Balance Druid changes are looking really good

In Development Season of Discovery Phase 4 PTR
1

The new balance druid changes are great. It’s great to finally see them get some attention. I did some testing on the ptr and here are my observations:

  1. DOTs being able to crit makes them finally feel good to use. Very big improvement here.
  2. The bonus spellpower should help to cover for the extra hit boomkins need to get from gear.
  3. I still want to point out that the datamined MC Tier set is useless but apparently it was confirmed that it will get changed so won’t go into details.
  4. The QOL fix for Elune’s Fires is great for the current boomkin rotation but it might cause problems at lvl 60.

Here is the problem with the new QOL fix.
All of our DOTs have a 12s duration
The current boomkin rotation is:
starsurge->moonfire->sunfire->starfire->(starsurge->2xwrath->starfire) repeating the brackets
When I tried doing this rotation on the ptr on a dummy I got a mostly consistent behavior. The DOTs were getting refreshed mostly evenly. That used to be a big issue and it’s now fixed. However, next phase we get a 3rd DOT added to our toolkit. Now I am not entirely sure if we are intended to use “insect swarm” in our rotation. If we are not intended to use it then you can leave the rune as it is and everything will work. That being said the only new useful talent that boomkins get with the 10 new points from reaching 60 is “insect swarm” so I am assuming it is intended to be used. If we have to use insect swarm in our rotation then there are two big problems with it.

  1. It does not benefit from the Elune’s Fires rune at all so it does not get extended and ends at a different time compared to your other DOTs.
  2. The new rotation integrating it will look like this:
    starsurge->moonfire->sunfire->starfire->(starsurge->insect swarm->wrath->starfire->starsurge->wrath->wrath->starfire) the brackets are repeating
    So why is this new rotation bad? Well since one of the wrath casts gets replaced with insect swarm that also means that the extension it would provide to sunfire also goes missing. That results in moonfire and sunfire once again having different timings which is what the QOL fix was meant to correct.
    Now I will say again that I am not even sure if we are intended to use “insect swarm”. In fact I would prefer if it wasn’t part of our rotation since it’s just annoying to manage it all the time. It also has a lower dmg output compared to our other DOTs so it might not even be viable. That being said I just wanted to point this out in case we are intended to use it.