What's balance druid weakness?

Probably highest aoe damage in the game in battlegrounds.
They can stealth.
They can heal.
They can cc.

Like, what’s the catch? lol

They look kinda ugly tbh.

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haha! I guess that’s something :stuck_out_tongue:

trasnmogs

10charrrrrrr

Disclaimer: I agree that we druids are strong in PvP.

I think it makes sense that a class designed around being a jack of all trades and master of none would have some solution or answer for anything you find in PvP.

That said, I think for anything you listed other than the “most AoE” thing, there are specs that can do all but one of them, and all of those things have counters from most all of the classes.

The most AOE thing is a little goofy, simply because it really is just stats padding with Starfall and the like. When I run epic BGs, I’m way more excited about topping the Killing Blows chart than the Damage chart.

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I certainly enjoy being around druids in battlegrounds. When they’re good, they’re serious game changers. I really don’t like fighting feral druids. >_>… Those are very very scary. Probably feel slightly more dangerous than rogues.

lol. Ive seen freaking Mages outheal me in Arenas.

We’re very strong, agree with your points about strengths.

Catches:

  • We’re rampy. Our damage takes quite a while to wind up. Convoke and the BOAT legendary fixes some of this. BOAT in particular, gives us a little burst window every 17 seconds or so.
  • We have long cooldowns. Celestial Alignment/Incarn is 3 minutes. Convoke is 2mins, but we need to hold it for CA/Incarn. We have good sustain, but really lack oomph without our CD’s a lot of the time.
  • Our off-healing is very strong, but it runs out fast. We’re great at topping up about 2 people, then we’re out of healing for quite a while until mana regens.
  • We struggle to get damage out if focused (in a pvp sense). Yes, we are incredibly durable if we sit in bear form and are receiving heals. But we can’t do any damage as a bear, unlike every other dps’s defensive strategies.
  • We have to sacrifice quite a few globals to be in the right form at the right time. This may seem minor, but it can make all the difference and lead to either missing opportunities, or getting stuck in the wrong form, which is baaaaad. For example, i’d love to just be able to open out of stealth, but we have to get into moonkin form pronto, to not get caught in caster form where we’re very squishy. That delay often results in having things reflected or stopped, or stunned, etc, if the person reacts fast enough.
  • We basically don’t have an interupt. While beam has its uses (root/beam), i’d trade it for a kick in almost all situations. This can limit both our m+ and pvp comps that are viable. Resto shaman is helping with this a bit, but without a rsham or prot pally, it can be very rough in dungeons with another ranged. With 3 ranged it can be brutal. Same goes for arena when trying to play two ranged dps (apart from ele sham).

We have other downsides too, but those immediately spring to mind.

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Thank you for this, Nevok! You’re awesome :slight_smile:

Also! Something a bit minor. While we have both Arcane and Nature schools (Astral too), most of our important spells are nature (Cyclone, Typhoone, Beam, roots, etc) while Arcane school is only 2 spells, so kicking out of Nature is always a big problem for us.
Or, kicking the magic school of our current eclipse. If we are in Solar eclipse and we get a Wrath and get kicked.

Yup, if anyone tracked our eclipses and kicked based on that, we’re pretty toast. All we can do is dot and cast unempowered/slow spenders.

Another weakness is most of our mobility options require sacrificing surviveability. Dash puts us in cat form, which is squishy. Travel form is squishy. Going travel form to leap away is squishy. Going caster form to leap to an ally is squishy.

If you catch us in any of those situations, pump whatever you can. Stun us if you can.

Stampeding roar puts us in bear, which is fine, and we can also change back to moonkin and keep the buff. NFae gives blinkfox which keeps your current forms defensives. Can go bear and blink and keeps bears defensives for the duration. Same for moonkin. Worgen racial helps. But for the most part we’re very squishy when trying to create distance.

A good way to play vs a boomy is to rotate cd’s into them. What we’re great at is hitting barkskin (20% damage reduction), going bear form (40% physical damage reduction, about 40-45k health). We can also pvp talent to take 10% less spell damage in bear form, and be healed for 20% more in bear form. Then, with those massive defences, we hit frenzied regen and heal for 15k or more.

We also get a conduit that frenzied regens automatically for us, in any form, when we drop below 40%. Has about a 1min CD.

What i’m saying is, you need to keep the balance in bear form by continually focusing him. If you just go for the big burst then wait for CD’s they’ll just go bear form and do that every “go”. Even with a CC’d healer we’ll often live with that combo, even as bad as I am at pvp after not having done arena since WoD.

So IMO, either catch us out of form or just tunnel us.

Outside of eclipse their damage is pretty poop.

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If you sit a druid they can’t do any damage.

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The downside to Balance is that they’re not Feral.

Obviously.

Seriously though, like any ranged they are susceptable to getting locked out of their spell school and losing casts due to melee players dancing around them. Also, unlike most ranged that focus on avoiding damage completely (ie. Mage using Blink, hunter using shell, and warlock using gate, for example), Balance druids pretty much just take less damage as their way of avoiding it (ie. going into bear form and such), which is still good, but not as good imo.

The weakness of fat chicken is it’s too easy to play. You usually fall asleep while doing top dps.

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Not in star form, yo!

Glyph of stars + Heartsbane Grimoire (toy) and you can see your transmog.

When they get smacked upside the head by a tuning pass, normally they have to heal.

Because lolferal am I right?

(I vastly prefer playing feral to balance, but if it’s not tuned correctly, then it’s community perception killing it before it gets a chance)

The thing I hate most when playing balance is the 1 minute interrupt.

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There are certain specs that can easily shut down a boomy though. If you can survive their cds and dispel, then there’s not much a Balance druid can do other than die or run away and try again later.