I have been having major issues keeping up on the dps charts in aoe. I mean, it’s nearly a joke how long it takes to moon fire 3 different mobs (taking into account a standard pull of 5-7 mobs), sun fire, two wrath’s, THEN star fall. (Assume incarnate and new moon/fury of elune being used appropriately) From start to actual damage output we are talking 15-20 seconds. In any key below a 16+ the mobs are already dead by time my damage is finally picking up. By time they are dead I have delt roughly 180k-250k while my demon hunter buddy with the same ilvl, same 2 set bonus, and 2 emblish items is pulling easily 450-550k.
Now, I know this may seem like I’m all complaints, I am new to balance but I have tried every variation of builds to increase my ramp time, the 2 piece has helped a ton and it makes sense why they implemented it. I really do throughly enjoy the spec, and in 9+ packs, I definitely see a massive increase in my overall.
I was wondering if I was missing a key component to the spec, I cancel aura, and keep starlord at 3 stacks as much as possible, use my incarnation on cd, along with timing my pulsar procs with pulls. Using my astral power before capping always, and maintain the correct 3+ starfire strategy. Along with having the correct eclipse running for that strategy.
I’m currently 465 ilvl, and I’m struggling to beat out folks 10 or 15 ilvl below me in aoe. Single target I am usually the top dps.
Sorry for the long post, if you’ve made it this far. Any information would be appreciated or maybe I just need to get to 24+ keys to really see my classes potential.
Nah Boomy just has ramp up time, always has. It is what it is
Don’t sweat it too hard on the lower keys, especially tyrannical weeks. When you get to higher keys when mobs start living longer, especially on fortified weeks, you should be blasting damage. And if you’re doing great damage on bosses then you’re doing just fine.
You won’t compete with BM, Fire/Frost Mage or Havoc or even warriors on +20 fortified weeks.
In M+ balance druid is only good for boss damage with high incarn burst windows, but on tyrannical weeks on higher keys as the fight drags out you don’t even pull ahead anymore as hunters and DH catch back up.
Balance druid also has the worst defensive CD’s in the game alongside shamans, so you’ll be struggling in +20s until you start overgearing the content or your healer is overgeared.
You’re a middle of the pack DPS spec, nowhere near as bad as shadow priest or destro/afflock/marksman in DPS. You’re there for the brez if no resto druid/bdk/holy paly and mark of the wild/ursol’s vortex.
Its the class. Hunters, specifically BM are always OP to some degree like Locks. But to be honest I kind of expect these classes to be the best dps bc they are pure dps. Meaning they dont heal or tank so they shouldnt suck.
Rogues shouldnt suck but they did for a long long time. Locks are rarely a bad choice.
I dont think Balance should be able to keep up with a pure dps class. I play a Ret Paladin, when i go into a run with a hunter, lock, rogue or really any class or spec I absolutely don’t expect to be high in the meters. I don’t stink at it but the class is more of a swiss army knife of sorts. Yea I want to bring B.D.D. and I can hold my own to a degree but not against the good classes as expected.
Druids are a flexible class too. You shouldnt be to hurt over your damage vs hunter or whatever dps class. Its not healthy. If you enjoy balance and do well vs other balance take it for what it is.
Compare apples to apples bc the hunter is an orange. Enjoy the class for what it is.
Hybrid Tax hasn’t been a thing since Cata/MoP, and specs aren’t balanced at the class level. Once a raid encounter or a keystone dungeon starts, any “advantage” of being able to switch to a tank spec or healer spec ceases to exist. If Balance/Ret are deliberately tuned lower than Lock/Rogue, groups will just opt into playing them instead.
Yea as the above said, hybrid tax isn’t a thing anymore. The only thing that could be close to that is that you have to compre a single dps spec to a class with multiple dps specs. Mage has 3 caster dps specs which means it’s more than likely that at least 1 spec will be good at all times. Compared to something like Balance Druid where we only have 1 caster dps spec so we’re a lot more dependent on tuning to make sure our 1 spec isn’t tuned bad.
I mostly play resto. I have always messed around with balance some tho. But I don’t even really try it in m+ anymore because of this. It feels like older shadow priest. Like I wasn’t in the fight the first 10 seconds
The nature of M+ will always be to favor burst aoe specs. Even on tyrannical weeks so long as your ST isn’t awful.
And Dragonflight is partifularly bad because the top burst aoe specs also happen to be the top single target specs on top like BM, havoc, and assassination rogue and fire mage.
DoT ramp up specs will always suck in M+ unless wildly overtuned like Shadow Priests were in S2. And that’s because shadow AoE was moved away from dot ramp up, and only required a single global to allow you to cleave off your direct damage.
Traditional dot specs like affliction, balance, and feral have not been good M+ specs since forever, and neither was assassination rogue until they recently gave them basically Blade Flurry for their poisons.
It seems like they could make feral good in m+ if they beefed up primal wrath damage and tick rate while allowing that bleed damage to funnel with ferocious bite. I THINK feral had this at one point. Maybe not.
This is massively exaggerated. Feral was one of the best specs in Dragonflight S1 (granted, that’s the first time they were that good in M+). Balance has almost always been a good spec to play in M+. It was popular in BfA all the way to SL season 3 where its scaling finally fell off. If we wanted to go all the way back to Legion Boomy was a staple class to bring. Balance has always been considered a good spec for M+ outside of the situations where the core design of it fails (things like Starfall in SL not stacking, became very apparent in later seasons).
If you are playing with BM hunter, Havoc, Rogue (any), Enhancement, Ret and some other specs in keys, Balance Druid is basically doing zero to little damage because they will blow the mobs up. Balance Druid need mobs to live for more than 45 seconds so that’s basically 24+ and higher or something.
