Mists of Pandaria Classic Restoration Druid Talent Builds

Restoration Druid has a fairly cookie cutter talent setup with very few talent choices actually impacting throughput and most increasing either your mobility or utility. Displacer Beast and Ysera's Gift will rarely ever change and provide you a good foundation for movement and extra passive healing. Incarnation and Soul of the Forest are highly situational and there is a good chance you will run both throughout a patch. This is your most competitive choice that you should keep in mind when adjusting your build to better suit a dungeon or raid. While Nature's Vigil has its uses, Heart of the Wild tends to be a better default talent for consistent output, giving you power in every situation.

In this section we will go over some of the key talents you will use when you are playing a Restoration Druid. Be sure to understand your most important talents as they are vital to play the build to its top strength.

• Incarnation — grants you access to a powerful healing cooldown that increases healing down and adds extra effects to your spells. Lifebloom can be cast on multiple targets, Wild Growth affects two additional targets, and Regrowth becomes instant cast. When using this talent, it is important that you line it up with heavy damage windows while also getting as many uses of it as possible over the course of raid encounter or dungeon.
• Soul of the Forest — grants you 100% increased haste for the first spell cast after using Swiftmend. Typically you will use this buff with Wild Growth for large AoE healing or Lifebloom when extra tank healing is needed. Additionally, this talent shares a talent row with Incarnation, meaning that you will often have to swap back and forth between these. The strength of Incarnation is when you have long damage phases where you can make full use of the 30 second duration. When damage tends to be quicker and less heavy, you may often find better value in Soul of the Forest.
• Heart of the Wild — increases your stamina and intellect by 6% at all times in addition to a large healing boost when you use the long cooldown. The largest reason to take this talent comes down to its flexibility, always giving you a strong stat increase. Nature's Vigil is competitive in the sense that it provides 12% when used, but this is only active for 30 seconds and has a 90 second cooldown, meaning that you will go for much of the fight or dungeon without it. If you find yourself really needing extra output on a difficult raid encounter or pull at a specific moment, then Nature's Vigil becomes significantly more interesting but it is primarily situational. In very short kill times where you cannot get two uses of Heart of the Wild, it may also lose value in the sense that you can get more uses of Nature's Vigil.

Glyphs in Mists of Pandaria have been slightly reworked overall, making minor glyphs less important and major ones providing all the throughput increases. We will break down the recommended glyphs below:

• Glyph of Efflorescence — causes Efflorescence to be placed based on Wild Mushroom instead of Swiftmend. This means you can have 100% uptime on Efflorescence and always have it down where players will be, rather than accidentally placing it far when you use Swiftmend on a random player.
• Glyph of Wild Growth — causes Wild Growth to heal an additional target but also have its cooldown increased by 2 seconds. Wild Growth makes up a large percentage of your overall healing, and healing an extra target is extremely valuable.
• Glyph of Regrowth — increases the critical strike chance of Regrowth but removes the periodic healing that it does. This causes the ability to be much more useful as a spot healing ability, allowing you to heal up a single target who is in danger much easier.

Minor glyphs only have one required option, and beyond that you are free to select whatever you may like the best or find the most useful. We will still list our recommended glyphs below:

• Glyph of the Sprouting Mushroom — Wild Mushroom can now be placed anywhere on the ground instead of requiring a target. When combined with Glyph of Efflorescence, this gives you full control to use Efflorescence wherever you would like.
• Glyph of Aquatic Form — increases your swim speed by 50% in Aquatic Form. Not ever useful in raiding or dungeon content, but this can help increase your quality of life in the open world.
• Glyph of Grace — similar to Aquatic Form, this is a nice quality of life increase and can make you nearly invincible to falling damage.