In this article, we present you with various talent trees for Restoration Druids (WoW 4.3) that you can use in specific situations. We also give you pointers for customising your talent tree and adapting it to a particular boss. The other articles of our Restoration Druid guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the left.

1. Common Talent Builds↑top

The following talent build is a common choice for Restoration Druids. It takes most of the healing-increasing talents and does not take Nature's Cure, the talent that allows Restoration Druids to remove magical debuffs.

This talent build is also very common. It takes Nature's Cure and also provides you with a larger mana pool, at the expense of slightly lower throughput from the missing points in Genesis.

2. Customising Your Build↑top

As a Restoration Druid, few of your talents are fixed and you have a lot of room for customisation. Despite this, we will only present you with those choices that are actually meaningful in the current state of World of Warcraft.

Additionally, we will explain what each of your important glyphs does.

2.1. Talents

Restoration Druids have a very large number of potential talents to take, leading to an enormous amount of possible talent builds. Given that these talents will all be gone in Mists of Pandaria and no new content will be released while they are in place, we will only present you with a few variations that are useful in current content.

• Restoration Tree
  • Choose whether or not to take 1/1 in Nature's Cure. This allows you to dispel magical debuffs. It is generally not needed in 25-man raids, but it may be needed in 10-man raids, depending on your groups composition (especially if you are 2-healing encounters).
  • 2/3 or 3/3 in Nature's Bounty. If you have taken Nature's Cure, then you must take 2/3 here. Otherwise, you can take 3/3.
• Balance Tree
  • Choosing whether or not to take 2/3 in Genesis. This will increase your periodic healing and the healing from Swiftmend by 4%. If you prefer the small amount of extra healing, you should choose this talent. Otherwise, you will use these talent points to boost your mana pool by taking 2/3 in Furor, in the Feral Combat Tree. This allows you to take less Spirit, which you can reforge into Mastery, making up for the lower throughput.

2.2. Glyphs

There is no discussion to be had in regards to the glyphs that actually affect your healing performance. Other glyphs provide utility or otherwise make some things more comfortable, but are of little impact, ultimately.

2.2.1. Prime Glyphs

You should use the following 3 Prime Glyphs in all cases:

• Glyph of Rejuvenation, which increases the healing done by Rejuvenation by 10%;
• Glyph of Lifebloom, which increases the critical strike chance of Lifebloom by 10%;
• Glyph of Swiftmend, which causes your Swiftmend to no longer consume a HoT from your target.

2.2.2. Major Glyphs

The following two Major Glyphs should always be used:

• Glyph of Healing Touch, which causes each Healing Touch you cast to reduce the cooldown of your Nature's Swiftness spell (assuming it is on cooldown) by 10 seconds;
• Glyph of Rebirth, which causes targets revived by your Rebirth to come back to life with full health. This glyph is practically mandatory, since it reduces the chances that players you resurrect during combat will die again right away to environmental damage.

For your final glyph, you will have to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether or not you want to use Glyph of Wild Growth. This glyph causes your Wild Growth to affect an additional target, but it also increases its cooldown by 2 seconds. The result of using this glyph is that you gain higher healing throughput (assuming that there are 6 players to be healed, so, predominantly in 25-man raids) from Wild Growth casts, but your uptime with it is lower (the HoT lasts 7 seconds and, with the glyph, the cooldown becomes 10 seconds). This frees up a global cooldown, allowing you to weave extra spells in. You will have to decide how important healing a 6th target is to you in the encounter, compared to having higher uptime of Wild Growth.

If you do not choose this glyph, you can take any other Major Glyph you want, as they are all mostly useless to you anyway.

2.2.3. Minor Glyphs

None of the Minor Glyphs is mandatory, so you can freely choose from these four glyphs:

• Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth, which reduces the need for a reagent to cast Rebirth;
• Glyph of Dash, which reduces the cooldown of Dash by 20%;
• Glyph of Mark of the Wild, reduces the mana cost of Mark of the Wild by 50%. This is useful if you are rebuffing Mark of the Wild during a fight;
• Glyph of the Treant, which changes your character's appearance when in Tree of Life form. It is a purely cosmetic glyph, especially useful for those players who dislike the aspect of the Cataclysm version of Tree of Life.