How to Be a Sucessful Healing Druid in World of Warcraft

I've played World of Warcraft since its release in 2004. I started out playing a Warlock, but then moved into playing a Night Elf Druid when I realized that I wanted to play a healer class. The idea of shapeshifting interested me, but not enough to keep me from almost fully putting my talent points in restoration.

In patch 1.8, Blizzard reworked the Druid talent trees to make both Balance and Feral as provocative as Restoration is/was.

I hope to impart you aspiring Druids on what I have found to be the best and most efficient way to heal at level 60. I do not have uber gear (I have full Wildheart and a few purples from MC, but the epics are NOT necessary to be effecive, believe me).

First of all, you will want to realize what stats you want. I have found that +healing isn't nearly as good as people make it out ot be, so what you can get just from a Hide of the Wild and from set bonuses is pretty good. You really want to invest in either as much Int/Spi as you can or as much Int/Mana per 5 seconds. It really depends on your personal healing style, but for me, I like high Int and Spirit more than anything else, so I will be taking that route as I write this.

Your talent build isn't really that important. To be the best healer you can be, in my opinion, you should take these talents:

Improved Healing Touch: Just to lower the casting time by .5 seconds can be a life-saver.

Improved Regrowth: 50% critical chance on our "emergency" heal is astounding.

Innervate: Regenerates 50-70% of total mana while casting, depending on spirit. If a Priest begs for this spell, then laugh in his or her face. Innervate is most useful for Druids to get because we are more mana inefficient. If a Druid is at 70% mana and has been healing as long as a Priest who is at 15% and begging for an Innervate, the Priest needs to learn more mana management. Toss the spell on a Priest (or even a Mage) or another Druid if they are out of mana and you are low, but keep in mind that it is YOUR spell and you should get FIRST priority. Afterall, why hope someone else can do a job that you KNOW you can do?

The rest of the talents are honestly negligible. Subtlety doesn't stack with the new 1.9 Shaman Totem OR with Paladin's Blessing of Salvation, so that's iffy whether or not you should take it, and the rest of the talents are up to personal preference and style. The ones listed above are the only ones that I believe that every Druid who attempts to heal should have.

Let's look at your spells:

Healing Touch, your "big heal." You will want the talents that make this spell a 3 second cast. I suggest using Rank 7 as your "main" heal.

Regrowth, our "flash" heal. This is far too mana inefficient to be used as our main heal, so invest in "Improved Regrowth" so you can get a much higher chance to crit when you do have to cast it, making it much more Mana to HP Healed efficient.

Rejuvenation, our bread and butter spell. This spell is the best we have. With my gear of almost full Wildheart (with Cenarion Leggings), Hide of the Wild, and the Dire Maul trinket, I generally get 260-290 per tick.

This is how you should heal in almost any normal situation: Toss a Rejuvenation on the target, then start casting either Rank 7 or Rank 10 Healing touch depending on how hard the person is getting hit. Your Rejuvenation should act as enough of a buffer from the damage the target is taking, and when the Healing Touch goes off, the target should be close to full health.

You should use Regrowth only in emergencies (if a mage draws aggro, or a priest) and you have to do something quick. If you are using Regrowth on the Main Tank as a chain heal, then you are wasting mana and losing the benefits of the Heal Over Time that the spell has. You will notice a large difference in how much mana you can save by using Rejuve/HT over Regrowth after Regrowth with a Rejuve occasionally tossed in.

Though I must say that I do occasionally start a fight off by Regrowthing a MT because I want to stack it's HoT and Rejuvenation on him or her at the same time to give a little more lee-way in the fight.

By doing this method, I have become one of the more sought-after Druids on my server, especially once someone has partied with me. I have yet to be out-healed by a Priest in UBRS or below who wasn't casting Prayer of Healing over and over, and I am usuall 3rd on our Molten Core ranking. I never have more than 15% overheal rate.

What a Druid has to realize to be an effective healer is that we aren't Priests. We do not have a quick flash heal or shield to keep people out of danger when they get in trouble. We are PROACTIVE healers meaning that we keep damage from happening with our Heal Over Times and want people as high as they can be in HP so we can be as efficient as we can be. Priests, on the other hand, are REACTIVE healers, so they can shield and Greater Heal/Flash Heal when someone is at next to no health.

Neither class is a "better" healer than the other, but I hope that this short look at the Druid healing abilities will help you be the best Druid you can be. We are "support" healers in most cases, and if we keep that in mind, we can actually become more valuable to the group than the Main Healer who only worries about 1 or 2 people out of 10-15.