I know it’s not final but I saw they put insect swarm to a 12 sec duration on the 60 raid set.
The current state of the balance druid rotation doesn’t have almost any room for adding in new spells.
We’ve got Surge → sunfire → moonfire → starfire → surge → wrath → wrath → starfire → surge
those two wraths are all we have when it comes to wiggle room. One of which is replaced by faerie fire every 40 seconds (or 3 rotations) if there is no other druid in the raid.
So if we add insect swarm in, even at 12 second duration, we are down to one wrath per rotation and zero wraths per faerie fire rotation. Are we okay removing wrath? Should we be concerned that the Fury of Stormrage rune gets no use if wrath is not cast? Will we just move away from fury of stormrage into survival of the fittest?
I know nobody has these answers right now. But I just wanted to voice my concerns with the rotation. I almost think extending the amount of spells cast per rotation would help things out to allow for more wrath casts. I also think removing wrath from the rotation would be bad, because killing a spell off is not good design imo.
Something I misunderstood was that the set bonus would bump insect swarm up to a 24sec duration. So It would only be cast once every 2 rotations.
so your rotation wouldn’t feel as rigid which I’m not sure if a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes you’ll cast swarm and faefire fire toether. Sometimes 2 wraths. sometimes 1 swarm and 1 wrath. Sometimes 1 wrath and 1 faerie fire.
Interesting, wrath casts are still put down even further, but insect swarm is still nature damage replacing nature damage (buffs from the dreamstate) so it’s actually not as bad as I thought. If you have another druid doing faerie fire maybe the rotation will be just fine at 60.
Bro play the game the way you would like to play it. Do whatever rotation is fun to you.
2 Likes
I want the class to be designed in a way that is fun to play optimally.
Current balance is very very fun to play optimally, especially because of melee weaving.
Balance was really not fun to play early phase 2 when our spells were not worth casting.
Just because you have an ability, doesn’t mean you need to use it every time.
My mage is Arcane. I like never cast Fireball…even though I could make use of the DoT it leaves.
Insect Swarm would be good for ‘on the move’ DPS. But that doesn’t mean you need to ‘push all the buttons’ once you’re stationary.
2 Likes
Balance already has 3 instant casts that are cast frequently enough for on the move.
Imagine complaining that you have too many instant cast damage abilities, and that you have too many options for what to press on the move.
Imagine reading what I wrote and thinking that was the complaint.
Imagine if your instant cast options got reduced to 20 yards range.
Is one of them Insect Swarm? 
Haha, this is not the complaint.
The complaint is that the way Druid abilities work right now it’s like… hard to find time to do much of anything, lol.
Anyway, it seems like if you have the 4-piece tier 1, the rotation will be something like:
Starsurge->Moonfire->Sunfire->Starfire->Starsurge->IS->Starfire->Wrath
Starsurge->Moonfire->Sunfire->Starfire->Starsurge->Starfire->Wrath->Wrath
More than likely the truth is IS will be a DPS loss and you won’t cast it unless you want the debuff. And if your tank is a bear druid or warrior you probably won’t want it.
1 Like
So…now you have 4 abilities to use, one of which is used exclusively for ‘on the move’.
Again, you don’t need to use every ability every time. I, again, return to my Mage. I just removed Fireball from my bar because there was no point in losing DPS just to apply a mediocre DoT. Same with Fireblast; I only use that for ‘finishers’ and if I gotta move, but don’t want to totally stop DPS. Which means it’ll spend 98%+ of the fight ‘ready’ [to be cast].
The idea that insect swarm is only for movement is coming from where exactly?
From you saying fitting it into the ‘standard rotation’ is nearly impossible:
I say this with love and not to antagonize you: I think you’re worrying too much. More than likely IS won’t be a part of our rotation in p4 because it just doesn’t deal enough damage. It’ll be something resto druids keep up, and in a 20 or 40 man raid, there will be plenty of them. In P3 you won’t even have enough talent points to get it and still have Moonkin.
Again, 2% miss is actually sort of not great for bears and warriors because getting hit is good for them. IS is a situational ability and is not meant to be a part of the rotation this way IMO.
IMO the problem is the set bonus, lol. Doubling the duration makes it easier to add to the rotation but also, why would you want to? 
IS in Moonkin is gonna be GREAT for PVP though. I love that.
You might be right. I think adding insect swarm into the rotation could be really great so I don’t want to come off as saying it’s something I’m against more so than wanting it to be done the right way if it is done at all.
1 Like
I think if they want to put IS in the rotation, they’re going to have to make the damage significantly better someway (maybe by making it benefit from Moonkin Form the same way MF and SF do) and doubling the duration without the set bonus. Until they do that no one will cast it as part of the balance rotation I think.
1 Like