Restoration Druid Leveling Guide from 1 to 90 — 12.0.5

Leveling as a healer is quite a lot slower than DPS or tank specs since we do not kill things very quickly. It is still more than fine to do so, just expect a longer journey. You can also take advantage of dungeon content to put your healing abilities to use. It is quite common to level as one of the Druid DPS specs LinkEngineering Balance or Feral and then swap to Restoration at max level but it is your choice.

If you do persist as a healer then you will want to take advantage of your amazing survivability by pulling a lot of enemies at once - particularly once you have picked up a few talent points. As a Druid you also have access to Prowl which allows you to skip some enemies entirely since it puts you in "stealth" where enemies are much less likely to detect you. You can use this ability to skip past tricky mobs to get quest items.

Leveling Information

Beginner Leveling Guides

If this is your first character, or want to know more about the leveling process in Midnight, we've got you covered with these two guides!

Basic LevelingMidnight Leveling

Item level is always more important than individual stats when leveling up. Always choose the piece of gear with the highest item level. Items with Speed tertiary stats can help speed up your leveling, especially during parts of extended time spent indoors. Heirloom gear is also useful while leveling, allowing you to ignore a lot of gearing for a large part of your leveling journey.

Itemization

Leveling Heirlooms

Learn how to use Heirloom gear to level your characters as fast as possible!

Heirlooms Guide

To level fast, you will want to focus on minimizing downtime and increasing damage as much as possible. You will also want to take advantage of your powerful healing capabilities by pulling as many enemies at a time as possible. You do not need any special items to level, but picking up a few of these beforehand might hasten your journey:

• Flask of Tempered Swiftness: Flasks are a decent way to add damage without having to pay a high price. Haste is a great choice.
• Tempered Potion: Combat potions can speed up big pulls or difficult mobs.
• Silvermoon Health Potion: You do not really need healing potions when levelling as a healing spec, but these are very good and can be used from level 81 onwards.

If you are just starting your journey into Midnight, we have a Level 80 import string for you. You can follow the point-by-point allocation of the below tree once you start gaining levels in Midnight.

In this section, we will highlight the most useful War Mode PvP talents to speed up your levelling process. Unfortunately, none of the others provide anything useful in terms of damage output.

• Thorns provides incredible damage against any enemies that hit you in melee.
• Tireless Pursuit slightly increases your movement speed while leveling.
• Deep Roots can be paired with Mass Entanglement to pull a lot of mobs and DoT them all up.
• Forest Guardian can be a nice healing bonus, if you are leveling in a group.

To help with understanding what changes for your spec as you level up and progress through the talent tree, use the slider below to select your current level. Each time you level up, move it along, and the section will level up with you!

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

Starting at Level 1, you only have one main attack ability: Wrath.

• Convoke the Spirits is a great spell to damage an enemy and heal your group quickly. Use it as often as possible.
• Moonfire is a damage over time spell that you should use against any enemy you are fighting. It's particularly good at pulling new enemies into combat with you.
• Ferocious Bite deals damage based on the amount of combo points spent. The damage is increased further for each Energy point used beyond 25, up to 25 extra.
• Use Rip instead of Ferocious Bite if you expect the enemy to live long enough for the DoT to do all the damage.
• You gain your first talent point, spend it on Rake. Use Rake and Moonfire to DoT up multiple enemies.
• Cat Form. You move 30% faster in Cat Form. This also unlocks Shred, a single target attack only usable in Cat Form and awards 1 Combo Point. Use Rake instead most of the time.

Class Guides

Druid Class Guides

Finished leveling your character? Check out our max level guides!

All Druid Guides

Voulk

Guide Author

Follow Voulk

This guide is written by Voulk, a long-time Restoration Druid and healing theorycrafter who develops the QuestionablyEpic live healer gearing app. You can also follow them on Twitter and YouTube.