I see a lot of these, but I am just going to jump on the bandwagon here. I think Blizzard just needs to go back to the drawing board with this classes spec. It isn’t just the fact that it underperforms, it just isn’t fun to play at all. The rotation just feels all over the place.
6 Likes
I’ve been playing a bunch in bgs and m0 dungeons so far. So far the damage numbers aren’t that bad. its all ramp and rot pressure. In both scenarios.
As of right now with 360 ilvl I can consistently pull 15-20k dps at the end of a boss fight and most trash packs without lining up cooldowns i sit 20-40k dps. With lining everything up and getting a good sized pull I have been able to hit 122k dps.
The dot timers with circle of life and death are too short.
The fact sunfire, moonfire, stellar flare, or mushrooms dot don’t line up and their durations are clunky. Stellar Flare = 18s, Moonfire = 16.5s, Sunfire =13.5s, Mushroom = 6s. Leaves you with this awkward stage where you are trying to maintain dots but they are falling off all over the place ( 2 points into aetherial kindling helps a lot with this)
Casting Stellar Flare is probably the worst thing about all of this. The only time I ever picked this talent up before was during torghast runs for certain powers. The ironic part about stellar flare is that without keeping sunfire and moonfire up. Its such a weak abilltiy that it hits for less than our instance cast dots which hit multiple targets at once. Its only saved by our mastery and the 8% damage buff from waning twilight
Starfall actually feels great now they have done a good service to it with the changes!
The entire first 3 rows of talents on the druid talent tree ( excluding imp barkskin and verdant heart) should all realistically be baseline… there is no reason why you should have to spend a point on moonkin form… like what??? Just a lot of dead talent points to move through the tree for talents that are interesting. For example if you wanted to get Hibernate as a feral/guardian druid. You would need to spend 4 total points. 3 of those would be in starfire, starsurge, and moonkin form. Things you are never going to use.
the biggest shock to me is how little value I get from starsurge. I’m almost at the point where I don’t even push it in single target scenarios. Pushing starfall and adding 4 seconds to both starfire and moonfire from Aetherial Kindling adds 2 more ticks to each dot which are hitting for about 1700 each ( or 6800 total ) and delaying the globals I need to spend before I refresh the dots. Which means I can throw in some extra generators to more than make up for the astral power loss between the cost of the 2 spells.
All in all the spec is not bad its just clunky. I don’t think its a disaster. They just really need to figure out this Stellar Flare garbage and bake it into other spells or remove it all together.
2 Likes
To add to your point on Starfall use over Starsurge : there’s also the Starweaver talent giving a 40% chance to get a free Starsurge on Starfall cast, meaning you get 2 more seconds on dots and almost half a Starsurge for each Starfall press.
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I didnt even think about this. What a bad spot starsurge is in lol. If you have this talent i cant see it being better at all. Even in strictly single target scenarios.
The problem as it currently stands in pve is two talents in particular drastically over perform to all the others. Stellar flare and circle of life and death. These two talents alone are something like 23% more dps combined compared to not using them. Most other talents cap out in the 4% per point range.
Stellar flare on top of being better than other generators for pure damage, turbo charges shooting stars + orbit breaker. Circle of life and death then scales this even harder.
If you have these talents, your damage is fine, but the rotation is kind of awkward and your spenders feel lacking because so much of your damage is coming from dots + procs from said dots. Sims have my damage at ilvl 372 with the flare/CoLD build at ~40% of my damage just from dots + procs.
Without these talents you do damage that is not anywhere near fine.
I hate how dot heavy the spec is. I’ll play an affliction warlock for that.
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i like how dot heavy it is. i really dislike how easy the dots are too remove and how unfun they are to apply. They just cant make it work like this
Fair enough. I think they should definitley last longer.
Leveling for a bit as Balance it felt to me like a scuffed Affliction lock.
Not unplayable by any means, but not my cup of tea.
Then right back to guardian and facerolling the Dragon Isles.
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