Hello, I am a long time balance druid player over several expansions, so I’ve seen quite a few changes to the class come and go. One thing that stands out in Dragonflight as a recurring problem to me is the long ramp time due to the changes in mastery. Take a 2 target example- best case scenario you moonfire cleave onto both, sunfire, then wrath twice to get into eclipse. So minimum 4 GCDs before we can even begin to do 100% of our dps, usually much longer with additional mobs. This is particularly an issue for most of the m+ playerbase, who are not pushing 20+ keys.
30 second cd, apply moonfire and sunfire to all targets the player is in combat with, so sort of what you had tied to incarnation several iterations back on the PTR. Ideally 30 seconds because it would be up for most pulls in m+ but even a minute cd would be a significant quality of life increase for us.
Thanks for taking the time to read and have a great day!
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You’re right that it takes a good 10 seconds to “show up” on the meters sometimes, so if you are running really low keys or Heroics, you’re just not going to be very useful.
That said, as soon as packs are living as little as 30 seconds or so (say M+9?), you can really pump out some damage. Getting both dots on everything as efficiently as possible is a fun little mini game, and following that up with Orbital Strike and a billion Starfalls is really satisfying.
My plan for Tuesday when people switch gears into doing valor farms is to fill with all 3 of druid’s other roles for super low keys. Feral has some simple, quick burst, and if the key is so low that boomkin doesn’t show up on the meters, it will be a joke to tank or heal. Enjoy that mega flexible druid life!
Requiring you to cast two single target spells to even start to do AoE is just awful design in a game based on burst damage. The whole eclipse system needs to change or be eliminated. Also, every other class with multiple DoTs has a way to spread them without having to do it one by one - see shadow crash or seed of corruption. It’s like they sat down and tried to find a way to make Boomkin as bad as possible in AoE.
Okay, that’s Sunfire. Others have to be applied manually as well
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Shadow crash, for example, applies both vampiric touch and shadow word: pain.
If you’re talented into it. Otherwise it just does Vampric Touch, like Seeds only does Corruption
No, shadow crash always does both. However, even if it only did one, they don’t have to cast two single target spells to be able to do AoE for 15 seconds, then have to go back to single target. Also, sunfire’s radius isn’t all that great. It’s pretty dang rare in my M+ runs that the tank is able to bunch the mobs up closely enough for one sunfire to hit them all. Add in that for waning twilight, you’re going to have to add in yet a third DoT in the Moonkin’s case.
You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that Boomkin isn’t simply the worst DoT spec in regards to ramp up. It’s flat out awful.
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Shadow crash only sucks in that it’s a super slow moving, ground targeted, projectile. A tank can move the pack in such a way to invalidate your DPS for the next 30 seconds. Boomkin at least doesn’t have that problem.
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Balance feels clunky for sure for the first 10-15 seconds of the pull (depending on the pull size).
Sunfire, 3-5x moonfire globals, get into eclipse, figure out how you want to go about applying your 3rd dot for waning twilight, use your 4pc so you don’t munch it, spam starfall so you don’t overcap, incarn, cycle through stellar flares on each target if they’ll live, maintain Rattle, optimize Starlord…
It’s a ton of busy work for sure. Though that said, with 415 ilvl and 4pc and doing a key high enough where packs do live, it does feel good, and the payoff is there. Doesn’t mean it should be designed only for people with gear/4pc/running 18+ keys.
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boomkin has always been a high skill cap caster spec, the diffrence with this xpac is that its not noob friendly in the slightest, if youre playing moonkin rn its not because u wanted a fresh class to play.
if youre playing moonkin, its cause youve mained the class atleast 5+ years
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Venthyr balance druid (season 2 shadowlands) is probably the first time in recent memory that Balance has had a high skill cap, at least since the Legion rework. Even that though kind of boiled down to “follow a weakaura’s instructions”. It wasn’t so much that it was difficult and skill expressive, it was more that it heavily punished you for error.
Prior to that, this spec has been the poster child of “pick up and play about 98% effectively out of the box, do the most effed up stuff to gain 2%”