I mainly play balance, but man the damage is just not there. When i play a warlock the damage is insane, and the survivability is better. I expect a pure dps class like a lock to do better dps, but dang balance just hits like a wet noodle. Gonna miss travel form tho. Gotta say had loads of fun with druid but the dps is just not close enough. 
Balance druid is one of the 2 best ranged dps in m+. It’s actually the best because of its better ultilities than the 2nd one, shadow priest.
It depends on what you are doing. Balance is one of the best dps for 20+ keys. If you are doing lower keys, due to the really long ramp up time to do damage, it is not good at all.
balance scales well
in a 20 and above fort key you blast
same packs in a 12 on tyran and all you can do is sunfire then type “:(” in party chat
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Well dang, maybe I’m just not playing it that well. What are your rotations like? I throw on Three Dots and then start hitting with the single Target or AOE spells depending on how many I pulled. But when I have let’s say three to five trash mobs on my guy I notice the damage just doesn’t seem to be there and they start hitting me pretty hard. Hard enough I have to stop and heal while the dots finish them off. I’m like what gives, these are trash mobs and on a warlock I steam roll through them. And I’m in leather, and the lock is in cloth.
welcome to old Feral days, if you love your spec just play it like many Ferals did in past expansions. (incluyed me)
Install addon Hekili and it will help you to under the optimal rotation and eventually you can remove it
Are you playing retail? If so, this expectation isn’t really a thing anymore… dps specs are just dps and sometimes they’re strong and sometimes they’re not.
If you’re playing WotLK Classic, that represents a period of time where the hybrid tax was a thing, but it’s in the process of transitioning. Balance was really strong in Phase 1 but is a bit less so in Phase 2. This may or may not change with subsequent phases.
If you’re playing Classic Era… my respect to you, sir! Though this probably isn’t the case since you’re making this post 
In all scenarios though, you can totally play what you want if you like the class, but if you want to chase the meta, you’ll need to be prepared to reroll with every patch. Good luck to you! 
This sounds like you’re just doing overworld content and we’re not talking about dungeons or raids where your tank is doing this work. If you’re talking about overworld and leveling, that’s an entirely different game. Some specs are going to have a much easier experience and pet specs like lock and hunter are always going to feel better than other casters. I know Boomkin who level as Feral, then swap at max because it’s just faster and cleaner.
Basically, class balance and design on live is based entirely around the max level/mostly maxed gear experience. So many things affect a spec’s play prior to max level and good gear that there’s really no sense in even trying to compare them.
Oh i never chase the flavor of the month build. Playing retail. Just feels like balance is squishy and alot less dps than my lock. Maybe im doing something wrong, probably am lol. But just doesnt feel like the damage is there.
You might be… I did a quick google and Balance is doing really well in M+ and fairly well in raids. Don’t feel bad though, I struggle to jive with Balance as well and am not really a fan of it, but I think the damage absolutely is there.
If you like your lock more though, have at 'er! But if you enjoy your druid and just struggle with doing well at it, there’s lots of resources you can try. These forums are an option, but I think the druid discord is also a good resource. You can find a list of the community discord servers here…
Might have to research a good pve balance build. Would love to keep high damage and that travel form LOL
I do decent I can pull like 20k single target and around 50k AoE but mind you this is my off off spec and I’m only in 8-14s
Heck even wrath has decent balance. Not as good as retail but Wrath is when Blizz started to make alot of the non-viable specs viable.
It’s a mixed bag right now. It’s amusing to see how things play out actually… and there was a loooooot of speculation when WotLK Classic was coming out back in September.
Some things have followed prediction (Death Knights being super strong) and some things haven’t (Feral in Ulduar is not doing nearly as well as people thought). Nobody saw the ret buff coming either 
But yea, Wrath was a turning point in the perception of hybrids… for the better imho. I see where they were coming from in Vanilla with the “hybrid tax” but very quickly WoW became a game about min/max, so being able to do everything mediocrely wasn’t all that useful.
People still played the “meme” specs in Vanilla Classic though, and made them work, which I think was awesome 
That might’ve been good back in december…
I have the utmost respect for people that played the “meme specs” in vanilla.
Balance just isn’t a casual-friendly spec. The ramp up time is just obnoxious, and the devs response to that is merely to make stellar flare less essential. They are doing anything to fix the awful ramp up time.
I love the theme, spell effects, shapechanging and even the rotation, but I don’t do high end content, and I just can’t figure out how to do any real damage in lower keys. It’s incredibly frustrating.
Maybe theres a gearing threshold. My 380 Ret does twice the dps of my 390 Boomy
There is the same problem as in SL when it comes to raid…weak ST dmg but that one boss fight with large amounts of adds over a long time that lets balance shine. This makes the graphs show balance as better than it really is for raids.
On m+ they are only good in the highest end of keys, where fights last long enoguh for the every cd & every tick of every dot be useful.
So its really a microscopic niche where balance is good (and than really good) thats the top end of m+…where hardly anyone plays 