Restoration Druid Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0.1)

There are two key concepts in Restoration Druid healing that you'll need to get comfortable with to master the spec: efficient maintenance casts, and the Abundance cycle.

Try and follow this list at all times through the fight. Most of these are very efficient casts and you can often improve your healing a lot by just doing everything in this section more reliably.

1. Keep Efflorescence under a group of players, usually melee. If you have the Lifetreading talent then it'll automatically follow the target of your Lifebloom and you can ignore this entry.
2. Keep Lifebloom on a tank or a player taking heavy damage.
3. Cast Swiftmend on cooldown and follow it with Rejuvenation.
4. Cast Wild Growth on cooldown.
5. Fill your free global cooldowns with Wrath. You will get a lot of free mana via the Master Shapeshifter talent.

The Abundance talent greatly increases the crit chance, and lowers the mana cost of Regrowth depending on how many Rejuvenation buffs you have out on your group. The talent encourages you to structure your casts so that you are chain-casting the latter, and then the former. You'll also continue your maintenance casts above while you cycle through both spells.

We also have two (and a half) different ways to extend our heal-over-time effects to open up a longer window where we can chain-cast Regrowth:

• Tranquility extends all heal-over-time effects by 10 seconds (via the Flourish talent).
• Convoke the Spirits has a 50% chance to extend all heal-over-time effects by 2 seconds (via the Flourish talent).
• Swiftmend extends all heal-over-time effects on one target by 8 seconds (via the Verdant Infusion talent).

Casting Rejuvenation into our Tranquility and Convoke the Spirits casts are therefore of much higher value and we'll put the most focus on these. We can also line our cooldowns up with the most dangerous moments of each fight. Make sure you follow both with Regrowth casts.

In addition to your core rotation above, you will have access to a few extra buttons with various functions. We will cover what each of those do here. We also have a number of very powerful cooldowns that you can read more about further down the page.

• Innervate: Makes all of your spells free for 8 seconds. Try and use this whenever you are casting a lot of Rejuvenation in a row. You can cast your first around 80% mana.
• Ironbark: Reduces the damage a target takes by 20%. Build a habit of using this often because the cooldown is quite low and it is off the global cooldown.
• Mark of the Wild: This is our "Raid Buff" and it's very powerful. Cast this before every boss.
• Stampeding Roar: An AoE movement speed increase that you might use during specific boss mechanics.
• Barkskin: Your personal defensive ability. Very low cooldown so use this whenever you're in danger.
• Rebirth: An in-combat resurrection ability. Combat resurrections are in a shared pool and will recharge over a boss fights duration.

Dungeons consist of two primary types of damage: unavoidable and avoidable. You will deal with the former every single key and once you have mastered a boss you can easily repeat it. The latter is from people getting hit by mechanics, failing interrupts and so on. It will vary heavily from dungeon to dungeon. You will be expected to handle all unavoidable damage through a dungeon and simply to do your best against the avoidable.

Similar to in raid, you'll have a few maintenance casts that you should take care of at all times. As a beginner you should do these even if there isn't a lot of damage at the time, and then you can start cutting casts once you are very comfortable with the dungeon.

1. Keep Efflorescence under as many players as you are able. If you have the Lifetreading talent, then it will automatically follow the target of your Lifebloom.
2. Keep Lifebloom on a tank or a player taking heavy damage. If the tank is not near the party, and you are using Lifetreading then put it on a more central player so that you don't lose Efflorescence value.
3. Cast Swiftmend on cooldown and follow it with Rejuvenation if the party is quite healthy, or Regrowth if they are struggling to stay alive. The choice is between better setup for later, or more healing now.
4. Cast Wild Growth on cooldown to cover light to moderate party damage.
5. When nobody is hurt and you do not expect that to change soon you can cast DPS spells to speed up the dungeon. We will cover that in the "Damage Rotation" tab because we have a few choices over how we do that.

Your maintenance rotation above will take care of about 75% of your dungeon. The other 25% you will face a mix of dangerous AoE damage to the entire party, and sharp damage on a single target.

1. Make sure Lifebloom and Efflorescence are up before the damage hits.
2. Prepare for the damage ahead of time by casting Rejuvenation on DPS in the party.
3. Cast Swiftmend -> Regrowth as damage hits. Your Regrowth will hit three targets.
4. Follow up with more Regrowth casts until the danger has passed.

Most of these AoE checks are built into the dungeon and will happen at set times that you can predict and prepare for.

Single-target damage comes in a few forms. It can be a dangerous damage-over-time effect that he have to heal over 5-10 seconds, or it can be a missed interrupt that causes someone to lose 80% of their health at once. Our responses to both will differ slightly.

If the damage is sharp and instant, then Regrowth the target. This is a great time to pair the cast with Nature's Swiftness if it is available. Continue to cast Regrowth until they are safe.

For semi-dangerous damage-over-time effects you should cast 1-2 Rejuvenation on the target before you start casting Regrowth. If the damage is very dangerous then move over Lifebloom too. Targets with Lifebloom are much safer and will be nigh immortal when Midnight releases in full.

There is more specific information on spell usage in Mythic+ on our Restoration Druid Mythic+ page.

You have two options for adding damage as a Restoration Druid: caster-form spells like Wrath, or swapping to Cat Form and using melee abilities. The latter is more advanced but significantly more damage. You are a healer first, your damage is very low priority and it is fine to not do any of this, though do cast Wrath at least because it gives you mana regeneration.

When setting up your bars for Catweaving you should find a keybind on your caster-form bar for Rake and if possible one for Shred. We will be taking the Fluid Form talent which will automatically shift us to Cat Form when we cast these abilities - saving us a global cooldown and greatly improving the Catweaving experience.

1. (Optional) Prowl before a pull. It increases the damage of your next ability.
2. Cast Rake on the biggest enemy in the pack to enter Cat Form and apply a big DoT.
3. Cast Rip if you have five combo points, or tab-target to apply Rake otherwise.
4. If all enemies in the pack have Rake then use Shred (1-2 targets) or Swipe (3+ targets). Note that most of your damage will come from the bleeds above.
5. Cast Ferocious Bite if you are fighting a single target and it already has a fresh Rip on it.

You can also use Convoke the Spirits in Cat Form to make it cast mostly damage spells. This is quite a good idea if not much else is happening.

Catweaving can feel scary at first, but you will get used to it quickly.

If you want to read an in-depth guide on how to deal damage in dungeons, read the page linked below.

Your Mastery, Mastery: Harmony, increases your healing done to a target for each HoT that you have on that target at the time. Each HoT's healing is updated dynamically as soon as you apply another and it applies from your first heal-over-time effect. With 20% Mastery, a single Rejuvenation will do 20% extra healing. The value of Mastery decreases the more HoTs you have. The second HoT will only provide 70%, third 60%, fourth 50% and so on. Regardless, the more HoTs you have on average, the better Mastery is.

There are currently 7 HoTs that count towards our Mastery:

• Rejuvenation;
• Germination;
• Wild Growth;
• Regrowth's HoT portion;
• Lifebloom;
• Frenzied Regeneration;
• Symbiotic Bloom ( Wildstalker HoT).

It is important to note that this list is exhaustive. No trinket effect interacts, contributes, or otherwise benefits from Mastery.

Pandemic is what players call an in-game mechanic where casting a heal-over-time effect on a player that already has that one will both refresh its duration and add some of the remaining duration to the new heal-over-time effect. The general rule is you can add up to 30% of the original HoTs duration. In 12.0, this now applies to a smaller selection of HoTs. Rejuvenation will not extend at all, whereas Lifebloom and Regrowth still get the full 30%. We are not sure why they made this change.

Tranquility should be used during heavy raid damage or when you are assigned to use it by your raid leader. Tranquility extends the duration of all your heal-over-time effects on the group by a massive 10 seconds which means it is a best used during the most dangerous moments of each fight. We mentioned this briefly above, but your rotation around Tranquility will look something like the following:

By getting as many Rejuvenation buffs out as possible (and a Wild Growth), you will be able to maximise the value of the Tranquility extension. We will then have so many Rejuvenation out on the raid that we will have maximum Abundance stacks, and our follow-up Regrowth casts will cost no mana and have a 100% crit rate.

This Tranquility "Ramp" as we will call it is one of the most powerful healing cooldowns in the game. It's best if you plan out its usage before every fight, since as you can see it is much more powerful if you can cast a lot of spells before you press it.

In Dungeon content like Mythic+, Tranquility is similarly powerful, and you can keep the same concept as the ramp above but it'll be a faster process. You'll just try and get out as many Rejuvenation as you can but it'll number closer to 3-5 rather than the 12+ you can aim for in raid.

Note the Swiftmend -> Rejuvenation combo above since this will put superpowered Rejuvenation on three targets (owing to Power of the Archdruid and Soul of the Forest).

Convoke the Spirits is a powerful healing cooldown on a short cooldown. It casts random Druid spells over 3-4 seconds. It's mostly random what spells it casts but there is a little bit of logic in how many healing and damage spells it will cast. Roughly 50% of casts will also cast a smaller Tranquility if you have the Cenarius' Guidance talent (it is in the Icy Veins builds).

You will also usually get 0-2 Wild Growth casts, 2-4 Swiftmends and a handful of Rejuvenations. It will usually cast 2-4 Wrath and these can proc associated talents like Master Shapeshifter.

Convoke the Spirits should be used often during the most dangerous moments of each fight. You can cast Nature's Swiftness before to greatly increase the healing all Regrowth casts you get from it will do. This does not consume the buff!

Incarnation: Tree of Life is a choice-node alternative to Convoke the Spirits. It focuses on healing over a longer period of time. It can be useful for longer phases of healing in raid like a 30 second burn phase near the end of a fight. It has a longer cooldown than Convoke the Spirits also.

You get the following bonuses when Incarnation: Tree of Life is active:

• All of your healing is 10% stronger.
• Wild Growth heals an additional 2 targets.
• Regrowth cast time reduced to 0.
• Wrath damage increased by 20%.

Innervate makes your spells free for 8 seconds. It can be cast on yourself or another healing spec, however, I recommend self-casting it in most situations. You should use Innervate as often as possible during a fight, starting at around 80% mana. Make sure you line it up with Rejuvenation casts rather than Regrowth since you should mostly be casting the latter for free anyway.

Nature's Swiftness makes your next Regrowth instant cast and increases the amount of healing it does. In Mythic+ or dungeon content you will mostly use it when people drop low to save them. In raid, you will often use it right before Convoke the Spirits to make all Regrowth casts from it heal more. This also will not consume the buff.

Ironbark reduces the damage a target takes by 20% for 12 seconds. You should use it on anyone about to take heavy damage. It is available very often so you are usually better off using it often rather than saving it for a special occasion.