Balance Druid - Changes/Buffs needed for Season 4

Classes Druid
1

Right now Boomy has one glaring issue outside of getting over-nerfed - We have absolutely no way to scale our primary AoE spell via multiple casts, or via haste. So right now we’re completely at the mercy of damage scaling % on starfall where its going to require continuous buffing as expansions go on with this present design. We need some buffs heading into Season 4 so that we’re in a playable state (in M+ especially). Our Multi-target damage right now is way undertuned.

Right now we need:

  • Straight up ~20% damage buff to Starfall for Season 4. Along with % buffs to our dots and ideally a small buff to starsurge and Starfire / Wrath. We need quite a bit to not be a complete waste of time to play in Mythic+ right now… We’re currently WAY far behind on stacked multi-target target.

Into next expansion we either need:

  • Starfall to get a total redesign and be able to be stacked (more preferable)

  • Or Starfall to get some scaling with haste on some level, similar to Feral bleeds. (less preferable since this still doesn’t solve our over-capping on Astral Power during AOE problem).

  • Stellar Drift also needs to be looked at with its cooldown incurred on Starfall. Perhaps look into making stellar drift reward consecutive stacked starfall casts with a damage bonus of some sort (is another idea).

As of right now the current design of Starfall just doesn’t work at all and it encourages casting Starsurge on AoE to dump resources (which is awful design) otherwise we have to drastically overcap on AP if we want to spam starfire - which is further terrible design.

Again it would be nice to see the primary / fundamental issues with Starfall functionality addressed, however if that isn’t able to be done by S4 then we are still in dire need of a straight up % damage buff across the board.

As one last hilarious aside, Warlock literally has ALL 3 of its specs well ahead of us in raid at the moment across all metrics, lol. Yes, ALL 3 of its specs.

Balance druid is in an AWFUL state right now, and is unplayable in M+. Please fix us.

19 Likes
2

id like to see moonfire and sunfire buffed considerably and twin moons have the same treatment as sunfire, been applied to everything within 10 yards of the target.

8 Likes
3

Yep… Bumping this.

Would love to see Sinful Hysteria legendary nerfs reverted and buffs to several of our spells (Starfall largely) to get us back to being reasonably competitive and in a place where we’re playable in M+ once again.

2 Likes
4

When starfall is up, make starsuge cause moonfired secondary targets to get hit with starfire.

It would be a throwback to when starfall used to have that cool ‘echo’ damage

5

Strongly agree with this. Balance druid was overly nerfed.

I would also say make stellar drift no longer give Starfall a CD, it makes the entire rotation clunky and unfun to play.

3 Likes
6

The one danger of sinful hysteria specifically is it forces tuning around that which makes everything else unplayable.
It makes balance druid (potentially) good in very high coordinated keys and bad everywhere else.
I think substantial aoe baseline tuning (kinda like monks ST in s3…) for s4 is the way to go.

Definitely agree with stackable starfall for 10.0 and a removal of the CD mechanic on stellar drift.

3 Likes
7

I would love to see this reverted and nerf the guardian’s 4pc by another 30%.

8

Yeah i’ve been playing moonkin and holy hell, it’s damage is terrible.
I remeber leveling one pre-nerf and it felt like you do 0 damage, i switched to guardian and everything died in half the time

2 Likes
9

At least I’m not the only one seeing this, just got my boomie w/ double leggos + 4pce and to a similar ilvl to my surv hunter, demon hunter and a few other toons, and man…

Buff this damn spec, its actually garbage tier dps especially in keys

3 Likes
10

Please Blizzard do something.

Give us a way to spend Astral power in AoE situation.
Make Starfall Stackable.
Delete Stellar Flare is literally the worst talent ever why would u even use it? feels so weird using it, 2 second cast for a single target dot? a DOT.
Make Twin Moon to put Moonfire to all target exactly as sunfire works
Every “Meta” class now days is bursty and ramp up classes like boomkin are dying.
Give us a way to extend and shorter the duration of eclipses at “will” with a limit of course.

All our toolkit is not needed even Hardcore players are saying it, Look at Naowh S4 class tierlist in youtube. Boomkin is last.
Treants die instantly, our heal support is not necessary, innervate died to Uhr and is kinda meh.

Boomkin takes almost 15 second to ramp up and every pat is dying in like 30 seconds, beside that Eclipse is so un fun to play why do we have to cast 2 solar wraths to enter lunar eclipse and vice versa? I need to do Aoe so hey guys lets waste 2 GCD doing single target damage to be able to do AoE, but wait first let me put sunfire once and then mm maybe moonlight once more… makes no sense.

The Spread AoE niche is lame, is not useful at all. In this Season was useful for what? 1st boss of the raid? wasting an entire spec in this niche for 1 or 2 fights feels so wrong.

Our only CD “CA” is a 3min cd that give us 10% haste and what else? besides that our strongest spell is a 2min CD and with leggo is a 1min but in DF is 2min again so every 6 min u can cast both where is the synergy?.

It feels people that were designing the class back in Legion left and now we got other team and they cant glue anything at all.

Not saying make us top tier but come on, so much potential and feels so weird no synergy at all.

7 Likes
11

I agree, it feels really bad at the moment to play, DPS is way too low and to make the gap bigger the meta specs are way too good.
I just ran +9 Gambit on a near perfect stat 277 Balance and ended up exactly equal with a 251 Windwalker. Here I am managing eclipses, convokes during CA, close to a perfect rotation and all the WW does is Bonedust Brew and Spinning Crane kick.
I am not asking for huge buffs because I dont care to be meta, but just something so we dont get laughed at please

8 Likes
12

Lowkey love aimed shot doing triple the damage of my starfall in keys.

2 Likes
13

Okay, lot of thoughts to this.

There’s no doubt that boomy is one of the worst specs in arena, raid, and M+.
multi-target AND single target damage are very low in both environments.

Disagree here. The legendary overperformed every single other class legendary and SHOULD have gotten nerfed. Same with BOAT from season 1.

That being said, you address an important issue:

Except it’s not just our primary aoe spell like you’re talking about in M+ (which seems to be the point of your post, but effects all areas).

Boomy rot damage in the form of dots/starfall is negligible to useless in arena environments, and starsurge damage is very low as well, due to versatility being required to survive, and haste being such an important stat to get casts off that mastery is undersireable, especially with incarn/CA being a longer cooldown than the average gametime lasts.

The moonkin class just scales extremely poorly with secondary stats. We saw this in BFA S4 with corruption where classes like mage, spriest, and warlock had INSANE value and were incredibly strong, and boomy did less damage than tanks (we’re seeing a similar issue now tbh).

I’d like this. especially since there are 5-6 dead talents in the boomy tree already.

Ya, having a starfall up and full AP feels terrible in AOE, especially since starsurge does so little damage outside of major CDs already.

I don’t mind this. The talent is for movement, not for damage, and I think that’s okay.

Yep. Current eclipse design is garbage as well. It feels SO unimpactful because no matter how much you buff that empowerment damage up, your wraths go from like 1k to 2k or starfire from 2k to 3k. It doesn’t feel impactful whatsoever. The only point of mastery and eclipse in general is to buff starsurge/starfall, and it’s already a low-ish increase.

Yep, and even aff-which was solidly middle-of-the-pack got a buff over 16 other specs that were performing worse in all areas of content :slight_smile:

2 Likes
14

The powerful gets more powerful, while the weak gets weaker. Druid is the most op class in retail, besides Warlock’s Chaos Bolts.

15

Still waiting on them to release the patch notes on the Season 4 class changes… it seems to be taking a long time (patch is literally 1 week away and they’ve still not released any info).

So hopefully that delay means they’re making further adjustments beyond just nerfing Survival and Destro etc.

16

My Ilevel 255 Beast Mastery hunter does more damage then my Ilevel 278 Balance Druid… Yes there is a difference in complexity of play (big one is movement), however even in Sims the balance druid only does 2k more damage. I’m tired of being automatically passed up in group finder for Mythics because our damage is known to be bad and not comparable to other classes.

2 Likes
17

Druid is the most op class i will agree there.
However, i have a ret and a destro lock of the exact same ilvl

Templars verdict hits harder than chaos bolt ever will

18

Well, Starfall buffed by 15% for Season 4, no further changes. I don’t think this is enough, but we’ll see how it plays out.

1 Like
19

It’s not enough for s4, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s a mickey mouse fun house season. The important thing is the “due to starfall not benefitting as much as other comparable spells” and “we are looking to different solves for the future”. After over four years of feedback they are doing something.

Boomkin won’t be meta my any means, but destro and surv and ww getting toned down, a ~3% overall damage boost in keys for moonkin via starfall buff, and the removal of Uhr (which boomkin gained nearly zero benefit from while other classes gained well over 25% bonus damage from) will see us in a playable state.

1 Like
20

Looking at the Dragon Flight talent tree seems the 2 Wrath 2 Starfire playstyle is staying on Balance and that already makes me not want to play my Druid :frowning: Not a fun playstyle at all and I was really hoping to see it change in DF.

6 Likes