Elaborate please…?
This is huge.
Yeah, I’ll grant you that. Bears are hurt by the changes but the other three are pretty decisively coming out ahead, even feral. Though where now you have to choose between bash and typhoon, you’ll be able to access both in SL or more likely, bash plus vortex.
It’s a hit overall but guardian will be just fine.
The fact still remains that it’s generally not good practice to compare abilities one to one in a vacuum. Abilities are balanced around a spec’s entire toolkit. What specs lack in one area they make up for it in another, more often than not.
See my post above. Balance CC is being improved overall. We’re also getting stampeding roar which used to be exclusive to feral and guardian, though obviously that’s not CC.
I don’t see balance having typhoon baseline. Can you source that? Because the “crazy buffs” sound like getting clone back (which isn’t exclusive to balance) and another affinity utility (again, not balance exclusive). Just trying to clarify.
Specs get their ‘affinity CC’ baseline. Guardian and guardian affinity get disorienting roar, resto and resto affinity get vortex, etc. Typhoon is the balance equivalent.
So to recap, instead choosing between typhoon and bash, you’ll get both plus cyclone for use in all environments and the addition of another CC based on affinity.
I’m not passing any of these changes off as “crazy” but it’s undeniably an improvement to an already pretty robust CC kit.
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Talents shouldn’t be tuned based off of what we have baseline already, or even other talents. EVERY talent choice should feel good to pick in a given environment. You can’t just say "druids get a worse stun talent than warriors because we already have x y z and warriors don’t. Every class has abilities that make the class different than other classes, but comparing the druid single target stun talent compared to the warrior single target stun talent is a fair comparison in my opinion. The bash nerf doesn’t make sense.
Starfall will be centered on caster with a huge radius but only hit targets affected by moonfire/sunfire and extend the dots. They will get typhon, ursols vortex, cyclone and mass root/stun. So big uppgrade in aoe potential and cc department. Also they get stampeding roar.
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I also just realized, demon hunters have fel eruption as a talent which is 100% the same as storm bolt except it costs 10 fury/pain.
If bash is gonna be twice the cooldown, melee range, and can be parried/dodged, then it shouldn’t be the same duration as storm bolt and fel eruption.
Hrm, if that’s true that is pretty awesome. Typhoon to stop casts more frequently than every minute alone is pretty awesome. I didn’t read that anywhere but I’ll take your guys’ word for it. Sweet 
So on top of typhoon and bash for pvp, I can get an incap or Ursols. Hrm…
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Awwww man. I liked getting that extra 0.5 - 1.2% damage when i could spare the rage. Now that talent’s even more dead.
Edit: I checked some more of my parses and brambles sometimes did 4 + % of my damage depending on how much of the fight I was tanking and the number of adds. So ya, this change kinda sucks.
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Yes, you absolutely can say that. Crippling poison is strictly better than hamstring. Divine shield is strictly better than ice block. Spellsteal is strictly better than purge. There are countless comparisons like this because, again, abilities are designed with all of the other specs’ abilities in mind.
Why is one of their stuns being better than ours such a crime if our CC overall is better? What’s more, why does our CC need to be the same or better at all? We’re all in agreement that homogenization is bad so we should be supportive of some classes doing certain things better or worse than others. Strengths and weaknesses, give and take.
With the PvP talent slot left vacant by cyclone becoming baseline, you’ll see more moonkin running disarm as well.
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Ehhh… yeah perhaps. It’s iffy because it’s a magical disarm. Dispel easily counters it. I suppose if I can bait a dispel with a root on a melee at the time it needs a disarm and also at a time where he has no root break then maybe. But the duration was nerfed and magical makes it meh. On the flip side though, boomys don’t have super great pvp talents anyway. Only other useful ones are celestial guardian (often interchanged with thorns pending the comp) and ironfeather. Clone baseline will definitely help feral much more than boomy but I’ll of course take it either way. I might main feral in slands anyway. Undecided.
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I’m already leveling my Brewmaster for Shadowlands.
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Play what’s fun man, not what’s good. The whole hierarchy can get flipped up in a patch. Especially early on in a new expansion.
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Brewmaster is always good, though. Bear has only been good once, apparently by accident.
You know what’s NOT fun? Not being able to properly kite psychophages because I’m the only tank without a slow.
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Druids also have Roots and Cyclone. Can’t really look at it in a vacuum
Some Druids do.
Did Guardian and Feral not get Cyclone? (I can check, just asking for discussion purposes).
And this will benefit me as a guardian how?
Guardians do not currently have cyclone either as a talent or a pvp talent.
Oh sure. But without being castable in forms it doesn’t do us much good.
That’s why Feral & Guardian are getting the shaft from the Shadowlands design philosophy. Making things “druid-wide” is terrific for Resto & Balance, since those specs get access to everything. But it shuts out Feral & Guardian completely. They didn’t even bother adding the new stuff to Predatory Swiftness for Feral, for god’s sake.
It’s also why Heart of the Wild is so useless for us, despite Blizzard hyping it as a big thing for Druids. And why the Torghast “Heart of the Wild is permanent!” thing is so laughable.
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