PvE Restoration Druid Talents, Builds, & Glyphs

The Mists of Pandaria expansion overhauled the talent options for every class and removed Prime Glyphs, leaving a more streamlined system for building out your character. For Restoration Druids, your choices will have a subtle, but still meaningful impact on your gameplay and performance.

Talents

Talents can now be changed out of combat as long as you have some Tome of the Clear Mind on hand. That means you can easily swap out talents on a fight-by-fight basis. This gives you greater flexibility to take advantage of niche talents when the situation calls for it instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all talent build.

Here is our recommended default talent build for the majority of content. Read on to find out about individual talents and what situations might call for different talent selections.

Level 15 Talents (Tier 1)

• Feline Swiftness
  This talent provides a nice consistent increase to your movement speed, which makes it a solid default option when you don’t have a particular need for one of the other talents.
• Displacer Beast
  This talent is the best option for fights where you need a burst of speed on a short cooldown. It works very much like a Mage’s Blink.
• Wild Charge
  This talent offers a little bit of flexibility since it changes based on your current form. You can get a little bit of crowd control out of it with Cat Form or Bear Form, or leap forward in Travel Form. You’ll primarily use this ability to fly to an ally’s position in your normal form, like a reverse Leap of Faith. That in itself can be very useful for repositioning, and this ability is on a shorter cooldown than Displacer Beast.

Level 30 Talents (Tier 2)

• Ysera’s Gift
  This talent provides a nice consistent passive healing effect that will improve your own survivability, and it will heal allies when your own health is full. You will only skip this one when you want to use Cenarion Ward for a particular fight.
• Renewal
  This self-heal is similar to the Priest’s Desperate Prayer. It’s only useable on yourself and it’s not very strong. You’re better off taking one of the other two options, even for your own survivability.
• Cenarion Ward
  This is a nice buff to put on a tank or another target who you expect to take reliable damage. It’s only worth taking if you know it won’t be wasted. It can be particularly strong in dungeons where your target won’t be getting topped off by other healers. Otherwise the steady passive healing of Ysera’s Gift will be more effective.

Level 45 Talents (Tier 3)

• Faerie Swarm
  There aren’t too many situations where you’ll find a single-target slow effect useful in endgame group content, but if you do, here you go.
• Mass Entanglement
  This ability will be your best option when you need to lock down enemies. It will root your target and enemies near them for up to 20 seconds, assuming they aren’t hit.
• Typhoon
  This will be your best option in most situations, since it affects multiple targets and isn’t broken by damage. You can use it to help another player kite or to knock away any stray adds that aggro to you or another non-tank.

Level 60 Talents (Tier 4)

• Soul of the Forest
  This talent is strong when used to buff Wild Growth since it will add 2 extra ticks to the HoT. It can also be used with Tranquility for burst healing or Rejuvenation for single-target healing. The downside is that it encourages you to withhold Swiftmend to take advantage of the buff, which may prevent you from triaging effectively. The cooldown on this effect is short since it’s procced by Swiftmend, so you’ll be able to use this more often than the other two abilities. That gives it an edge in fights where you need steady healing rather than burst.
• Incarnation
  For Restoration Druids, this talent gives you access to Tree of Life, a powerful healing cooldown. This buff is on a longer 3-minute cooldown but lasts for 30 seconds, making it great for a heavy damage phase or as part of a raid healing cooldown rotation. It provides the greatest boost to your healing of the three options, albeit on the longest cooldown.
• Force of Nature
  As a Restoration Druid, this talent will summon a Treant that heals nearby injured allies. These heals are not the most intelligent. The other two options will be more effective since you have more control over them.

Level 75 Talents (Tier 5)

• Disorienting Roar
  An AoE disorient on a relatively short cooldown. Probably the least useful in most situations since it breaks on damage and requires close range. It’s usable in Cat Form, though, so you can use it while catweaving.
• Ursol’s Vortex
  A good default option for general crowd control if you don’t have a particular reason to take Mighty Bash. It has the longest cooldown, but it can be used to keep a large number of enemies contained, and it doesn’t break on damage. It’s also the only option of the three with a long range, making it easiest to use while healing.
• Mighty Bash
  This single-target stun offers hard CC for a lone enemy, which can sometimes be more valuable than the other two options for locking down a particularly nasty foe. It does require melee range, however. Usable while catweaving.

Level 90 Talents (Tier 6)

• Heart of the Wild
  Primarily you’ll be taking this talent for its passive 6% buff to your Intellect, which is very good on its own. The ability it grants is on a long cooldown, and its benefits won’t be useful for healing, although the enhanced damage can certainly come in handy for fights with an enrage timer. Typically you’ll take this talent for its passive stat increase when you don’t need the burst cooldown from Nature’s Vigil. This is the only one of the three options that will benefit catweaving as well as spell damage.
• Dream of Cenarius
  This talent gives you an effect that is similar to a Discipline Priest’s Atonement, allowing you to continue healing while dealing damage. Unfortunately you don’t have much else to support this style of play, which leaves this as the weakest option in this tier.
• Nature’s Vigil
  A solid cooldown for burst healing and damage, on a much shorter CD than Heart of the Wild. Lines up well with Incarnation if you want to use them both together. Allows for a better imitation of Atonement healing than Dream of Cenarius, which makes it very good for fights with a burn phase since you can contribute both damage and healing at the same time. Even if you aren’t going to be casting damaging spells or single-target heals to take advantage of the splash component of the spell, you can still benefit from its 12% increase to your healing.

Glyphs

Prime Glyphs are gone in Mists of Pandaria. You will still choose 3 Major Glyphs and 3 Minor Glyphs.

Major Glyphs

There are a few Major Glyphs for Restoration Druids that will be useful in the majority of content, and several alternatives that can be even more useful in the right circumstances.

Default Options

If you’re just looking to grab the 3 most straightforward glyphs for a Restoration Druid, here are your picks.

• Glyph of Efflorescence
  This glyph transfers your Efflorescence effect to your Wild Mushroom spell instead of Swiftmend, extends the duration to match, and buffs Swiftmend by 20%. Everything about this glyph is useful, especially in larger groups. You’ll be able to keep near 100% uptime on your Efflorescence and apply it via a similar AoE healing effect, allowing you to use Swiftmend freely for spot healing. With the Minor Glyph of the Sprouting Mushroom you’ll be able to place your Mushrooms wherever you want, which means you’ll also have greater control over your Efflorescence. Then there’s also the buff to Swiftmend, which is a nice bonus.
• Glyph of Wild Growth
  This option adds an extra target to your Wild Growth effect in exchange for adding 2 seconds to the spell’s cooldown. This glyph becomes stronger the more targets you are responsible for. In 25-player groups, it’s mandatory. For dungeons, the extra HoT is wasted, so you should pick up something else.
• Glyph of Healing Touch
  This glyph causes your Healing Touch casts to reduce the cooldown on your Nature’s Swiftness. The value of this glyph will depend entirely upon how much you are using Healing Touch. This glyph will usually be strongest in smaller group content or any fight where you will be doing a lot of tank/single-target healing. It may also pay dividends early on when your mana is tighter and you must lean more heavily on Healing Touch for its efficiency.

Situational Options

These can offer strong alternatives to the glyphs above depending on the content and your approach.

• Glyph of Innervate
  You should only use this glyph if you’re very comfortable with your own mana pool and willing/able to give your Innervates away to other healers. In that case, it will give both you and your target a 60% effective Innervate. That’s 20% more mana total between the two of you, but your character will get 40% less than you would if you saved it for yourself.
• Glyph of Rebirth
  Your Rebirth targets already resurrect with 60% health, but there may be situations where bringing people back at 100% is the safest bet, and that’s where this glyph comes in. Outside of such situations, there are better options.
• Glyph of Regrowth
  You won’t be stacking much Crit as a Restoration Druid, so giving your Regrowth a 40% increased chance to crit can be a substantial buff to your single-target and emergency healing. You lose out on the spell’s HoT in the process, however, so this glyph’s usefulness depends upon how much you need a strong emergency heal versus a steadier tick of HoTs.
• Glyph of Rejuvenation
  This glyph reduces the cast time of Nourish when you have Rejuvenation active on at least 3 targets. This interaction is a bit awkward since it involves a mixture of raid healing (keeping Rejuvenation up on multiple targets) and single-target healing (Nourish), but it can be good in certain situations, such as dungeons or content where the group is too spread out for you to use your other AoE heals.
• Glyph of Stampede
  Lets you cast Stampeding Roar without having to shapeshift, which can make the ability much more usable in any encounter where you expect your group to need it.
• Glyph of Stampeding Roar
  Extends the effect of Stampeding Roar by 30 yards. Like the glyph above, this one can make this group buff much more useful, but it should only be used if you will actually need it for the encounter at hand.

Options to Avoid

These may seem like strong options for Restoration Druids at first glance, but they’re generally not as good and will only have limited or niche usefulness.

• Glyph of Barkskin
  You shouldn’t be getting hit enough for this to be useful.
• Glyph of Blooming
  While increasing the expiration healing of Lifebloom by 50% might sound great, trading a third of its duration and your ability to refresh it with your other heals is not worth it in endgame PvE. This glyph is best reserved for PvP.
• Glyph of Dash
  You have enough movement options not to need this.
• Glyph of the Master Shapeshifter
  Your shapeshifting spells aren’t expensive enough for this to make much of an impact.

Minor Glyphs

Minor Glyphs are mostly cosmetic. There are a few that can offer useful utility at endgame.

• Glyph of the Sprouting Mushroom
  This lets you place your Wild Mushroom where you want to, which is especially useful if paired with Glyph of Efflorescence, which you should pretty much always be using. The combination allows you greater control over where your Efflorescence is placed.
• Glyph of Grace
  Slowfall can sometimes be useful even during boss fights.
• Glyph of the Stag
  This can be nice for helping your slower teammates keep up anytime you are able to use Travel Form.