Restoration Druid Healing Guide — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

The Midnight Pre-Patch brings with it a massive overhaul to Restoration Druid and healing as a whole. It also includes sweeping UI changes which affect Restoration Druid more than a lot of other specs. The overall objective is to make the game more accessible by removing how many addons you need to play the game competitively, as well as making specs themselves easier to get into. They did succeed in making specs easier to play, though the user interface changes have had a disastrous roll out so far.

Both hero trees got three new nodes for the expansion and it is possible to put points into them during the Pre-patch too.

The Wildstalker tree plays very similarly to The War Within. It still focuses on putting out Symbiotic Bloom and offering both healing and large healing taken increases to those with the buff. The proc rate of Symbiotic Blooms has been nerfed a little bit, and there are some new generic heal-over-time increases like Patient Custodian. It continues to be an extremely strong tree in Mythic+ but expect it to be a bit weaker in raid. Note too that the Wildstalker tier set bonuses that shot it to the top of raid in Season 3 have been swapped out with generic healing increases.

Keeper of the Grove sees larger changes due to the Grove Guardians ability now being passive instead of an active button. Grove Guardians now proc whenever you cast Swiftmend and Wild Growth. This simplifies Keeper of the Grove gameplay by removing the need to stack charges and drop them all at once during burst. The flavor of the tree remains, but it should feel like it's giving you more straightforward healing increases now instead of requiring specific gameplay to maximize. The new hero tree talents in Midnight also give you even more Swiftmend casts which will play well given how many effects are now attached to it.

There were two major changes to Restoration Druid in Midnight:

• Many small heal-over-time effects were removed like Spring Blossoms and Cultivation. With the user interface changes, tracking many HoTs at once has become burdersome so they removed a bunch of smaller ones. These usually didn't have gameplay interactions anyway. Our Mastery effect ( Mastery: Harmony) was buffed significantly to compensate the loss of HoTs.
• Our frequent cooldowns were made much less so. Flourish was turned into a passive that procs when you cast Tranquility instead which turns its former one minute cooldown into three. This might seem quite bad but Blizzard have pruned healing cooldowns across all specs. The goal is for healing to be based around which rotational buttons you press instead of countering every mechanic with a major healing cooldown.

Despite all of the changes, your rotation won't be greatly different. You will still prepare for upcoming damage with Rejuvenation, and you will still pay off your ramp by casting Regrowth as damage hits (to take advantage of Abundance). You'll continue to maintain Lifebloom and Efflorescence (though Lifetreading makes the latter easier) and Swiftmend and Wild Growth remain key rotational casts.

Midnight (including the Pre-Patch) completely revamps the games UI by adding heavy restrictions to a lot of addons. This means that addons you might have used for decades like Grid2, Cell, or Weak Auras might no longer be available and even if they are they'll be in a much more restricted format. In exchange for the loss of a lot of combat addons, Blizzard have been working on the base user interface. It still leaves a lot to be desired though.

We hope this summary helped you prepare for the Midnight launch on March 2nd, or February 27th with Early Access. If you want to prepare for your leveling journey in Midnight, make sure to check out our recommended consumables and items that can help you reach max-level in Midnight faster!