“Feral’s and Guardian’s Berserk and Balance’s Celestial Alignment have a 15 second duration in The War Within (down from 20). Incarnation forms, including Tree of Life, have 20 second durations (down from 30). Druid cooldowns’ long durations meant their power was more spread out than other class cooldowns, and the very long Incarnation durations made them hard to balance against other talent options.” So why not just reduce the CD?? So with the TWW reducing the up time of the topic spells are we going to get a reduced CD to go along with it; without needing to spec into “UG”?? The norm CD is already 3 min or 2 min if ur spec has “UG” and you spend the rage or what not. I think blizz should take 30 - 60 sec off the norm CD of the topic if they are concerned with the long CD and not take up time off of the spell when used. Take “AW” for a prot paladain a 2 min CD but if ur spec has “RP”, “HP” abilities reduce the remaining CD by 2 sec so you can have it up in about a min. Looks like the same DF team is working on TWW spec for druid.
I’m also pretty confused about the logic behind this decision making. The whole point of balancing a 3 min CD vs a 2 min CD vs a 1 min CD is that the longer the CD is, it usually has more power and/or a longer duration. I’m generally confused about Blizzard thinking that the duration needs to be reduced since all of them are baseline 3 minute CDs that often need a multi-talent point investment. If they’re comparing them to 2 minute CDs then they either need to stop it, or just change them to be 2 minute CDs. A 3 minute CD can’t just be a worse version of a 2 minute since it has a similar power level and duration but with a 50% longer CD. It wouldn’t make sense or be balanced.
I’m also pretty confused that they think these CDs actually need to be nerfed.
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CA/Incarnation for balance druids received a big nerf coming into Dragonflight which made it a fairly weak CD in the first two seasons. The only reason it is powerful now is because we have a powerful 4-set bonus on the season 3 tier set which gives double effect during CA/Incarnation and is making it a more powerful ability and condensing damage into those windows.
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Balance druid is also receiving more than double the uptime nerf on CA/Incarnation because Blizzard is removing Arcanic Pulsar for some reason. Arcanic Pulsar was nice for giving players some small damage windows to build up to while waiting for our long 3 minute CDs. The loss of the 4-set bonus (which is getting added as a TWW talent but with only half of the power) and such a huge reduction in CA/Incarnation uptime is going to be a HUGE swing in power for the CD and will affect the synergy and flow of the spec.
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Feral druids’ Berserk is still a base 3 minute CD and requires a 3 talent point investment in order to get the full power of it and reduce its cooldown. In addition, a large part of the burst associated with the CD in single target was from also lining up a 2 minute Convoke with Berserk and a 2 minute on-use trinket.
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Tree of Life is by no means an incredibly powerful cooldown. In fact, Resto druids are one of the worst healers in progression raids because they have such bad burst healing CDs (especially compared to other healers) in an environment where timing your healing CDs to deal with burst damage is so important. I’m not sure why Resto druid is getting nerfed again when their burst healing in raids is already very bad. They also didn’t even use Tree of Life in PVE in favor of using Convoke all of the time until Flourish gameplay was absolutely destroyed and Grove Guardians (with Tree of Life synergy) was added in its place.
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Guardian druids’ Incarnation is objectively the best of all druid specs but it also requires investing 5 talent points directly into it and basing our gameplay around the CD. Dealing with “Build-a-Berserk” design in the talent tree already feels bad enough after spending all those talent points on it, and now we’re looking at a large uptime nerf.
They also removed pulsar, so good luck.
There was literally NOTHING good about these changes.
They just stripped away from literally everything.
It should be criminal.
They even make a choice node between orbit and sunder, like what in the actual F?
Like at least put some cdr for alignment in if you’re gonna remove pulsar, like wtf??? Is balance gonna be fun for like 10% of the rotation? Who asked for this? Who made these changes? Whoever it is should probably not work on druid anymore. And whoever asked for this stuff should literally never be taken seriously anymore. They would ruin anything they touch, no procs, no cdr, no cde, nothing to look forwards to aside a 15/20 sec cd window every 2/3 damn minutes! No dynamism in the spec at all! Just boring, boring, BORING.
I get that there are some people so hyperfocused on balance and squeezing the last bit of % of performance from a spec, even if it would mean that the gameplay would be terrible, they would still take that deal. But have you… Ever considered… That maybe the issues they have with this… Are not what you should focus on?
Did you take a look around and ask yourself why people play games? For balance? To squeeze out every ounce of performance as if you’re trying to do a math exam?
No it’s for GAMEPLAY! People play games for GAMEPLAY!
Id rather play balance and feral druid right now 100% of the time than whatever garbage this is.
I could get behind the duration reduction for Guardian Berserk/Incarn IF:
- the CD is reduced to 2 minutes, which would be proportionally the same as the 30s → 20s duration change, or…
- we don’t have to spend 5 talent points to maximize its effectiveness, or…
- we get CC immunity for its duration.
EDIT: To add emphasis.
We get #1
Berserk: Heart of the Lion reduces the CD by a flat 60s. Turning it into a 2min CD