Restoration Druid Healing Spec, Builds, and Talents — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

While optimizing talents on a contextual basis is the highly recommended method of setting up your build, the talent builds listed below work great for specific purposes.

Multiple talents require a change to your rotation to use them optimally. You can find more information on how your rotation will look after selecting your talents on our rotation page below.

Restoration Druid gets to pick between the Wildstalker and Keeper of the Grove trees.

Wildstalker focuses on its unique Symbiotic Bloom heal-over-time effect that greatly buffs the amount of healing the target takes and adds a Mastery stack. It has special synergy with Cat-based gameplay however its DPS and Healing capabilities are completely separate and it's not required in order to play the tree. Wildstalker is a mostly passive tree and you don't have to unique play into it to benefit from its strengths. It will be our default tree in Mythic+ and other small group content.

The Keeper of the Grove tree focuses instead on burst healing and our Grove Guardians mechanic. Every time we cast Swiftmend or Wild Growth we will do more healing 8+ seconds. Convoke the Spirits will cast plenty of both which means when we need the healing most we can have 4-5 Grove Guardians active - greatly increasing our healing. Keeper of the Grove is also a passive tree.

Your main idea when building a talent tree should be to spend as many points at the bottom of the tree as possible since they are the strongest ones. With that in mind, try to pick the bare minimum in the first two sections. We will try to break down the order in which you should pick talents and priorities within each tier.

You have to spend 8 points in this section, which generally leaves you with little choice.

1. Lifebloom, Swiftmend, Soul of the Forest, Nature's Swiftness and Omen of Clarity are always chosen, no matter what content you are doing.
2. You will always pick one of Verdant Infusion and Prosperity. Default to the former.
3. Lastly, you will pick Nature's Swiftness-improving talents, Improved Regrowth, or Tranquil Mind. Regrowth often has a high crit chance anyway so it is up to you which you pick here. It isn't important.

Similar to the first tier of talents, you are left with 12 points to spend here, making selections generally obvious depending on content. The final point in the section can be interesting.

1. You will, first of all, always pick the following 3 talents: Efflorescence, Ironbark, Tranquility. You will also always take Power of the Archdruid which means you will take Grove Guardians to path there.
2. For raiding, your next obvious choices will be Flourish, Wild Synthesis and Improved Wild Growth.
3. For Mythic+ and raids we pick Stonebark / Improved Ironbark + Regenerative Heartwood. Mythic+ skips an extra target for Wild Growth.
4. Your final points get a bit more interesting. Renewing Surge offers good baseline cooldown reduction to a high priority spell and a little more if they are low health.
5. Verdancy is now particularly exciting but is required for pathing in all builds.

Raiding Druids have a lot of mandatory points in this section: Abundance, Master Shapeshifter, Germination, Convoke the Spirits / Incarnation: Tree of Life, Cenarius' Guidance, Intensity, Nature's Bounty. This spends 6 talent points out of your 10 available.

You have 4 remaining talent points. Nurturing Dormancy is almost essential since it improves your Rejuvenation uptime by a lot, and Thriving Vegetation serves a dual purpose of adding a little healing to Rejuvenation and extending your Regrowth for better Nature's Bounty healing. Reforestation is also extremely competitive and likely to be taken in Midnight when you are better able to lock in your ramps.

On very short pulls, with many external sources of Mana, or with good gameplay you can opt to pick Liveliness over Master Shapeshifter. It will provide a couple of percent healing.

Mythic+ Druids have to make different choices. The only DPS talents left in this section are Convoke the Spirits and Call of the Elder Druid. We will always pick Convoke here for both more healing and damage, skip Call of the Elder Druid unless you want to go heavy on damage. We will also always pick Cenarius' Guidance.

Out of Master Shapeshifter and Liveliness, we will most often prefer Liveliness. Liveliness massively speeds up the tick rate of your DoTs. We are mainly interested in Rake and Rip. The more ticks on these two, the more Bloodseeker Vines procs you will get. Liveliness will also increase the tick rate of Bloodseeker Vines, and they will buff your Rake and Rip. You get some small healing value too.

Photosynthesis and Harmonious Blooming make our Lifebloom target very hard to kill. Both also have special synergy with our upcoming Apex talents so they will be even better in Midnight.

Call of the Elder Druid and Dream of Cenarius really require a lot of time to be spent doing damage to be worth it. They will not contribute any healing during heaviest damage, which is a major downside. Dream of Cenarius will basically always be a bad talent, because it is a pure healing talent contributing little healing. We strongly recommend to never pick these 2 talents unless you are doing some solo content or content way below your skill level. Another point against Dream of Cenarius is that you are not casting any of the spells from this talent for optimal DPS.

With the remaining 3 talents we will want to put one into Abundance and Rejuvenation focused nodes like Nurturing Dormancy, Thriving Vegetation, and Germination.

There is no good way to make one spec that will work for all raid bosses or all dungeons at all levels. It is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each talent path and build something coherent with synergies, making sure that all extra spells you pick up are utilized properly.

2 points in Nurturing Instinct are too strong and important to ignore.

All Druids will always want Ursoc's Spirit and Improved Barkskin.

The major decisions are on the left side of the first rows. Raiding druids will want to pick defensive options: Frenzied Regeneration and possibly Verdant Heart.

Mythic+ players will want to pick Rake, Rip, Thrash, as they are obvious choices for Wildstalker. You will have a couple of flexible points here, which are going to have almost no effect.

Here, every Druid should be picking the following talents: Natural Recovery, Thick Hide, Ursol's Vortex / Mass Entanglement / Typhoon, Soothe, Stampeding Roar, Renewal, Lingering Healing.

To go into the left-side defensive talents, you will have to pick Wild Charge / Tiger Dash and either Feline Swiftness or Well-Honed Instincts to progress further. Because both of these talents are quite good, we recommend you take both.

In the last part of the tree, you will have to pick 2 talents in Lycara's Teachings and 1 talent in Oakskin.

Raiding druids will always pick Innervate, Symbiotic Relationship, and Nature's Vigil.

After that you will have choices between damage, defensive and crowd control talents. Lycara's Inspiration is a bad talent for both Mythic+ and raiding, because it provides no real benefits for Restoration Druids.

You can go into "War Mode." Enabling War Mode provides the following benefits:

• PvP talents enabled in the outdoor world.
• 10-30% increase in World Quest rewards at maximum level.
• 10-30% more experience gained while leveling.
• Earn Conquest Points, which can reward gear every week.

With the benefits of enabling War Mode for leveling and PvE content, it is recommended enabling the feature to maximize your leveling and rewards at maximum level. However, you will make yourself available for open-world PvP, and the possibility of being killed while leveling or doing World Quests exists.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content. Below is a ranking of General PvP Talents and Restoration Druid-specific PvE talents.

1. Thorns is a good choice that offers a direct damage increase. It is usable in any form and can provide significant damage to big pulls.

Disentanglement, Entangling Bark, Deep Roots, Focused Growth, Early Spring have limited effect on PvE content in terms of increasing your damage in the open-world or healing in a small group setting.