There are lots of posts out there covering the topic of glyphing for resto druids.  They pretty throughly cover the different glyphs available and give their thoughts and opinions on the usefulness of each glyph.  The community is largely in agreement on Swiftmend and Wildgrowth being the strongest two glyphs and occupying two of your main glyph slots, with a fair bit of discourse on what should be choosen for your third glyph.  Largely, your third glyph will vary depending on what type of content you are encountering and your play style.

With that in mind, I’d like to offer an alternative to picking your third glyph…or what we would call in the work place, a “best practice”.  My thought is this: why settle on just one glyph?  Every encounter is unique and will require different things from you as a druid, so why lock yourself into a single glyph if another one might be better for an encounter. 

I personally carry around a stack of Innervate glyphs and a stack of Rejuv glyphs, and change them up depending on which I feel will suit me best for an encounter.  I will probably add a few Healing Touch glyphs to my stack to test them on heroic Anub as well, as there are some favorable reports on glyphed HT being fantastic for handling penetrating cold in phase 3.  Glyphs are cheap, and can be changed on the spot.  Why not maximize them to suit your needs as a druid best?

Here are a few suggestions that I would offer:

• Glyph what you feel are your “strong” glyphs.  Then review your healing assignments and the encounters that you’re facing and determine where you would get the biggest bang for your buck with regards to your final glyph.
• Popular third choices are Innervate, Nourish, Rejuv and Healing Touch.  Determine which of those will help you most on an encounter, grab a stack of each of the ones you want, keep them in your inventory and swap them up at will during your raid night.
  • I personally favor Innervate and Rejuv. 
    • I have found in some of the TotGC I am mana starved to the point that I have had to change my meta gem and often need to swap in a stronger regen trinket.  Even though the extra mana gained from innervate may seem trivial, I have found it does make a difference.
    • I have also found there are a few encounters (in both ToC and Ulduar) where the glyph of rejuv is worth it’s weight in gold.  While not appropriate for every encounter, those niche fights where it is useful, it is extremely  useful.
• Pick up a number of different glyphs and “experiment” with them on encounters where you may find them useful and swap them out freely!
  • As an example, I intend to nab up a few HT glyphs and give it a spin on heroic Anub to see if I like how it works, and it make our raid smoother.  There is nothing lost in doing this!  If it doesn’t work well for me, I can always change the glyph back before the next pull.
• Don’t get caught up in a “I must always use this glyph”, or a “that glyph is rubbish” mentality.  Be flexible and creative.  Glyphs are dirt cheap (just get some cheap northrend herbs milled and have your guild inscriptionist make you some!), and are quick and easy to replace!  There will be encounters where one glyph will  be better suited than another.  Take the opportunity to experiment and swap them up.

I would strongly encourage everyone to create a best practice of stocking your bags with interchangeable glyphs and always using the glyph that will suit the challenges you are working on best.  What about you?  How many are already using this best practice?

There is currently a semi-raging debate going on in the Restoration Glyphs thread over at EJ regarding the  usefulness of the Glyph of Rejuvenation.  More specifically, the statement has been made that this is theglyph to use in your third glyph spot if you are working hard modes in Ulduar (with the assumption being made that you were using Glyph of Wild Growth and Glyph of Swiftmend in your other two glyph spots).

Of course, anytime anyone states that “you must do this” it is going to spark some discussion from people who will naturally disagree.  Now, I will admit that one of the guys in the thread advocating the rejuv glyph is a little pompous, but if you can get past his elitism he did actually raise some very interesting points.

Interesting enough to get me thinking about the Glyph of Rejuvenation.  Interesting enough for me to reglyph last night to see for myself what I thought of it during our first attempts with Heroic: I could say that cache was rare.