As stated in my previous posts, I am raiding in a 10-man guild. As such, my gear/spec/glyph choices are tailored for that, rather than a more general 25-man raid environment. To help other druids that might be in a similar situation, and to (hopefully) get useful input on whether my choices are good or not, I have decided to explain them in more detail, starting with my spec.

As you can probably notice from my armory, I am running a pretty standard 11/0/60 resto spec. I have decided to spec that for several reasons:

  • my role is mostly raid healing, so I don’t need Living Seed. I took Revitalize instead, as the benefits are quite high in a 10 man group.
  • due to the size of my raiding group, I do not need to reduce my GCD to the extent where I can blanket 15 people with Rejuvenation. As such, I do not need to pick up Celestial Focus in the Balance tree, to up my haste, nor do I need to stack haste to the point where I cap my GCD to 1 second. I have chosen to focus on throughput(especially with the hard modes looming for my guild), and use Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation in order to help deal with the increasing amounts of raid damage that seem to prevail on fights like Sindragosa, Blood Queen, and the Lich King himself.
  • my play style is that I tend to use Nourish for spot healing, and Regrowth for the hot component rather than the direct heal. In other words, I prefer to put Regrowth up pre-emptively on tanks and other raid members that will/are taking damage, and then use Nourish to top them up. This, coupled with the fact that I have a disc priest in the raid most of the time, has made me choose to pick up Tranquil Spirit in my spec.

    • My glyph choices are, I hope, quite obvious. My major glyphs are:

  • Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation – as previously explained, it helps a lot with throughput in cases of high aoe damage.
  • Glyph of Swiftmend – it is both a subjective, and an objective choice. An alternative here would be Glyph of Wild Growth, but due to the positioning in 10 man raids, having a 6th person in range would mean we’re doing something wrong. Also, the fact that I can swiftmend every cooldown and still have hots ticking on the target suits both my play style, and seems like a better choice to me.
  • Glyph of Nourish – again, due to my play style, I end up using this spell quite a lot, to spot heal, and even tank heal. In those cases, the extra healing received from the hots is quite beneficial, since the targets I’m healing are usually at a 6k health deficit or so.My gearing choices and stat priorities are, again, tailored for my guild. Due to the fact that we’re a 10-man raiding guild, I am not stacking as much haste as I should under other circumstances. Don’t get me wrong – I am still preferring haste, but I can afford the luxury to not absolutely need the haste cap. As such, I tend to go with a spell power > haste > crit priority, while of course preferring the spirit pieces over those that don’t have any spirit. One of the things I am still pondering is whether I should pick up the t10 4-set bonus. Due to my raid’s size and the fact that I am easily keeping 10 Rejuvenations up, I feel it would be wasted most of the time, fact that makes me wonder whether I’d not be better off picking off-set pieces with better stats.