Since I put together my thoughts on the restoration tree for a guild member, I figured I may as well post them here as well for discussion.


This is my current build in restoration for reference:

Tidal Focus 5/5
Totemic Focus 5/5
Improved Reincarnation 2/2
Ancestral Healing 2/2
Improved Lesser Healing Wave 5/5
Tidal Mastery 5/5
Nature's Swiftness 1/1
Purification 5/5

I've also specced to Mana Tide Totem in the past.


General Comments:

Tidal focus: Reducing the mana costs of all healing spells by 5% isn't ground-breaking, but until they did the upgrade to Healing Wave it was better than Improved Healing Wave at Rank 1. Still might be, I want to think about that post-patch more though.

Improved Healing Wave: Reducing the casting time for Healing Wave from 3 sec. (max rank) to 2.5 sec sounds better than it is, at least pre-HW 11(?) from AQ. The basic problem with healing wave is that before 1.10 and the new rank from AQ 20 it was only about 5% more mana efficient than Lesser Healing Wave and even WITH this talent only about the same for healing rate (health per second). As a result, I never used Healing Wave unless it was combined with Nature's Swiftness because I was more likely to overheal or heal late with no real advantage in mana efficiency or healing rate to compensate for those disadvantages. That MIGHT change now, I need to run some numbers on the new HW rank with the 1.10 changes.

Totemic Focus: Given how many totems I drop, 10% lower mana cost seems like a no brainer. Since it does stack with the mana spring/tide talents, it's really nice with those.

Ancestral Healing: While a 25% armor boost (at 5 talent points) on a crit heal (for 15 seconds) sounds really nice, I just put the 2 points there to get the prereqs done for Purification. 25% more armor generates less than 25% more mitigation since armor operates according to diminishing returns logic. Given the random nature of crit heals, it just seemed like more of a neat effect than anything particularly significant to me. It's only in those rare cases where you crit heal at the right time to dampen a damage spike that it really helps, and I don't like to rely on luck that much.

Improved Reincarnation: Doesn't really seem all that useful to me, since I've almost never needed to reincarnate more than once per hour anyway. If I could change things, I'd put the two points elsewhere now. Either Ancestral Focus, or put all the points from this talent and that into Eventide if I were going for Mana Tide Totem.

Combat Endurance: I don't see much value in getting another 5hp/sec (or so) in combat. If I'm raiding or in PvP, either I don't take that much damage or I die too fast for this to matter. It's better soloing, but I'm not normally in any danger when I'm doing that so I don't worry about this.

Improved Lesser Healing Wave: 75% lower interrupts for LHW is golden to me, since that's my bread-and-butter heal. Good for soloing or PvP, less useful in raids since I'm either not taking hits much or I'm taking a dirt nap.

Eventide: 10 sec more on Mana Spring and Healing stream sounds good, but frankly if we're sitting in the same place for 70 seconds everyone is normally healed to full and fom from drinking anyway. HOWEVER, it does affect the Ancient Mana Spring totem we can cast using the trinket from ZG, and since that is a shorter duration totem (27 sec normally) with a higher mana regen rate I think it would be very useful for raiding in particular. Note that this will NOT increase the duration of Mana Tide Totem.

Improved Healing Stream Totem: 20% boost to Healing Stream means instead of healing 14hp every 2 sec, it heals 17hp. Hardly worth 5 talent points to me, and not a prereq for anything so I'm happy to pass on it.

Tidal Mastery: 5% boost to crits for healing and lightning spells is a nice combo to me since I use healing a lot and in pvp cast Chain Lightning fairly often.

Improved Mana Spring Totem: 25% boost to Mana Spring boosts it from 10 mana per 2 sec to 12.5 (don't know how they round it) per 2 sec. 1 mana per second is hardly earth shattering, so on the face of it I don't think it helps much. However, it does also work with the Ancient Mana Spring Totem. The combined effect of this and Eventide is to boost the mana output of that totem from 324 mana (IIRC) over 27 sec to over 500 mana over 37 sec, castable for free every 2 min. If I were willing to spec to Mana Tide Totem again, I would definitely appreciate this talent along the way.

Nature's Swiftness: Insta-cast the next nature spell with a casting time under 10 seconds is nice, since all our healing and lightning spells are affected (so is Ghost wolf, iirc). Good for emergency Healing Wave casts during raids (I have both macro'd together) and instant Lightning/chain lightning in PvP. A must have, if going restoration, IMO.

Purification: 10% more healing from every healing spell is a very nice boost, especially combined with Tidal focus for the reduced mana cost. It's enough to make us reasonably mana efficient healers, which is damn nice since I do a lot of healing in instances, raids, and BGs.

Mana Tide Totem: 960 mana over 12 seconds is pretty good, but I found I didn't use it much. The only times I ever found a use for it was on boss fights during raids and while soloing multiple mobs. Trash mobs die to fast, and in PvP I seem to either have no problem drinking or I die before going OOM.