The Restokin build: 35/0/16 Balance and Restoration for PvP in WoW Forever

If you play a Balance and Restoration druid in Forever and you’ve sat in front of the talent calculator at level 60 with 51 points to spend, you’ll probably know the good talents are easy to spot and the trouble is deciding which of them to leave behind. This guide makes that call for one build, the 35/0/16 Restokins is taking into battlegrounds, going through every point to say what it does in Forever, then setting out what the build leaves out and why, and ending on the one test that decides where the last two points go.

Whilst I’ve spent years on druids across both factions, learning each spec by playing it rather than reading about it, Forever has only been live since 4 November and Restokins isn’t 60 yet, so I haven’t played this build at 60 on the live client. The numbers come from the client’s own talent text and Blizzard’s notes rather than from memory, and anything resting on Classic, the beta or a calculator export rather than the live game says so in the sentence. It was first written before launch from the beta client, and updated for the live game on 7 November 2026.

The short version

If you want the build without the working, here it is on one sheet, the allocation in a line and then the fourteen calls that shape it, each with its reason and a link to the detail. The talent numbers on the sheet come from talentsforever’s export of the client rather than from live tooltips read at 60, which the detail below also says.

Before we start

This guide assumes a level 60 druid with all 51 points to spend, and it reads every talent from talentsforever’s export of the client, which already carries the changes in Blizzard’s 2 November development notes. The launch client’s interface code has no talent or spell text in it, so the spells come from Wowhead’s Forever database (its live tooltips), and that settles Wrath, Swiftmend, Entangling Roots and Moonkin Form’s cost. It’s a PvP build, so each talent is judged by what it does in a battleground, a duel or a fight in the open world, and raid value doesn’t come into it. It also assumes you’ll have Balance druid PvP mechanics open beside it, since a build is only the list of tools and the mechanics guide covers how to use them, so where a talent leans on a technique I link there rather than explain it twice.

Anything Blizzard’s notes or the live client back is stated plainly. Most of the talent detail rests on talentsforever’s export of the client’s talent text rather than on live tooltips read at 60, and some of it on Classic, so those claims name their source in the sentence, or once at the top of a section where a whole list shares it.

The numbers here are other people’s work before they’re mine, so credit first. The talent text, the tree layout and every calculator link come from talentsforever, whose export of the beta client is published under CC BY 4.0 and saved me reading the client files myself. The Forever changes come from Kaivax’s development notes on the official forums, the Classic numbers for base mana and Wrath come from the Warcraft Wiki editors and classicdb, and Fouren’s Restoration overview at wow.gg and kami-labs’ Restoration build page are what the Restoration side was cross-checked against.

The build at a glance

Essentially, the Restokin build is a Moonkin that leads with damage over time and Wrath, roots whatever chases it, and steps out of form for one short heal when it has to, so it’s a caster that heals itself, not a healer that sometimes casts Wrath. Balance takes 35 points, which buys every talent on the way down that changes a fight plus Moonkin Form (on row 7 in talentsforever’s export), and Restoration takes 16, the 15 that Swiftmend’s row asks for and one more for Swiftmend itself. You can open the whole thing in talentsforever’s calculator, which shows 0 points left, or see both trees in the figure below (on a phone, Restoration is the half you drag across to).

The solid cells are the build and the dashed ones stay at zero. Feral is empty on purpose, which means no Feral Charge or Feral Swiftness, and What the build leaves out explains why.

Written out, the 51 points go as follows:

• Balance 35, Improved Wrath 5/5, Genesis 5/5, Moonglow 3/3, Improved Moonfire 2/2, Nature’s Majesty 2/2, Nature’s Reach 2/2, Improved Entangling Roots 2/3, Nature’s Splendor 1/1, Insect Swarm 1/1, Vengeance 5/5, Overgrowth 1/2, Moonfury 5/5 and Moonkin Form 1/1, with Improved Starfire, Eclipse and Nature’s Grace left at zero.
• Restoration 16, Nature’s Focus 5/5, Naturalist 5/5, Reflection 2/3, Natural Shapeshifter 3/3 and Swiftmend 1/1, with the rest of the tree left alone.

The Balance tree

Every row in a Forever tree opens once you’ve spent five more points in that tree, so row 2 needs 5, row 4 needs 15 and row 7 needs 30, going by talentsforever’s export. That rule sets the order below, which follows the tree, and it’s why the cheap talents near the top count for more than they look, since each one is a step towards Moonkin Form as well as a talent in its own right. The talent text in this section and the next comes from that export of the client rather than from live tooltips read at 60, and where a claim leans on Classic instead, the sentence says so.

Row 1, Wrath and Genesis

• Improved Wrath 5/5, takes 0.5 seconds off Wrath’s cast and halves its mana cost. Wrath’s top rank in Forever (rank 8, learnt at 54) is a 2 second cast for 120 mana at 30 yards on the live tooltip, so with this talent it’s a 1.5 second cast (no longer than the global cooldown, the short lockout after most abilities) for 60 mana before Moonglow. Wrath is the spell this build casts most, and a short Nature cast is the one an interrupt costs you least, so these are the first five points, and nothing competes for them.
• Genesis 5/5, adds 10% to the periodic damage and healing of your spells, doubled in the 2 November notes from 5%. That covers Moonfire’s and Insect Swarm’s ticks, and Rejuvenation’s and Regrowth’s, which is why it competes with Improved Starfire for five points and wins. Genesis is as much a Swiftmend decision as a damage one, and the numbers section shows why.

Row 2, mana, crit and range

• Moonglow 3/3, makes your damaging spells cost 25% less mana. Wrath, Moonfire and Insect Swarm all count, and Roots should count too because it deals damage, though that rests on the talent’s wording rather than a Roots cost read on the live tooltip. A build that wins long fights on mana takes this before anything flashy.
• Improved Moonfire 2/2, adds 10% to Moonfire’s damage and critical strike chance. Moonfire is the instant you throw on the move (see instants on the move), and these two points are also the gate for Vengeance, so they’re not optional.
• Nature’s Majesty 2/2, adds 4% to your spell and melee critical strike chance. It feeds Vengeance directly, and it’s the gate for Nature’s Splendor, so like Improved Moonfire it pays twice.
• Nature’s Reach 2/2, adds 20% to the range of your offensive Balance spells and 4% to your chance to hit. A 30 yard Wrath becomes 36 yards, which is six yards a Warrior has to cross before his Charge (8 to 25 yards in Classic) is even a question. Classic’s version named Entangling Roots outright and Forever’s doesn’t, so whether Roots gets the extra range is a reading of the wording, not a measured range.

Row 3, Roots and Splendor

• Improved Entangling Roots 2/3, at full rank adds 75% to Roots’ own damage and lets a rooted target take 75% more damage before the root breaks, and at 2/3 it’s 50% on both. The second half is new, since Classic’s version didn’t have it, and its wording suggests Forever Roots have a damage budget, breaking once a target has taken a set amount. Nobody has published how much that is at base, and it’s the one number this build hangs on. Why it sits at 2/3 is the whole of the roots decision.
• Nature’s Splendor 1/1, adds 3 seconds to Moonfire and Rejuvenation, 6 to Regrowth and 2 to Insect Swarm. Rejuvenation goes from 12 seconds to 15, which is 25% more healing from the same cast if the extra seconds add ticks at the same value, as they did in later expansions, and every DoT you don’t have to refresh is a global you can spend on Wrath instead. For one point, this guide counts it the best value in the tree.

Row 4, Insect Swarm and Vengeance

• Insect Swarm 1/1, an instant Nature DoT over 12 seconds (14 with Splendor) that also lowers the target’s chance to hit by 2%. It’s your second instant on the move, and since it’s Nature it still works after a Kick on Moonfire has locked your Arcane school (in Classic an interrupt locks every spell of the school it lands on, and school baiting covers how to use that). The 2% is small, worth a swing or so against a melee who swings forty times a fight.
• Vengeance 5/5, adds 100% to the critical strike damage bonus of your Arcane and Nature spells, which takes a spell crit from 150% damage to 200%, with the 150% base taken from Classic. It applies to Wrath, Starfire and Moonfire’s opening hit for certain. Whether it touches Moonfire’s and Insect Swarm’s ticks depends on whether those can crit in Forever, which they couldn’t in Classic, though Forever’s notes already let Rejuvenation’s ticks crit. It’s worth less on average than Moonfury or Naturalist, and the build takes it anyway for the reasons set out in the numbers.

Row 5, Overgrowth

• Overgrowth 1/2, lets you have Entangling Roots on one more target, so two at once, and the live Entangling Roots tooltip confirms up to three with Overgrowth, which is 2/2. It isn’t an area root, since each Roots is still its own 1.5 second cast at 30 yards on its own target, and without Overgrowth a second Roots simply moves the first. The common case it covers is a flag carrier with two people on them in Warsong Gulch, which is why the build starts with one point.

Rows 6 and 7, Moonfury and Moonkin Form

• Moonfury 5/5, adds 10% to your Arcane and Nature damage, which is the beta client’s text and Classic’s value, and guildorder’s 5% comes from data older than the 2 November notes (it still shows Genesis at 5% as well). Either way it’s also the gate to row 7, so it isn’t a choice.
• Moonkin Form 1/1, by its live tooltip, costs 35% of your base mana to enter, makes you immune to Polymorph and gives party or raid members within 45 yards 3% critical strike chance, and that entry cost is the price of every heal in this build. The live Leader of the Pack tooltip says the two can’t be used together, so your aura and a Feral druid’s in the same group don’t stack. Two things are still unsettled. One is the rest of the talent text, which raises the armour you get from items by 360%, doubles your Omen of Clarity chance and stops you casting heals whilst you’re in it. The other is the aura, which the 2 November notes say covers every kind of critical strike again whilst the live tooltip still says spell critical strike chance, so neither source settles whether it helps a Warrior’s or a Rogue’s crits.

The Restoration tree

Swiftmend sits on row 4 of Restoration, so it needs 15 points spent above it, and the argument for this half of the build is that Swiftmend costs you one point, not 16. The 15 that open its row are Nature’s Focus, Naturalist, Natural Shapeshifter and two ranks of Reflection, and a Balance-led PvP hybrid wants every one of those whether or not Swiftmend is at the end of them.

So the comparison to make is 16 points of Restoration against going deeper in Balance, rather than against Swiftmend alone, and Balance runs out first. The whole tree holds 46 points, so after these 35 there are only 11 left, and they’re Improved Starfire (5), Eclipse (3), the third rank of Improved Entangling Roots, the second rank of Overgrowth and Nature’s Grace. Even a druid who wanted every one of those would still have five points to put somewhere else.

Row 1, Nature’s Focus

• Nature’s Focus 5/5, gives your Arcane and Nature spells a 70% chance not to lose casting time when you take damage. In Forever it covers every Arcane and Nature spell, not just the three heals it covered in Classic, so Wrath, Starfire, Roots, Hibernate, Regrowth and Healing Touch all benefit. It does nothing about interrupts, so a Kick still ends the cast, and what it stops is pushback (the delay each hit adds to your cast). A Wrath that takes one hit goes through untouched 70% of the time, so a cast that takes a hit usually finishes untouched. It competes with Heart of the Wild on the same row and wins easily.

Row 2, Naturalist, Reflection and Natural Shapeshifter

• Naturalist 5/5, takes 0.5 seconds off Healing Touch and Wild Growth and adds 10% to all the damage you deal, doubled in the 2 November notes. This guide counts them the best five damage points in the build, because Moonfury’s 10% only covers Arcane and Nature whilst Naturalist covers everything, Roots’ damage included. That doubling is what made the Restoration side worth taking for its own sake, rather than only as the price of Swiftmend.
• Reflection 2/3, lets 33% of your mana regeneration carry on whilst you’re casting, and 3/3 would make it 50%. It moved up from row 3 in the 2 November notes, swapping with Subtlety. Two ranks get most of the value and the gate point the build needs, and the third rank is the mana option (option D) in the roots decision.
• Natural Shapeshifter 3/3, takes 30% off the mana cost of every shapeshift. On a Classic druid’s base mana (the fixed pool every shift costs a share of, before Intellect) that turns a 435 mana Moonkin Form into about 305, and the same 30% comes off Travel and Bear, so a build that shifts out to heal and back in to fight saves mana on every trip.

Row 4, Swiftmend

• Swiftmend 1/1, instantly heals a target with your own Rejuvenation or Regrowth on them for the amount that HoT (heal over time) would heal across its full duration, on a 15 second cooldown for 20% of your base mana, as its live tooltip in Wowhead’s Forever database gives it. The beta tooltip said it consumes the HoT, Blizzard’s developer note in the 2 November notes said that wording was wrong, and the live tooltip no longer says consume, so the HoT stays. The same notes made it need a HoT you cast yourself, so another druid can’t spend yours and you can’t spend theirs.

What the build leaves out

Each talent below has a case for it. For each one there’s why it isn’t in and what would bring it back, so if the live tooltips or the roots test go the other way, you’ll know which way to move.

• Improved Starfire 0/5, takes 0.5 seconds off Starfire and gives it a 15% chance to stun for 3 seconds. Starfire’s 40% buff in the 2 November notes raised how hard it hits, not how often the cast finishes. The field note on the final notes argues that five points for half a second on a 3.5 second cast don’t earn their place in PvP. The honest case for it is the roots, because a rooted melee at 36 yards is a target that can’t reach you for the whole cast. If roots turn out to hold through a Starfire reliably, that would put it back in the build.
• Eclipse 0/3, makes Wrath shorten your next two Starfires by 0.5 seconds each, up to four charges, for 15 seconds. The charges come from Wraths that finished, so it speeds up the Starfire you cast after the other player has already let you cast freely, which is the one moment you didn’t need it faster. Without Improved Starfire it also has nothing to build on.
• Nature’s Grace 0/1, after a non-periodic spell crit, gives you 10% faster casting and a 10% shorter global cooldown for 3 seconds. On a 1.5 second Wrath that’s 0.15 seconds saved, and only after a crit, which at a placeholder 15% crit chance is roughly one cast in seven, so its point goes to the roots instead. If roots hold well at base, option A (three roots) takes it back.
• Heart of the Wild 0/5, now on Restoration’s first row, adds 10% Intellect, 20% Stamina in Bear and 10% Strength in Cat. For a caster it’s mostly mana. On a placeholder 250 Intellect it’s 25 more, or about 375 mana at Classic’s 15 mana a point, which is a little more than one trip back into Moonkin and less than Reflection and Natural Shapeshifter give back over a long fight. A build with Feral points would see it differently.
• Bloom 0/1, heals for 100% of your Spirit when a Rejuvenation or Regrowth runs out, and half that if it’s dispelled. It pays only when a HoT gets its full duration alone, which in a battleground is the exception, and it needs a point on row 3 that the build doesn’t have spare.
• Gift of Nature and Tranquil Spirit 0, 10% more healing and 10% cheaper Healing Touch and Tranquility. Both are for a druid whose heals are their job, and in this build a heal is for emergencies only.
• Nature’s Swiftness 0/1, makes your next Nature spell instant, needs Naturalist, and sits on row 5. Row 5 needs 20 Restoration points spent, so taking it is 21 points, and Moonkin Form needs 30 Balance points spent before it, so 31. That’s 52 points, one more than you have, so Nature’s Swiftness and Moonkin Form can’t both sit next to Swiftmend’s 16.
• Feral Charge and Feral Swiftness 0, Forever has two Feral Charges. The Bear one interrupts for 4 seconds on a 15 second cooldown, as its live tooltip says, and the Cat one is a leap behind the target on a 30 second cooldown, which didn’t interrupt in Wrath of the Lich King, the only precedent for it. Feral Swiftness adds 30% Cat speed but needs five Feral points first. An interrupt is what this build most obviously lacks, and it goes without one knowingly, because the points would come out of Moonfury or Swiftmend’s gate.

The roots decision

This is the least certain part of the build, and the part most likely to change. The wording of Forever’s Improved Entangling Roots suggests Roots have a damage budget, breaking once the target has taken a set amount. The catch is that this build is DoT-led, so your own Moonfire and Insect Swarm ticking on a rooted target count towards breaking it, and so does your team’s damage near an objective. Overgrowth without any extra durability might just give you a third root that breaks before it matters, which is why the recommended build splits the points rather than putting them all in one place.

The recommended starting point is two roots that each take 50% more damage, because the most common case is a carrier’s two chasers, and two sturdier roots cover it better than three fragile ones or one sturdy one. The four ways the roots points can go are below, all checked in the calculator, with the recommendation first and the others in letter order:

The test that decides between them needs a training partner and the points spent at 60, and it goes as follows:

• The setup, root a friend who has agreed to stand still, with Improved Entangling Roots at 0/3, then apply Moonfire and Insect Swarm and count the ticks until the root breaks. The combat log gives you each tick’s number, so write them down and add them up, because the total is the base threshold nobody has published yet.
• The comparison, do it again at 2/3 and then 3/3, which should take 50% and 75% more, and once more with a teammate hitting the target as well, because objective fights are never one druid’s damage alone.
• The reading, if a root at base survives both DoTs for most of their duration, durability is cheap and A, three roots, is the better spend. If it breaks on the second or third tick, the threshold is small and B, one root that holds, is the better spend instead. Anywhere in between, C, the split, stays.

The numbers

The recommendations above lean on four bits of arithmetic, and the working is here so you don’t have to take them on trust. Every input names its source, and where an input is a placeholder it says so.

Vengeance against Naturalist

A spell crit does 150% damage, so at a 15% crit chance (a placeholder, not a measured figure) your average direct hit is 1 plus 0.15 times 0.5, which is 1.075 times a normal hit. Vengeance makes the crit bonus 100%, so the average becomes 1 plus 0.15 times 1.0, which is 1.15, about 7% more on direct hits. If your DoT ticks can crit as well, it’s 7% on them too, and if they can’t (the Classic rule) it’s nothing on them. Naturalist gives 10% to all damage and Moonfury 10% to Arcane and Nature, which is all of this build’s damage, so for the same five points Vengeance is worth somewhere between half and two thirds as much on average.

The two 10% talents stack on a Nature spell like Wrath. If they’re separate multipliers, as talents from different trees usually were in Classic, that’s 1.1 times 1.1, or 21% more damage, and 20% if they add, so the difference doesn’t change any choice in the build.

This guide keeps Vengeance anyway, because a PvP fight turns on the hit that lands when someone’s at 20% health and their healer is a global away, more than on average damage. A 200% Wrath crit is the kill that happens before the heal does, and that’s worth more than an extra 3% or so spread evenly across a fight. If you’d rather have the average, the five points have nowhere better to go in Balance anyway, which is the other half of the argument.

Swiftmend with Splendor and Genesis

Nature’s Splendor makes Rejuvenation 15 seconds rather than 12, which is 1.25 times the healing, and Genesis adds 10% to the ticks, so the Rejuvenation itself heals 1.25 times 1.1, or 1.375 times an untalented one. For example, a Rejuvenation that heals 900 over 12 seconds untalented (a round placeholder, not a tooltip) heals about 1,238 over 15 with both talents.

Swiftmend heals for the HoT’s full duration, and if it reads both talents it heals another 1,238 straight away, whilst the Rejuvenation keeps ticking because it isn’t consumed. That’s about 2,475 from two globals, 2.75 times a bare Rejuvenation. Whether Swiftmend counts Splendor’s extra 3 seconds and Genesis (which says periodic, and Swiftmend’s heal is direct) isn’t settled by the text, and if it reads neither it’s the bare 900, so the range is somewhere between about 2.4 and 2.75 times.

The cost of going back into Moonkin

Moonkin Form costs 35% of base mana on the live tooltip, and a Classic druid’s base mana at 60 is 1,244, with no Forever figure published yet, so entering it costs about 435, and Natural Shapeshifter’s 30% brings that to about 305. Swiftmend is 20% of base mana, about 249, so a heal cycle costs roughly 554 mana plus the Rejuvenation itself. Leaving Moonkin Form was free in Classic, with no global, and if Forever keeps that rule the cost is all on the way back in, which every heal in this build pays.

Wrath per thousand mana

Wrath’s top rank in Forever is 120 mana and a 2 second cast for 92 to 102 Nature damage, by its live tooltip in Wowhead’s Forever database, rather than the 180 mana Classic charged, which an earlier version of this guide used. Improved Wrath halves the cost to 60 and makes it 1.5 seconds, and Moonglow takes another 25% off, which comes to 45 if the two multiply or 30 if they add, and neither tooltip says which. So a thousand mana buys about eight untalented Wraths, and between 22 and 33 with both talents, which is the whole reason this build can afford to leave form to heal. Between fights, Raw Greater Sagefish gives 848 mana eaten seated, and the fishing guide covers it alongside the potion fish.

How it plays

This is roughly how the build is meant to be used. None of it has been tried at 60 in a live battleground yet, so treat it as a plan, and the techniques it leans on are all in the mechanics guide.

• The opener, Moonfire and Insect Swarm go on first, from as far out as Nature’s Reach allows (36 yards), because they’re instants and keep working whilst you move. If the target hasn’t seen you, an untalented Starfire is the one long cast nobody can stop, which is the case the field note on the final notes makes for keeping it on your bars without points in it.
• Pressure with Wrath, because at 1.5 seconds it’s no longer than a global, an interrupt costs you one cast rather than three seconds, and it costs between 30 and 45 mana. Stand still for Wrath only when you’ve got the range for it (see range discipline), and fake a cast when you can see a Kick coming (see the fake cast).
• DoTs set once, not refreshed every time you see a gap. With Splendor, Moonfire lasts 15 seconds and Insect Swarm 14, so refreshing early wastes a global, and on a target you want rooted, a DoT is also what breaks the root.
• Roots on what chases, on the melee who’s on a teammate or a carrier, then walk to range before you cast (see root, walk, cast). Count them, because diminishing returns (each root on the same target is shorter than the last) mean you get roughly three per target a fight, if Forever keeps Classic’s rule (see diminishing returns on roots).
• The heal cycle, cancel Moonkin Form (free, with no global, if Forever keeps Classic’s rule), Rejuvenation, Swiftmend, then back into Moonkin, which is three globals, 4.5 seconds and about 554 mana plus the Rejuvenation on Classic’s base mana, as shown below. The Rejuvenation keeps ticking after Swiftmend, so the cycle is really a heal now and a heal for the rest of its 15 seconds.
• When Starfire is right, on a target who can’t reach you or can’t interrupt you, a Hibernated druid in a form, a fresh opener, or a melee rooted at 36 yards whose root has room left. Starfire is Arcane and nearly everything else you cast is Nature, so starting one to draw an interrupt and then cancelling it is also an option.

The long green bar is the one that matters, because that Rejuvenation keeps healing for the rest of its 15 seconds after you’re back in Moonkin. The macro for the first step is the following, so the cancel and the heal happen on one key whilst you’re in Moonkin Form:

/cancelform [form:5]
/cast [@mouseover,help][] Rejuvenation

In this case, form 5 is Moonkin on a druid with no Feral points who has Bear, Aquatic, Cat and Travel ahead of it in the stance bar. Check yours (the settings guide covers forms and the stance bar), and note that the first line does nothing if you’re already out of form.

How it got here

This guide first went up on 31 October as a short piece on the thinking behind a 31/0/20 split, written before the final notes, and the thinking survived whilst the numbers didn’t. Between then and launch Blizzard doubled Genesis and Naturalist (each now 2 to 10% across five ranks, up from 1 to 5%) and raised Starfire’s base damage by about 40%. They also moved Reflection up a row and Heart of the Wild into Restoration, and changed Swiftmend so it needs a Rejuvenation or Regrowth you cast yourself, with a developer note confirming it doesn’t consume the HoT (the beta tooltip said otherwise). Each of those moved a point or two, and by launch they’d moved the build to 35/0/16.

The first version treated the Restoration side as a tax you paid for Swiftmend. That was wrong, because once Naturalist doubled it became the best five damage points in the build and the rest of the gate turned out to be talents the build wanted anyway. Earlier drafts tried a couple of versions on the way, one that kept Improved Starfire and one with no Swiftmend at all, and rather than walk through each, the reasoning that ruled them out is in What the build leaves out. If you read the old version, the four questions it ended on are in the next section, reworked for a build that now has numbers in it.

Four questions

These are four questions worth asking in every fight, and a talent build won’t answer them for you, though it does change what the right answer costs. Here they are, with what this build adds to each:

• Position, whether you’re at 36 yards with a corner nearby, and which teammate you can still reach with a Rejuvenation if this goes wrong. A build with a 4.5 second heal cycle needs somewhere to stand for it, so the corner comes before the first cast, not after the first hit.
• Pressure, whether both DoTs are up and Wrath is the cast, or whether there’s an opening worth committing to that you should hold everything else for. Vengeance only pays when you’re pressing on a target that’s low, so swapping targets because a new one looks easier usually throws that away.
• Support, whether your next global helps the team more as a Roots on a chaser, a Rejuvenation on the carrier, or another Wrath, even when the Wrath feels better. In this build support is mostly control, and two roots on two chasers is often the most useful thing in the whole battleground.
• Review, what you’d change if the same fight came round again, keeping the quality of the decision apart from whether it happened to work. The numbers to count are roots broken by your own ticks, Swiftmends used and shifts made, because those three are what this build will be judged on.

In each battleground

Each battleground has its own guide, so here’s only what the build changes in each. In Warsong Gulch, it’s an escort first, with two roots for the two players chasing your carrier and a Rejuvenation that keeps ticking on them through every shift you make, and the Warsong guide’s section on hunting their carrier is where Roots on the enemy carrier earns its 36 yards.

In Arathi Basin, the build plays best as a node defender, because Moonkin Form’s armour holds a flag against a single attacker for longer than most casters can, and a root on someone trying to cap is worth more than any amount of damage. Watch your own DoTs near the flag, though, because your team’s damage around a node is exactly what breaks a root early.

On Darkspear Islands, Forever’s new map, it plays as a lone base defender, with the two roots for the attackers, a DoT on whoever reaches the point and a heal for yourself, standing on the inland side of the base because the sea between the islands kills.

In Alterac Valley, the fights are longer and wider, so the Moonkin aura for 3% spell crit across your group and Wrath’s low cost carry more of the weight, and the roots matter less than range. It’s also the one battleground where a Starfire from range finds a stationary target often enough to be worth thinking about.

All of this to say, the build is a plan with its reasons written down, not a finished answer, and the reasons are the part worth taking from it even if your points end up somewhere else. If you play a Balance and Restoration druid in Forever and you’d rather win the third minute of a fight than the first five seconds, then I wish you every success with it, and I hope the arithmetic saves you a respec or two.

Once Restokins hits 60 you’ll find me on the stream most weekdays from midday AEST, and the skills that make the build work are in Balance druid PvP mechanics.

Contributing to this guide

If you’ve run the roots test, or you can show me a talent here that does something different on the live client, I want to hear it, and I’ll credit you by name when I correct the guide. The surest way to keep it from getting lost is to open an issue on the Restokins GitHub, with a combat log or a clip if you have one, because a number from the log beats an argument every time. Every claim this guide still rests on a precedent for is on the open questions page, as a question anyone can settle in game.