Going to start with a TL:DR:
Balance druid defensives suck
Talents have very little synergy and that ones that do, have very little impact or are still not useable.
Stellar Flare still just feels like button bloat
Double Celestial Alignment is ok but needs to actually reset when a boss wipe happens along with every other cd for that matter.
This may get a bit long but take the time to read and understand this feedback. I have been playing balance druid since around the beginning of Wrath. I have played just about every variant of eclipse from the pendulum with procs style to the builder spender style.
Stellar Flare:
I look at all of the other classes that get reworks and removal of button bloat and wonder when druid is going to get the same love. A button I keep thinking about hating is Stellar Flare, it’s bad enough you have to maintain 2 dots already but having to hard cast Stellar Flare feels horrible specially when you have several extra targets Mythic Blood comes to mind. Honestly if you took Stellar Flare and made it function like shadow crash or Vile Taint and that would fix the multi dotting problem boom has to deal with.
Barkskin:
needs a second charge or give us survival instincts.
Mushrooms:
The proc chance was really cool but twice a minute and for how little the damage is needs to be changed / buffed to be worth using. I’m cool with the proc I like it, but the damage is pretty sad.
Celestial Alignment:
First and foremost the 2 charge CA is ok however we still have very little interaction with eclipse. Also wiping on a boss and having it not reset is infuriating. Nothing says boomkin like pulling a boss and realizing neither charge is back up.
Suggestions:
Extra charge of Barkskin
Need a way to apply all dots without having to use 20 globals can be on a cd like 30 seconds
Reset our cds when we wipe on a boss
Make mushrooms worth taking
On paper the free starsurge/starfall plus starweaver sound fun to play but they are still way behind other options. It would be better for both of these to just be passives boomkins get without talenting into them.
I really just want to start a conversation with the hope that the developers take the time and soak in what im trying to say. Boomkin is my favorite spec we need abit of help we have been low/mid tier all expansion. Every class should be around A tier IMO.
10 Likes
Druid cannot be Dracthyr, so what we got is what we get. If blizzard read or communicated anything, the glaring bugs and issues wouldn’t have rolled out from beta into live and still ongoing. Can’t get people to pay for a race change with a non-dracthyr class.
Meanwhile shaman destroys everything! They should be fired asap
3 Likes
Okay so tuning stuff aside (because right now our tuning is terribly low since for whatever reason they decided to give us a bunch of talent nerfs to off-set stuff going baseline and stuff going from 2 point talent to 1), but I’m not going to talk about that.
Right now playing Keeper of the grove feels basically forced in keys, for multiple reasons. Firstly, for anyone doing +10 and above keys where Tyrannical is always present… playing Elunes isn’t viable because it does non-existent boss damage and is absolutely useless on single target. So until it actually gets some ACTUAL St damage, nobody is going to play it.
Secondly, for AoE pulls its way too cringe having to tab dot repeatedly for 10 seconds during a pull in keys and not having the moonfire from Keeper of the grove treants. This spec NEEDS a way to seamlessly apply our dots regardless of hero talents. Playing dot whack a mole every pack IS NOT FUN.
Not only this, but Elunes offers 0 defensive value as a hero tree, and its damage is still lackluster. It feels horrible to play.
We need a way to have shorter cast time Starfires, it feels terrible to cast. Nature’s Grace is not enough. Long cast times on clunky abilities is absolutely not a fun playstyle.
I still don’t understand the point of the 2 min CA. It makes absolutely no sense, and has limited if any interaction with the spec.
The mushroom talent is trash… Sunseeker mushroom doing like 3% of my damage in keys.
Stellar Flare is the worst thing ever. Annoying maintenance DoT that has 0 interaction with this spec. Make it actually good or interact somehow or get rid of it entirely and put something else in its place. I hate it so much. Our single target rotation has way too much random bloat from stuff that doesn’t interact at all that is just thrown in.
9 Likes
I agree with all of those points. The fact that the previous iteration was better than this says a lot. Mushrooms are a joke SF being back on the table makes me cringe for single target so much that I consider rerolling
1 Like
My suggestion is to make Stellar flare also apply moonfire/sunfire in a aoe around the target you are casting on so atleast it functions as something you want to press. It would remove the tab target moonfire spam and remove some of the ramp required to get the spec doing damage.
One way or another we need a way to apply all of our dots without wasting 5ish globals every other dot spec has a way to apply dots like this other than feral but you get aoe rip and thrash i guess… It’s alot of extra effort to still be under the middle of the pack thats for sure.
I really want the shrooms to be good but its just impossible sunseeker just blows and the regular mushrooms arent really great either. I’m surprised they didn’t make it function like Touch of the Magi where it takes all of the damage over x seconds then blows up at the end. That would have been cooler thematically honestly having that be a proc but the option to spec into it being a actual ability could have been cooler than what we have now which essentially are 2 dead talents its literally 3% on every key I’ve done so far.
On the same token I really want the proc based boomkin back but speccing into either talent is a net loss so its also not worth using pretty sad because the interaction adds abit of random nature to a otherwise very scripted rotation. Also if starfire needs to be 2 seconds to cast it better be hitting like a truck nothing is worse than being in mythic hard casting these 2 second casts for them to hit like 600k-1.2m. If the stars align ive seen 3.5m but that requires several different talent interactions to work with eachother and a crit which i basically have 35% chance with boat.
3 Likes
Stellar Flare is one of those abilities that has survived in the game for a very very long time for some unknown reason. No one has ever enjoyed playing it. It was never a great option.
They are stubborn about certain abilities and keeping them.
5 Likes
No lie there if it actually did something other than be a long cast time dot that does less damage than moonfire and sunfire maybe we would have something to talk about.
3 Likes
Amazing how they can make the ST more complex and do less damage. Nice one Bliz
Bringing back stellar flare so have to manage 3 dots in ST is so bad its embarrassing
3 Likes
would have been nice if stellar flare applied moonfire and sunfire to the target in conjunction with it’s own astral dot. But that would be too nice.
2 Likes
Lets be honest that was a million dollar idea to make it apply all 3 dots and be aoe so it hits multiple targets with a cd ofcourse like 20-30 seconds. I went over logs from last night it was a solid 4% of my damage, moonfire and sunfire were 5/7 respectively mainly from running the EC build everyone hates always in lunar eclipse. You would think if you have to hard cast a dot it should do decent damage but no not really. My uptime wasnt perfect but it was 94% so maybe im missing half a percent but still for a hardcasted dot it needs to do more.
2 Likes
I refuse to use stellar flare. Any single target fights i’d swap to bear and a tank would go dps. The ability can kick rocks.
5 Likes
Stellar flare needs the cast time removed for me to even CONSIDER taking it.
4 Likes
And I want my second flying corgi back with the damage reverted.
1 Like
We got some buffs however the problems I still see aren’t really affected by any of these changes. And we get a nerf to sunseeker shrooms which makes even less sense considering how little they proc and how little they contribute to damage. I really don’t understand that change or why they did it.
1 Like
Im still running the regular mushrooms cause… i dont know… like to control the spells i have in a videogame. Regardless, happy to see that they are fixing frenzy. An apology would be nice for it being bugged for this long. Why are they buffing healing spells that we never use? 20% to rejuve? Was that by mistake and was suppose to be regrowth??
After a bunch of Normal and Heroic boss kills. For me personally I think ST is such a clunky mess, especially in boss situations where you are constantly being asked to move and travel a large distance throughout the fight. Moon cast times feel bad, as well as stellar flares cast time. I still feel like eclipse is forced pointlessness.
AoE felt a lot better, even if the damage isn’t there yet, but having more burst windows lining up especially on a fight like Brood was nice. Also in M+ everything lined up with every big pull which made playing it feel a lot better.
All of this resonates in PVP too. The game is faster paced now, which is all well and good. But our defensives and playstyle can’t keep up. In a fast paced meta, having to spend 5 globals for a 20% heal to do no damage, only to have to ramp up again for multiple globals again after is just so tedious and creates a situation where we’re constantly falling behind trying to play catch up to everyone else who either doesn’t have the ramp up time, or can stay offensive with defensives.
If pacing is going to stay this way then we need to not be so reliant on having to go bear and do nothing for a less than mediocre heal. Buff FR, let us use it in boomy form. Give us something like Ysera’s gift back.
The meta is high consistent damage and we’re just falling over when tab-targeted(or while getting passively cleaved which seems to be the direction the game has gone). Fixing the FR bug isn’t going to fix that. Buffing rejuv and wild growth by 20% literally does nothing - the talents aren’t easily taken, they do NO healing anyway, and you have to leave form leaving you even more susceptible and GCD starved.
Honestly this attempted “buff” leaves me extremely worried and pessimistic for how out of touch the devs are with boomy problems to think they would have any meaningful impact.
Like, is there someone new that’s been designing boomy? How did we get here?
1 Like