Restoration Druid Frequently Asked Questions — Shadowlands 9.0.5

Restoration Druids remain the best healers in Mythic+ and one of the better specs in raid healing environment. Combination of strong passive tank healing, a wide variety of raid healing cooldowns, and an ability to do burst DPS makes the spec desirably in pretty much all forms of content.

A summary of all changes can be found on our intro page.

In Shadowlands, Restoration Druids are getting Convoke the Spirits, which is essentially another mini-cooldown. You can pair it really well with both Incarnation: Tree of Life and with Flourish or even use it as a standalone CD. Overall, our strengths are amplified, but the weaknesses still remain: lack of damage reduction cooldown and low overall damage output may put us a couple positions down. You can overcome some damage issues with aggressively using Convoke for DPS with Heart of the Wild, but not all. The main role of a Restoration Druid in raids remains as a strong cooldown-oriented throughput healer with good survivability and tank healing.

We gained Stampeding Roar, more frequent access to burst healing via stronger Soul of the Forest, and better burst damage using Heart of the Wild and Convoke the Spirits.

For Alliance, Night Elves are slightly be better, due to the power of Shadowmeld in dungeon content. Both Night Elf and Worgen passive racials are inconsequential in raid content.

As for Horde, you have to choose between a better throughput from Trolls and better utility racials from Taurens and Highmountain Taurens. There is no formula that will help you make this decision, but the differences between all three races are pretty small. Finally, Zandalari Trolls offer nothing exceptional, but they are not too far behind that it would realistically make a difference in any content, even cutting edge.

There are no goals for stats, no set amounts to aim for, no combinations of stat distributions that are good. It is a very common misconception to focus on stats, or aim for the "right" ones. They do not exist. The only stat that will always be correct to pick is Intellect.

Haste increases the healing of all your HoTs linearly, which means there are no, and cannot be, any breakpoints. Vision of Unending Growth looks like it may have a breakpoint, but the proc chance is proportional to the power of the partial tick in the end, making it also scale linearly with Haste, just like everything else. You will have a 10% reduction of Haste rating effectiveness starting at 30% Haste, which will make it slightly weaker overall. At your discretion, you can start gearing for other stats at that point.

Grid2, VuhDo or ElvUI all provide strong, customisable raid frames options. Standard Blizzard frames, unfortunately, do not offer options to show the same amount information or ways to filter out useless information.

You can, but there are no good reasons to do it. Playstyle in any of the affinities is essentially the same as the specs they mimic, but with much lower damage. If you choose to still level as Restoration, make sure you drop any and all gear with Mastery on it and try to use any trinkets with damage procs or on-use effects.

Pick whichever option provides you the most Intellect. Right now, Two-Handed weapons of the same item level provide slightly more Intellect and secondary stats than similar One-Handed and Off-hand combo. Regardless of the stats on those, you will always pick Two-Handed version.