Restoration Druid Healing Spec, Builds, and Talents — 12.0.5

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.

Apex talents are new to Midnight. They are a new node in your Restoration spec talent tree that you can put up to four points into. Ours is called Everbloom and it's designed around enhancing Lifebloom. Putting points in unlocks the following benefits:

• First Point: Your Lifebloom stacks up to 3 times, automatically stacking every 5 seconds. It heals for 3 times as much, but you still get the same mastery value as without the talent.
• Second and Third Points: Your Lifebloom cleaves 30/60% of its "bloom" healing to up to 6 nearby allies. This includes talents that generate more blooms like Photosynthesis.
• Fourth Point: When you consume Soul of the Forest, your Lifebloom blooms 3 times in quick succession.

In dungeon content our Apex node is incredibly powerful, since it makes your Lifebloom target nearly immortal. The cleave healing to the rest of the party is also very valuable and you get a ton of value every time you press Swiftmend. You'll not only take it in all scenarios but you will take accompanying nodes that further buff Lifebloom like Photosynthesis.

In raid, it is not quite as valuable to make one person immortal since they make up a smaller percentage of your group. The 12.0.5 buffs were enough to make it a good talent though and you should still expect to take it in all content.

Restoration Druid gets to pick between the Hero Talents Wildstalker and Keeper of the Grove, both offering similar gameplay, but with different strengths.

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 Cat Form is not required in order to play the tree. Wildstalker is a mostly passive tree and you don't have to uniquely play into it to benefit from its strengths. This will be our default tree in Mythic+ and other small group content. It is also competitive in raid.

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 for 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 fairly passive tree. It's good in raid, and fine in Mythic+ as a damage-oriented alternative (due to the 12.0.5 changes).

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.

Enable War Mode if you enjoy PVP, or if you want a slightly quicker levelling experience. However, you will make yourself available for open-world PvP, and might occasionally be involved in skirmishes.

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.