I have to ask, does the blizzard balancing team care about M+ balance at all? Balance druid has been one of the lowest performing specs of the season, its so bad that even the top rated balance druids might not even get the title. And with the latest series of buffs to other classes it just made it worse.
The core issue of balance druid right now is the inability to spend all the astral power we can generate on AoE damage. It leads to some of the lowest overall damage performance in keys.
A proposed fix i would give is to make starfall stackable with diminishing damage/make starsurge cleave/make convoke perform better on aoe, but there are also multiple other options they could be given to address the issue.
They are also one of the lowest performing raid specs in terms of damage altho their damage profile/utility still makes them desirable and in a decent state in raid thus buffs towards their raid performance are not needed i would say.
It would be quite sad to have to wait till the next expansion to see this addressed and I would really like to get some feedback whether the balancing team even knows or cares about this.
I don’t think they could make starfall better without making boomie broken in some raid encounters. But a good buff for starfire and sunfire maybe would do the trick for m+. + Plus maybe a small buff for wrath to balance out st sustain dmg without making us even more reliant on our burst window.
Nope its more important to make sure that all 3 Mage specs are S tier in every content… Who cares if Feral sucks for multiple xpacs or that no Druid dps spec is competitive right?
What? Just make the starfall caped at 20-30 stars and make it 1 minute 30 CD like it used be
and you will deal a lot of AOE dmg bring back mushrooms so you can deal a lot of dmg in SOLAR phase with them and it’s good because you can move and place them.
This starfall is garbage yes you have it every 10 or so second because of talent but you need to ramp it
why not make it CD that will do a lot of dmg?
There is a solution to every problem people have with their specs
blizzard just needs to drop the optimized spells and utility so we not BROKE something in our E-SPORT game
you know maybe try for once to make this game FUN again?
really hate your solution. current starfall is a really good bit of gameplay with astral shift even in st fights + a long cd would be the last thing a specc that already has really bad sustain dmg needs. my current idea would be giving us back hurrican as ap spender and let it work like bfa starfall.
I liked shrooms a lot. Also for resto it was peak druid game design during MoP. The overall problem, not being able to spend AP really needs to be addressed.
Not just in m+, its balance in general. Sure people argue that balance is still played a lot (in raids ex.) due to utility like rebirth, innervate, mass root, root, aoe silence, typhoon and vortex. I get it, druids has a nice set of utilities and their decently tanky. However the dmg is så low in all scenarios and the worst thing is, to fix it, they can roll back previous nerfs, such as nerfs to NF or venthyr and maybe remove the cd on starfall with stellar drift, buff other legendaries but pulsar. However, rolling back or tuning legendaries isnt even enough to make it fun probably,
Their probably rethinking balance entirely (I hope so at least) for 10. I doubt they will do a lot for us in the remaning time of Shadowlands, same as they did nothing for feral in the first 2/3rds of Shadowlands.
Its not just working around the AP thats the issue, its the entire spec thats off. Forced into specific eclipses on rotation, playing around incarn together with AP and relying on procs such as venthyr shade, changeling and IQD and a 3min main cd forces you to play only pulsar - which to be fair, isnt even a fun legendary, just adds a new thing into your rotation which forces you to overcap AP if you play anything but venthyr.
In general the entirety of boomie is pretty ruined, 9.2 just made it worse with forcing pulsar that screws up the rotation even more.
I wish Blizzard was more proactive with blueposts regardling class balance in general. Playing a dead spec is one thing, but the fact that you dont know for how long that spec is dead is another.
Balance was fun when there was no CD on starfall. You got to choose whether to use starfall instead of starsurge on high movement fights even though the spell itself was a dps loss because the cost of stopping casting to move might be higher. It made it interesting.
Sure people argue that balance is still played a lot (in raids ex.) due to utility like rebirth, innervate, mass root, root, aoe silence, typhoon and vortex. I get it, druids has a nice set of utilities and their decently tanky.
This is the case now however if you have reviewed the tree, they are cutting our utility. They can fix the AP stuff but they should not be doing this by reducing our utility.
In order to fix balance druid they would need a complete rework.
It doesnt have proper scaling or synergies between 2ndary stats. Because of this they just set starting numbers high, leading to it beeing really good at start of expacs but slowloy falling to the bottom happened in bfa as well.
So far the talent tree looks really awkward. No paths or logical combinations. Just an awkward puzzle to try finding all the abilities needed to actually play.
I doubt they got competent enough people to actually do the rework needed.
I’ve been playing balance in keys a bit lately (usually play feral) and I was thinking the same thing. Especially with the 4-piece, starfall needs to stack. As it is you end up using most of the extra AP on starsurge because starfall is already active or on CD, and starsurge isn’t doing much in AOE.
Stacking SF would be overkill. Then they at least need to tune it down dps wise. Imagine Pantheon, Anduin or other AE bosses with stacking SF and frenzy. Would be way to op
I like the idea but if they leave the Damage from SF as it is and make it stackable it would create the next meta spec. M+ would be fine but for raid it is too strong
Although neither Cenarius nor Malfurion played a role or had any appearance in SL, they created an entire SL realm linked to natural forces, nature based classes, guardian of the Emerald Dream Ysera and consequently the source of druid power. Convoke before its nerf made balance druids very strong also for a short time span. Rightfully so, minding the long and tragic history of devs ruining the spec with their experimental approach.
It can be assumed that there were plans to improve the class in the beginning of the expansion. But then, 28 druids unfortunately decided to show off their new gained power clearing Castle Nathria within the blink of an eye and doing up to 1 million damage in seconds while all hitting convoke at the same time… And the devs are scared until this very day about how incapable they actually are to balance a space called balance… That’s why they rather punish the entire balance community with letting the spec drown in nothingness than lay hands on the fragile, uncontrollable monster they’ve created over the years with nerfing balance to death.
Minding that since said happening, an entire scandal rolled over the company and they had a pile of other… fecal matter to deal with regarding the player base being fed up with their course, they probably considered the balance issue, once again, non-priority. And here we are, back again, at the peak of irrelevance.
epic fail