With the alpha testing of Midnight currently in full swing and having had the chance to play with the changes made to Balance Druid for 12.0, the Dreamgrove community wanted to get our initial feedback out there in an organized fashion. As always, the thoughts below are gathered from and reviewed by members of the Balance Druid theorycrafting community. This thread will be focused on responding to some of the major changes made to the spec and how they feel to play in a PVE context. Reading this, remember that we are still in the early stages of alpha, things can change rapidly, and we are only able to test in limited forms of combat. That being said, we will keep this thread updated to reflect changes to the spec and our thoughts on how they impact gameplay as we move into later portions of the testing cycle. We appreciate you taking the time to consider our feedback and we look forward to seeing how Balance Druid continues to evolve in Midnight and beyond!
New Eclipse System:
The design direction aimed at making Eclipse feel like a meaningful button press that should feel impactful rather than a maintenance buff is great. Testing with that goal in mind, there are a few key pieces of feedback
Eclipse Downtime: Currently, the gameplay outside of Eclipse feels quite bland.
- Due to our rotation being a very simple builder/spender without many relevant procs or additional buttons to press, we spend any time outside of Eclipse spamming 1 button and keeping up dots. While the concept of “building for the next Eclipse” makes sense, the actual gameplay ends feeling very stale.
- Effects like Elune’s Challenge that aim to smooth the gap between Eclipses could aid in this, but would need to be tuned/positioned in the tree appropriately.
The GCD: Eclipse being on the GCD feels clunky as it delays you getting started on what is already a relatively short window to do damage.
- The Lunar and Solar Bolts help to make the GCD of Eclipse feel more impactful, but there are some concerns with their targeting functionality.
- The bolts are currently not coded to fire at our active target. This could potentially lead to a similar issue we already have with Convoke on encounters with immune, irrelevant, or heavily DR’d mobs like on Mug’zee, Dimensius, Nexus-King Salhadaar, Forgeweaver Araz and Cauldron of Carnage.
- Force of Nature also being on the GCD means that when you align those cooldowns you are casting 2 on-GCD spells in a sequence before you can start doing any damage.
- Force of Nature on its own is not a very engaging button to press. Your Treants don’t really do any damage on their own, but pressing it activates the 24% damage increase from your hero talents.
Starlord: With the overhaul to Eclipse, Starlord also saw some changes increasing the duration of the buff to 20 seconds and resetting it whenever you enter a new Eclipse.
- Starlord is a talent that has been a bit polarizing during its existence because of the use of cancel-aura macros in very specific conditions, and it is looking like they will continue to be utilized in Midnight.
Apex Talents:
- The critical strike scaling feature in Ascendant Eclipses is cool and offers a way to gain further value from stats beyond only Mastery which has been a concern in the past.
- The instant cast generators to start each Eclipse feel great as a way to help increase mobility and more quickly generate additional Astral Power. However, these generators currently consume Dreamstate-buffed generators from Nature’s Grace, which devalues the talent.
Cooldowns/Lack of Payoff
Celestial Alignment/Incarnation: Chosen of Elune feel Redundant
- A large part of what made Celestial Alignment feel impactful before was that it served as the controllable window of damage standing in contrast to our otherwise maintenance buff-focused rotation. Now with the Eclipse system filling that role, Celestial Alignment (especially when taking Whirling Stars) just feels like another slightly bigger numbers version of Eclipse.
- It would feel great if pressing our major cooldown was something to look forward to and offered a differentiated moment of excitement/payoff in the rotation, which the spec feels like it’s missing currently. Despite its many hurdles during the PTR cycle, this is a gap in the rotation the 11.2 Keeper of the Grove tier set filled and something that many players were excited for.
Orbital Strike/Whirling Stars
- Orbital Strike will likely continue to be near impossible to take in any PVE builds in Midnight as it currently stands. The increased emphasis on Eclipse uptime will further push us to take the shorter, more flexible cooldown option in Whirling Stars.
- Whirling Stars further makes our primary cooldown feel redundant alongside the new Eclipse system. We now essentially have 2 different keybinds effectively doing the same thing. Both have 2 charges and put you into Eclipse, but one just has bigger damage attached to it. The gameplay loop doesn’t change in a meaningful way.
Aligning Cooldowns
- We have heard a lot of complaints from both experienced and newer Balance Druid players about the desynced nature of our various cooldowns, the impact of various talents on those cooldowns, and Control of the Dream’s interaction with them.
- Force of Nature (60s/45s/30s), Convoke (120s/105s/60s), Celestial Alignment (180s/120s/100s/90s/85s/75s), Trinkets (Generally 60s/90s/120s), and now Eclipse (30s/32s) all have so many different potential cooldown timers that do not cleanly line up with one another. This has led to wide adoption of third party tools being used to pre-map out when exactly you need to use each one to ensure you aren’t losing uptime and then rely on a reminder addon to ensure proper execution. This has led to confusion and a lack of approachability for those wanting to play the spec and feel like they are doing it the “right” way.
- Control of the Dream theoretically offers a unique way of adding flexibility to our cooldowns, but instead has just been required as a way of helping all the different desynced cooldowns fit without losing uptime. If all cooldowns that we need to be using together were on consistent intervals in a way that allowed them to line up without having to pre-solve the jigsaw puzzle, Control of the Dream might be able to provide the flexibility/buffer functionality that it was intended for.
General Rotation/Abilities Feedback
Being GCD locked inside of Eclipse/Celestial Alignment
- The duration of Eclipse/CA feels constrained given the number of different, mostly non-interactive spells that we must fit into the window. This is especially true for builds playing Keeper of the Grove.
- Additionally, talents like Starweaver, Wild Mushrooms, Full Moon, Power of the Dream, and Bounteous Bloom are severely hampered by this dynamic. They are almost never taken in any builds, as their alternatives do not require additional GCDs to make use of in an already GCD locked damage window.
Wild Mushrooms
- When first introduced in Dragonflight, Wild Mushroom was an interesting, on-demand AoE button that added flexible AP generation and helped break up the mundane Wrath/Starfire spam. Unfortunately, it quickly fell out of use after Season 1 due to being limited by its role as a Waning Twilight activator. Now that Waning is gone, it would be good to see the spell return as a core, impactful part of the spec.
- Sunseeker Mushroom was added as a passive alternative at the start of The War Within and despite being tuned slightly worse it has seen more play than the active button has. Even during Season 2 when the tier set made our spenders do 20% more damage to Wild Mushroom targets it was better to take another talent completely over the active Wild Mushroom talent.
Hero Talent VFX
- Both Keeper of the Grove and Elune’s Chosen are lacking in visual effects. For example, updating Force of Nature to be ancients or something similar would make that moment feel much more exciting.
- The VFX is a bit better for Elune’s Chosen, but is mostly carried by the increase in Fury of Elune casts and not the hero talent itself.