Part 2: Mastery, tree form, and other spells (updated 11/28/2011 for 85 in 4.2)
Mastery: Mastery is a bonus you get for choosing restoration as your talent spec focus. Mastery is also a stat on high-level (85) gear.
Our current mastery is called harmony.
Harmony increases direct healing by an additional 10%, and casting direct healing spells grants an additional 10% bonus to periodic healing for 10 seconds. Each point of mastery increases each bonus by an additional 1.25%. Healing Touch, Nourish, Swiftmend, and the initial heal from Regrowth are considered direct healing spells for the purposes of this Mastery. All other healing from druid spells is considered periodic.
So, Lets break this down. Harmony actually has two effects:
- First, it buffs all of our direct heals by 10% plus mastery on your gear. Direct heals are considered to be: nourish, regrowth, healing touch, and swiftmend.
- Second, you get a buff on YOU for 10 seconds that buffs your HOTs by 10% plus mastery from gear. You get this buff every time you cast a direct heal (including swiftmend!).
Here’s how this will work in practice:
- As a tank healer, you cast enough direct heals that Harmony’s buff will almost always be active on you.
- As an AOE/raid healer, you should use Swiftmend to refresh your mastery every time Swiftmend comes off cooldown, being mindful of using swiftmend to benefit the most from efflorescence. You will want to use a direct heal to refresh Lifebloom on your tank to activate the mastery between Swiftmend casts (the Harmony buff is 10 seconds, and swiftmend has a 15 sec cooldown).
- Between swiftmend refreshing and using direct heals to keep lifebloom rolling, the mastery actually encourages you to have a good healing style that is still incredibly HOT-focused and semi-mobile. This mastery has the potential of buffing every cast you make if you manage it correctly (ie. near 100% up-time on your healing).
Tree form:
Tree of Life (instant – shapeshift form) is a 3 minute cooldown, with a 25 second duration (up to 31 seconds with talents). Pop this at times when you need to heal for more (as it gives you a 6% increase to healing to all your spells). When you go into tree form, a couple of your spells get benefits for the duration of the effect. The ones most relevant to healing at 85 are:
- Regrowth becomes instant cast, which means you can cast it on the move. Use this as an emergency direct heal when you are in tree form (especially when OOC procs).
- Lifebloom can be put on more than one target. This allows you to briefly use it to stack with other HOTs on raid members for increased healing output. Or, you can stack it up on a 2nd tank when times are tough. I tend to sprinkle around some lifeblooms to try and increase my OOC proc rate during tree phase (and then the ones on DPS or a second tank are allowed to bloom). When OOC procs, I use my instant regrowths.
- Wild Growth will hit up to 2 more targets (most useful in a 25-man setting)
- It also gives a bonus to wrath & roots for PvP/soloing (for example, use tree form for doing damage in Chimaeron’s 3rd phase when healing doesn’t work anymore)
Other abilities for resto druids:
- Remove corruption: allows you to remove 1 magic (if talented), curse, and poison effect. All of our dispels are in this one button.
- Mark of the Wild: Now raid-wide and gift of the wild was removed. Does not cost a reagent. Same buff as paladin Kings (so only one of the two can be on someone at a time).
- Innervate: When you cast innervate on yourself, you regen 20% of your mana. When you cast it on someone else, they regenerate 5% of their mana. So, it is usually preferable to cast it on yourself.
- Thorns: Lasts for 20 seconds and has a 45 second cooldown.
- Nature’s Swiftness: You can macro this to Healing Touch for another instant burst tool when you choose this talent.
- Rebirth: In-combat resurrection. Cooldown is 10 minutes, but the raid group can only res 1 person per fight in 10-mans, or up to 3 reses per fight in 25-mans. Warlock & DK’s in-combat res abilities count towards this total. You should use the rebirth glyph so that the person will res at full health (making your res not ever get wasted when you use it). I also use the Rebirther addon for tracking who used their reses in 25-man raids.