Restoration Druid Healing Guide — The War Within Pre-Patch

Restoration Druids specialize in maintaining a steady stream of healing on a few targets in the raid and offer strong bursts of healing after using cooldowns. Restoration Druids also do well when healing a small number of targets for a prolonged period (such as players with debuffs).

Restoration Druids generally suffer when they have to react to damage for which they were not prepared and when they did not have the time to set up their HoTs. Tranquility, Incarnation: Tree of Life, and Flourish offer decent burst healing when needed.

To properly play a healing role, you will need more than just class-specific information. To better understand healing in general, we recommend that you read our healing guide.

Strengths

• A lot of cooldowns, such as Tranquility, Incarnation: Tree of Life, and Flourish.
• Ability to sustain good healing on the move.
• Retains strong healing even in situations of heavy spread.
• Very good survivability.

Weaknesses

• Lack of a raid-wide damage reduction cooldown.
• Very punishing in the case of mistimed cooldowns.
• Reliance on cooldowns leaves healing outside of them weak.

Restoration has seen significant changes to the class tree, which has made it easier for us to acquire some talents like Feline Swiftness, Renewal, and some defensive options, because the number of required talent points was reduced significantly. We have lost access to Moonkin Form (and therefore Flap and Wild Charge disengage). Finally, and most importantly, Astral Influence has been changed to only work on spells, which means Cat Form abilities and auto-attacks no longer have increased range.

In terms of the spec tree, the top and the middle of the tree were left basically unchanged. All the changes were to the bottom part. We are losing Adaptive Swarm completely. Luxuriant Soil is also gone, but the raw power of Rejuvenation is increased to compensate. There have also been a few new talents and reshuffles.

• New Talent: Call of the Elder Druid — When you shift into a combat shapeshift form or cast Starsurge, you gain Heart of the Wild for 10 seconds, once every 60 seconds. This talent replaces Adaptive Swarm. It is quite good, but requires you to spend too much time doing damage.
• New Talent: Dream of Cenarius — While Heart of the Wild is active, Wrath and Shred transfer 150% of their damage and Starfire and Swipe transfer 100% of their damage into healing onto a nearby ally. This talent replace Unbridled Swarm (the improved Adaptive Swarm part). It is unfortunately not very good, because the uptime of Heart of the Wild is not high.
• New Talent: Thriving Vegetation — Rejuvenation instantly heals for 15/30% of its periodic healing and Regrowth's duration is increased by 3/6 seconds. This talent replaces Luxuriant Soil (Rejuvenation spread). It is actually decently strong, doing around 5-8% for 2 talent points.
• New Talent: Prosperity — Swiftmend now has 2 charges. This talent replaces Flourish in the choice node with Verdant Infusion. It is very strong for both Mythic+ and Raids. You will waste less of Swiftmend cooldown, which means your Reforestation uptime goes up.
• Grove Guardians' healing reduced by 15%. Wild Synthesis Wild Growth healing reduced by 15%.
• Verdant Infusion now extends the duration of heal over time effects by 8 seconds (was 12 seconds).
• Nurturing Dormancy is now capped at 4-second extension (was 6 seconds).
• Abundance now increases the Critical Strike chance of Regrowth by 8% and decreases its Mana cost by 8% per stack (was 5%). This is a significant buff to both throughput and Mana efficiency for us, especially in raids.
• Photosynthesis and Flourish now share a choice node in the same place Photosynthesis used to be. This means we will no longer use Photosynthesis in raids and therefore Lifebloom goes back to tanks. In Mythic+, this does not change much. A lot of players were already running without Flourish there.

To summarise these changes, we can pick all the healing talents we want much easier in the class tree, which leaves more points available to be invested into utility, defense, or damage. Healing in raids will remain the same, nothing changes there. Healing in Mythic+ is significantly nerfed due to the loss of Adaptive Swarm.

Before you start leveling your Druid, we suggest you take a look at our Addons page, as setting up your UI before you begin will allow you to get more comfortable with playing your character on max level.

Unfortunately, leveling as a Restoration Druid is only optimal if you have a group and plan on doing it in dungeons. But if you decide to do it anyway, refer to our leveling guide:

Restoration Druid is all about using your abilities strategically. Rather than a fixed rotation, you will be using your flexible spell kit to adapt and overcome whatever the game throws at you.

Two abilities require constant maintenance throughout the combat: Efflorescence and Lifebloom. Wild Growth has a relatively low cooldown, high Mana efficiency, and high group-wide healing. Using these 3 spells often is one of the basic things to learn as a Restoration Druid. Rejuvenation will be used as a filler spell for as much as your Mana will allow, but preferably concentrated around heavy group damage and coupled with your cooldowns such as Incarnation: Tree of Life, Innervate, Flourish.

If you are an absolute beginner to the spec but would like to learn the fundamentals of the class, recommend looking through the Spell Summary first, as well as the Easy Mode page linked below.

If you are familiar with Restoration Druid, go to the Talents and Rotation pages for more detailed information.

Gearing can get complicated as a healer due to many variables and multiple available group sizes. You can find information on how best to gear a Restoration Druid on the gearing page, which includes Best in Slot recommendations from this tier.

After acquiring gear, you will want to ensure you have the best consumables, gems, and enchants. You can also find more information about the role of each stat for a Restoration Druid, which one you should be stacking and why.

End-game content can be very daunting right after leveling. Our Mythic+ Dungeon, Raiding, and PvP guides can guide you to perform as well as possible, regardless of your content preference.

Another important aspect of the end game as a Restoration Druid is dealing damage. You can check the in-depth guide here.

If you find your performance lacking and are trying to figure out what you are doing wrong, you can check out the pages below that will help you improve.