Skyriding needs to either be dropped completely or be optional for druid flight form. It used to be an advantage to have flight form but now its just like any other mount.
9 Likes
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I just wanted to note that I love Fluid Form and I wouldn’t mind it being moved up into a higher spot in the tree because of how great it makes some abilities feel, probably for every spec (I’m a Moonkin).
For example, both Roars and Skull Bash(!) now can each take a single GCD as Moonkin, functionally. I can mash a single button that puts me in Cat Form and instantly SBs a target in one GCD, and then (due to Fluid Form) I can immediately just go back to Wrath/Starfire and FF will do the rest. Or, after doing the skull bash, I can begin casting Wrath and immediately cancel it with Wild Charge to reenter moonkin and disengage now that SB put me in melee range. The same goes for the Roars not costing me 2 GCDs. This is the kind of “class fantasy” I actually really enjoy on druid, so thanks for Fluid Form. Again, it might not be in the best spot on the class tree. -
Instincts of the Claw makes getting certain defensives a bit more painful than they used to be, but I recognize that you’re presumably gating them behind a few points because of their defensive power. If I was doing keys that weren’t pushing the limits and I didn’t need extra oomph, I really like that I can pull those points out of the bottom left and instead take Feline Swiftness and SB for extra mobility and melee-quality kickyness as a caster. If we’re throwing away points that buy us nothing other than “I can reach this talent I can actually use”, I’d prefer IotC was a single point.
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I like that Pulsar is gone, and it is replaced with CA/Incarn lasting 40% longer. I will happily spec into Orbital Strike for M+ and enjoy my 2min CD burst on trash! It feels like the ES/FR choice node on Paladin where one leans heavily ST and one AoE, which isn’t too loved by Paladins. I also play Paladin though and never minded leaning into one of those for a build, so I’m all for this.
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Lunar Calling is weird. I kind of feel like it only feels good if you’re very poor at tracking your Eclipse buffs and this lets you be lazy about it; I don’t see how it competes with the other choice in the choice node at all. Perhaps someone here can explain why it is good? I can’t see myself ever taking it, especially now that Nature’s Grace is a talent. My only guess is with CA/Incarn still allowing you to “be in Solar” and WoE making SF instant means you can still kinda have Wrath on boss fights and instant-cast your “main” filler occasionally outside of it?
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I know many people don’t take WoE so they won’t have this issue, but as someone that adores that spell and uses it all the time for mobility and trash AoE burst, the Hero Talents involving the treants are basically dead to me. Is there any way we could separate out that unusual choice node or have the Hero Talents grant Treants? It is a bummer to lose access to WoE in order to be able to use half of my Hero Talent choices.
3 Likes
Balance Druid Thoughts On Hero Talents
Elune’s Chosen
Pretty much flawless overall, very much feeds into the vibe of the spec and really makes it feel like you can just drop the whole galaxy on someone and is constantly feeding you astral power, huge spike of power from using incarnation which is nice, but I wouldn’t ever take the lunar calling talent. Just spamming starfire feels awful and it reminds me of those talents where it removes an ability in lieu of an auto attack.
Unless it’s vastly overtuned by comparison I think most folks will skip over it except maybe in mythic plus where spamming aoe is good a lot of the time. Everything seems to play off each other well and all the added arcane damage feeding into starsurge as well was a very pleasant surprise.
Keeper of the Grove
I think this one needs a bit of help, thematically because not often do we use tree’s outside of taunting in mythic plus, but also, they don’t stay around very long and even with reducing the cooldown through abilities they still felt really absent and didn’t really fit the theme. Boomkin has a lot of ramp time so even though 15% spellpower sounds amazing on paper, with the cast times even with some full moons planned around it, you’re lucky to get the two off and a star surge or two before it’s gone, and though that might offer a good burst window, it doesn’t feel comfortable. Maybe 12 seconds to smooth it out for the duration?
On top of that, as a moonkin, I really miss when our trees used wrath, and even with the increased damage to the tree’s it feels really weak. Like all of them combined swinging is like, a wrath cast or two maybe? The cooldown doesn’t feel good to press, I don’t get excited about it, even with the 15% buff because the trees are so underwhelming.
I think for the choice node something that would feel better would be the tree’s can cast wrath with some competitive damage on it, or perhaps instead of three small three’s with 50% health that still taunt, it summons an Ancient Treant instead, that taunts, is bigger and has more heath. Thematically looks cooler, feels very druidy and although it kind of impedes into restoration for their look, we’re already borrowing so what’s the difference lol.
I was kind of hoping to see adaptive swarm and convoke the spirits be something more leaned into with keeper of the grove or as an alternate hero talent because I know resto and balance for a while that button felt really good to hit. I don’t think grove is a totally lost cause, I just think in terms of gameplay and thematics it doesn’t quite hold a candle to Elune’s Chosen at the moment.
3 Likes
Same story as DF. Maybe we’ll get to be meta for 8-10 weeks in season 2 of TWW as well. Savor the little moments.
3 Likes
My comment is much less thorough and well thought out than most other folks here, but I would like to say that the Elune’s Chosen Hero Talents feel very underwhelming. Moon Guardian, Glistening Fur, Elune’s Grace, and Moondust all feel incredibly useless. That’s 3 talent points that I would rather spend on literally ANYTHING ELSE in the Balance tree. As for the Keeper of the Grove tree, the only thing useful in there appears to be Cenarius’ Might and Potent Enchantments, unless you want your new class fantasy to just revolve around making treants, always, forever, until the end of time. Control the Dream is just super confusing and seems like a pain to manage. This feels bad.
1 Like
Speaking as a Guardian druid, I did some testing with the tank training dummy and similar underlying talent trees for both DotC and EC. I found that EC was significantly sturdier (I was able to go about twice as long before dieing), did more damage (10-20% more), required fewer supporting talents, and had a much simpler play style. Given these observations, I’m not sure what would recommend DotC - especially since it is so lacking in AoE.
When compared to “base” guardian druid, EC is adding more usage of Lunar Beam (bonus mastery and leech in LB will add defensive capacity), more rage (extra rage from GG and Fury of Elune procs), and some passive anti-magic DR.
DotC increases rage pooling, but actually reduces how much rage we get (attacks in cat form don’t generate rage). While DotC allows us to keep a proportion of our Bear stam and armor in cat form, we still will have less than if we stayed in bear form. Other defensive benefits all have some sizable concerns: Killing strikes is hard to control since you don’t want to sit on Ravage procs, Empowered Shapeshifting gives up sizable damage bonus (and enjoyability) from wildpower surge, Strike for the Heart is a relatively small heal and tear down the mighty requires extra talent tax/button bloat by forcing Pulverize.
Since DotC offers so much less defensively, it needs to offset this with contributing more offense or utility compared to EC. From a utility perspective, EC is currently higher because of the move slow that it adds to moonfire.
EC requires very little additional tracking, though there is very little visual cue of Lunar Beam or Fury of Elune, making it difficult to track those in the default UI.
DotC requires significantly more tracking, since there are at least 2 additional bleeds to maintain uptime on (rake and rip), as well as needing to keep track of an additional resource (combo points) that are not typically included in the Bear kit. This extra complexity would be more welcome if it came with extra defensive or offensive pay-off, but right now that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Overall, I’m fond of the thematic design of both hero trees, but there’s a ton of baggage coming with DotC in the form of tracking/button bloat/rotational complexity and I don’t feel like there’s any reward for taking on that baggage.
5 Likes
I dont have anything indepth or grand to say quite yet. I just wish/ hope something “new” is coming for Balance druids Elunes Chosen tree. Thematically this hero talent tree should be one of the most beautiful and powerful available.
It should easily feel heroic and fantastical considering there are dozens of amazing astral/arcane bilities used by npcs all over azeroth. The most recent raid is a great example with his moonkinnform activation and abilities.
The current iteration feels like a couple tier bonuses spread across 10 or 11 nodes.
Im not expecting balance druids to suddenly be the best aoe burst caster dps , but it can definitely feel and Look better, in comparison to the majority of other casters .
3 Likes
Both balance druid hero trees have very bland and unimpactful visuals, on top of mostly passive trees.
It seems like the trees were designed first for resto and guardian and made generic enough to also accommodate balance with boring passives.
Keeper of the Grove needs to give Force of Nature upon selecting it, and Elune’s Chosen needs to give New Moon upon selecting it.
Then treants have to be reworked for balance druids or reverted to the WoD treants, they’re terrible. They do not cleave well, their need to melee while having no charge makes their uptime on targets bad. In PvP they’re terrible because they just get rooted/snared and their short duration makes it so they expire quickly by the time they come off roots.
Treants just feel like a terrible button for balance druids. Revert them to WoD where they are summoned one treant at a time with a 3 charge system that casts wrath or starfire based on target count.
The Keeper of the Grove tree should mirror Diabolist by making you summon a Dryad, an Ancient, and a Keeper sequentially through a ritual, and change your next spender or wrath/starfire to a new spell upon ritual completion.
Whatever you do, Keeper of the Grove needs a rework, it’s an unacceptable tree for balance druids. The class tree also needs a monk/mage level overhaul, not just a shuffling around of talents, half of which are useless spec specific core abilities that are useless to the other 2/3 of the specs.
11 Likes
I prefer to have passives.
I really don’t want to have Balance end up a piano spec.
We have enough buttons already thank you.
4 Likes
I would really prefer that we don’t do that. There is a clear distinction between dot maintenance and spammable filler, and for me, cat gameplay is rooted in dot maintenance and that leading into being able to get big payoff with direct damage hits in between.
4 Likes
Refuses to elaborate on something with no downsides.
Good feedback.
I don’t want us to be OP that means we have nowhere left to go but down 
if they would just reshuffle the tree that would fix a few of my issues. They really don’t even have to change or add anything just swap some abilities to different spots to make accessing our hero trees easier.
1 Like
I want to see Keeper druid be focused on treants and mushrooms as a way to differentiate it better from Chosen and Wildstalker. Balance already has mushrooms. Resto could have Verdancy or other effects in Effloresence spawn mushrooms that explode for healing.
Getting a bit more practical with my feedback, I’d love to see a few things
- Swarm back in its spot
- Grove Guardian moved down to a choice node with Swarm;
- Alternatively, just Swarm in Nourish’s place as is and keep the HOTW things
- Flourish buffed
- Flourish moved out of Photosynthesis choice, more central in the talent tree
- Shapeshifting off the GCD, on its own internal shared 1-GCD cooldown with all forms, Fluid Form is an abomination of a “solution” to this community request
- Swarm reinstated
- Focus on making ALL Cat damage spells worth pressing when Catweaving instead of the weird mumbo jumbo we have right now where 4 different Moonkin spells are still significant DPS gains because Swipe is worthless
- Swiftmend available for non-Resto as it’s the most useful form of off-healing in the circumstances that it comes up
- Control over Call of the Elder Druid trigger
- Swarm returned
- Please just give me back my Swarm I’m on my knees rn
11 Likes
Feral Druid in General
- Range: I’m definitely noticing the nerf to our melee range and it really does not feel good. There are still mobs I feel like I need to get way too close to in order to hit them.
- Primal Wrath: The tooltip still shows 8 yards
- Tireless Energy: This feels mandatory right now, especially for Druid of the Claw. This really should just be baked in at this point - especially since I doubt anyone is going to take Double Rake or Infected Wounds (except maybe in PvP).
Druid of the Claw
- Ravage does not proc nearly enough, even with Berserk/Incarn active. Having more control over when one CAN ravage would feel better.
- Ravage feels weak, and its DoT feels even weaker.
- Ravage needs to have greater range.
- Feels more “frantic” as I’m trying to fish for Ravage procs
- The whole play style of Druid of the Claw does not seem to favor the “making Feral gameplay slower” stance. One fix to this would be to make Ravage a short (maybe 10-15 second) cooldown button instead of a proc.
- It might be interesting to have some more interactions that cause procs. For example, I’d be interested to see a guaranteed proc of Ravage after using Feral Frenzy.
- Ravage would feel better to press if it was ‘free’ like an Apex Predator proc.
Wildstalker
Honestly, no complaints here YET. This felt MUCH better to play than Druid of the Claw.
7 Likes
I’m so sad they removed Swarm, one of the coolest spells, from resto druid because of button bloat, and not the boring, set-and-forget, Grove Guardians.
4 Likes
The interaction between Ravage and Tooth and Claw needs to be resolved. Ravage costing rage, being on a seperate proc from T&C, consuming T&C when you maul/ravage while both are up, but Ravage having no interaction with Raze feels incredibly unfinished.
Ravage feels like a spell you made with the intention of reworking the Maul/Raze talents in the bear tree, but have simply not gotten around to it. Between that weird interaction failure and Lunar Beam being so low in the tree for a spell one hero tree is based around, it feels like there was a rework of the bear tree scheduled, but it simply hasn’t be produced.
1 Like
Was excited to jump on and test Druid, but was left pretty underwhelmed by the hero talents I was excited for:
- It was hard to enthusiastically test Feral given its current state. Feral slowdown feels absolutely terrible. Very unrewarding and very boring. Even with all the energy boosting choices and boosting haste, I just felt energy starved the whole time and it felt bad, not ‘rewarding to pool energy and bite’. I know you are trying to appease a group of ferals who insist that snapshots and energy pooling were great, but the gameplay design of today doesn’t give that playstyle any time to shine. Either go back to Dragonflight design or move on to something new.
- The gameplay feel in Season 1 of Dragonflight was almost perfect for Feral, it was just bogged down with a bit of bloat and the class tree was bad (as it is for all Druid specs). Half the tree should be baseline skills for the appropriate specs. To fix the bloat, make Primal Wrath an AoE upgrade to Rip, not an alternative spender. Give Swipe the Moonfire dot rather than the Thrash dot with Thrashing Claws (call it Moonlit Claws or something instead).
- Elune’s Chosen offers nothing new visually for either Guardian or Balance. It doesn’t feel very heroic, more like a minor buff to existing talents. You could at least change Thrash to have a moon/arcane effect with Lunar Calling.
- For Moonkin with EC, it feels odd to be still using Wrath to trigger Lunar Eclipse with Lunar Calling traited. With EC I want to build a lunar only Moonkin. Let 2x Starfire trigger Lunar Eclipse with that talent. Would be nice if something in the kit altered Sunfire too, so it had an astral or moon effect rather than fire.
- I did actually really like Wildstalker visuals and effects. It was just unfortunate that Feral plays so badly now. I would be unlikely to touch the spec in this expansion in its current state.
10 Likes
Hey there. I’ve played Resto since Classic. I’d like to add my suggestions to the pot, if that’s alright.
In a nutshell, as a resto druid - my entire rotation, gameplay, everything is the same. It’s been the same for quite a few expansions now. While it’s always refreshing to have ‘old reliable’, I was really hoping for what the Hero Talents could offer.
While being advertised as gameplay fantasy and new opportunities for gameplay, it has critically fallen short for Resto druid. Compare to Riders of the Apocalypse Unholy or others who find themselves with new strategies and spells, fulfilling that heroic fantasy.
Druids remain unchanged and almost uninspired. I’m hitting all the same buttons, doing all the same things. Spawning trees, I suppose. Or catweaving. But it’s just… the same. I did this before. It removes my excitement for the expansion and fills me with crushing disappointment.
I’d really like to suggest reworking the Keeper of the Grove tree entirely, but I know it’s not feasible. As it stands, it’s bland and does nothing to add onto what I already have.
Might I suggest something along the lines of Druids of the Grove. What if, for instance, our Treants were turned into Trees of Life? A singular Ancient on cooldown? What new and fascinating gameplay can spawn from a ‘pet druid’ playstyle, what new challenges could I face if I were to say, have to keep said Ancient alive and in good positioning?
As a lover of all things Druid, that would truly feel like a hero talent and a fulfilled class fantasy. I’m not asking for this directly, though it would be fabulous - only a suggestion to expand on what we’ve got. Go further. Get more inspired, creative. Because what we have right now is sorely lacking.
Thanks for the development so far. I look forward to see what new things can come, and I really really hope this isn’t the final iteration…
This, exactly this. The Feral ‘slowdown’ only works if you (Blizzard) make our periodic damage abilities so powerful that they can compete with burst classes while we’re waiting for energy to regenerate and I don’t think you (Blizzard) will be able to pull that off in balancing passes. I just don’t.
It was definitely not fun waiting and hoping for Ravage procs. What felt even worse was getting a Ravage proc and not being able to cast it right away.
10 Likes