Restoration Druid Healing Mythic+ Tips — Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.1

1. Restoration Druid in Mythic+

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 weaknesses include pretty low damage output, especially during heavy healing portions of dungeons, and a lack of healing cooldowns outside of talents. Germination and Flourish in the same tier mean that you are either taking sustained healing throughput loss or have no strong short cooldown.

1.1. Restoration Druid Mythic+ Rotation

For more information about the Restoration Druid rotation in Mythic+, refer back to the Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities page.

1.2. Restoration Druid Utility

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.
• 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.

2. Mythic+ Talents for Restoration Druids

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

Level	Choices
15	? Abundance	✗ Prosperity	? Cenarion Ward
30	? Tiger Dash	✗ Renewal	? Wild Charge
45	✗ Balance Affinity	✓ Feral Affinity	? Guardian Affinity
60	? Mighty Bash	? Mass Entanglement	✓ Typhoon
75	✗ Soul of the Forest	✓ Cultivation	? Incarnation: Tree of Life
90	? Inner Peace	? Stonebark	✓ Spring Blossoms
100	✓ Photosynthesis	? Germination	? Flourish

There are a few talent builds you can run with all of them giving pretty much the same results.

The most popular combination is Cenarion Ward, Cultivation, Spring Blossoms and Photosynthesis. The idea behind this build is to keep Lifebloom on the tank most of the time and swap it to yourself during heavy group damage.

A safe healing option spec is Abundance, Incarnation: Tree of Life / Cultivation, Stonebark and Germination. The idea behind this build is to spend most of your time either putting Rejuvenations out or casting Regrowth on the tank. If your group is pulling slowly one pack at a time, then Cultivation would be a safer pick. Otherwise, Tree of Life offers an incredible cooldown option. You should look to use this build over Photosynthesis one for dungeons with heavy hitting debuffs.

3. Azerite Gear for Restoration Druids for Dungeons

As Azerite gear comes with set traits, we can identify the best Azerite gear for a given item level. Below are the best Azerite gear pieces for dungeons:

3.1. Azerite Helms

• Cowl of Fluid Machinations (Shrine of the Storm)
• Hood of the Sinuous Devilsaur (Dunegorger Kraulok, World Boss)

3.2. Azerite Shoulders

• Shoulders of the Sanguine Monstrosity (The Underrot)

3.3. Azerite Chests

• Jerkin of the Aberrant Chimera (Fetid Devourer, Uldir)
• Cephalohide Jacket (Siege of Boralus)
• Spymaster's Wrap (Atal'Dazar)

4. Mythic+ Affixes

The way Mythic+ affixes are tiered in Battle for Azeroth has changed quite a bit since their launch in Legion.

There are now 3 weekly affixes and one seasonal affix. The first affix available instantly at level 2 and 3, the second affix starts at level 4, the third affix enabled at level 7, and finally the seasonal affix at level 10.

4.1. Tier One Affixes

• Fortified increases the Health pool of all non-boss enemies by 20% and damage dealt by 30%.
• Tyrannical increases the Health pool of boss enemies by 40% and their damage dealt by 15%.

Fortified and Tyrannical are the two affixes every player will see. These affixes shift the focus of dungeons from boss to trash depending on the week.

4.2. Tier Two Affixes

• Raging increases the damage dealt by enemies below 30% by 100% until they die. This buff is dispellable using Soothe. You should Soothe enemies that deal excessive group-wide damage or those able to one-shot your group members.
• Teeming adds additional trash mobs to certain packs throughout each dungeon.
• Bolstering buffs remaining enemies' Health pools and damage dealt by 20% when an enemy dies nearby. To counter this affix, help with damage on high Health mobs.
• Sanguine places a pool of blood on the ground when a mob is slain. This pool will heal remaining enemies who stay inside the zone and also damage players. You should take Typhoon to push enemies off of Sanguine zones.
• Bursting forces enemy mobs to detonate when slain, afflicting the group with a stacking debuff that causes players to suffer 10% of their max Health in damage every four seconds. When handling the Bursting affix, make sure you have multiple HoTs running before enemies die, have Efflorescence down and use your cooldowns when stacks get high. It is acceptable to spec into Inner Peace if your group plans to do big pulls often.

4.3. Tier Three Affixes

• Volcanic spawns volcanic plumes underneath and around players when in combat with any enemy. When damaged by Volcanic, players suffer 50% of their maximum Health in damage. Make sure people in your group stay above 50% Health at all times to avoid unnecessary deaths.
• Grievous afflicts players with a stacking DoT when they fall below 90%. Use Regrowth liberally during Grievous weeks. Heal one person at a time instead of trying to heal all at once.
• Quaking will periodically attempt to interrupt casters by creating a damaging zone around each player. About 3 seconds after the zone forms, it will deal 20% maximum Health in damage to each player caught in the zone as well as interrupting any casts and locking you out of that school for 4 seconds. Getting locked out can result in deaths or even wipes.
• Explosive will occasionally spawn Explosive Orbs that need to be targeted and burned down within a short period of time or they will deal significant damage to the party. Explosive Orbs can not be cleaved with Sunfire and Swipe. You can assist in killing them with Shred or Moonfire. It is generally cheaper on Mana and easier to kill them rather than to heal the damage after they go off.
• Necrotic causes all enemies' melee attacks to apply a stacking debuff that inflicts damage over time and reduces healing received. You should utilise Typhoon and Ursol's Vortex to assist tanks in kiting enemies before the debuff stacks too high. Restoration Druids can also use Bear Form to taunt enemies to give a tank some breathing room. Make sure to HoT yourself before doing so, since there will be nobody else to heal the damage mobs will deal.
• Skittish reduces the amount of threat generated by tanks throughout the dungeon.

4.4. Seasonal Affix

Infested is the seasonal affix for the launch of Battle for Azeroth. Enemies afflicted with the Infested debuff will be scattered throughout each dungeon once you reach key level 10. These mobs will heal enemies around them and when slain, will spawn two Spawn of G'huun that will attempt to infest remaining enemies.

There are several ways to handle Infested mobs depending on pack size, which mob is infested, and group composition. The first way to handle an Infested enemy is to burn down the infested target and the subsequently spawning Spawn of G'huun while either crowd controlling or ignoring the other mobs in the pack. The second way is to crowd control the Infested mob and burn down all the other enemies. After you kill and infested mob and the Spawns of G'huun spawn, Restoration Druids can use Typhoon to knock them away, knock the remaining mobs away or use Ursol's Vortex to prevent them from escaping. In case everything is on cooldown, you can spam Entangling Roots continuously until they are dead. Doing so will not completely stop Spawns of G'huun, but will keep them in roots for a little bit, essentially slowing their attempted escape. Keep in mind, that Entangling Roots cost a lot of Mana and spamming them can force you into drinking.

5. Mythic+ Azerite Traits

1. S Tier: the strongest and most generally useful traits; these are always good choices.
2. A Tier: these traits are either slightly weaker than the S Tier traits, or only as strong in specific situations, but are still solid choices.
3. B Tier: a below-average trait that should be picked only in the absence of an S or A Tier trait.
4. C Tier: a weak trait that provides very little healing output or other utility and should be avoided if possible.
5. D Tier: the worst of the worst traits, these are virtually useless.

5.1. S Tier

• Grove Tending is an incredible trait for dungeon healing. Extra HoT for Mastery: Harmony is very strong and always needed. You do not need to spec Prosperity for Grove Tending to work.
• Tradewinds provides very high amount of Mastery on proc and will even increase damage of your other group members.
• Incite the Pack also provides high amount of Mastery and will increase damage of your group members on top of that.
• Archive of the Titans provides a strong Intellect increase, but decays a little between the packs. Make sure your group keeps the pace, otherwise the trait becomes much weaker.

5.2. A Tier

• Waking Dream is extremely strong when you have only one trait of it, but the added value of a second and third trait are progressively lower. It will be much stronger if you picked Germination.
• Resounding Protection is an all-round strong trait. It is always useful and provides solid throughput.
• Blood Siphon provides a good passive increase to your stats.
• Blightborne Infusion provides a solid proc with decent uptime.
• Blood Rite is another trait that provides a solid proc with decent uptime.
• Lively Spirit is a good trait, especially if you time your Innervate around burst phases.
• Meticulous Scheming is a very strong trait, but requires you to pay attention to a buff you receive in order to activate an extremely strong Haste buff.
• Lifespeed is a very good trait to pick up even just for Haste itself. Avoidance increases your survivability, which makes it invaluable on a lot of dungeon fights.
• Secrets of the Deep requires you to move around and pick up orbs, but that also allows you some leeway in when you want to activate the buff. It should be easy to pick them up as a Restoration Druid.
• Ursoc's Endurance can be useful to avoid dying to certain infrequent one-shot mechanics.
• Synergistic Growth does not provide a good amount of Mastery, but Mastery is extremely strong and burst healing is incredibly strong in dungeons.
• Blessed Portents can be extremely potent on encounters with high damage.

5.3. B Tier

• Anduin's Dedication / Sylvanas' Resolve provide decent Intellect proc.
• Swirling Sands is another trait that provides a secondary stat proc. The duration increase part is trivial to fulfill with all the HoTs Restoration Druids have ticking.
• On My Way is a decent trait with passive movement speed increase on top of it.
• Azerite Veins provides incredible healing once it procs, although it can be unreliable with only 1 proc per minute.
• First Autumn Leaves can be a decent choice for Germination specs just for 1-second increase on Rejuvenation.
• Early Harvest provides decent healing and can be abused between the packs to give you lower cooldown on Innervate.

5.4. C Tier

• Rampant Growth provides amazing throughput no paper, but falls short whenever you have to spam heal the tank.
• Laser Matrix will provide some healing and damage, but there are much better options for both.
• Bracing Chill and Concentrated Mending both proc healing in one way or another. The healing itself is pretty mediocre.
• Earthlink does not provide enough Intellect to be considered a solid choice.
• Savior has too low of a Health threshold in order to proc and the healing itself is not impressive.
• Impassive Visage provides decent throughput, but in order to do so requires quite steady damage events, which do not happen on all or trash.
• Unstable Catalyst's biggest downside is the requirement to stand still, which is not always feasible, especially in dungeons.

5.5. D Tier

• Self Reliance it is generally extremely hard to keep 20-yard distance between yourself and enemies, especially in dungeons with tight corridors.
• Second and third Autumn Leaves traits are terrible in dungeons and provide almost nothing useful.
• The second or third Rampant Growth traits provide very little throughput and should be avoided when possible.
• Ephemeral Recovery provides very little Mana. On top of that, Mana is generally useless in dungeon content.
• Woundbinder procs Haste, but on low uptime and the amount is pretty low.
• Longstrider is probably the worst trait there is. The movement speed increase is laughable for a spec with incredible mobility, as well as having no extra throughput benefits on top.

6. Changelog