I will put the incoming balance druid buffs below for anyone out of the loop.
So… These changes might put Balance druid into middle of the pack for pure single target with low movement, but for anything with higher movement (Silken court, Nexus Princess, etc), or anything with adds, we’re still going to be well towards the bottom. We still struggle heavily with dynamic, movement-heavy fights, we still lack any sort of add burst damage, struggle heavily with excessive ramp times, and our single target damage is punished severely when having to take Starfall talents.
I would have definitely liked to see more of a buff thrown into Starsurge, since for any add / multitarget fights (aka most in the raid) we automatically lose a huge amount of our single target having to awkwardly spend talent points to spec into Starfall way off to the side in the tree (which is absolutely absurd might I add). Go to WarcraftLogs and look at boss damage ranks on Broodtwister Ovi’nax for example and look at how hard we’re sandbagging. I can see that it is kind of getting addressed for 11.0.5, but it still doesn’t help us for most of this tier.
This forces us into having to play full single target and not even opt into taking Starfall for most of the add fights in the raid, since the extra small amount of damage from our undertuned Starfall isn’t even worth taking in exchange for losing a good amount of boss damage in the process (due to how undertuned Starsurge is).
TLDR: 16% is not enough of a buff for Starsurge to allow us to have somewhat reasonable single target damage when taking Starfall talents in our tree for raid and M+. This Starsurge buff needs to be a minimum of 25%. We still will not even be able to take Starfall in fights like Mythic Silken court and Queen Ansurek if it goes live like this since it will be giving up too much boss damage (which is definitely not how the spec is intended to be played).
Druid
Balance
All ability damage increased by 6%.
Starsurge damage increased by 16%.
Starfall damage increased by 20%. Not applied to PvP combat.
Elune’s Chosen: Lunar Calling increases Starfire’s damage to its primary target by 80% (was 65%). The bonus remains 50% in PvP combat.
Starsurge and Starfall damage has been really low, but I was hoping for some talent changes. Hero trees both feel kinda bland and the class/spec tree is a knotted mess with many two point nodes that blizzard said they wanted to get rid of. I guess that was just for other classes and specs :<
You have on demand burst and a cd for movement with the three instant cast starfires. I understand chosen of elune isn’t on wowhead’s talent build suggestion, but you CAN do it, you know? lol. Nothing is making you play with treants.
Especially with starfire now doing 80% more damage when you take Elune’s chosen instead of the 65%.
It may even be meta, since elune’s chosen wasn’t THAT far behind
And with starfall baseline in .5, and with 10% more damage… idk. I feel like balance Druids will be in a more solid place.
Y’all are always chicken littleing. But I suppose that’s appropriate lol. Given the big chicken thing
Significant survivability buffs - durability or recovery
(Frenzied Regen still seems bugged in PvP, and where’s our meaningful stop or shield compared to other casters? It’s odd that several have us beat in both mobility and durability – makes no sense from an archetype balance and philosophy e.g. More mobility = less survivability, unless Starsurge becomes a nuke button again ig… but I really DON’T want to be a glass cannon, or I would’ve played Mage that has a much better utility toolkit for it!!! with immunities and rewinds… even Devoker is better in that regard…)
Further class (4th & 8th row jams hello?) and Spec (after 11.0.5 – right side) Talent Tree revisions.
A wholesome re-design EARLYinto the development cycle of the Midnight 12.0 xpak.
Core mechanics re-designed (to move away from the clunkiness of the ramp-up and lock-in of Dragonflight Eclipse)
That our redone toolkit will have emphasis on choice of complexity via talents (as now, however with more) player agency and ‘weight’ to individual spells ala start of BfA (even though that overall kit was both pruned and limited – IMO it felt cohesive and each spell felt meaningful, and deciding what to use when could highly impact the encounter. “Spamming noodles”, on the other hand, is NOT FUN nor viable nowadays, frankly. The spec will forever keep falling behind UNLESS it’s re-designed in accordance with both its vision AND the speed and mechanics of the modernizing game. We need more, better feedback loops – FAR earlier and more often)
I think the Druid talent tree is cumbersome bc it has 4 specs. Like, it might can be done, but I think one would have to have very good spatial reasoning to see how they could create a tree from 4 specs and us not have to pick up “useless” skills.
A good solution and easy solution might just be giving Druids ~5 additional class points (not to be used for your specialization).
I would love being less squishy, but I think the argument that we have to go into bear form for defense and do no dps isn’t valid when mages have ice block… in which they don’t do dps lol.
But Boomkin needs higher armor rating or talents that boost bark skin.
Mages now have a capstone talent called ‘Ice Cold’ which gives them 70% damage reduction instead of full immunity (and still triggers the 50% heal) but lets them keep dpsing. So their defensive no longer forces them to stop dps.
Well, it’s certain that no class will ever get more points than others…
Rather, what needs to happen (and easily could, as it has before) is a Re-Shuffeling of the talents inside the Class tree, and reworks of others, to where there are more points to allocate for utility and defensive options each spec might need for different content purposes.
Why is that different, though? We don’t do damage in Bear Form either…
(and we don’t even block any damage meaningfully, anyway, and our recovery in it is botched now… so it’s far weaker than an immunity in all regards, WITH the downsides…)
Indeed, Druids need some absorption or recovery alternative, perhaps a passive shield leeching from damage to choose over Nature’s Vigil… Or, even the old shield iteration of Savage Defense brought back as an option with Frenzied Regeneration, with self-healing better allocated elsewhere…
i don’t disagree with ya. i just often see that complaint, usually with the verbiage, “NO OTHER dps has to sacrifice dps for their defense!” Which is just axiomatically false lol.
I’m not saying it’s a fun system or a good system, i’m just saying the argument that no other dps has that is wrong.
It IS a good argument though to mention that their’s comes with an immunity though. And also i think they restore health with a talent? Idk, i’ve never touched mage lol.
Plus we have to hit several more GCD between the shapeshifting, defense abilities, and then shapeshifting back haha.
oh sh** that’s good lolol. i didn’t know they had. nevertheless, i can’t imagine too many are taking a defensive capstone vs a damage increase one. but idk, i don’t play mage. but that’s a good defensive button.
I promise you, when i pop bark skin and still get one shot in mythics or TW, i’m outraged too lol.
Frenzied regen really needs to not drop off when shifting out of bear form. You should be able to pop it then shift if need be, right now you’re almost cc’ing yourself being stuck in bear form sometimes when you want to use another forms wild charge.
Nah don’t worry we have that embarrassing 200k shield for popping barkskin on the bottom left of the Druid tree.
But really the difference in defense between even boomy and feral is atrocious. Look at Elune’s Chosen vs Druid of the claw, Druid of the claw literally gets a better magic damage reduction, which is the only defensive buff in Elune’s chosen, on top of all of the other benefits they get (bigger frenzied regens, bear form benefits for 6 seconds in cat, 10% damage heal when shifting to bear, frenzied regen and iron fur in cat), and look at Keeper of the Grove vs Wildstalker, the difference is night and day.
What we need is to borrow the mage or warlock devs for a couple of patches since it does seem like there is no archdruid working on our spec since whoever is doing it is just focusing on the dmg aspect which is 100% not our main problem (how useless defensive wise we are and how outdated it feels to play is our main concern), its insane we still have our class tree like we have but other classes already on their 3rd rework since beta
I’m dying in barkskin. Fr is doing like 3% per tick (lol). Regrowth heals like 360k (9k tick??… sir 9k?)… basically leeching off my healers big time. Basically a aoe padding cc bot.
This spec is still garbage and judging by the fact Shadow Priest is receiving more buffs tuesday and we’re getting nothing, I honestly think we’re #@$'d until 11.0.5… Same old issues still present for Boomy - Cumbersome, annoying ramp times when hitting adds (no way to put up dots fast and no way to conveniently get into eclipse fast). So you end up having to spend the first 10 seconds of every dungeon pull playing whack a mole with putting dots up on nameplates and then pressing wrath twice to be able to get into Lunar eclipse and be able to actually cast starfire and do aoe… VERY fun gameplay!! (not)
Drastically undertuned single target when playing Starfall talents for M+, huge difficulties with movement heavy encounters due to having no way to movecast our builders, middling aoe, bottom tier survivability. Terribly designed Hero talents and class talents.
We received a 10% buff last week and are still bottom for mythic raid. The only small upside for this spec right now is you have mark of the wild - if we didn’t have it this spec would be 100% dead.
The outlook / prognosis is definitely looking like a “afk til 11.0.5” type of deal right now for boomy.
I really don’t want to do mythic dungeons given how heroics felt. One general aoe ability from a mob and Well-Honed Instincts procs. Damage profile still old as dirt. Dot everything then do xyz before getting a few starfires off during eclipse.
I’m still annoyed with the Dawn Breaker as fury of elune doesn’t work in p2 of last boss. Like boomkin single target needed any more grief.
Sure, SPriest and Warlock are receiving the numeric attention… but even Mage is getting better visual re-works. Meanwhile, Balance Druid hasn’t received ANY mechanical, rotational, visual nor barely any meaningful tuning help through the entire testing cycle for The War Within. We’ve been dully neglected, with no vision for the spec and no care for making it more fun to play. I frankly prefer BfA Boomkin. At least with Empowerments we had more agency. I’d say, either revert it to that… Or, just scrap Eclipse again and give us other options and revise the kit, the ability interactions, survivability etc. The very LEAST that can be done until then is to further improve the new Nature’s Grace (or grant it an alternative that makes it so you only need ONE spell to enter Eclipse), buff numerous spells again, and survivability talents for the class tree and pvp. An even more 'band-aid’y solution would be to give improvements to ease of access, to reduce ramp and improve mechanics via tier set bonuses, just as DF S3 2pc was HUGE for QoL, and then became the new Nature’s Grace. The 11.0.5 spec talent tree changes are a good start, but there’s still a great deal more to be desired.
