With Season 2 and the Liberation of Undermine raid tier ongoing and 11.1.7 and 11.2 news on the horizon, the Dreamgrove community wanted to share some feedback about the current state of Balance Druid, and how it has performed and played so far in the season and also highlight some of the pain points of the spec. We have done these feedback posts in the past, you can find the feedback regarding the core gameplay here and the 11.1 PTR Feedback post here.
Performance in the Liberation of Undermine Raid
Raiding has felt like a struggle point for Balance for several tiers now, coincidentally ever since the new talent trees were implemented with the launch of Dragonflight. Currently, Balance’s choices are to either lean into single target builds with Convoke or an explosive AoE burst build with Bounteous Bloom and Incarnation. The latter example, most notable on the Stix Bunkjunker encounter, reduces your gameplay to a cycle of summoning trees, pressing Incarnation and then hammering Starfall for almost every global over 10 seconds - ignoring all other spells and proc interactions that should make the spec interesting. Playing this build also sacrifices a very noticeable chunk of your single target performance making you compete with the tanks on damage to the boss. For most raids, the best specializations are the ones that are able to do good cleave damage without completely ruining their single target performance, and currently Balance doesn’t have that.
When it comes to single target, Balance started the tier off as one of the worst specs in the game and has seen a few tuning passes, most notably a 30% damage buff to Wrath, which slightly impacted talent builds and moved away from talents that helps generate Astral Power in order to fit talents that increases the damage of your generators. This is generally not a well-liked gameplay loop, focusing more on pressing your generator rather than building towards something with a pay-off, and when you do have these moments where you do big damage, you are left frustrated due to the number of unconnected spells you are forced to cram into small windows.
For this raid tier specifically there have been a few encounters where Convoke the Spirits and Force of Nature will randomly hit immune targets, most notably the shocker adds on Mug’Zee and the Voltaic Image adds on Cauldron of Carnage, potentially losing you a decent chunk of your damage. It feels bad whenever you press your biggest button and you see your projectiles going to targets that are taking 99% reduced damage.
Performance in Mythic+
Even though Balance has not been performing well in raid, it has been a very strong pick in mythic+ and has seen play in almost every high key. In mythic+ you play the Elune’s Chosen talent tree where the entire gameplay revolves around being in Lunar Eclipse, regardless of target count, and casting Starfire to generate Astral Power and reduce the cooldown of Fury of Elune. The current tier set helps a lot with stacked AoE, increasing the damage of your spenders to targets affected by Fungal Growth, and this has been hard to balance, with both Starfall and Starsurge having seen multiple tuning passes to reduce AoE damage to help increase single target damage. The alarming thought here is what will happen when the current tier set goes away if our spenders are not tuned again. The balancing of Wrath/Starfire versus Starsurge/Starfall is difficult to get right, and with the amount of passive talents that straight out buff our generators compared to the ones that interact with our spenders, you can quickly end up with a build where you only spend AP for Starlord and otherwise ignore your spenders.
Talent Pathing and Build Diversity
During The War Within beta cycle, there was a blue post and feedback from the developer explaining the thought process behind removing Primordial Arcanic Pulsar, citing that the effect was so powerful that it reduced the value of any other effect that did not line up with its 40-45s cadence. It was also specified that Pulsar was removed to make room for interesting cooldown interactions and build diversity, but the design of Balance’s cooldowns has not seen a lot of meaningful change since then, except for the addition of Whirling Stars, and the current state of Balance has to juggle 4 different cooldown timings to line up during an encounter, which can feel overwhelming to new players. Force of Nature, Celestial Alignment, Convoke the Spirits and your on-use trinket all have different cooldown timers on them, and while Control of the Dream is a talent designed to alleviate some of the headache, your abilities will still desync after a while into a raid fight and it is very easy to end up making bad decisions if you haven’t meticulously planned out your cooldowns before pulling. The removal of Primordial Arcanic Pulsar also left a hole in the overall gameplay of the spec and has made it feel hollow. The addition of hero talents does not help with this, where it currently feels like no matter what talents you take or builds you play, you’re still doing the exact same thing and the exact same rotation.
There are a handful of talents that are not playable in any PvE scenario, most notably Orbital Strike, Starweaver, New Moon, 60 second Convoke and Wild Mushrooms. Orbital Strike was played early in the expansion, but lost a lot of value whenever Whirling Stars got added since the alternative provides noticeably better uptime on Celestial Alignment. Starweaver does not see play in any scenario other than being a niche choice at spread 2-3 target cleave, and suffers from making you feel GCD capped whenever you use cooldowns and generate Astral Power that you can not spend in time, or limiting you from spending procs like Umbral Embrace and Dream Burst. New Moon’s design feels very out of place no matter what build you play since your cooldown windows are too short to be able to spend all 3 charges while also using Convoke the Spirits, spending your Dream Burst stacks and spending any excess AP. New Moon was buffed during 11.0.5 PTR to be competitive with other builds, but was nerfed after a week due to negative feedback on how the ability fits into the current design of the spec. Wild Mushroom suffers from the same issues as New Moon, where the spell itself does not do considerable damage and you don’t have the time to use it during your short cooldown windows with the amount of other spells you are forced to fit into it. Even with the current tier set buffing the damage of your spenders by 20% it is still better to take other talents than it is to take the active Wild Mushroom ability. It is also disappointing to have a hero talent that focuses around the nature parts of the Druid fantasy, but having none of the talents interact with Wild Mushroom.
The Elune’s Chosen hero talent has been the go-to pick for mythic+ content throughout the expansion and suffers from making you feel too limited in your talent builds. Whenever you’re done choosing your mandatory talents, you are left with 1 point to spend since the hero talents force you to spec into Fury of Elune and Radiant Moonlight.
Small Wishlist
More agency in your cooldown windows.
With the issues outlined above concerning the randomness of Convoke the Spirits and Force of Nature, it is concerning how little control you have of your own damage whenever you press your biggest cooldowns. There aren’t really any procs or interactions to play around, it is just “press your damage buttons until your cooldown window is over”. This can lead to very noticeable swings in your damage between each pull and is especially prevalent considering most of your damage comes from your powerful cooldown window when you play Keeper of the Grove. Adding interactions or changing talents to focus on building towards moments of damage would be a big step in the right direction as the spec currently lacks any pay-off.
Connectivity in talents.
This has been said before, but a big part of Balance’s spec tree talents don’t provide anything meaningful. Denizens of the Dream, Harmony of the Heavens, Crashing Star, Power of Goldrinn, Cosmic Rapidity, Umbral Intensity, Umbral Embrace, Umbral Inspiration, Astronomical Impact, Stellar Amplification, Astral Smolder, Wild Surges, Astral Communion and Rattle the Stars all have close to zero gameplay implications. It would be nice to see this get addressed in some way, either by replacing excess talents, changing existing talents or adding new ones to promote build diversity.