The expansion announcement was great on Tuesday and many people are very excited BUT we still very much need adjustments for the live server content. Post double legendaries and 4 piece bonuses, balance druid DPS in mythic plus content seems to hover between healer and tank damage outside of cooldowns, doing slightly better during pulsar procs and then just keeping up with other DPS during a pull if we pop our “big” 3 minute cooldown. Last season we were lucky that our single target damage was good enough on bosses that groups would overlook our low trash mob damage contribution in favor of the boss damage and utility. Currently our raid damage looks/feels to have fallen to very low compared to others and our mythic plus damage has to be one of the lowest. Could we please have some help Blizzard?
They are most likely gonna be done with SL after 9.2.5 releases, and I doubt they have many people even working on that.
I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t totally agree. I do a fair amount of pugging and running with a mostly static group. While I am rarely the top damage done overall due to Balance’s low, consistent aoe damage, I am competitive. The utility offered by balance druid often makes my group’s runs go smoother allowing us to do more aggressive pulls when they know I can innervate the healer, drop trees etc. While many have argued our utility does not compensate enough for our reduced aoe damage, there are many people who value the utility with equal weight to large aoe dps.
Try to find a group who values your utility, and then work as hard as you can to top boss damage with a high degree of consistency. For instance, my group is usually a frost mage, mm hunter, me on boomy, prot pal, and resto sham. Both of the other dps are heavy aoe damage dealers, but I focus on boss damage. While I am not always the top boss damage, I am frequently top, and often enough, I am top by a large margin, giving my damage profile value, especially on tyr weeks.
Possible solution; increase the damage of our wrath, starfire, and DoTs, have the non-talented starfall be stackable, and maybe buff the range on starfire cleave? I get that spenders should do more damage than builders but if our spenders are the equivalent of tossing a pot at a mob, our builders are the equivalent of tossing individual wet noodles.
Wrath is definitely a bit on the low side of damage.
Starfire, especially with multiple stacked mobs, could get over tuned quickly. I have been able to keep up with a 4 pc sv hunter in big ardenweald pulls (if I have cds) by spamming star fire and keeping up sunfire and starfall. Although, I can do that once every ~3 minutes, the sv hunter can do that far more consistently, so that’s a bit of a problem.
Buffing the range of starfall wouldn’t solve the problem, as its range is already quite larged, however stacking starfall absolutely would go a LONG way to helping our aoe damage. Honestly, that might be the best solution for current tuning given our abundance of AP with pulsar and 4 pc.
What kind of overall damage are you guys doing? Specifying the dungeon, ilvl, and tier. At the end of 9.15 I was doing about 9k overall with boomy so I imagine they are capable of at least 13-14k+ with tier and 265-270+ ilvl? I dunno, I haven’t played boomy in 9.2 and I rarely get grouped up with one.
Two weeks ago (fortified, bolstering quaking) i did 13.4k on a 17 nw with 4 pc as NF at 267 ilvl. There was an enh sham did 14.2k, frost mage did 14.1k, weapons did 8.3k, pwar did 7.9k, necro resto druid did 5.3k.
We completed in 26:29, giving us a 2 chest.
That’s one example, but I am fairly consistent in the 13-15k range with variance depending on key level, dungeon, and group comp.
Lol I was in the process of calling BS on you thinking you were responding to a resto damage post I made…okay yeah that’s boomy damage not resto damage.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I expected. It’s okay numbers, but compared to some of the more busted aoe specs it’s probably on the low side.
Could be worse. I mean you could be feral. At least you’re low damage with utility.
Feral 15’s all dungeons
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/25#metric=dps&partition=3&class=Druid&bracket=15&spec=Feral
Protection Pallys 15’s all dungeons
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/25#metric=dps&partition=3&class=Paladin&bracket=15&spec=Protection
Balance 15’s all dungeons
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/25#metric=dps&partition=3&class=Druid&bracket=15&spec=Balance
Doesn’t look good for birds, exceptionally bad for cats, but pretty good for pally TANKS.
Kind of an outlier, but seeing a feral in MDI doing less dps than resto pack for pack… that says a lot to me lol.
I sincerely hope they are able to tune better in DF like Ion says. I am skeptical, but hopeful.
Wait… there was a feral in mdi??
Guessing some sort of misguided hipster trend.
They ran a 4 druid comp.
Apes Together Strong I think was their name
This is the kind of thing I was worried people would take away from that idiot. The clown playing Feral was intentionally throwing because:
- Had zero conduits.
- Was playing Kyrian.
- Had zero soulbind traits.
- Wasn’t using Cache.
- I’m pretty sure he didn’t cast Primal Wrath once.
Pretty much the only button he pressed was the Kyrian covenant ability, and that’s it.
The top locks are doing around double of overall damage than boomies, surv hunters too… Frost mages are gonna beat us, well almost all classes are gonna beat us… Im 14 points away from 3k IO and when i get ther, im not touching any dungeons with that spec until the xpac…
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that back when my warlock alt was item level 250 and only had a 2 set I was pushing the same amount of damage as my 272 4 set druid.
Now my lock is 265 and it feels almost like sabotage to bring my druid to keys by comparison.
This argument would be correct.
You know what really makes runs go smoother? Doing more damage. Utility is sweet, but ultimately each piece is a means to an end for damage, and the damage isn’t there.
So you’re out here getting absolutely blasted by the dps in aoe and not even topping boss damage? At least you bring trees and innervate 
Not trying to personally attack you by the way. I wish I didn’t feel that way towards my druid but maaaaan
The Druid devs (or should I say, lack of druid devs) are a huge disappointment this xpac. Feral has been nothing but a letdown and it is sad. We have literally teams of people working to eek out every last bit of dps on the forums and discord. Yet, you can jump on your ww monk and do more dps napping through a dungeon than you can playing the game of your life on your main. The frustration of this has made me quit wow twice this xpac.
Not an easy thing to do or say but usually, even when things are bad, you can still find that magic combo to at least put up a good show in m+. However, today, they have so cratered our spec that the best of the best still let down the rest of the group with their performance.
Oh, and now we’re supposed to believe it can be better next xpac. Why should we believe that the same people that ruined Druid this xpac will make it better next time around???
Question for the devs and Blizzard alike, do the druid devs even play the spec? How could you introduce buffs to something and simply make it a little less embarrassing and not get it right? I mean, what kind of low level testing do you do?
How about you pay someone to test the spec at a high level with the meta classes and compare? Hell, I’m not even asking for you to make us meta, but leaving us in a spot where our overall damage can be doubled by other classes is simply ridiculous…
I don’t understand the logic. Are you telling us that you intentionally want us to be bad? If so, why didn’t you say so “We wanted to buff feral because it was simply embarrassing to play. That said, we know we didn’t do enough to make you competitive, but we are busy making a new xpac” Ok, and lets not forget the line I’ve seen repeated in other threads. Their hands are tied for PVE because that would mean they would have to rebalance for PVP. What a crock.
How about you do something right the first time? Ok, so I’m being harsh, I do understand no one is perfect, but if you don’t get it right the first time, why does it take the entire xpac for you to still not get it right???
Something is severely wrong with the druid dev team… It is either lacking in management, direction, or talent. Regardless, we suffer for it and can’t play the spec of our choice .
And another thing, WOW has always seemed to default feral to pvp and boomy to pve but even boomy is lagging behind currently. I understand they own the company but why not build each spec to allow people to play what they want (truly). Why force us into your cookie cutter view of gameplay? What if I want to play melee dps with my feral. Why tell me I can’t, it is for pvp, then better yet, make the anointed choice for pve suck as well?
Blizzard, please fire the druid dev team and move on, that or untie their hands and let them allow us to at least provide a good showing. I miss the days of “damn, I thought feral was in a bad place, but you killed it”. It just isn’t possible anymore…
This is the one thing I really don’t like when people talk about things like “hybrid tax” or “utility tax”, like yes, a soothe is going to make things like raging weeks a bit smoother, but it seems dumb to be punished for having a certain amount of utility or flexibility when it’s obviously not required to finish the key. Like Warlock which is currently destroying right now, has a pretty good amount of utility too, maybe not as much as us, but if it can be done without the utility, does it matter? We have a situation where there’s two choices, one that does 100% damage and can do everything that’s required for the key to be reasonably completeable (stuns, interrupts, group utility, etc.) And then another that has 80% damage but is meant to lean in harder on the utility that could also just be filled by another class that matches the utility that’s missing from the group without having to sacrifice the damage they bring.
I understand the concept that Druids are meant to be a jack of all trades to an extent, but that seems a bit unfair when one of the core mechanics of the game is also specializing.
This guy gets it.