4. Resto talents

Druid Healing Talents in Mists of Pandaria (Updated 3/2/2013 for 5.2):

In the current talent system, a set of talents is shared across all four druid specializations. Choosing your specialization now gives you a bunch of abilities as you level up. Then, you get to choose 6 additional abilities from the talent set. The purpose of these talents is to allow for choice, so I will spend more time explaining what they do than telling you which one to choose.

Level 15:  Take Feline swiftness.

• Feline Swiftness: Increases your movement speed by 15% at all times. This is the best talent for resto PvE.
• Displacer beast: Don’t take this for PvE.
• Wild charge: Gives you a different movement teleport effect depending on your specialization. Most importantly, in caster form, you teleport to the location of your targeted ally. In addition, travel form leaps forward 20 yards (helpful when outside). Other forms have additional movement bonuses. This has situational uses, so this could be a viable option.

Level 15:  Take Feline swiftness.

• Feline Swiftness: Increases your movement speed by 15% at all times. This is the best talent for resto PvE.
• Displacer beast: Don’t take this for PvE.
• Wild charge: Gives you a different movement teleport effect depending on your specialization. Most importantly, in caster form, you teleport to the location of your targeted ally. In addition, travel form leaps forward 20 yards (helpful when outside). Other forms have additional movement bonuses. This has situational uses, so this could be a viable option.

Level 30:  Choose Nature’s Swiftness.

• Nature’s Swiftness: makes your next healing spell, roots, rebirth, or cyclone instant-cast, cost no mana, and usable in all forms. This is helpful for getting off mana-free, instant Healing Touches. Macro this to Healing Touch.
• Renewal: Instant cast that heals yourself for 30% of your health. Not recommended for Resto since you can’t cast it on other people.
• Cenarion Ward: A buff you put on your target that will apply a HOT to tick down after they get hit. Note that this costs mana and we really already have enough HOTs (CW is prone to over-healing), so I don’t recommend this. This does more healing in 5.2, but I recommend the big burst heal that will save lives over a situational HOT when we already have tons of HOTs.

Level 45: Overall, I prefer typhoon for general purpose uses. However, this is really situational depending on encounters.

• Faerie Swarm: Your faerie fire spell slows your target’s movement speed. Situationally useful.
• Mass Entanglement: Will root multiple targets in place for a short time. Situationally useful.
• Typhoon: Knocks back your target and dazes (slows) them for a short period of time. Situationally useful.

Level 60:  These are actually much better balanced after the 5.3 changes. For general purposes, Incarnation, followed by Force of Nature are my general suggestions. Soul of the Forest is only good for people who know how to min-max the talent, and in most situations, the reward isn’t worth the increased effort.

•  Soul of the forest: For resto, using swiftmend gives you a 75% haste bonus to your next cast (buffed in 5.2). You would want to cast a wild growth or tranquility after your swiftmend to get the maximum benefit. For high-end raiders, this is definitely a viable option now. However, since the wild growth and swiftmend cooldowns don’t always line up right, I don’t recommend this for beginner healers.
• Incarnation (instant) is the old tree form cooldown talent that shifts you into the large tree and augments your spells: Lifebloom can be put on more than one target which allows you to briefly use it to stack with other HOTs on raid members for increased healing output. Regrowth becomes instant cast so you can use this when OOC procs to conserve mana. Wild Growth will hit up to 2 more targets (most useful in a 25-man setting). While SOTF has the potential for higher overall output, Incarnation is better for mana conservation due to lifebloom’s low mana cost and the potential for generating more OOC procs, and you can’t heal while OOM.
• Force of Nature: 1 minute cooldown. Summons a treant to fight for you. Resto treants cast Healing Touch and swiftmend. This talent doesn’t cost any mana, and is pretty easy to “set and forget”, so this can be really helpful for new resto druids or people who first hit level 90 and need more help with managing their mana.

Level 75: I recommend Ursol’s Vortex since it doesn’t require you to be close to the target.

• Disorienting roar: Disorients all enemies within 10 yards (your targets won’t attack for the duration of the effect, but any damage you do will break the disorient).
• Ursol’s Vortex: Will slow the movement speed of enemies in the vortex.
• Mighty bash: A 5 second stun that requires being in melee range.

Level 90: Most resto druids take Heart of the Wild. Both HOTW and Nature’s Vigil, however, may have situational uses that are preferred over the other (e.g. passive that is active all the time versus a cooldown to give extra healing). They both also contain some damage-increasing utility that may be helpful for some fights.

• Heart of the wild: increases your Int by 6%. When you are soloing or get bored, you also get a temporary boost to your off-specs (so, you can cast balance spells, mangle things in cat form, or pretend to tank in bear form for a few seconds before meeting an untimely death).
• Dream of Cenarius: Casting wrath makes your next heal (except tranquility) hit harder, and your moonfire/sunfire hits harder after casting healing spells. Don’t take this, since the other two talents are better.
• Nature’s Vigil: Cooldown that increases your healing done by 10% for 30 seconds and your single-target healing does damage to nearby targets. This changed from a 3 minute cooldown to a 1.5 minute cooldown, but the benefit was also reduced to compensate for the change. This is still a strong talent overall.

Here’s a standard cookie-cutter build for level 90, though you may want to make different choices as outlined above. Some glyphs are also included, though you may want to make different choices, as outlined in the next section.

Go back to table of contents         or       Go to 5. Glyphs