So I played a bit of fire mage alt which I haven’t done post WFA changes and damn, it’s so night and day looking at the well thought out mage system vs our haphazard nonsense balance system.
You have a short cast lower damage spell scorch which is basically in the same slot as our wrath, but you can cast it while moving for transition and it has a talent that makes it do more in execute situations (150% dmg plus guaranteed crits) which then sets up the ability to instant cast bigger harder hitting spells like pyro.
You have a system that rewards the mother of all procs, crits, and then just lets you get bonuses off of that system instead of making up new and confusing alternative systems like astral power, eclipse and so much more nonsense druids have been given.
There is a clear risk to reward tradeoff of bigger harder to get off spells (greater pyro) leading to huge damage, vs smaller easy to cast spells (scorch) leading to smaller more reliable damage.
For druid here is a sample of a functional class IMO.
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moonfire and sunfire as DOTs, I would just make them 8m radius based instant casts that apply the DOT to anyone in that radius. living bomb semi works this way, one cast, apply a DOT to all enemies in an area. Tab targeting to apply DOTs isn’t fun gameplay, and why sunfire is AOE and moonfire isn’t makes no real sense. That gives us two DOTs to apply which is a maintenance of the golden number we’ve had at our best (moonfire and insect swarm being the OG example).
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wrath is a cast while moving 1.5 sec spell, Starfire is a 3 sec turret spell that does a lot more damage.
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starsurge is a big damage instant, but is on a CD instead of messing with Astral Power. Just give us a normal mana pool we can spend on what we want again (heals, damage, whatever).
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Starfall is the same thing (instant high dmg spell), but is on a shared cooldown with starsurge so you choose which one you want, probably on pull size. This also gives us clear scaling with haste.
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You could let an instant healing spell (say swiftment) empower damage spells making them instant and vice versa with starsurge making healing spells instant, that way you can do a bit of off role stuff without really breaking your flow IE Ret or Prot paladin and their instant holy power based heal. That also fits the whole druid thing.
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Instead of a perminant alternative caster form like moonkin that restricts spell choice and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (why is an owl better at magic than an elf?). We could have something more like a perma barkskin for extra armor, and for forms a CD to replace celestial allignment called something like “nature’s avatar” which puts you in something not unlike the Avatar state if anyone remembers that show from childhood (or their recent Netflix que) that lets you cast versions of the spells that mix elements druids normally don’t use based on other talents or essences IE starfall includes whirling solar winds like our original hurricane AOE, starsurge bursts on impact doing extra fiery damage to all surounding enemies, or wrath releases lightning hurting all surounding enemies at point of impact. It really goes with the druids as master of the elements theme.
If we need flavor for druids we should have it by expanding their choices not retracting them. For providing options to enable divergent gameplay, but also not require it (if you don’t use your healing procs to instant heal its not going to ruin your DPS the way required alternation of healing and damage would do, it just gives you another accessable option in between rotations).