Restoration Druid Healing Mythic+ Tips — Shadowlands 9.2.5

Restoration Druid is one of the better healing specialisations for Mythic+. It has enough throughput to get through almost any healing situation, good crowd control, and the best tank cooldown in the game. The weakness is a pretty low damage output during heavy healing portions of dungeons.

If you are unfamiliar with Mythic+ and its associated general mechanics, you can read more about it on our dedicated Mythic+ page below.

While there is no specific rotation you should follow in Mythic+ content, it is important to know which spells are most efficient to cast or do the most healing so that you can make better informed decisions.

1. Keep Efflorescence down. This is by far the best spell both in terms of Mana efficiency and healing output per global spent.
2. Keep Lifebloom on a tank by default. Swap it to yourself during group damage if you are playing Photosynthesis.
3. Use Cenarion Ward on cooldown, if you are using the talent. Use it on the tank since it is a poor method of catching up.
4. Keep Rejuvenation on an active tank and any players with debuffs. Avoid casting too many unnecessary Rejuvenations. A lot of small damage can be healed passively by your AoE healing or even self-healed by players themselves.
5. Use Swiftmend to activate Soul of the Forest. Most of the time you will be using this to buff Regrowth, but in any scenario where multiple people are taking damage you should use it on Wild Growth.
6. Use Regrowth as an emergency heal.

During downtime from healing you should be actively looking to deal as much damage as you can. The rotation might be complicated to master fully, but you should still learn which spells to prioritise to time more keys.

For more information about the Restoration Druid spell priority in Raids, refer back to the Rotation page.

Restoration Druid provides much more to the group than just healing. Due to the nature of dungeon content, you will be expected to do damage, crowd control, and heal all at the same time.

• Typhoon knocks enemies in front of you away in the direction the cast was aimed. Use this to knock enemies away from the tank, yourself, or away from special mob-specific mechanics such as Sanguine pools. Keep in mind that you only have access to it through Balance Affinity.
• Soothe dispels all enrage effects from the target. It removes various strong buffs from enemies in dungeons, including Raging.
• Entangling Roots can be used to root patrols. If you apply them to the leading mob in the group, the entire patrol will stop moving. It is useful in tight quarters or to skip certain packs altogether.
• Hibernate puts enemy Beast or Dragonkin to sleep for up to 40 seconds. Any damage will awaken the target. Hibernate works in the same way as Entangling Roots for stopping patrolling packs in dungeons without pulling them. It can also be used to interrupt casts of NPCs without removing DoTs from the target.
• Ursol's Vortex conjures a ground zone for 10 seconds that will slow all enemies affected by 50%. It will also pull them to the center after the first time they attempt to leave the circle. It is an extremely powerful tool for kiting, especially during Necrotic weeks. You can pair Ursol's Vortex with Typhoon to group packs on top of each other for better AoE.
• Cyclone can be used to make certain enemies immune to everything for 6 seconds. You can avoid mobs getting Bolstering stacks, or delay them from dying and refreshing Bursting. Make sure you use it with caution, because you will also make them immune to taking damage, which might slow your group down instead of helping.

Below are the suggested talents for Mythic+, these talents are recommended for all groups and keys at the current time.

Level	Choices
15	✗ Abundance	✗ Nourish	✓ Cenarion Ward
25	✗ Tiger Dash	? Renewal	? Wild Charge
30	✗ Balance Affinity	✓ Feral Affinity	✗ Guardian Affinity
35	✗ Mighty Bash	✗ Mass Entanglement	✓ Heart of the Wild
40	✓ Soul of the Forest	✗ Cultivation	✗ Incarnation: Tree of Life
45	✗ Inner Peace	✓ Spring Blossoms	✗ Overgrowth
50	✗ Photosynthesis	✗ Germination	✓ Flourish

The default talents to play are Cenarion Ward, Feral Affinity, Soul of the Forest, Spring Blossoms, and Flourish.

Flourish is the preferred choice over Photosynthesis since Decrypted Urh Cypher from the Encrypted affix gives a lot of cooldown reduction that lets us cast significantly more Flourishes during the run.

Refer to the Talent page for descriptions of all talents, their strengths and weaknesses.

There is no obvious Best in Slot list possible due to the varying nature of damage intake in different dungeons, but you can get a general direction running mostly Haste and Mastery pieces in the slots with similar item level. Replace Mastery with Versatility and Crit as you feel necessary. Basically, run Mastery up until you do not need more of it to heal damage. Most Druids at higher levels aim to have as close to 0 Mastery from gear as possible.

Make sure you check the Gear page for trinket and significant item recommendations.

While most affixes do not need any specific advice, there are some that can be abused by a Restoration Druid toolkit or pose a lot more threat than others. We will try to provide some examples and advice here.

The Encrypted Affix will spawn three Relics on certain packs and on every boss in the dungeon. These Relics buff the pack they are in, and should usually be killed as the highest priority.

Depending on the Relic that you kill first, you will spawn an Elite, after killing which you will gain one of the following buffs:

• Killing the Wo Relic first will grant you a 1-minute stealth outside of combat, movement speed boost, and damage reduction via Decrypted Wo Cypher.
• Killing the Vy Relic first will grant you a 15% Haste buff for 45 seconds and a chance to deal extra damage on your attacks via Decrypted Vy Cypher.
• Killing the Urh Relic first will grant you a 200% cooldown recovery rate and 10% Health and Mana recovery for 10 seconds via Decrypted Urh Cypher.

The relics themselves are not dangerous since they die almost instantly. What you generally need to worry about are elites that spawn after all 3 relics die. Each buff is associated with its own unique elite NPC.

• Urh Dismantler is a very generic tank-buster enemy. It follows normal aggro rules, occasionally applies a Physical damage taken increased by 25% debuff on the current tank, and casts a frontal AoE stun. Do not stand in front and make sure you are prepared to heal your tank a lot. Cooldown recovery rate can be abused to get more short cooldown spells off such as Cenarion Ward or Adaptive Swarm.
• Vy Interceptor has no aggro table. It will shoot at random group members and teleport around. It will occasionally cast a frontal beam that deals very heavy damage. On higher levels it will kill anyone who stands in it. This NPC deals the most group damage and can be sometimes dangerous to deal with if its beam is cast during certain boss mechanics.
• Wo Drifter only has one 3-second interruptible cast that does AoE damage. Since Druids cannot interrupt it, the best we can do is make sure entire group is full Health.

During Legion Timewalking Events introduced in Patch 9.1.5, you are given the option to experience a number of Legion Mythic+ dungeons which also include the unique Infernal affix. This affix adds three Legion Beacons placed near specific bosses of each dungeon that will spawn a commander along with waves of additional enemies from the Burning Legion when activated. Each commander brings with it a set of unique abilities and reinforcements to fight.

As playing around these seasonal affixes applies to more than just Restoration Druids, please feel free to consult our larger guides about Mythic+ affixes below.

This affix usually provides the most problems to all healers. Make sure you are keeping an eye on enemies dying and prepare accordingly with Rejuvenations on entire group. If you notice some mobs dying later, start dispelling Bursting early to get another dispel later. Most often you should dispel the tank, since they have higher total Health and are going to require more healing. You can consider using Cyclone to make sure one enemy will not die, but keep in mind that it is a last resort option. The goal is to go through the dungeon as fast as possible, making enemies immune does not help with that.

Spiteful will spawn Spiteful Shades from dead enemies, which will fixate on players in your group. They have a decent amount of Health, but lose 8% of it every second. They also hit very hard, often nearly killing everyone they come in touch with. Make sure you use all forms of your crowd control on them. The best ability for that is Ursol's Vortex, since it does not interfere with anything else. If you are not already specced into Balance Affinity for a Spiteful week, it is probably a good idea to do that just to stay in range and safely use Typhoon on Spiteful Shades without hitting mobs positioned for melee players by the tank.