After reading through the proposed Druid changes for 8.1 I can’t help but feel mightily underwhelmed. They really seem to have missed most of the issues related to this class and a lot of the changes feel like papering over the cracks, deflecting the focus or just plain nerfing the spec.
Guardian:
Yes, we all agree we needed a damage buff to help bring us in line with a lot of other tanks, but so far there is nothing to address the major issue with bears and that is how squishy they feel currently and the long ramp-up time for increasing that survivability. Also, I find it strange that what used to be our mechanic to combat this (significantly higher health pool) seems to have been taken away and not addressed in any other way.
Feral:
Overall this one is hard to make out without testing it more – it feels like it is just creating further complication and boosting AoE damage potential to placate the meters without necessarily addressing single target DPS or issues with movement heavy/target switching fights.
There are so many changes to this spec (which again how the hell does it make it to live when you need THIS many changes the first major patch) it is a little hard to know exactly how things will pan out when it goes live. Overall this seems like a buff to AoE to skew the meters and a PvP nerf.
Balance:
Nothing major to note, basically Blizz burying their head in the sand to real issues surrounding Trait mechanics buffing the class to decent numbers in M+ content but failing to really address any problems in PvP or Raids. I think Balance is producing enough that they figured they could just avoid having to worry about it for now which is disappointing. The spec really suffers for not having the correct traits and that simply is not good enough.
Resto:
Tranquility nerf – while we are currently putting out decent numbers HPS-wise, it feels lacklustre playing a resto druid right now as we are essentially there to make up the numbers in a raid until Tranq time…for me this nerf is both good and bad, but depend on other things being changed that we are still not sure about. It was never good for so much of our healing to come from one spell so I’m all for nerfing this if it means we get more sustained throughput, but that is the big question, will we see a buff to normal healing at the expense of our big cooldown?
Right now we are getting a buff to WG and AL trait is getting reworked but will it be enough? Seems we are still lacking that throughput and reliant on specific traits. I’ve said it before and a rework of tranq is probably the answer, give us more throughput natively and make Tranq a raid wide damage reduction OR a buff for overall healing so we aren’t the only ones who benefit. We got hammered in PvP healing and there doesn’t seem much to redress this major over-nerf.
Still plenty of gaps that need addressing if 8.1 isn’t to be another tier of Beta testing and feeling like we are “waiting to be fixed”.
I can agree with ya , and I'm a balance druid . I think the new changes aren't good enough . They also nerfed some stuff which is stupid . Whoever manages these specs is not good at it
I think they could have done more, but Im not really upset with the current state of balance druid. I feel pretty fine in most scenarios, and the buffs in 8.1 should help out our ST a decent bit.