Balance getting a lot of changes in 10.1

Here’s a couple of my thoughts and/or concerns:

  • 6 AP base on Sunfire and Moonfire is too high, as already discussed. Stellar Innervation pushes this to 12 on single target, or 24 on 2+ targets (for Moonfire specifically). Spenders will generate 10, Starfire with reworked SotF can generate up to 19 (21 with Wild Surges). If these numbers aren’t adjusted for whatever reason, players may opt to just Moonfire spam in some instances since it has no cast time. I would be surprised if the AP generation of Sunfire/Moonfire doesn’t get lowered to 3 or 4.

  • Astral Smoulder, if it gets played at all, will likely be doomed to a 1 point value talent. The duration was increased to 8 seconds, and the damage increased from 20/40% of the generator damage to 40/80%. The 2nd point doesn’t affect duration, and because of the rework to SotF (Starfire cleave doing 150% damage >>> Starfire damage/ap gen increased by up to 90% based on # of targets), the buff in Smoulder damage ends up being a wash, to slightly worse potentially? The reason to take smoulder would be to enable Waning Twilight, and you can fulfill that purpose with a single point, so it just feels odd to have the talent be a 2 pointer to begin with.

  • Arcanic Pulsar is the best “per-point” value talent in our entire tree; it completely dwarfs Orbital Strike in just about any pve scenario. This will become even worse with these changes with the buff to Elune’s Guidance AP discount during Incarn, and both the removal of Shooting Stars on the Stellar Flares that OS applies, and the nerf to their tick rate via the Cosmic Rapidity nerf. I’m not sure that OS can compete with Pulsar in it’s current state, but decoupling the node from being a choice with Pulsar and allowing builds to play both would likely be overpowered.

  • They’ve acknowledged they want to fix the Lunar vs Solar Eclipse issue (" 1. Eclipse and effects that trigger on entering eclipse are so strong that they incentivize Druids to use Lunar Eclipse in all situations because it is faster to trigger."), but none of the changes actually accomplish this. Nature’s Grace, Balance of All things, Sundered Firmament, and Solstice all grant large amounts of stats or resource for cycling eclipses, but the abilities that actually care about the specific eclipse states all care about the base damage of our builders, which, for the uninitiated: Wrath’s damage is f— all.

Taking my live accts current gear and talents over all I can say is meh.

The fey and Goldrinn dmg spike is very noticeable, in a couple cases it was about 1/4 more damage then what it was on live. Starsurge dmg and amount was also noticeable as well. On the other hand, all 3 of my Dots registered less dmg and Shooting stars was almost 1/2 the dmg compared to live.

So basically it felt like they pulled dmg from SS and put it into the Feys and Goldrinn. As for the flow, to me it felt the same and that’s going to be an issue if we run into another Raid similar to what we just have. An considering other classes will be reworked and buff I just feel we are going to land in the same spot…

Damage (and ap) numbers can certainly (and more than likely will) change between now and release, but it looks as though right now they’re aiming to have our AP generation be close to what it is on live with our current 4pcs, plus the spender damage is up too. Obviously that’s just their goals, and reality may play out differently. Balance has a lot of interconnected powerful talents. A nerf to Cosmic Rapidity is a nerf to Solstice and Orbit Breaker. Losing Shooting Stars on Stellar Flare and the rapidity nerf might hurt Orbit Breaker more than people realize.

I think these changes are good though because they fix a lot of fundamental playstyle issues (not all of them, but many of them). Trust me when I say that we’d rather have that than just damage tuning. When the patch goes live if we underperform (or overperform), we can just simply be adjusted. In that same vein, any design issues we have with the spec are less likely to be fixed after that point.

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i really hope they focus on buffing eclipses rather than button bloating our spec, i dont think they realize how many attack spells we actually use, and we also have shapeshiftng, and a crap ton of utillity, and for the love of god buff wrath its been nerfed for so many xpacs

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I’d rather they scrap the system entirely, but that won’t happen mid xpac. The system has been a balancing nightmare since it’s Shadowlands inception, and has been the main contributor behind us being as borrowed power dependent as we have been for the last few years.

And yeah there’s a lot of bloat, not just in buttons but in procs and maintenance too. In an average build currently there’s Dots, waning twilight, tracking mushrooms, tracking 2 piece stacks, Umbral Embrace procs, Starlord, Rattle/weaver, Pulsar, ordering of 4 pc with weaver/pulsar. I like that balance is more complex than being a Wrath bot currently, but this iteration might be pushing too much in the other direction.

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So many changes and yet, nothing new. Class design is still abysmal.

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I wish the spec designs weren’t so dependant on having tier set bonuses. Can’t Balance just be good on it’s own? And then the gear could make it better?

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Would it be a terrible idea to make eclipse work like Fenix in Heroes of the storm? Just a button to decide if you’re single or multi target with some benefit to stay in either for a bit so you’re not constantly flipping.

So many abilities are just single/multi target versions of each other, so just let them be that.

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I love the theme of druids and wanted to main Balance, but I’m a casual player, not doing really high keys and the ramp up on this spec makes me feel like a liability in everything I do. I just can’t burst enough to do competitive dps and 10.1 isn’t fixing that at all. :frowning:

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You’re not wrong balance Druid has a niche so deep that they can’t really do anything else effectively. They decided that with the “class fantasy” pass.

So now every tier has to have a spread cleave fight to keep balance Druids looking good on the overall. And they’re great in high keys with lots of targets that live a long time.

But it’s infinitely more satisfying, to me, to play my demo lock in keys where I can instantly be doing 100k dps as we engage any pack at any key level, even if I can’t hit 1.5M dps on that one pull AA.

Having moonkins be this specialized at the detriment to more common enemy profiles hurts overall, imho.

TL;DR: put the BOOM back in Boomkin.

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