11.1 Balance Druid Feedback

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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Balance Druid 11.1 PTR Feedback

With the 11.1 PTR being up and work being done for the upcoming season, the Dreamgrove community wanted to share some thoughts and feedback about the state of the spec, and offer some insight that could help in fixing some of the issues with the spec currently, both short term and long term. Last time we did a similar feedback post was for the 11.0.7 PTR, where we brought up some underlying core issues with the spec, so this post will instead focus on coming into the 11.1 PTR specifically. For the “longer-term” / core feedback post that we will upkeep look here.

Current Bugs

1- Since the introduction of hero talents, Control of the Dream has had an issue with bosses being reset or your raid wiping while your major abilities are still on cooldown, resulting in not gaining the 15 second reduction for the beginning of next pull unless you swap talents back and forth in the choice node between pulls.

2- The DoT effect from Wild Mushroom required for the Season 2 4-piece does not activate unless you’re talented into either Sunseeker Mushroom or Wild Mushroom, making the choice node mandatory in every build.

3- When Arcanic Pulsar was removed back in the pre-patch for The War Within, an issue started where swapping between Orbital Strike and Greater Alignment (now Whirling Stars) would break macros mentioning Incarnation: Chosen of Elune or Celestial Alignment. This is only fixed by a full relog every time you swap the talent. This became noticeably more common after 11.0.5 when you are swapping talents in the choice node between builds, compared to previously where the choice was largely one-sided.

4-The Harmony of the Heavens talent was bugged throughout the entirety of season 1 where stacks would not reset correctly if you pressed Celestial Alignment after having used a spender inside Lunar Eclipse, or using a spender outside of Eclipse and transitioning into any Eclipse. This has been partially fixed with the 11.1 PTR, but there is still an issue where spenders used outside of Eclipse will count towards your next Eclipse or Celestial Alignment.

Class Tree Update

The updated Druid class tree has been well received so far, introducing some sorely needed defensive nodes and generally better pathing to access the utility you want for any scenario. Some of the defensive options are underwhelming, specifically Well-Honed Instincts and Matted Fur which don’t offer a lot of benefit relative to their position in the tree.

The class tree update also introduces a very degenerate gameplay loop through the addition of the Lycara’s Meditation talent for any Druid also talented into Fluid Form. When combined, creating a macro to cancelaura your Moonkin Form for the 6% haste buff and then entering back into Moonkin Form every 5 seconds with Wrath/Starfire abuses their intended effects and feels very disruptive to your rotation.

11.1 Tier Set

There is not a lot to say about the new tier set; damaging spells and pressing your major cooldown spawns a Wild Mushroom under your target, dealing damage. The 4-piece increases your spenders damage on targets affected by Fungal Growth, the DoT effect from Wild Mushroom. Wild Mushroom usually does a very small amount of your damage, where the active version of the spell is worth less than 1%, and the passive version is worth around 2%. The tier set also provides more passive AP generation, which we already have a fair share of.

Talent Build Diversity

The middle section of the spec tree is extremely bloated with “mandatory” passive nodes that all feel the same, making different talent builds very hard to select structurally. For any build to work, you need 2 points each in Cosmic Rapidity and Starlord, then points in Wild Mushroom, Astral Smolder, Celestial Alignment, Whirling Stars/Orbital Strike, Umbral Intensity, Soul of the Forest and Umbral Embrace. That is an 11 point investment, where the only ones that affect gameplay in any way are Starlord and Whirling Stars/Orbital Strike. If you wanted to pick interesting talents like Touch the Cosmos and Hail of Stars, this would be hard as you would also need Crashing Star and Stellar Amplification for synergy, essentially spending all your talent points only in the middle section alone.

Hail of Stars was introduced in 11.0.5, offering an interesting gameplay loop where free spender procs cast from Touch the Cosmos and Starweaver gave you 3 seconds of Solstice. Currently, any duration accumulated of Solstice resets back to 6 seconds whenever you enter an Eclipse/press Celestial Alignment. The spec currently has a lot of passive AP generation from procs or cooldowns, which lessens the value of free spenders overall, especially when considering the amount of interactions that include your builders compared to your spenders. Ideally we would want to see some more interactions with spenders to alleviate this.

Hero Talents

Elune’s Chosen has mostly revolved around taking Lunar Calling, going into Lunar Eclipse on all target counts and using Starfire to reduce the Fury of Elune cooldown funneling into Atmospheric Exposure’s damage increase. Lunar Calling is still a very uninteresting talent to take, despite it having seen numerous tuning passes since beta, and the requirement from Lunation to maintain constant uptime while casting can feel restrictive and punishing whenever you have to react to a scenario in front of you. There’s the other part of Elune’s Chosen that interacts with New Moon, which is interesting in theory, but with Celestial Alignment/Incarnation having a short duration and the spec having an abundance of passive AP generation, that talent is not playable in the current form of the spec, and when New Moon damage was buffed leading into 10.0.5, it was not received well and got nerfed in the tuning pass the week after the patch released.
The main issue with this hero tree lies in the mandatory talents you have to take from the spec tree to make it work, where Fury of Elune, Radiant Moonlight and Sundered Firmament are all mandatory picks in addition to the vast amount of passive nodes in the middle of the tree.

Keeper of the Grove has been the go-to hero talent for most content in season 1, being the clearly better choice on 7/8 mythic bosses and most M+ dungeons outside of the highest level. The main criticism relating to the hero tree is that Force of Nature is not a satisfying button to press, and does not offer anything special visually. Dream Burst being consumed by generators makes you restricted in what talents you can take from the spec tree, where talents like Bounteous Bloom, Starlord, Starweaver, Astral Communion, Hail of Stars, Fury of Elune/New Moon and Elune’s Guidance all prioritize spending AP as you get it and can make you scramble to spend your Dream Burst stacks before your cooldown runs out. Having Dream Burst interact with spenders instead of generators could go a long way in helping with overall build diversity.

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go back to empowerments. the end

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The DoT also doesn’t “ignite” or pandemic like most others in the game, so there is a lot of wasted damage with back-to-back procs, despite Mushrooms already being a fairly low overall percentage of our damage breakdown.

They offer decent burst and a moderate amount of Astral Power in short-duration, high-target encounters, but suffer greatly in single-target encounters where both the damage and Astral Power generation is low (since the latter scales with target count).

They should make 1 or 2 of the following changes to Mushrooms:

  1. Add the “ignite” or pandemic effect to the DoT.
  2. Increase the damage they deal to one target by 100%.

This talent needs to do 1 of 2 things to not cause absolute degenerate gameplay:

  1. Require the player to spend X seconds in a form to gain it’s buff.
  2. Grant a static % of the other stats when in a given form.

For example:

Lycara’s Meditation
Passive
Lycara’s Teachings also grants 1% of stat bonuses not associated with your active form.

What does this look like in practice?

  1. While in Humanoid Form, you gain 6% haste, and 1% critical strike, mastery and versatility.
  2. While in Cat Form, you gain 6% critical strike, and 1% haste, mastery and versatility.
  3. While in Bear Form, you gain 6% versatility, and 1% critical strike, haste and mastery.
  4. While in Moonkin Form, you gain 6% mastery, and 1% critical strike, haste and versatility.

Even if they added an ICD, we would still see players “stance dancing” in combination with Fluid Form, just less frequently than now, so I don’t believe an ICD is the solution.

With as many good talents as we have–even if some are simple or boring–and how little (no) wiggle room we have, all 2-point nodes should be 1-point nodes.

I would love to use Touch the Cosmos or Astronomical Impact (big numbers!) for Mythic Plus in Season 2, but that just isn’t possible now, and that goes for all talents you mentioned.

This is my go-to Hero spec because I find it incredible thematic, and it’s great to push with in higher keys. In addition to the issues you mentioned, here are my thoughts on some of its supporting talents:

Lunar Amplification is so low-impact. There’s no reason why an Arcane-centric spec needs a talent revolving around the use of Nature spells, which already happens very infrequently.

Lunar Calling also needs to increase the casting speed and it would feel great. I enjoy the concept of this effect, but Starfire should also feel good to press with it being our only filler/generator, regardless of target count.

For example:

Lunar Calling
Passive
Starfire deals 100% increased damage and casts 20% faster, but no longer triggers Solar Eclipse.

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I mistakenly posted this on the old thread, so copied and pasted here. Any suggestions are appreciated, and any bullying or hate will be ignored =P

I have been playing a druid since 2004. I have to say I quit wow during the panda kid expansion and rejoined a year later. Balance druid in the new content take way too long to ramp up when other classes are demolishing things before you have the chance. People booting you from groups because they still utilize damage meters as a way to make sure people are not being lazy. I have 8 level 80s all around 595 or more I level, and I would put any class higher than the druid in dps. Maybe I am not doing something right but when you go into an 8+ delve it seems like everything hits for half of my 5.5 mil life. So, you have to ramp up while its beating on you or run around and chance drawing in more. It’s also kind of stupid IMO to have 1 class that has to ramp up when others don’t. I have tried downloading other people’s builds, watching YouTube videos, and I’m always doing way less damage than all of the other classes I play. I agree something needs to be done; I just cannot point out what. I think the whole eclipse thing is garbage and needs to be removed. When my resto druids Starfire hits for almost a million and the Balance one hits for 80k until ramped… that’s a issue to me. I seem to kill things way easier, in resto.

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I posted in the official 11.1 PTR druid feedback thread and i’ll just echo my thoughts here.
Latest PTR update for 11.1 brings back moonkin for non-balance which is a win, and now improved sunfire is baked into the sunfire talent, also a win, but maybe a PVP nerf.

I’m not satisfied that Balance spec is losing access to skull bash now that it finally is in a reasonable place in the talent tree and functions with fluid form. I feel like for druids that had to talent into Skull Bash previously (DF and TWW S1) usually did so for niche content or to compensate for their 5-man static group comps, and now taking that option away will hinder Balance performance in such content (Zekvir ?? difficulty for instance). In PVP terms, it might feel strong to have two interrupts but Skull Bash already has a significant GCD cost, strict range requirements, and also puts the caster into melee range where the user is then succeptible to CC and other forms of counter-pressure. This is just a personal gripe but I had the idea of losing options for not much return, even if they weren’t that practical to begin with. Being able to cat-form skull bash had been an additional form of skill expression that was available even if not always practical.

I’m also not a fan of soothe being put on the same choice node with cyclone, as it feels like a PVP soft nerf in niche situations, although it doesn’t matter in 95% of other content. I’m less worried about this change however.

Fluid form’s current state and placement on the 11.1 PTR seems to lose value for balance unless they add another instant cast with gcd that can shift the user to moonkin. the current iteration has been changed to shift at the end of the wrath/starfire cast to avoid gcd cancel abuse, which is fair, but my suggestion in the PTR Feedback thread was that starsurge should also be added to the list of fluid form spells that shift into moonkin (also useful for non-balance owlweaving druids).

Lastly, I’d love to see Heart of the Wild reworked to a shorter cooldown so that I can actually provide meaningful active off-healing as a balance druid in a raid setting apart from just nature’s vigil.

Ultimately, the druid balance spec tree is running into a lot of the cookie cutter build issues that led to the MoP-SL style of talents: too many talents that feel mandatory, too many passives that cost more than 1 point, etc.
I’d love to see the return of the Legion era Rattle the Stars + Starweaver interaction return, as that was a really fun positive feedback loop style of play that really made casting spenders fun, but it is completely abolished in the current and previous iterations since the two talents share the same choice node.

all in all, the 11.1 changes are more interesting for non-balance, but it still feels like i’m losing more fun than i’m gaining in the class tree.

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Existing is the reason why I dropped the spec completely.