Introduction
This guide was written by Riku.
Riku or ‘Rikuxd’ is a Restoration Druid and Shaman main player, who sometimes dabbles in some Priest gameplay on progress. He is an officer and healer in the raiding guild ‘Honolulu’.
Restoration druid is a healer with a very wide variety of tools, with access to an extensive crowd control kit, damage, utility and movement. This makes Restoration Druid an excellent choice for M+ or raids.
What to expect from Restoration Druids in M+; A versatile and multi-purpose healer that can focus on building their talents around efficient healing or damage in other shapeshift forms. They have many different utility and crowd control talents to pick for different dungeons and scenarios.
What to expect from Restoration Druids in raids; Reliable raid wide covered healing, in the form of ‘ramping’. Restoration Druids rely on knowing the damage patterns ahead of time, to prepare their HoT’s for a big raid wide healing throughput by extending and buffing said HoT’s. In addition to this, they provide a raid buff in ‘Mark of the Wild’ and utility spells such as ‘Stampeding Roar’ and ‘Typhoon’.
What has changed
Patch 11.0.5 Changes
During a recent class tuning update, Enhancement Shaman had the following change:
- Swiftmend healing increased by 25%
The change is very minimal and has no impact on gameplay.
Patch 11.0.5 Release Changes
- Reforestation now procs after every four Swiftmends (was three). Somehow was left out of official patch notes. Obviously hurts our flexibility with ramping in raids, but overall a needed small nerf.
- New Talent; Twin Leaf. Nature's Swiftness now has 2 charges. Will most likely find use in m+ for certain scenarios.
- New Talent; Wildwood roots. Abundance now also reduces the cast time of Regrowth by 5% per stack. Cenarion Ward’s cooldown reduced by 10 seconds and its duration is increased by 2 seconds. A very useful talent for raids in a very accessible spot in the talent tree!
- New Talent: Renewing Surge. The cooldown of Swiftmend is reduced by up to 40%, based on the current health of the target. You need the target to be close to dying to get the full value and it scales linearly. The idea is interesting to say the least but very hard to get needed value from.
- New talent: Forest’s Flow. Consuming Clearcasting now causes your Regrowth to also cast Nourish onto nearby ally at 60% effectiveness, preferring those with your heal over time effects. Will be a very common pick. Easy and effective hps from consuming Clearcasting.
- Dream of Cenarius has been reworked: Wrath and Shred transfer 50% of their damage and Starfire and Swipe transfer 33% of their damage into healing onto a nearby ally. This effect is increased by 200% while Heart of the Wild is active. This talent will still do pretty much the same as it used to, with some small improvement to the talent overall.
- Omen of Clarity is now a passive ability learned at level 12 (it was a talent before). This frees up a talent point!
- Harmonious Blooming is now a 1-point talent. For m+, this talent is a go-to-choice, so we get another free talent point! Now we also have the option to pick this for raids in certain scenarios.
- Flourish and Convoke the spirits have had their visuals renewed.
Overall our playstyle doesn’t change in either m+ or raids. These changes allow for Restoration Druids to have more flexibility in the talent trees and allow us to have multiple better choices of our desire.
The War Within Changes
The new addition in The War Within is the set of Hero Talents; each spec will have access to another small special tree, shared with another spec, that will grant the player a new set of 10 points (+ the base one) that you’ll be able to take through leveling.
All 10 points will be granted to the player. The choices players can make will revolve around 4 of these points, being dual-talents nodes, in addition to the whole set of Hero Talents, since you’ll be able to choose between two of them.
For Restoration Druids, you’ll have access to the Keeper of the Grove set (shared with Balance), or the Wildstalker one (shared with Feral).