Talents explained
Last modified: July 19, 2011

Core talents

These are talents that you should always have in your PvE healing build.

 Natural Shapeshifter 2/2 Reduces the mana cost of all shapeshifting by 20% and increases ToL duration by 6 seconds. The shapeshift discount is not a big deal, but lengthening ToL is important and it gets us down Master Shapeshifter.
Naturalist 2/2 Reduces the cast time of your Healing Touch and Nourish spells by 0.5sec. HT and Nourish are now used very often in your healing and it is important that you maximise these spells.
Heart of the Wild 3/3 Increases your Intellect by 6%. Intellect is now our most important stat, and increasing your Intellect gives you a bigger mana pool, more regen, mana returns from Revitalize and Replenish, and a small amount of crit.
Master Shapeshifter 1/1 4% increased healing when you are in caster form AND tree form.
Improved Rejuvenation 3/3 Increases the effect of Rejuvenation and Swiftmend by 15%. Rejuvenation is still one of our staples and it is important to maximise it. If you are specced into Efflorescence, this also means 15% larger Efflorescence ticks.
Revitalize 2/2 Returns mana to you when you heal with Rejuv/Lifebloom, and grants Replenishment to party/raid members. This is vital to your own mana longevity, but also gives your group an important buff.
Empowered Touch 2/2 Increases healing done by Healing Touch, Regrowth and Nourish by 10%, and causes those spells to refresh your Lifebloom on that target. Again, boosting your chunky heals is important, but having them refresh your Lifebloom stacks (generally while tank healing) means that you are saving mana and time, because you don’t have to worry about taking the time to recast Lifebloom if you are already using Nourish or Healing Touch.
Malfurion’s Gift 2/2 Whenever you heal with Lifebloom, you have a 4% chance to cause Omen of Clarity. This gives you Clearcasting procs, which makes your next heal free, and it’s important to understand how to best use these procs, because they add up to a large amount of mana savings for us, and this is essential to our performance in groups. See the How to Heal page for more information.
Efflorescence Your Swiftmend spell causes healing flora to sprout beneath the target, restoring health equal to 12% of the amount healed by your Swiftmend to the three most injured targets within 8 yards, every 1 sec for 7 sec. This spell has recently been greatly improved – it is now a smart heal that ticks harder on fewer targets, rather than one that ticks for very little if you have a lot of people in the circle. It is now a great spell regardless of whether you are doing 5, 10, or 25man content.
Wild Growth 1/1 Instant cast multi-target HoT that ticks every second for 7 seconds, with an 8 second cooldown. The initial tick is the strongest, tapering off to the weakest tick at the end, meaning that the heaviest healing will be at the beginning of the spell.

Targets up to 5 friendly units (up to 6 with Glyph of Wild Growth) outside of Tree of Life, or up to 7 units while in ToL (up to 8 with the glyph) within 15 yards of the target that you cast the spell on. Can be cast on hostile units. This means that you can cast WG on a boss, and it will target 5 of your raid members within 15 yards (very handy for healing melee). It is also a smart heal – it will target the people who require healing the most, but is range-dependent, and can also target pets. Only useful on fights where sufficient people are clumped together; if spread out, and only hitting 1 or 2 people, it is not worth casting.

Also buffs the size of your Nourish casts, and preps the target for Symbiosis.
Swift Rejuvenation Reduces the GCD of your Rejuvenation spell by 1 second (to 0.5sec). Firing out Rejuvenations quickly means time saved for other healing. Some people choose to skip this; it will depend on how heavily you use Rejuvenation. Basically, if you don’t have it, then every time you use Rejuvenation, you are spending an extra second; if you use Rejuvenation a lot, that will add up to a lot of wasted time.
Gift of the Earthmother Increases the healing done when your Lifebloom expires by 5/10/15%, and makes your Rejuv plant an instant heal on the target for 5/10/15% of the total HoT effect. Basically, if your target is missing some health, this makes your Rejuv heal for 15% more, which is quite strong (but it does depend on your target missing that much health before you cast it). The Lifebloom portion is good for the times that you allow Lifebloom to bloom, but this isn’t terribly often.
Tree of Life 1/1 Our iconic shapeshift. Grants +15% healing, +120% armor, and changes some of our spells. See the Tree of Life page for more information.
Strong talents

These are talents that are not mandatory, but are usually taken.

 Natures’s Swiftness Nature’s Swiftness used to be a staple talent in our builds, but now that Healing Touch is not such a huge heal, and now that we have other fast heals such as Regrowth, its value has decreased somewhat. It has recently been changed to grant +50% larger heals if used with a healing spell. It’s still not the huge lifesaver of vanilla WoW, but better than at the start of Cataclysm.
Nature’s Bounty Increases the crit chance of your Regrowth by 20/40/60%, and if you have 3 or more Rejuvenations active on your party, your Nourish spell cast time is reduced by 10/20/30%. This is very handy for burst group healing – I would personally list it in the core talents, but I know that many people still consider it optional.
Nature’s Cure Allows you to remove magic effects with your Remove Corruption ability. This is not mandatory, particularly if you are in large groups with other magic dispelling classes, but for smaller groups it is extremely useful. This is probably a core talent if you are mostly running 5 man dungeons; for raids, you might get away with not having it, but you’re probably better off taking it regardless.
Furor (feral) 2/3 Furor increases our maximum mana by 5/10/15%. 2/3 Furor and 3/3 Moonglow is more effective than 3/3 Furor and 2/3 Moonglow. Later, you can choose to ditch Furor in favour of putting the points into throughput talents. For more information, Cannot Be Tamed has an article on Moonglow vs Furor.
Nature’s Grace (balance) 3/3 Gives 15% spell haste for 15 seconds after you cast Regrowth (1min cooldown). This is handy for times when you need more healing burst; simply cast a Regrowth to trigger. However, if you find yourself using Regrowth more regularly, then it can be difficult to "save" Regrowth as a Nature’s Grace trigger.
Moonglow (balance) 3/3 Moonglow reduces the mana cost of your healing spells by 9%. This adds up to be a lot of mana saved, and particularly at early levels of gear or in mana-intense encounters, it is a very strong talent to have.
Nature’s Majesty (balance) 2/2 Increases crit chance by 4%. This is not particularly strong, but gives us some benefit now that our HoTs can also crit now.
Optional talents

These are beneficial talents, but not as strong as other options OR can be hard to get with limited points. Generally they are taken when/if you can afford to give up mana regen/savings talents.

 Living Seed

Living Seed is strong in theory, but is weak overall because it relies on the target taking a hit before the seed blooms. If that next hit is quite small, and the Living Seed charge is large, then most of the healing will be wasted. For example if you had a 10k Living Seed charge waiting to go off, and your tank mitigates a bunch of the damage from the next hit and only takes 5k damage, then 5k of the Living Seed will be wasted.

Also, if the Living Seed is placed on a raid member, rather than a tank, they are unlikely to be getting chain-hit, and then the entire seed could be wasted because they don’t receive another hit before it expires. This means that LS is okay for tank healing, but almost worthless for raid healing. It’s a bit hit-and-miss, unfortunately. If it acted like an absorb, and absorbed 10k damage over the next 5 seconds (or similar) then it would be stronger. It’s still good, it’s extra bonus healing, but when compared to some of the other talents, it can be hard to justify spending the points here. Certainly if you mostly tank heal, you’ll want to include this in your build.
Genesis (balance) Increases healing done by your HoTs and Swiftmend by 2/3/6%. 6% to all of your HoTs is quite a good boost, but since we have to take 31 points in the Restoration tree, we can’t afford many points in Balance, and these are often put into Moonglow. Once you find that you aren’t having troubles with mana, you can opt to take points out of Moonglow and put them into Genesis. Or you could consider two restoration specs; one for regen and one for throughput. See the Dual Specs page for more information. Note: this talent also boosts Efflorescence, as anything that increases the size of your Swiftmends will also make your Efflorescence tick harder.
Blessing of the Grove +2/4% to Rejuvenation. Rejuvenation is still one of our main spells, and it’s important to boost it, but 4% to a single spell is quite weak. You would be better to invest these 2 points in Genesis above, which would give 4% to all of your HoTs AND Swiftmend, rather than just 4% to a single spell.
Perseverance Reduces spell damage taken by you. This is nice to have, but hard to free up the points to do it. Handy for when you’re just starting out in dungeons and heroics.
     
Weak talents

These talents have some use in dungeons, PvP and solo play, but are generally avoided in PvE healing builds. The survivability talents are sometimes taken for particular encounters that require that little bit more survivability.

 Fury of Stormrage Reduces the mana cost of Wrath by 50%, and when you use Wrath you have a chance to make your next Starfire instant cast. Obviously this is not a PvE healing talent.
Nature’s Ward When you take an attack while you are at or below 50% health, you have a chance to cast a free Rejuv on yourself. Again, this is nice to have, particularly when you’re just starting out, but it can be hard to find the points for it.