Introduction
This guide was written by Heregellas.
Heregellas, or Alisza on his priest, is mostly playing disc/holy priest or resto druid during progress. He previously raided in From Scratch, and in Impact as an officer & raid leader before joining Method.
Restoration Druid is a versatile healer with access to damage, crowd control, mobility, and robust healing throughput that makes them great healers for Mythic+.
In raids, they will be able to provide a huge amount of healing during some specific regular windows with a proactive type of healing (what we call “a ramp”), and can completely carry the healing throughput on the whole raid during those.
What has changed
Patch 10.0.7 Changes
In the 10.0.7 patch, Blizzard did rework the Specialization tree a bit, moving some talents around, on top of updating the effect of three of them:
- Embrace of the Dream now also triggers on targets with the Regrowth heal over time effect
- Regenerative Heartwood now also extends the duration of Ironbark by 4 seconds
- Natural Wisdom is now a baseline effect on Innervate for Restoration Druids. No longer increases mana regeneration by 5%, and the additional Innervate’s effectiveness has been reduced to 50% (was 100%)
First Impressions
Dragonflight is bringing back talent trees. Even though a modified version of the old trees (with a Class tree and a Specialization tree, with two distinct pools of points), we have some exciting changes/additions, such as:
- The return of Nature’s Vigil, a free boost to our DPS while healing, very strong in raids,
- We’re no longer tied to affinities, and can pick multiple talents, whether they were tied to feral, guardian, or balance in the past, …including Skull Bash!
- We still can pick our old Tier Set from Sepulcher or Night Fae & Necro covenants spells via the Restoration Talent Tree.
In terms of gameplay in raids, this probably won’t change much from the end of Shadowlands since we can globally have the same toolkit with the same 1-minute ramp windows.
The free DPS boost granted by Nature’s Vigil is most welcome, and the fact that we are able to take Skull Bash to help with the interrupts is pretty nice!
The same will apply for M+, with a very similar toolkit in terms of gameplay, which was already quite satisfying.