Druid Runes Feedback / Rework

In Development Season of Discovery Phase 4 PTR
1

Hey everybody,

some adjustments are really good and suit me quite well. Tree of Life without the Movement debuff, the Swipe Rune is brilliant, and the adjustment to Wild Growth is really well done. As a Boomie, Wild Growth was always too OP. Starfall is also a great addition for Boomie and likely covers its biggest weakness so far.

However, I am a bit disappointed with the adjustments to the existing runes:

  1. Wild Strikes and Survival of the Fittest should not be on the same slot. As a Druid Tank, you are almost forced to always play Wild Strikes. Thus, you are currently the only tank that is not Critimmune.
  2. Skullbash should not be on the same slot as Mangle and Sunfire. I can’t think of a single scenario where you would choose Skullbash over Mangle or Sunfire.
  3. There is not a single useful rune for the Tank Druid on the Wrist Slot. A possible adjustment would be to swap Improved Frenzied Regen with Wild Strikes accordingly.
  4. Regardless of the runes, I think the Druid design should push more towards a hybrid role. The set bonus for Guardian with Battlerezz and Innervate is a good start, but it’s unfortunate that these options are only available as a set bonus – which leads to Pure Tank / Feral DPS not standing out much from the “original” classes. The playstyle is otherwise almost identical. For example, it would be cool if, as Feral, you had to include a nuke/heal in the rotation to trigger a buff, making hybrid play meaningful. Similarly with the Tank Druid. As a Guardian, you could get a short-term damage reduction buff when shifting out of bear form, allowing more use of the druid toolkit. Druid is the class that can do everything – it would be great if the playstyle reflected that.

I can’t say much about balancing – In P3, druid felt very strong in every spec in PvP, but in PvE, it was mainly taken along for the buffs. The damage is rather average in all three possible specs compared to competing classes. The rune adjustments won’t change that, but maybe the items will. This is really hard to test… we would need logs from 2-3 weeks.

Alright, those were my 2 cents – no idea if anyone is even looking at stuff in europe, but whatever :smiley:

2

One of the more annoying things i noticed just by checking last night. the rune setups clunky for Resto.

P3 - Introduced our only caster rune on the feet slot, Dreamstate , which allows us to gain some mana regen, from our damaging spell crits.

P4 - Tree of Life - gives you the whole Healing buff etc, but if you cast any damaging abilities, it then brings you out of Tree form.

this just feels really meh to me, if you are looking to have people fit in some wraths to try and proc the mana regen because really annoying if you have to keep going back into Tree form before healing etc. using mana to activate the form.

Just my 2 cents.

As for Balance, while Starfall is a cool ability for AoE, im just wondering where Boomkin will stand given we got zero single target damage increase in P3 really, the runes ended up being improved Barkskin and elunes fires, which just extended dot duration, so yea it saved some GCDs and mana i guess before reapplying dots but just felt lack luster in terms of damage increase.

Starfall again only looks to be really good in AoE situation (on a 1.5min CD til you get full set) in dungeons, so again i feel like Boomkin will be meh in Raiding scene.