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Balance Druid Review - Battle for Azeroth Community Opinions
Live
Posted
2018/07/29 at 1:34 AM
by
Squishei
Throughout the pre-patch, we'll be launching a community opinions article for every class and spec. We're continuing our Battle for Azeroth Class Reviews and in this post, we'll be taking a look at the state of Balance Druids. See if this spec appeals to you in Battle for Azeroth!
We reached out to the Balance Druid community to give their thoughts and opinions on the changes and current state of the spec.
If this spec appeals to you after reading this article, check out our
Battle for Azeroth Balance Druid Guide
.
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
17:
Assassination
18:
Subtlety
19:
Outlaw
20:
Fury
/
Arms
21:
Ret
/
Windwalker
22:
Feral
/
Enhancement
23:
Havoc
24:
Survival
25:
Beast Mastery
/
Marksmanship
26:
Fire
/
Frost
27:
Arcane
28:
Boomkin
/
Elemental
29:
Demonology
30:
Destruction
/
Affliction
31:
Shadow
1:
Unholy
/
Frost
2:
Holy Paladin
3:
Disc
/
Holy
4:
Restoration Druid
5:
Restoration
/
Mistweaver
6:
Blood
7:
Brewmaster
8:
Guardian
/
Protection Warrior
9:
Vengeance
10:
Protection Paladin
Tettles
is a Theorycrafter, Guide writer for Wowhead, and Balance Expert in the Dreamgrove.
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Borabank
: is a Theorycrafter, Guidewriter, and a raider in <Encore> on Illidan.
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Since our last
State of the Moonkin
, the storm of changes surrounding our class have settled and we now have what will most likely be the Moonkin you see in Battle for Azeroth. The Moonkin playstyle between expansions has thus far remained largely unchanged. Some of the weaknesses have been strengthened and new problems have arisen to take their place.
The Good
One of the best feelings for a class is when you feel engaged in your rotation. The Balance Druid rotation has for the most part stayed the same but the way in which you sequence your casts now require a bit of thought. The addition of the
and
passives have been a resounding success within most of the community adding depth and flavor to both single and multi-target encounters. You cast more spells that are faster and more impactful than you did in Legion.
In Legion, since our “fillers”,
Starfire
and
Wrath
were just meant to be ways to reach one big cast in
Starsurge
, our ability to target swap was limited to only our Astral Power. The best way to hit targets hard and fast was to have 80 Astral Power and hit the target with two
Starsurge
s. Now we have other abilities such as
Force of Nature
and
Warrior of Elune
to combo with in addition to pooling Astral Power. This should make our target swapping and multi-target burst ability much more effective and easier to set up for than it was last patch.
The Bad
Probably the largest mechanical change for Moonkins is the reduction in globals and casts we can use while moving. With the loss of baseline
New Moon
, we generate about 15%-20% less Astral Power during the pre-patch and will be generating even less Astral Power as we lose more Haste going into Battle for Azeroth. The loss of instant globals via
Starsurge
s in conjunction with the fact that we no longer use
Stellar Drift
as often as we once did is going to heavily hinder our DPS on heavy movement encounters.
Talents as a whole are just very unimpactful for Balance Druids. For single target, correctly talenting only provides a ~15% damage increase and for multi-target talents it is about ~25% at five targets. While this is a tuning issue at its core, the fact that most of the talent choices are meaningless is not the greatest sign moving forward.
The Tunable
The award for biggest tuning surprise of the Battle for Azeroth Beta came in the form of the Mastery rescaling. Not just the removal of Stellar Empowerment (which was a welcome change) but the reduction of both base scaling, and halving Mastery’s effects on both
Starsurge
and
Wrath
. While the
Wrath
portion was acceptable due to the nature of the empowered version of the spell, the nerf to our most iconic spender was a shocker. In Legion, our fillers did little and our spenders were powerful, in Battle for Azeroth our fillers have more importance, but our spenders don’t always feel worthy of the time spent to build towards them. This is also apparent with
Starfall
.
Starfall
took a big enough hit with the loss of Artifact traits that the target threshold rose from two targets to three to be worth the Astral Power to cast. Talenting
Soul of the Forest
or
Stellar Drift
does not change the target threshold either.
The final things needing a bit of that Blizzard number love would be our cooldowns. In an effort to make our cooldowns more universal, they indirectly took a good portion of power away from them. Due to the increased generation portion of both
Celestial Alignment
and
Incarnation: Chosen of Elune
, they were not as effective in multi-target scenarios. Most of the multi-target benefits were from the Moon and Stars Artifact trait and the percent damage both cooldowns provided. So they gave us the bonus Haste in lieu of increased generation but that still leaves both spells one third incomplete compared to their Legion counterparts.
Level 15
This row is by far the biggest success of the Balance Druid talent tree shakeup.
Force of Nature
brings utility and remains competitive in single target scenarios,
Warrior of Elune
is a strong hybrid and multi-target talent, and even
Nature's Balance
is a good open world choice and could even end up in some niche raid and dungeon encounter scenarios. As a passive ability,
Nature's Balance
does not need to hold the same power as the other competitors on its row.
Level 30 through 60
These talents have seen no changes since the last
State of the Druid
article. If you’re interested in our thoughts on these rows, you can refer back to that article.
Level 75
When last we spoke about this row,
Soul of the Forest
was your single target choice,
Starlord
was pretty bad, and
Incarnation: Chosen of Elune
was the multi-target go-to.
Starlord
is now the favored talent for single target and light cleave fights. This talent is fun to play with, good for single target and cleave, and gives players a bit of room to min-max their play. Balancing Astral Power and
Starlord
stacks while working through bosses is always enjoyable but it is not so important that it is mandatory at the cost of a good portion of DPS. We hope this talent stays relevant throughout all of Battle for Azeroth because it is the most engaging talent on the row if not the tree.
Soul of the Forest
and
Incarnation: Chosen of Elune
could use some looking at though.
The cost reduction on
Starfall
better than the flat damage and duration increase of
Incarnation: Chosen of Elune
. However
Soul of the Forest
does not bring that much to the table after the Mastery nerf hit the Empowerment portion of the talent and the cost reduction was already pretty lackluster as well. When comparing
Soul of the Forest
to
Incarnation: Chosen of Elune
, it's just pitting two weak talents against each other for the same role. Realistically,
Incarnation: Chosen of Elune
just suffers from being a weak cooldown as well as a talent and could possibly use a bit of a rework as it is still in danger of being too powerful if just the numbers are adjusted. We did not touch on that in the above portion of this article because we spoke of it last time. For more information, you can refer back to “The Bad” and the “Level 75” section in our previous piece.
Level 90
The level 90 row was repurposed to be the multi-target flavor row. Each talent is best utilized in specific situations.
Stellar Flare
is your best pure single target choice. It offers very little as targets scale up, so little in fact that it is outscaled the moment a second target is introduced.
Stellar Drift
is the sustained damage choice. On fights where you do nothing but
Starfall
and the target count is not so high that you can not maintain
Moonfire
on all targets, you take
Stellar Drift
for maximum DPS. You can also opt into
Stellar Drift
for periods of intense movement that intersect during your multi-target rotation. Finally,
Twin Moons
is your hybrid choice. It is competitive on single and multi-target as well as easing the globals necessary in our multi-target ramp by halving our
Moonfire
casts. This will most likely be taken in almost all multi-target situations barring heavy movement.
Level 100
As many have noticed,
Shooting Stars
was seemingly reverted back to its Legion values with a recent patch. However a diminishing returns effect was also sneakily incorporated into the
Shooting Stars
proc making it substantially weaker than what we assumed to be. With the way diminishing returns work, at one target,
Shooting Stars
is still strong but as the target count increases, it scales so poorly that much like
Stellar Flare
, it is almost useless after the second target. This talent has swung from overpowered to almost useless since the launch of the prepatch. This hotfix makes
Fury of Elune
the best talent the majority of the time. Hopefully, we can find the balance it deserves as we grow closer and closer to Battle for Azeroth.
While
Fury of Elune
is once again top dog of the level 100 row, it is not because it is obscenely strong.
Fury of Elune
has been getting nerfed little by little over the last several patches. It lost its Mastery scaling and its Intellect scaling was also reduced. This should still see some use in its current form, however if other talents get buffed it could easily be bullied out.
New Moon
on the other hand is just nowhere near where it needs to be to fill in as our single target generator. In a recent patch it received a recharge rate buff as well as a damage nerf. While the Astral Power gained by each spell was unchanged, spenders are not nearly as impressive as they once were. So the damage loss outweighed the gain in Astral Power per minute and plunged
New Moon
into unviability. This should be an easy number fix as it does have a very defined role and can be tuned easily without affecting the other two choices significantly.
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Comment by
Kanariya
on 2018-07-30T14:10:52-05:00
yea, didnt talk about DPS, my concern is that DPS will be balanced. and when it comes to that what do we give in that point? :]
Battle Rez, Innervate, Tranq, Hibernate (unique CC), root(s), best off-heals in game if talented... There's a reason they did not put MotW back in game. Druids bring the most utility of all classes. You'll be fine.
Comment by
Anubishaman
on 2018-07-31T04:15:21-05:00
Balance druid is a beast on PvP right now
Comment by
elementex
on 2018-08-01T01:33:35-05:00
yea, didnt talk about DPS, my concern is that DPS will be balanced. and when it comes to that what do we give in that point? :]
Battle Rez, Innervate, Tranq, Hibernate (unique CC), root(s), best off-heals in game if talented... There's a reason they did not put MotW back in game. Druids bring the most utility of all classes. You'll be fine.
innervate is crap, other classes bring brez, hibernate is only useful sometimes, what's tranq?, ret pally has much better heals than boomkin, roots are great but that doesn't compare to what frost mage has.
Comment by
tettles
on 2018-08-03T02:55:18-05:00
So what druid got? hibernate/soothe. I played mythic plus dungeons betweeen +2-10 as an boomkin / warlocks affli / destro.in beta, most of the time when mob enrages a whole pack enrages, so if i remove one of five enrages? "wooow" those packs will be kited / stunned anyway, i dont wanna even start with the hibernate.
Enrages are far more common in Battle for Azeroth and unless you are running with a Resto Druid then you wont have access to an unenrage. Enrages in 1 - 2 mobs are super common on trash as opposed to the whole pack raging as a whole.
Things that we already had: Blizzard took away druids motw because druids already had so many utilitys. Yea druid has CR, well warlock has it too, druid has roots / typhoon, those are cool but quite situational, where warlocks AoE stun / mages int buff are useful in every situation. Solar is cool when packs has many caster in it but 1min cd can be bad too. Innervate after we got some gear it didnt matter that much. overall if you compare druid, mage and warlock who has most utilitys druid wins so the amount replaces quality? did they count guardian / feral roars and restos vortex in that toolkit too?
Solar Beam. End of discussion. Solar Beam is by far the best interrupt in the game for M+ and with the removal of the blanket silence from Torrent makes it even better.
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