Why You Should & Shouldn’t Play Restoration Druid in Dragonflight Season 2 – Patch 10.1

Unsure what class to play in Dragonflight Season 2? Whether you’re a returning player coming back to play the new content or a longtime veteran just looking to explore a new main or alt, we’ve got you covered.

We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Restoration Druid in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Restoration Druid!

Frost DK
Unholy DK

Vengeance DH
Balance Druid

Restoration Druid
Devastation Evoker

Marksmanship HunterSurvival Hunter

Brewmaster Monk

Restoration Shaman

Dragonflight Season 2 Druid Tier Set

Why You Should Play Restoration Druid in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)

Restoration Druid has carried a moderate revamp in Legion through multiple expansions now with a strong theme and unique playstyle. It remains an incredibly popular choice at all levels of play and that should continue in season 2. You’ll combine bread and butter heal over time spells like Rejuvenation with major cooldowns like Flourish and Convoke the Spirits to build powerful windows of healing. Players looking at picking up or continuing to play the spec should find a decent amount of depth, though somewhat less than it has been in previous expansions.

In Mythic+ you’ll continue to play in multiple forms, leveraging your versatility and damage / healing over time effects. You’ll find the playstyle incredibly engaging, with high haste and always having something to cast forming a cast per minute heavy rotation. You’ll find it very similar to season 1 and that’s quite a positive. Here are some other reasons you should (and shouldn’t) play Resto Druid in Season 2:

Why You Should	Why You Shouldn’t

Why You Should Play Restoration Druid in Dragonflight Season 2

Why should you bring a Restoration Druid to raid? What role does a Restoration Druid fill?
Resto Druid is a very versatile throughput healer and brings a wide array of powerful raid cooldowns. Very few healers are able to match our prolonged burst windows and we can combine them in so many flexible ways that we can easily match whatever damage pattern we have to face. Need absolutely everything thrown at a mechanic? Convoke the Spirits + Flourish + Tree Form (via Reforestation). Damage a little less dangerous? Tranquility, or fire Convoke the Spirits without Flourish. Whether the damage pattern is every minute, every 90s or even just once a boss, we have something for it. We also do a notable amount of sustained HPS which sets us apart from some other cooldown-heavy healing specs like Discipline Priest.

Resto Druid is also absurdly tanky and very hard to kill. This is actually a key trait on a healer since recovering from a healer death on progression can be very difficult. The absolute priority for the role in general is to survive and with Bear Form, Barkskin, Thick Hide, Matted Fur, Renewal, Well-Honed Instincts and Ironbark we are ridiculously good at surviving almost anything. We also keep a Lifebloom on ourselves for Photosynthesis. Resto Druid doesn’t bleed out or die to rot damage ever and we have a ton of tools to deal with burst too. Just don’t fall down a hole.

We also bring decent passive damage with no need to commit any offensive GCDs via Nature’s Vigil. In Season 2 we’ll be able to kick in 8-10k+ DPS for free which is competitive with a lot of other healing specs.

Restoration Druid Utility in Dragonflight
Resto Utility often isn’t talked about a ton but is actually extremely good.

• Mark of the Wild: A very powerful raid or party wide 3% versatility increase. One of the strongest raid buffs.
• Stampeding Roar: Having a few movement speed buffs in a raid is often mandatory. Stampeding Roar is one of the better ones and can be reduced to a 1 minute cooldown.
• Rebirth: A battle res is a key Mythic+ tool that every group brings in some form. Resto Druid has one of the best available.
• Innervate: A noticeable mana increase to a healer of your choice (or yourself). Almost a key enabler of Disc Priest and Mistweaver Monk.
• Soothe: Very useful dungeon utility on a short cooldown. Just as good in Season 2 with the revamped Raging affix.
• Ursol’s Vortex: A key kiting tool in dungeons. Can be combined with Typhoon (if talented) to interrupt most enemies without throwing them everywhere. Limited but occasionally good in raid.
• Incapacitating Roar: An AoE interrupt on a short cooldown. In a difficult place in the talent tree but powerful.
• Skull Bash: One of the weaker utilities in our kit. It’s in a difficult place in our tree and requires you to be in melee in Cat Form to use it. Often skipped but available if absolutely required.

Extremely Strong Season 2 Tier Set

Resto Druid has been blessed with a ton of strong set bonuses in recent history and we have one of our best yet in season 2. You can expect to gain ~15% or so healing from the set, which is a decent increase over our season 1 yet. Our 2pc is a fairly straightforward power increase to most of our commonly used spells, and our 4pc is a massive increase to our sustained healing. The Flourish effect will also proc off about half of your Convoke the Spirits casts and this actually stacks multiplicatively with your hard cast Flourish. The end result is a massive 160% increase to your HoT speed while both are active. There’s also a Verdant Infusion effect attached though that’s unlikely to see as much play since the talent isn’t that competitive.

High skill ceiling, high CPM, engaging playstyle
Resto Druid plays with 30-40%+ haste and has a cast for every global cooldown. This makes it a very fast paced spec. In mythic+ you’ll weave healing spells, caster-based DoTs like Moonfire, Adaptive Swarm and Sunfire, and Cat-based abilities like Rake and Rip. In raid you’ll be fine tuning your spell casts to match the damage patterns of the fight and better align your huge cooldown windows with incoming damage. You’ll also find the spec endlessly optimizable. Manage 5 DoTs at once on a single target, or perfect your cooldown windows in raid. It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or an advanced player, you’ll always find something you can improve on as Resto Druid. That can be very rewarding!

Unrivalled Mobility
Nothing quite beats a Resto Druid on mobility. It isn’t just that we have an abundance of ways to move around quickly like Wild Charge, Dash, Cat Form, Travel Form (sometimes), Stampeding Roar and more. Most of our spells are also instant cast which means we’re never stuck in one place. That makes us great candidates to carry out key mechanics for the raid since we don’t lose any throughput to do so. Love to move? You’ll love resto druid.

Why You Shouldn’t Play Restoration Druid in Dragonflight Season 2

Restoration Druid playstyle evolution in Dragonflight so far

Resto Druid remains an incredibly fun healer to play and this could easily be listed in the positives section if not for a slight decline in the specs depth over the first 5 months of Dragonflight. Buffs to the Luxuriant Soil talent has pushed the playstyle toward casting as many Rejuvs per minute as possible. This was always somewhat the case, but the timing of them used to be much more important. Throughout BFA and Shadowlands Druid was primarily a ramp based healer where your rejuvenations were just a piece of your cooldown puzzle. They were the first floor of your healing tower, not the entire thing. Luxuriant Soil puts so much power into your base Rejuvenation casts that timing becomes a little less important. It might seem like a minor point overall, but it’s the kind of thing that reduces some of the complexity and thus reward for mastering the spec.

In Mythic+ there’s a similar issue but with a different spell. Moonfire and Sunfire are such key spells that even in some AoE scenarios you’re putting Moonfire on every target. This is a change from the previous playstyle that played much more heavily into Cat Form. You still form switch a lot but it represents only ~20% of your damage now instead of being a centerpiece like it used to be.

The class tree & other tree changes
Druid has seen a ton of talent tree changes since Dragonflight began. A complete revamp to the class tree failed to fix many of the issues we had with it (Skull Bash being in an overly restrictive position) and added some new ones like Improved Sunfire costing 6 talent points now. Improved Sunfire is of such high value in mythic+ that no alternatives compare and the heavy point investment thus cuts off a lot of Feral talents on the other side of the tree that would be really fun to play. On top of that, new talents added like Forestwalk aren’t very interesting for Resto.

Spec tree changes were a little more positive overall. Several shifts toward the end of the tree have made Photosynthesis playable in raid and it’s both powerful and fairly interesting. An unexpected early buff to Luxuriant Soil was great for Resto’s raid power level but also reduced choice by making the more offensive Adaptive Swarm much weaker in comparison. They’ve also continued to push for a place in our playstyle for Nourish with several accompanying talents now in the tree. It still hasn’t found a place on many peoples action bars but I’m generally ok with blizzard trying to find a niche for underplayed spells – so long as the talents aren’t mandatory which they aren’t so far.

Increased mana tension in Season 2 due to potion of Chilled Clarity nerfs

In patch 10.1, the Potion of Chilled Clarity gives you a hidden -40% haste aura when you use it (previously it just increased the cast times of non-instant spells). This makes the potion unusable for Resto Druid since the haste aura greatly reduces the healing our HoTs like Rejuvenation do while the potion is active. We still get free spells, but at such a large cost that we are better off using a different kind of mana potion. With the amount of Haste we are able to stack, Druid is hit quite hard by this nerf.

This page is being updated and maintained by Voulk. Voulk is the author of healer blog Questionably Epic and created healer gearing & theorycrafting app QE Live and the Dungeon Tips addon. He is also a moderator in Dreamgrove and Wyrmrest Temple. If you have any questions you’re welcome to DM him on Discord at Voulk#1858.

For more information on playing Restoration Druid, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:

Restoration Druid Guide