Med School: healing resto at levels 1-80

I was goofing around today getting some of the vanity pets I had missed along the way while leveling when I got a whisper out of the clear blue sky from a druid I didn’t know asking if I was resto.  “Yea,” was my eloquent reply.  “How would you heal at my level?” was the question that followed.  This druid was level 21.  I gave my best advice and told him to feel free to ask questions any time, throw me on his friends list, etc., etc.  The question got me thinking, though.  I’ve seen lots of general druid leveling guides, but I don’t remember ever seeing one that said, “at level X, try healing in Y manner.  At level X+1, throw Z into the rotation.”  It may exist, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.  So here from me to the little druids coming up is that guide. 

Before I get into the meat of the guide, I would like to point out that this guide is directed toward healing 5 man instances only, as most healing experiences you will have up to level 80 will probably be in this setting.  That is not to say that you won’t try out some of the old world level 60 raid instances or Burning Crusade level 70 raid instances before you hit level 80.  However, raid instances would require a completely different kind of discussion that will not be undertaken here.

This guide, and this site generally, have nothing to do with healing PVP.  I don’t do it, I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t want to do it.  Sorry.  =)

In addition, this guide does not touch on glyphs, and only addresses talents lightly.  Glyphs and talents will change the nature of some of these spells significantly, but I did not want to overly complicate this discussion.  Discussions of both glyph and talent choices are available elsewhere, and the hope is that once people get these basics down and get some practice in, they will be able to make their own, educated, informed decisions about how to glyph and talent for their healing style and goals.  However, if someone has questions about glyphs or talents in reference to this guide, please feel free to ask them in comments or in an email to me and I’ll be happy to extend the conversation for you to cover your question.

Level 1 - Congratulations!  You exist!  You may not have many chances or reasons to heal a group at this level, but if you find yourself  in that position, you have no choices yet to make.  It’s Healing Touch or nothing, so I’d go with Healing Touch.  At this level Healing Touch takes only 1.5 seconds to cast, and lands a big heal all at once.  The cast time of Healing Touch will increase steadily as your level increases until it reaches its 3.5 second max.

Level 4 – This level is very important because it brings to you the first of your bread and butter spells, your heal over time spells, or HoTs.  Your first HoT is Rejuvenation.  Rejuvenation heals your target for a set amount over the period of 12 seconds.  The actual healing is disbursed at 3 second intervals over this 12 second period. 

If you are in a group and healing, you will want to keep a Rejuvenation on your tank throughout encounters.  This will mitigate the damage the tank takes.  You can then reserve your Healing Touch spell, which has a long cast time (at this level it is up to a 2 second cast) and costs considerably more mana, for when your tank has taken significant damage and needs a big heal.  Rejuvenates can also be cast on other party members to bring their health up if they take some damage but the tank is able to pick up the aggro off them.

Level 12 – At this level you get Regrowth, another HoT spell.  Regrowth deals out about half of its healing up front, then the other half over the next 21 seconds. 

I would recommend continuing to start out healing an encounter by putting Rejuvenate on your tank and refreshing this spell as necessary.  Wait to cast Regrowth until your tank’s health has dipped down about 1/4 – 1/3 so that the initial big heal of Regrowth is not wasted.  Then cast Regrowth.  You will now have 2 HoTs running on your tank, mitigating incoming damage.  If there is a damage spike, I’d recommend casting Healing Touch if there is still a long way to go before your Regrowth HoT runs out, or, if Regrowth is about to expire, cast another Regrowth on the tank.  Keep your HoTs rolling whenever possible.  A druid healer’s main strength is not in dealing with heavy spike damage, it is in preventing it.  Remember this!

Level 14 – This level brings a Cure Poison spell.  This shouldn’t change your healing style much from 14, but if you see members taking poison from things you are fighting, cure them as soon as possible to keep their health from dipping.

Level 20 – This one is kind of a doozy, for at level 20 you get Rebirth, otherwise known as “battle rez.”  This spell is unique to druids in the game.  No other class can do anything like it.  With this spell you can raise someone from the dead in the middle of combat!  Use this spell wisely while healing.  First, raise only crucial players.  The cooldown on this spell is very long and you should be very picky about whom you choose to cast it on.  Tanks are always my first choice for a Rebirth, because the chance of the whole group wiping when the tank goes down is great.  Also, this spell has a long cast time and uses up a lot of mana.  If you’re casting Rebirth, you aren’t healing during the long cast, and you are reducing your ability to heal after the cast is complete because of the mana depletion.  For these reasons, I almost never raise DPS with a battle res.  Exceptions include if you are fighting a boss with an enrage timer (boss damage spikes dramatically after a set period of time so you need to get boss down quickly) or if you are fighting a boss that has some gimmick that requires a certain class of DPS to complete the fight (need crowd control, need something mind controlled, etc.).

Level 24 - Remove Curse is added here.  See description for Level 14, substituting “curse” whenever you see “poison” and you’ll be on the right track.

Level 30 – You get some great spells to throw into the mix at Level 30!  First, Tranquility.  Tranquility is a channeled heal over time that heals all of the party members who are near you over a period of 8 seconds.  However, until you pick up the Improved Tranquility talent (2 levels) in your restoration talent tree, this spell generates more threat than almost anything else in the entire game.  Therefore, until you have picked up that talent, use this spell very judiciously, as you will almost certainly draw down the aggro of the mobs in the encounter, and chances are you will die.  Once you have picked up Improved Tranquility, however, this spell becomes a very nice “oh crap” button for you to hit when everyone is taking heavy damage and if you choose to heal one party member, others will die.

You also get Nature’s Swiftness at level 30.  Nature’s Swiftness is an instant cast spell that turns your next spell with a cast time of less than 10 seconds onto an instant cast spell.  This spell is huge, and I wish that I had learned to use it long before I actually did.  You will still keep up the same rotations that you have been practicing since level 12, with one big difference.  If the tank takes a huge hit, you can cast Nature’s Swiftness followed by Healing Touch for a huge, instant heal.  The spell does have a cooldown, so use it wisely, but have fun with your new instant heal bombs! 

Level 40 – If you have been spending your talents all in the restoration tree, you will be able to get a 31 point talent at level 40 that gives a spell called Swiftmend.  What Swiftmend does is consume a HoT (either Rejuvenation or Regrowth), while instantly healing your target for the amount of 12 seconds of Rejuvenation or 18 seconds of Regrowth.  Swiftmend, like Nature’s Swiftness, provides you with an opportunity for a big instant heal on one of your party members, and should be an active button on your cast bar for that reason.  If you can, it is nice to cast Swiftmend as your HoTs have almost run out so that you do not waste the healing left on them.  However, sometimes you just need that big heal right away, and Swiftmend is a great place to turn to make that happen.  F.Y.I. if you have both Regrowth and Rejuvenation up on a target, the HoT with the least time remaining is the one that will be consumed by Swiftmend.

Level 44 – If you still have not talented into Improved Tranquility, at level 44 you can cast Barkskin before Tranquility, which will alleviate your channeling from being broken while you cast Tranquility.  Good to know, right?  =)

Level 50 – At level 50 you again get a big, game changing ability, in this case Tree of Life Form.  When you assume this form (which looks like rotten broccoli), your whole party will get 6% increased healing as long as you maintain the form, so long as they stay within 45 yards of you.  You cannot cast aggressive spells in this form, only heals, innervate, and barkskin, but the mana cost of casting HoTs is reduced by 20%.  This form is hugely beneficial to you and your party, and you should get into the habit of healing in tree form exclusively once you have access to it.

Level 60 – Hooray for another group heal!  At 60, if you have maintained most of your talent points in the Restoration tree, you will gain access to Wild Growth, an instant cast HoT that is targeted at up to five  party members near you who most need it.  The Wild Growth HoT plays out over a seven second timer, and currently has a 6 second cooldown.  Wild Growth is a wonderful tool to add to your druidic tool box, and can be cast in between your standard rotation when there is splash damage to the party from the boss and you have more than just the tank taking damage.

Level 64 – got another game changing spell coming here, no doubt about it.  At level 64 you gain access to Lifebloom.  Lifebloom is another instant cast HoT that heals your target for a certain amount over 7 seconds.  At the end of 7 seconds or when Lifebloom is dispelled, it “blooms,” healing its target for an amount that is approximately 2.5 times the amount of one of the HoT ticks.  You can think of this spell as sort of a  reversal of Regrowth, where the big heal is frontloaded, followed by small HoT ticks.  Lifebloom starts with the smaller ticks and ends with a larger heal.  In addition, Lifebloom “stacks” so that you can have up to 3 Lifeblooms going on a target at one time.  Because of the efficiency of this spell, the strong Heal per Mana and Heal per Second it offers, you will learn to “roll” lifeblooms, never actually letting them bloom, but keeping the HoT effect of a Lifebloom stack going constantly on your target.  As the stack is about to expire, you need cast Lifebloom only once to maintain the stack of 3 going on your target.

Lifebloom will change your healing style more significantly than any change leading up to it, particularly if you incorporate “rolling Lifeblooms” into your repetoire, which you certainly should.  There will be some changes to the mechanics of this spell that will make it more attractive to bloom in some cases, as the mana cost for the spell will double, but part of that mana will be restored when the spell blooms.  However, this is mostly intended to make raid healers make choices about rolling Lifebloom on several targets, and may not play such a big role in 5 man instance healing.  In 5 party member healing, it still seems as though rolling Lifebloom on a tank will be a strong healing strategy. 

Because of the 7 second timing on this spell, you will find yourself casting much more often than you did prior to Lifebloom.  My recommendation is, unless a fight has a high degree of spike damage frontloaded into the beginning, that you should start each encounter by stacking up your 3 Lifeblooms.  Then add Rejuvenation, and finally Regrowth if that 3rd HoT becomes necessary.  Keep your eye on that Lifebloom stack and practice refreshing it at the last possible moment to conserve mana.  At this point in your healing career, you will have many more choices than you ever did before in terms of rotations and ways to keep party members at full health.  You will have much more experience and will be able to make intuitive decisions about which spell to use when.  Do keep in mind, though, that HoTs are still your strongest asset, and preventing damage is MUCH better for you as a group’s only healer than trying to recover from damage.

Level 80 – The spell that you will add to your repetoire at level 80 is Nourish, a 1.5 second cast direct heal with a twist.  The spell heals for an additional 20% if you have Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Lifebloom, or Wild Growth active on your target.  This means that if your target has HoTs on them already, as would a tank, you will benefit greatly when this spell is cast.  Blizzard has gone out of their way to make this spell more attractive and useful for Tree healers since its inception, and it is nice to have this direct heal on board to turn to when handling spike damage, particularly due to its cast time, which is a full 2 seconds shorter than an unglyphed Healing Touch, and directly benefits from you doing your job well of keeping HoTs on your target. 

So that’s the rundown of spells.  I would like to add a couple of brief pieces of advice to this conversation, as well.

1)  There’s a saying that has made the rounds in the WOW universe that goes like this:

If the tank dies, it’s the healer’s fault.  If the healer dies, it’s the tank’s fault.  If the DPS die, it’s their own damn fault. 

The reason behind this is that the tank should be cognizant of keeping aggro off the healer, the healer should be cognizant of healing the tank as needed, and the DPS should be cognizant of not pulling aggro onto themselves and bringing about high damage.  This saying provides a good rule of thumb.  Heal the tank first because they have the greatest survivability if something goes wrong.  Heal yourself second because tanks are not impervious to damage and need you there to keep them up.  Heal the DPS as you can.  Don’t just leave them to their own devices; I’m not saying that.  If you have the time and the mana resources to add some DPS heals into your rotation, by all means keep them on their feet.  But they should all know how to bandage themselves and if they are worth their salt they will not be pulling aggro off the tank.  If it comes down to a choice between the tank and a DPS member, or between yourself and a DPS member, the choice works against the DPS almost every time.  Do what you can, but remember the priority list and be faithful to it.

2)  The above guide is only a series of suggestions.  Play the style that works best for you.  Some druids glyph and talent their Healing Touch into a healing machine and lay it on thick for most of their healing.  Others don’t even put the spell on their cast bar.  The best thing for you to do is to not become so rigid that you become unadaptable.  Challenge yourself on occassion to step out of your comfort zone and heal in a different way.  Remember the lessons you learn from doing so and try to apply them down the road.

3)  If you become dissatisfied with your ability to heal at a certain level, don’t become too discouraged.  As you level up your spells will become more powerful and you will receive new spells to throw into the mix.  In addition, Blizzard seems constantly to be tinkering with things and forcing change in playstyle that keeps things interesting.  The biggest problem seems to be settling into rigidity, which results in either boredom or an inability to adapt to inevitable change.  Be like a willow tree; bend and flex in the storms and you will come out the other side whole.

I’d like to consider this guide as a work in progress, so if anyone has some thoughts to add in the comments I’d be delighted to hear them.  Best of luck you bringers of life, you spreaders of leafy goodness everywhere!

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