Please Blizzard phases last so long every spec should be somewhat viable and enjoyable Elemental shaman is atrocious help us.
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please blizz, we need a buff severly, playing ele feels so bad man we are so nerfed and need to be buff
pls blizz
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You’re fine bud. Once you have double crit damage and chain lightning ele sham is a cheese lord, not to mention free guaranteed crit lava burst.
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Phase 2 is gonna be strong. It’s weak now, not much you can do about it.
Don’t even bother with ele rn
It doesn’t need buffs. You’re at the mercy of the level cap. You don’t even have enough talent points to be an ele sham yet
They’ll want to nerf you next phase
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This. Shaman in general, next phase with ele, and then 3rd phase with DW using caster mainhands, is going to have a lot of people mad.
Even before runes and such just standard ele sham could easily kill people in a chain lightning into a frost/earth shock if either crit. Now they will have guaranteed crit lava burst, and chain lightning shock combo as a follow up. Its going to be gross.
your time will come in phase 2 lol
how about buffing balance druids D:
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Balance druids need an entirely diff toolkit
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We should come online a lot more next phase, I doubt they’ll be having to nerf us next phase like some people have said but we should be able to pull our weight and be good enough to get into raids. Faster lightning bolt casts, good spell ranks at 40, double crit DMG, lava burst and overload and SR to let us not go oom should all be huge next phase while doing decent DMG. Fingers crossed I’m not huffing copium lol.
i feel like the play for balance druid is to not play balance.
it would have to be a hybrid spec of half feral, half balance and furor. Starsurge inbetween shifts, mangle for 300% feral damage, all gear in strength/agil/stam (because starsurge is 2 mana anyway), only go down balance tree for natural shapeshifter and to get starfire stun effect so starsurge can also act as a stun every now and then.
This is the play, but i havnt tested it. You can also just go for wild growth/starsurge, but thats kinda boring.
At 25, this is very effective. Moving forward? That is a death sentence in pvp. Melee will shred you and you won’t have the mana pool nor damage capabilities to take out casters of equal level
That is “the play” because Balance truly is that bad as the game progresses. It is why druid is consistently the least played class. To be effective, you have to put in 3x the work of other classes
I am hoping we see treants and other nature summons, an improved barkskin that either dramatically reduces damage taken or has a an effect where it behaves like nature’s grasp for its entire duration, and some more on hit effects associated with our spells since we are such a run n gun class
Don’t buff ele.
There’s nothing to be done
You could buff LB 500% and it would still be complete garbage at a 3 second cast.
It gets reduced by talents next phase.
Get over it.
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Yeah SoD really hasn’t fixed Balance to any real degree so far, and based on its extremely lean and interactionless talent tree will most likely not self address it’s issues over time like Elemental Shaman will.
It’s just sad to see a fair bit of Druid hate based off the single gimmick of Starsurge in full Arcane spell damage gear with Nature’s Reach and then slowly plinking down health bars one cast every 6s from 42yrds and out of sight.
That just isn’t a great representation of the class, is only apparent in one very small aspect of the game, and not the gameplay experienced by 90% of balance druids.
The whole spec tree needed to be looked at in my opinion. Lvl 25 bracket is basically a write off though.
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Completely agree. Before SoD launched, one of the foundational goals was to improve the “meme” specs. The devs came out the gates and gave Paladins their entire wishlist of potential improvements, all by 25. Druids haven’t received anything that addresses the class’s foundational-problems.
They have all of their work in front of them with Druid.
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Yeah, I mean I remember first seeing the tooltip for Starsurge and it having the clause “benefits from most talents that affect Wrath and Starfire” and then being like “oh, so you mean 2 talents, one to increase damage by 10% and another for 100% increased crit damage” lol (yes stun from Starfire potentially but it’s kinda a dead talent anyway, if the interaction even works)
There is just so low interaction in the base talent tree, and all of them are just flat modifiers to already bad spells.
There are 5 “throughput” talents in the entire tree outside of Moonkin Form (which is more a party aura than druid throughput), faster Wrath, crit (lul) and damage on Moonfire, crit damage increase, Nature’s Grace, and flat damage.
The only one remotely interesting in that bunch is Nature’s Grace, and no other talent really interacts with it to any degree.
I remember doing a quest on my Warrior the other week in Loch Modan and being surprised that the lvl 13-14 Shaman NPCs had equal base damage on their Lightning Bolt spell to my level 25 Druid with rank 4 Wrath lmao.
Think Wrath is base 60-70 roughly, and these level 13 mobs were hitting for 55-65 
Honestly I’m just rambling at this point because I feel somewhat frustrated by it.
I understand the difficulties of modifying something in classic in a way that it doesn’t affect the other specs (especially early on and easy to access), but I do feel like they could have looked at options like baking something in with talents like Imp Wrath which other specs won’t want to waste talent points on or something.
Spell pushback protection, threat reduction, actual throughput or interactions, a reason to press Starfire. Anything really.
If they don’t want it to affect the baseline spell, and they don’t want it to be an easy pick up for another spec just bake it into something other classes don’t want, or alternatively the plenitude of utility only talents at the beginning of the tree which don’t hold high value.
Shadow Priest is in the exact same place as well I believe if not worse, although I think their talent tree is a bit more robust further down than Druid is which should address some issues. Plus fortunately for them some of their discipline runes like Penance are so good (along with general early bracket priest) that they at least fare quite well in PvP despite not being able to truly play their spec.
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lol people still think balance druids are waiting for phase 2 to come online because we don’t have moonkin form yet. yeah ok man armor and 3% crit and the loss of our healing spells is absolutely a game changer for moonkin damage
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Maybe because lightning bolt is a 3 second cast and wrath is 2 second.
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Haha yeah, 3% crit to the rest of our party lol.
It’s not even like it’s a personal buff or grants us a better version (like Aspect of the Lion for Hunter).
We just become a slightly better buff aura for our party, which as history has shown us is not significant enough to offset the loss of just taking a better dps class in the first place lol.
The increased trigger for Nature’s Grace from 3% is also fairly trivial, especially since outside Moonfire/Sunfire (which only benefit on the intial cast) we don’t have any other crit modifiers in our talent tree to assist further.
No threat reduction or drop, no pushback protection, no hit or resistance reduction.
Balance druid lacks the basic functional requirements as a spec, and those things aren’t something we should have to rely on runes for (instead of extra abilities).
At the moment we already suffer from having all of our runes simply providing necessary base spells instead of extra functionality, heaven forbid that becomes the default whilst other classes get new tools over the next 3 phases.
That is fair, still pretty hectic from a low level mob though 
Lava burst is already OP.
Elemental is fine.
Stop trying to unbalance the actual balanced specs.