I’m lvling a resto druid for the first time on era. Will I need to spec resto to be able to heal dungeons? And will I be capable of healing all the dungeons in the game?
No. I’d recommend leveling with a feral spec. That is widely considered the best spec for solo leveling.
Yes. But there is one major disadvantage about druid dungeon healing and that is the lack of an out of combat resurrection spell. You get battle rez but that has a 30 min CD. So don’t let anyone die!
Druids are poor dungeon healers but bis for raids cuz free bio/food breaks during wipe recovery rezzes.
If you’re “leveling a resto druid”, then surely you are already specced for resto? I don’t understand the question.
And as for healing, in general, you’ll want to keep a healing gear set. Not being specc’ed specifically for healing will mostly mean that you’ll go OOM and have to drink more than if you were specc’ed for it (that is a very reasonable tradeoff, imo).
Not at all. Druids are the most mana efficient healers in the game. They might actually be the best dungeon healers. As I said, their only downside is a lack of out of combat rez.
The only reason they are often beaten in HPS in raids is because they are expected to faerie fire everything and because they don’t have a quick heal so other healers often beat them to the punch. But you can still top heals even in raids if you know how to effectively use rejuvenation. Just the other day my druid was the #1 healer in a 1h 37 min Naxxramas run.
Not really. The difference that talents make when it comes to going OOM is extremely marginal compared to the impact gear has, especially when you consider that Heart of The Wild also increases your mana pool. It’s waaaay more about gear than the spec.
Oh okay. Yeah, to be fair I hadn’t really considered Druid talents. For pally it is definitely true, and I’d sort of assumed that’d be the case for other healers, but I guess the mana back on crits could make that pal specific.
Druids do get combat mana regen in the resto tree, though I suppose if you favor raw stats over +healing you might not notice it as much (I mean, I’m skeptical, but I’m not healing leveling dungeons on a feral Druid at the moment to really compare it to. And I think the last time I did that specifically was SM instances).
Sure, but fights probably won’t last long enough for that to be super valuable. Mana regen is almost worthless if a fight only lasts 30 seconds. Unless you’re trying to speed run a dungeon and don’t have time to drink it’s just not all that important.
Yeah, it depends on group comp. if you are with mages who are drinking every pull anyway, then you might not actually notice or care.
If you’re with 3 warriors and a shaman trying to spam grind, you will notice.
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Here’s some insights from my own experience.
- Druids absolutely do make great dungeon healers! However, you play differently than the other healers do so it’s helpful to be aware of that.
- You do not need to spec resto to be able to heal dungeons, but do pack around some intel gear because that will help a lot with giving you enough mana to sustain healing.
- Classic Era has become a place of extremes but a lot of people forget that your talent tree is extremely flexible. You do not have to go full resto to heal. You do not have to go full feral to level effectively. You are free to make your talents work for you in whatever way you like.
On that last point, there are some key talents that will make your life a little easier as a healer hybrid…
- Improved Healing Touch - When you reach level 26 you will get Healing Touch Rank 5, which will have the maximum cast time of 3.5s. You probably won’t be using this rank for your general purpose heal spell for a while, but you might want to consider having 5/5 of this talent somewhere around this level.
- Reflection - This allows your mana regen from spirit to continue while casting by 5% per talent point. At early levels you won’t really have much spirit so it’s probably not a big deal to have this, but you may want to pick it up around your late 20’s to mid 30’s. It’s up to you… if you find your mana longvevity struggling, ty this.
- Nature’s Swiftness - This is always useful, but especially so if you’re not primarily resto. It will just bail you out of jams. You can get this whenever you like.
That’s pretty much all you need to worry about. At end-game you can be an extremely effective healer as 0/30/21, giving you the option to play as both feral and as resto. If you’re comfortble without Nature’s Swiftness you can even swap that point over to get the extra crit from Leader of the Pack if you want.
Don’t be afraid to experiment and don’t be afraid to respec your talent points. Just be aware of the increasing talent respec cost.
Good luck!
You’ll also want to make a castsequence macro to cast Nature’s Swiftness and your biggest heal spell.
Unless you can do dungeons from basically Level 10 to 60 it may be better to just level as Feral and spec to tank, and if you want to heal use +healing / sprit / Int items wherever you can get them. I mention this because it widens your role capability in PVE, and does not tie you down to dungeons only that are sometimes harder to get.
The nice part about “Vanilla” is that you can heal effectively in dungeons with bad specs, for example using Feral , Shadow, ret, Enhance. These can all heal if you put some healing bonus items on or have a big mana pool and play smart.
you will need to drink more often with a worse spec, but just bring water and some mana pots and its GG ez mode.
I have a 60 t2 resto druid. I’ll give my advice.
From 10-60 level as Feral. It’s extremely difficult to form dungeon groups on classic, so most of your leveling will come from questing. Having the feral dps will vastly improve your life. Then at 60 respec to resto.
Feral druids can heal non 60 dungeons super easily, you don’t even need to be resto to heal them. Druids are great healers.
Feral has a talent that increases the movement speed of Cat form I think it’s by 20%? been a while. You get that before you get travel form. This mobility is invaluable for questing.
And if you heal non 60 dungeons as feral, then keep a second gear set in your bank. so you have a feral gear set, and a healing gear set. keep the healing gear set in your bank unless you are planning to form a dungeon group.
It is not only no res because that can be mitigated by not dying. My thought was always overall poisons/curses are annoying. Magic (more common) and diseases (longer lasting) are generally worse. Can you play around it? Sure, but I found it super annoying.
I tried to level resto on my first druid. It was so much easier to find groups tanking. So much so I got to like it and I kept him feral even in pvp, even though the plan was to play him as balance.
I leveled a Druid to 60 as feral tanking and healing dungeons along the way. I went with a feral + NS spec. Not having the 31 pt talent in feral was not ideal but having natures swiftness was huge. It is a good panic button as a healer, and even as a tank, I could pop out of bear form, top myself up, and then back to bear form to avoid a wipe. Love that spec.