Restoration Druid Healing Spec, Builds, and Talents — The War Within (11.1.5)

While optimizing talents on a contextual basis is the highly recommended method of setting up your build, the talent builds listed below work great for specific purposes.

Multiple talents require a change to your rotation to use them optimally. You can find more information on how your rotation will look after selecting your talents on our rotation page below.

Your main idea when building a talent tree should be to spend as many points at the bottom of the tree as possible since they are the strongest ones. With that in mind, try to pick the bare minimum in the first two sections. We will try to break down the order in which you should pick talents and priorities within each tier.

You have to spend 8 points in this section, which generally leaves you with little choice.

1. Lifebloom, Nature's Swiftness, Flash of Clarity and Ysera's Gift are always chosen, no matter what content you are doing.
2. Grove Tending is a powerful talent for this tier. You will generally pick this one as well.
3. After that you will pick Abundance and Wildwood Roots.
4. Next you will pick Nature's Swiftness-improving talents, Improved Regrowth, or Tranquil Mind. Neither is particularly exciting, so you can use your discretion here. Keep in mind that Mythic+ spec will use double Lifebloom, which will give you more Clearcasting procs.

Similar to the first tier of talents, you are left with 12 points to spend here, making selections generally obvious depending on content.

1. You will, first of all, always pick the following 3 talents: Efflorescence, Ironbark, Soul of the Forest.
2. For raiding, your next obvious choices will be Inner Peace / Dreamstate, Improved Wild Growth, Cultivation.
3. For Mythic+ and raids we pick Stonebark / Improved Ironbark + Regenerative Heartwood. Mythic+ skips an extra target for Wild Growth. Mainly, we pick Regenerative Heartwood in raids to use Ironbark in ramps. The buff to Wild Growth from Unstoppable Growth is not as good as an extra target being unkillable for your ramp.
4. Both raid and Mythic+ specs will pick Grove Guardians.
5. Wild Synthesis is generally good for both types of content.
6. Renewing Surge should be skipped for both raids and Mythic+. In order to get maximum cooldown reduction, you pretty much have to heal someone at 1% Health.
7. Raiding spec will have one point left. You spend it on Rampant Growth.
8. Mythic+ specs will need three points to advance further. Verdancy is a pretty good choice here. You can spend the remaining points on Harmonious Blooming and Rampant Growth.

Raiding Druids have a lot of mandatory points in this section: Flourish, Master Shapeshifter, Germination, Convoke the Spirits / Incarnation: Tree of Life, Cenarius' Guidance, Verdant Infusion. This is 6 talent points out of 10 available.

You have 4 remaining talent points. First of all, to make it to Germination, you need to pick either two points in Thriving Vegetation or one point in Nurturing Dormancy. This leaves us with 2 talent points. We generally prefer to use them on Spring Blossoms and Power of the Archdruid

Mythic+ Druids have to make different choices. The only DPS talents left in this section are Convoke the Spirits and Call of the Elder Druid. We will always pick Convoke here for both more healing and damage, skip Call of the Elder Druid unless you want to go heavy on damage. We will also always pick Cenarius' Guidance. Then it is a choice between Prosperity and Verdant Infusion. The better choice for most situations here is Verdant Infusion. This leaves us with 7 talents.

Due to the small group nature of Mythic+, we will generally prefer Lifebloom-oriented builds over Rejuvenation. For the most healing, we will always pick Undergrowth. We will also want Spring Blossoms due to how strong it is. We are now left with 5 points.

Both Flourish and Photosynthesis are competitive choices here. You will not be wrong to use either one.

Out of Master Shapeshifter and Liveliness, we will most often prefer Master Shapeshifter for Keeper of the Grove and Liveliness for Wildstalker. Master Shapeshifter buffs caster spells, which are utilised a lot more with Keeper. Liveliness, in turn, massively speeds up the tick rate of your DoTs. We are mainly interested in Rake and Rip. The more ticks on these two, the more Bloodseeker Vines procs. Liveliness will also increase the tick rate of Bloodseeker Vines, and they will buff your Rake and Rip.

Call of the Elder Druid and Dream of Cenarius really require a lot of time to be spent doing damage to be worth it. They will not contribute any healing during heaviest damage, which is a major downside. Dream of Cenarius will basically always be a bad talent, because it is a pure healing talent contributing little healing. We strongly recommend to never pick these 2 talents unless you are doing some solo content or content way below your skill level.

With the remaining 3 talents we will want to put one into Forest's Flow or Nurturing Dormancy, one into Thriving Vegetation, and one into Germination.

Nurturing Dormancy in particular is very strong with Druid Restoration 11.1 Class Set 4pc. Rejuvenations from this bonus will be able to get extended by 4 seconds, and you will generate a lot of them when specced into Photosynthesis and Undergrowth.

There is no good way to make one spec that will work for all raid bosses or all dungeons at all levels. It is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each talent path and build something coherent with synergies, making sure that all extra spells you pick up are utilized properly.

2 points in Nurturing Instinct are too strong and important to ignore.

All Druids will always want Ursoc's Spirit and Improved Barkskin.

The major decisions are on the left side of the first rows. Raiding druids will want to pick defensive options: Frenzied Regeneration and possibly Verdant Heart.

Mythic+ players will want to pick Starfire, Moonkin Form, and Sunfire when playing Keeper of the Grove. Rake, Rip, Thrash are obvious choices for Wildstalker. You will have a couple of flexible points here, which are going to have almost no effect.

Here, every Druid should be picking the following talents: Natural Recovery, Thick Hide, Ursol's Vortex / Mass Entanglement, Soothe, Stampeding Roar, Renewal, Lingering Healing.

To go into the left-side defensive talents, you will have to pick Wild Charge / Tiger Dash and either Feline Swiftness or Well-Honed Instincts to progress furtehr. Because both of these talents are quite good, we recommend you take both.

Skull Bash is a good pick for Mythic+ here, too, especially if you decide to pick Fluid Form later.

In the last part of the tree, you will have to pick 2 talents in Lycara's Teachings and 1 talent in Oakskin.

Raiding druids will always pick Innervate, Symbiotic Relationship, and Nature's Vigil.

After that you will have choices between damage, defensive and crowd control talents. For Mythic+ you will be doing quite a lot of shifting, so we recommend to take at least Lycara's Meditation. Raiding druids want to take Heart of the Wild for extra Mana regen, but to get there you need to spend 1 extra point. Choose whichever option you prefer.

You can go into "War Mode." Enabling War Mode provides the following benefits:

• PvP talents enabled in the outdoor world.
• 10-30% increase in World Quest rewards at maximum level.
• 10-30% more experience gained while leveling.
• Earn Conquest Points, which can reward gear every week.

With the benefits of enabling War Mode for leveling and PvE content, it is recommended enabling the feature to maximize your leveling and rewards at maximum level. However, you will make yourself available for open-world PvP, and the possibility of being killed while leveling or doing World Quests exists.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content. Below is a ranking of General PvP Talents and Restoration Druid-specific PvE talents.

1. Thorns is a good choice that offers a direct damage increase. It is usable in any form and can provide significant damage to big pulls.

Disentanglement, Entangling Bark, Deep Roots, Focused Growth, Early Spring have limited effect on PvE content in terms of increasing your damage in the open-world or healing in a small group setting.