4. Recommended talent specs

4. Recommended talent specs

There is some degree of flexibility in what specs people think are “best.” So, you can modify these builds to best suit your particular healing style (think of it more like guidelines than rules).

  • The 3.3 talent change to Gift of the Earth Mother changes the amount of haste we need. While we used to be able to gear for about 400 haste or so, the amount of haste we need to hit the “soft cap” has more than doubled. Information about the 3.3 changes can be found here.
  • What does that mean? Well, it means that you need about 735 haste to hit the HOT haste “cap” if you put talent points into Celestial focus and have full raid buffs. You need 856 haste to hit the “cap” if you don’t have CF talented and you have full raid buffs.
  • How important is being haste-capped? Well, basically, at the haste “cap”, all your HOTs have a one second Global Cool Down. Without any haste, they are at 1.5 seconds. So, your casting of instant-cast HOTs is considerably slower without enough haste. You want to be at or as close to the 1 second GCD cap as possible, especially if you are doing more cutting-edge raiding. For people in smaller groups & 5-mans, you won’t necessarily have all the raid buffs, so you would be below the haste cap just from missing the wrath of air totem and moonkin aura.

Talent Specs if you are near the 850 haste soft-cap (with access to Wrath of Air & moonkin/swift ret auras), you can go with one of two builds, with either 14 or 11 points in the balance tree:

Has Nature’s Grace, but not Celestial focus. Nature’s Grace can be useful (even at the HOT haste cap) if you have the glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation, or if you cast a lot of Regrowth/nourish. I dropped replenishment from here, for a more tank-oriented spec. You can trade 2 points Tranquil Spirit for 2 points Revitalize.

Drops Nature’s Grace in favor of maxing out revitalize. May be better for people who don’t benefit as much from Nature’s Grace procs. Revitalize builds are more raid-oriented for 25-mans. Also, you can still use this build with the rapid rejuv-glyph.


Talent Specs If you are at or below 735 haste (or don’t have access to one of the raid buffs), you should consider picking up Celestial Focus. You will end up with something like:

This is a possibility for a CF tank-healing build. Drops replenishment and 2 points of living spirit. Keeps other tank-related talents (empowered touch & living seed). People who tank heal without using a lot of nourish (but still want to keep living seed) may want to drop the Empowered Touch talent for the 2 points of living spirit.

This is a more raid-oriented CF healing build, and is likely going to be more popular for end-game 10′s & 25′s. Keeps replenishment and living spirit. Drops both Empowered Touch and living seed.

Talents I don’t put in my PvE healing builds:

  • Natural Perfection & Imp barkskin – I consider to be PvP talents.
  • Naturalist – Skip this since you won’t be using Healing Touch (and it’s glyph) at level 80. HT gets marginalized when nourish comes out (in the end, nourish heals for more, costs less mana, and has better synergy with the talents & HOTs).
  • Furor – is a balance/feral talent that happens to be in the resto tree.

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