I have been a boomkin main since p1 and it’s getting harder and harder to enjoy the game when it feels like the dev team has no understanding of what makes the spec fun and it consistently being bottom dps competing only with arcane mage and shadow priest. I was holding out hope that it was just growing pains and that once we got to level 60 those problems would get fixed but after seeing the new tier set and the new rune it seems to me it’s a fundamental design problem that has been causing all of the issues boomkins have been having. Since the dev team has said that the classes in the ptr are not final I would like to point out all of the issues and the solutions to them in hopes that they get implemented before p4 goes live and boomkins go extinct.
Before I begin to explain my view of the current state of boomkins I would like to state something very important that seems to get ignored quite a lot! Boomkins are a dps spec! They are no longer a utility spec in SOD! Just because I can cast innervate on a healer or once in a blue moon throw a single heal does not mean that balance druid is not a dps caster. I keep seeing people trying to justify boomkins being bottom dps because “they have utility”. That was true in vanilla but it is no longer the case in SOD. With all the new runes and spells added to all the classes boomkin has either the same amount of utility or in some cases even less utility than the “dps casters” of vanilla. With that being said let’s get to my gameplay thoughts.
The first and most important thing I want to cover, because this will serve as the basis for all my other arguments, is what makes boomkin fun to play. The main reason boomkin is fun to play is because it’s what I like to call a “gamba spec”. What do I mean by that? It’s simple. The fun comes from critical hits. Balance druid excels at making you feel great when you score a crit. Now you might think to yourself that this is the same for every other class but you would be wrong. The reason boomkin crits feel better is because they are more than just a simple damage increase. When you score a critical hit with a boomkin in addition to the damage being higher you also get to trigger the dreamstate rune, which gives you mana regen and also puts a debuff on the enemy that increases nature damage, but most importantly you trigger the nature’s grace talent which makes your next cast 0.5s faster. It may not seem like a lot at first glance but triggering nature’s grace is one of the 2 main dopamine spike moments in your rotation. The reason it’s so good is because of the Wrath spell having a 1.5s cast time. When you have the nature’s grace proc active and you cast Wrath, it reduces not just the cast time but also the GCD so you get to cast faster than the GCD. Now if your 1s cast Wrath also crits you get to do it again. When you have a high crit chance this can result in what I like to call “machine gun mode” which feels amazing.
Alright so what is the second dopamine spike? Unsurprisingly it’s when you manage to score a Starfire crit. I don’t think I need to elaborate too much on this as it seems the devs understand that this feels good and it’s in a good state at the moment.
Finally let’s talk about how DOTs feel. Throughout the entirety of SOD druid dots have felt really underwhelming and more like a filler between the feel good moments of your rotation. From my own personal experience I have tried to avoid using them whenever I get the chance. In p1 I built my gear in such a way that it made only wrath spam a completely viable dps rotation. In phase 2 I did a different build that focused on getting as much crit chance as possible so that my optimal dps rotation consisted of Starsurge, Starfire, Wrath and only using DOTs when I had to cast on the move. In p3 DOTs got an improvement but it came at the cost of a huge QOL decrease, which I will cover in more detail in their own section of the post, so I once again did everything I could to get my hands on as much crit chance as possible even at the cost of spellpower (I believe the ST staff is boomkin bis and not the one hander even after they gave the staff shadow damage and increased the spellpower of the dagger).
So why am I telling you all of this? For one simple reason. I want to really drive home the point that the main stat that makes boomkins fun is critical chance. It’s not INT, it’s not spellpower, it’s not mana regen and it’s not the bonus armor you get from boomkin form. All you have to do to make a boomkin happy is to give them a piece of gear that increases crit chance. I will cover stats and gearing a bit more in their own section but first I want to cover the last big design problem that has been plaguing boomkin since the start of p3.
Boomkins should be designed as a single target dps spec! I want to draw big attention to this because the dev team have been taking the good parts of the spec and watering them down just so they can accommodate AOE spells that nobody uses. This started with phase 3 and the improved hurricane rune. This rune is completely useless and a waste of a rune slot. I have yet to find a use for it even once since the single target damage you can do in the same time is way more useful and costs less mana. It is also unusable for outdoor activities since you have no way slowing the mobs (like a mage can with blizzard) which results in them instantly coming to you and preventing you from casting hurricane because it gets instantly cancelled from spell pushback. I have been using the resto rune Barkskin instead and even that is only useful in pvp so the whole rune slot might as well not even exist for boomkins. I thought that it was obvious that this was the case and that the devs would learn from it but it seems I was wrong. The new boomkin rune is yet another AOE spell that is almost as useless as hurricane which means boomkin is now 2 runes behind other classes in power level and you can easily see that by it being bottom dps for the entirety of phase 3. The only thing the spell has going for it is that it thematically feels better and it doesn’t suffer from the pushback issue but it makes itself mostly useless with a 90s cooldown since one cast of it is not enough to kill a group of mobs, therefore it’s not usable for open world farming. Please stop giving balance druids useless AOE and instead give them single target damage or utility instead.
Alright now that I have laid out my general design problems with the current state of boomkins I want to cover some problems more in-depth and give my solutions to fix the spec.
Runes - As covered above the 2 main offenders here are the improved hurricane and the new Starfall rune. They are a terrible fit for the spec and need a complete overhaul. Here is what I would do to fix them.
Gale Winds (Improved hurricane) - There are 2 ways to go about fixing this rune. What I would personally do is completely scrap this rune and replace it with either a rune that gives you a single target threat reduction ability or with a rune that gives you a steroid ability similar to icy veins that gives you either more spellpower or preferably a crit chance increase for a short duration. Alternatively if you really want to keep the rune as an improvement to hurricane then you have to make it so the rune gives a further mana discount to hurricane and also make it completely remove spell pushback while channeling hurricane. This is the only way to make it anywhere near viable but I would still strongly advocate for scrapping it altogether since it’s a bad fit for the class.
Starfall rune - At its current state the rune has pretty much no use for single target situations which ,as I outlined in my gameplay section, is the bread and butter of boomkins. At best it’s an additional DOT that is weaker than your basic moonfire and sunfire DOTs since it doesn’t benefit from the Elune’s fires rune and it has a 90s cooldown on top.
The way I would fix the rune to make it viable is by adding 2 things to it. First make it so when a star hits a boss monster it applies a debuff for 15-20s to it called for example “Moon sickness” that either increases arcane damage taken by 15% (example number) or if you want to lay more into the utility nature of boomkins 10% all spell damage taken (this can kill 2 birds with 1 stone by helping bridge the gap between melee and caster dps). The second change in addition to that is to make the spell cd get reduced by let’s say 2s every time a single target spell crit occurs and make the base cd 2 or 3 mins. This ties in nicely with the rest of the boomkin kit that wants to get as much crit chance as possible. Also I will cover this in the next segment but the Tier set should not reduce the cd of the rune.
Elune’s Fires - This rune has a big QOL issue. On paper it looks like it helps you evenly extend your active DOTs. The problem is that in practice due to the Wrath spell having travel time it reaches the target too late and sunfire expires before it can get extended. Moonfire on the other hand keeps getting extended since starfire has no travel time. This in turn leads to you having to reapply sunfire while your moonfire still has plenty of time left on the target. This causes your DOTs to get mismatched timings and it’s extremely annoying to constantly have to look at which one has expired and needs to be reapplied. I don’t really care in what way this QOL issue gets resolved but I would like to see both dots get evenly extended and expire at the same time as I assume it was intended originally when the rune was added.
Additionally to the QOL changes I would like to see this rune add the ability for DOTs to crit to make them feel more exciting and make them synergize with the crit chance which is your main stat. Alternatively this DOT crit effect could be offered as a separate new rune on the head slot if the hurricane rune rework doesn’t happen.
You may think that adding these changes sounds like too much added power but boomkins are bottom dps at the moment (and have been for quite a while) so they have plenty of room before they get to an even state with other dps.
With runes being covered let’s talk about gear!
Tier set - The new tier set bonuses for boomkin are beyond garbage. Back when the tier sets were first teased there were some promising effects shown such as DOT ticks giving you a % dmg increase on your next single target cast spells. What happened to that? Instead the new tier set gives us improved thorns??? Cooldown reduction on the new rune that will likely see no use??? I guess the 4 set bonus giving spell hit is nice but other than that there is nothing useful. How am I supposed to turn the improved thorns into damage? Boomkin tanking? It is completely incompatible with the way the spec is played. This is the kind of effect you give to bear tanks not the dps caster owl. I really hope there was some kind of error in the datamining because if these are the tier effects then the ST Tier set will unironically be better at 60. The ST set was designed so well for boomkins so I don’t know how we go from that to this. Boomkins want crit chance, hit chance and spell damage. That’s it. Not a a bunch of useless buffs to unusable spells.
Here is what the tier set should look like. Get the ST effect of giving wrath and starfire bonus crit chance and add that as the 2-set bonus instead of the improved thorns. The 4-set giving hit is fine I don’t see a reason to change it. Make the 6-set what it was originally supposed to be with DOTs increasing the damage of your single target spells so they can feel more fun to use. It was perfect so I don’t see why you decided to move away from it. Alternatively if you don’t have time to implement that just put a flat spell power or crit chance increase as a 6-set bonus.
As for the stats on the items they don’t seem to be accurate on Wowhead but judging by the T0 gear I very much agree with removing spirit from the boomkin gear and I would even recommend cutting down the amount of stamina it gives to go for a more glass canon archetype of caster similar to the radioactive set from Gnomer. The stat budget from removing spirit and stamina should be spent on helping us get hit cap as boomkins don’t have talents that help with that and most importantly give us as much crit chance as possible even if it’s at the expense of spellpower.
Non-tier gear - Pretty much the same stat prio as I gave for the tier pieces - No spirit, less stamina, crit chance>spellpower>int. And of course enough hit chance sprinkled in.
Now that I have explained my thoughts on gear let’s move to the elephant in the room and the reason boomkins have been so underpowered for so long.PVP. For the love of all that is holy please just put a flat dmg reduction on starfire when hitting a player and spread that power around the kit. The main reason PVE boomkins have been in such a sorry state is because you are too worried of them being too oppressive in PVP. The only reason people don’t like boomkins in pvp is because of starfire doing a lot of burst damage. That’s it. The rest of the boomkin kit is not good for pvp. It is all getting carried by starfire. We have no reliable cc, we have no interrupt, and the little healing we can do is all rng based on a wrath proc. If a melee player decides they want to kill you, you are dead and there is nothing you can do about it. Root them? Oh the wonders that will do for you when it’s your only cc and they just break it with a trinket. After that interaction there is nothing more you can do. No way to escape, no way to fight back, you just sit there and die. The situation is not better with casters either. The only thing a boomkin can 1v1 is a healer. The reason it has the reputation of being op is because it’s a glass cannon that works well and can do a lot of damage when there is a frontline. Other than that it’s irredeemable. So please just nerf the pvp dmg of starfire and spread it around the kit somehow. I am not a big pvp player so I can’t give you good ideas in this regard but I am tired of PvE boomkin being bad because of pvp.
Well then that’s it for my essay! I really hope the dev team has enough time to pivot the direction boomkin is going before the release of p4 or at least by 1 or 2 weeks in. I really don’t want a repeat of boomkins being a meme spec you bring to MC just for the spell crit aura.
-To the WoW dev team from Silverloon (a concerned boomkin)
TLDR:
Boomkin has a fundamental design problem of being treated as a utility class instead of the dps class that it now is in SOD.
Boomkins are a single target dps spec. Stop giving us useless AOE.
Crit chance is love.
DOTs don’t feel good.
The Improved hurricane and starfall runes need a big rework.
The Elune’s Fires rune needs a QOL fix.
Tier Set is complete garbage. The ST one is unironically better.
Stat prio that boomkins want is crit chance>spellpower>int, no spirit, less stamina.
Pvp balance concerns are keeping pve boomkin in the gutter.
P.S. If anyone has access to the US SOD PTR Forum and you found this post useful, then please repost it there so it has a higher chance of being seen by the devs more quickly.
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