With how convoluted the spec is to play, maintaining dots, slow ramp, overall poor dps.
Will it be worth playing balance druid into DF or should i just roll a different toon?
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To be honest i dont know… im gonna give a shot and see it through. But so much of the spec is about maintaining dots that fall off to quickly are not fun to apply.
It looks like there might be some hard casting spec but without tuning it just wont balance the fact so much of the damage in the balance class is based around moonfire and sunfire and mastery. That i really cant see there being any stat other than mastery thats as viable.
The way the damage interactions work with having 3 dots up for 8% damage, having your dragon spawn and give you 4% damage, having your sunfire and moonfire give you X% damage from mastery. The flat 6% mastery buff in the druid tree for 12% damage on your astral damage. Shooting stars working on 3 of your 4 dots. Full moon from the shooting stars. Shooting stars falling more often on eclipse procs. And then then crit chance from balance of all things.
Literally all these compounded buffs will be a balancing nightmare to keep in line with other playstyles the spec could have.
So played right the spec has insane synergies with the dots and maintaining them. Played wrong its going to be a mess. The fact is keeping all these plates spinning is bland and boring right now. You overcap on astral trying to trigger eclipses because the spells are so expensive you dont want to cast them outside of the buff windows. Your generator spells are lack luster and clunky and arent smooth with the dot management. Your spenders feel impactful once you have the ball rolling. But casting them outside of ideal windows feels aweful.
Im hopeful for 3s in arena but well see how the spec plays. As of right now no dispell protection and stellar flare are huge issues.
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Is this based on beta logs?
Which 4 dots?
Are you including starfall?
I’ve had starfire crit as much as a starsurge to be honest. I think hard casts are in a decent spot. More so than they used to be.
We don’t deserve that.
In pvp you likely won’t take stellar flare. I personally wouldn’t.
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I can’t agree with you more, circle of life and death makes this spec feel so bad. I really wanna see it nerfed into the ground so we never take it.
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For raid it will be fine due to utility package. For M+ probably not. For PvP we will see, not enough testing done yet but it will probably be okay.
I disagree being a pvper :(. It’s a massive buff to us in pvp and faster ticks allow more stars, more AP, more dragons, more moons, etc.
I can see its use in pvp, I really wish they found a way to keep all that but lose the bad taste it leaves in pve
That would be simple really. Just increase the base duration. That way they don’t fall off as quickly in pve and you still retain fast ticking benefits. In pvp they never sit the full duration anyway due to dispels so it doesn’t matter.
its not that it doesnt work well in pvp. it just focuses you to manage the dot more than we realistically should which feels bad. it becomes such a staple talent you have to take it. When thats the option why is it even a choice?
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It doesn’t though really. Dots get dispelled so frequently you’d likely reapply just as often as you would without the talent.
It’s not really a choice. No more than many of the other talents aren’t. Shooting stars isn’t a “choice” either.
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I was about to create a similar thread so now I can just pile on to this one… I got my Balance Druid to level 64 and I just can’t do it anymore. The spec just feels clunky and convoluted. Unless I’m doing something wrong? Dots, 2 Starfire and then Wrath till they’re dead. I’m just sick of the Starfire casts, it feels terrible.
In dungeons its fine, but questing and open world sucks… I wish they would at the very least drop the Eclipse requirement to one cast. One cast of Starfire puts you in Solar, one cast of Wrath puts you in Lunar.
I don’t know… I’m going to level my Evoker and see if I like it better.
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Flapz, your builders should never hit as hard as your spenders. There would be no point to having them then. There would be nothing rewarding about spending time to build into it.
The problem with it is that the dots fall off quick unless you drop starfall which only increases them by 4 seconds. If they are dispelled then you loose AP gen, the ability to have a FullMoon drop, or summon dragons of which is not a good choice in pvp with how low the proc chance is as well as the damage they do and the damage increase they provide. Having everything tied to DoT’s was a bad choice.
There is a thread about the mobility war between casters and melee. Casters are in such dire straits right now simply for the fact that we can not get away. While a melee is ontop of you, Balance can typhoon and mass entangle, but most melee have a “get out of jail free card” not just a trinket and get back to you. “But we have mushrooms now and can slow.” Yes we do but our slow is 50% while most melee have a 70% spamable slow with gap closers and stuns to remain on us. At this point, balance druids have to take anything that is instant cast or makes our abilities instant cast.
I hope there is someone at blizzard that is willing to take the time to balance this spec. With all that goes into it, Balance Druid is one of the most complicated specs in the game. Pay them more or give them a bonus if they manage to crack the code on balancing balance druid.
PS. you might as well play guardian druid. Top damage, incredibly hard to kill due to defensives, and top healing.
With umbral embrace… I’m not saying baseline. Obviously. It’s a unique proc. It not only increases its damage by 50% but makes it astral doubling its mastery benefit and giving it the same scaling as surge.
Stop right here. I said pvp. You don’t even take that talent in pvp, the duration increase one. They get dispelled too frequently in pvp anyway. I’d MUCH rather have faster ticks than longer duration. One would be a direct buff. One wouldn’t help at all.
The counter maintains even if dropped and you simply reapply. I have zero issue maintaining 95+% uptime on both dots in arena. Never have.
We can do a lot more than that. Melee do have a lot of gap closers but I can definitely get away from one if I need to with all my buttons available.
Most melee absolutely do not have a spammable 70% slow lol. And we can literally shift out of them.
Hard pass man lol.
I’ve played my druid for the most part since Cata. I normally always level my druid first and play it as my main character and if it’s not my main I tend to have it as a well played alt.
I leveled my druid first this expansion planning on playing balance. Huge mistake, balance is so clunky, does okay damage but terrible in dungeons, So much setup with getting all my dots on mobs. Just really annoying to play. Don’t even get me started about PVP, put my dots up and use starsurge to do 10k damage to someone with starsurge when I’m two shot by a prot warrior.
Currently looking at a different class to level to play as my main but I’ll be honest, after doing all the available quests in the dragon isles, doing mythics, working on professions, doing weeklys… I just don’t feel like leveling another character. So I’m just looking at the character select screen thinking of what I want to do lmao
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In pre-patch the spec was incredible because of RF + Convoke but after leveling it I thought it was incredibly lackluster so I switched to feral but ended not liking it at all so I just completely swap to a different class.
Also RIP travel form, completely useless now with dragon riding.
switch to feral, balance is dead until they tune
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The problem isn’t really tuning. It’s the design of the spec overall going into dragonflight. They changed it to have much more interaction with their dots now. Previously in AoE situations you would pretty much spam starfire but now you have to put moonfire on all of your targets for your starfire to benefit from your mastery.
Say the tank pulls a pack of 10 mobs. To prep, you need to Sunfire, Moonfire (5 times if you have twin moons) if you want yoru spells to benifit off of your dots, then cast two starfires to get into solar eclipse if you want to pop your shrooms if they are stacked or two wraths if you want to spam starfire. There is just way too much set up and that’s not even taking stellar flare into account. By the time I have my sunfire and moonfire applied, the demon hunter and ww monk has already blown everything up (this will be better at higher keys).
There are situations where I just sunfire, two starfires into triple mushrooms to get get decent burst aoe damage but that is still 8-9 secs of casting and GCDs. This is obviously my observation and by no means am I a world first raider.
It’s overly complicated and really needs to be revisited. If you take your interrupt it’s a pretty substantial DPS loss. I highly doubt they will make any major class design changes during the expansion where those are typically set aside for the start of a new expansion but I hope they make a few minor changes to the spec (the mastery would be a good starting point).
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My biggest issue is the slow ramp for just mediocre dps. Before I can ramp, everything is dead. By now means am I chasing numbers. But I dont want my group to think they are carrying me.
In some cases, I MF SF dot and pop shrooms to get some decent aoe damage in quickly. But the pack is dead before I can do anything else. Then the next pack my shrooms are on CD. So I dot up and start casting but by then everything is dead.
I dont enjoy playing it anymore.
In my position I have people who are Feral and Resto. So it is likely I wont fit into any M+ or raid spots.
Last night we did a few M0 and they all reformed without me likely because I couldnt keep up.
Its one thing to change a class to allow for different choices in spec and rotation for playstyle quality of life. But whats happened is I want to play my rogue as a main.
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Currently at ilvl 360, doing mythic 0’s, I have yet to see a DPS/Tank class that cannot out damage me on AoE packs… it’s honestly SAD. Went to the single target spec to see if it was any better for bosses and it was OKAY at best. WTF happened to us? Talk about a Hero to Zero in a single xpac.
DoTs do not hit hard and they fall off way too fast and are a MASSIVE pain to keep up with. Your bigger CD abilities like Full Moon and Mushrooms are mandatory in order to do more damage than the healer. The trash and bosses seem to have a lot more mechanics that force movement than any other xpac I’ve played so far as well, which makes it even harder to keep things going smoothly for us.
Overall, this spec needs some help BADLY. I cannot believe how gutted it became. Why am I giving up 7% damage just to get an interrupt? No other class AFAIK has to give up such a huge amount for their interrupt.
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Currently solar eclipse is less damage than lunar eclipse i.e. case wrath to get into lunar is better even on single target right now. Due to getting into eclipse faster I think and all the random stuff that happens as a side effect. Although it won’t make a huge difference I think in your situation =S.
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