Druid in Forever

The three specs:

• Balance is the ranged caster tree, built around Moonfire and Starfire and, at the capstone, a Moonkin Form that boosts the whole group’s critical strike chance.
• Feral covers both melee roles from a single tree: Cat Form for combo-point DPS built on Rake, Rip, and Shred, and Bear Form for tanking, built on threat generation and mitigation talents in the same tree.
• Restoration is the healer tree, centered on Rejuvenation and Regrowth with mana-efficiency talents that let it out-sustain other healers over a long fight.

None of Blizzard’s six confirmed new race and class pairs is a Druid, so Druid’s race list is unchanged from 1.12 on both factions. Druid is open to Skyborne on both sides — the Alliance’s High Order Skyborne and the Horde’s Windshaper Skyborne can both play Druid, with sky-blue shapeshift forms made specifically for the race.

Talent trees keep the familiar seven rows and 51 points, with a fourth one-point “gold medal” talent added at the 16-point mark alongside the existing ones at 11, 21, and 31. A handful of baseline changes matter across every Druid build: Omen of Clarity and Nature’s Grasp moved off the tree and onto the trainer, opening up two points; Revive is a new short out-of-combat resurrection with only a 10-second cooldown, which takes the pressure off Rebirth’s half-hour one; Lacerate, the Bear bleed familiar from later expansions, is a Feral talent since client 1.60.1.70707; and Cure Poison was cut, leaving Abolish Poison to cover both jobs. Improved Mark of the Wild became a baseline passive too, and gear’s bonus healing now also grants roughly a third of that value as bonus damage starting at level 10 — small, but enough for a leveling Restoration Druid to contribute some damage without carrying a second spec. Feral got its own structural change on top of those: Feral Charge splits into a Cat version, a gap-closing leap that dazes on landing, sitting alongside the older Bear version that interrupts; and Blood Frenzy now grants its bonus combo point off Cat critical hits too, not only Rage off Bear ones, so the same talent supports either form.

The beta only runs to level 30, so none of this has been tested at the level and raid content Druids will actually play at launch — see each spec guide’s Overview for what’s confirmed versus projected. The Balance, Feral, and Restoration guides below cover talent priorities, rotation, stats, and gear for each tree.