I’ve played boomkin a bit through BFA, and throughout all of SL’s season 1, and I was always doing either good or great on it in terms of dps, both in raids and M+. Now, I’m 462 and I can’t crack 100-120k overall dps no matter what I do, I do the same dps on this DH with 15 ilvls less.
It’s specifically bad in M+ because it feels like I’m maintaining dots and eclipses half of the time instead of actually doing damage. I read the compendium and watched Nagura’s guide and am trying to do everything that’s listed. I’m using the m+ build with Elune’s Fury, not capping on ap, firing as many starsurges/starfalls as I can after entering an eclipse for Boat stacks, keeping starlord at 2-3 stacks whenever possible, using solar on 1-2 targets (with starfall at 2+) and lunar above 3, using the flask+rune+potion during incarn etc etc etc, and it still sucks.
I was doing all of that with the luxthor weakaura pack to track everything, and then tried using Hekili for one run to see if anything changes, but it doesn’t. I try to moonfire every mob but it it’s very hard to track if I got all of them with moon/sunfire with how many mobs there are and how erratic they’re moving all the time.
It feels like there’s so much constant micro managing especially with boss fights that are constantly rotating between having 0 ads, and 1 or 2-3 ads, because so much of the rotation is directly tied to the number of enemies. Then even there are 3 or more, I’m never sure if starfire is hitting all of them or if they’re spread out just enough for it to be a dps loss if it’s hitting only 1-2.
I really don’t recall it being this draining in SL s1 where convoke was the main spell that you were setting up and then blasting fools like there’s no tomorrow. Now it feels like it’s both harder to play and that it performs much worse. The highest key I’ve done on the druid is 18 so far, and I won’t be doing 20+ keys ever because I just find them tedious in general. Does balance just suck in keys below 20 or is there some secret ingredient that I’m missing?
If you don’t run higher keys, switch class. Boomie has ramp up time and before you even start, dh or bm will decimate any pack.
This is much less of a problem in higher keys as the initial burst of some broken classes is what’s giving you this impression. The longer packs live the more the damage between classes will even out.
It’s not you it’s the devs incapable separating pvp and pve. If they’d bring the orbital strike change from ptr we wouldn’t have that problem. Unfortunately it was ditched on ptr and we’re once again dog tier in casual key segment.
it is not that bad anymore, really.
During the pull you set up your dots and than just press starfall all over and over.
I am not familar with balance at all but in the dungeon I played I got still 160k overall dps and most dmg just came from starfall. (ilvl 460 at that time with a healer trinket :x)
isn’t the standard build to play New Moon?
I don’t know but I just smash starfall all day and throw moons to generate AP and I can get fairly ok dps without even knowing what the heck I am suppose to do.
for me at 18-20 keylevel trash dies so fast that i cant do proper damage. with classes like outlaw, havoc who can deal easy 500k-1mio in a pull meanwhile im still dotting targets and go into eclipse, ramp up ap and cast starfall not fun class at all. maybe its better at +25-30.
i think the spec is outdated for normal content. not fast enough to compete vs other classes. you need very big pulls and they need to love at least for 1min until you added moonfire to all of them. our mastery is utter garbage and i lost mastery vs s2. had 40% now i have like 20 because of season scaling. I think it was always like that because mastery scales differently.
i switched to ww monk and sometimes feral. much more fun for relatively low keys. but feral suffers from the same thing. keep the dots up. best spec is guardian and resto for sure
and yes in sl balance was super fun! until we had to go venthyr which sckt
I switched to warlock for my usual key range (+20-21) or resto druid… Balance dps is unbearable compared to hunters or DH in “low” keys. It’s a joke how the balancing is tailored towards a playerbase which is less than 1%
Orbital strike was the solution to this problem finally an they scrapped it because they are too incompetent to finally separate pvp from pve.
Balance in SL was fun during the last season where pulsar procced orbital strike and had lower cooldown. It was awesome and they did it by chance. It was not even planned yet they learned nothing from it.
I completely agree with this and don’t frankly see the point of having a spec balanced around the content range that a tiny minority of the playerbase is doing. My experience in keys up to 18 on that boomkin sucks too, and it feels the worst of all when you have to alternate between ST and 3-4 adds phases.
I have brain freeze trying to figure out how long the adds will live for, whether they will be stacked for starfire/lunar to be worth it, or should I continue with solar and wrath and do 0 aoe dps.
I only played balance in S1 of SL so not sure how it worked later, but being able to cast during starfall and not having to micro manage eclipse non stop + having Convoke made the class way more fun in both raid and M+.
haha yes it sucks some people recommended that the sunfire aoe talent in the class tree should be moonfire aoe so its easier to dot all targets because it takes soooooo many gcd to start with damage and then its usually over
Yeah something like that is absolutely necessary for M+. Dot classes in general are just completely unadjusted to the most popular PvE game mode in the game and are still designed around single target/cleave boss fights like it’s 2012.
Either have moonfire be auto applied like sunfire, or have starfire apply it to affected targets so you can start blasting right away. Frankly I wish they do away with eclipse as well because it’s just incompatible with content that asks you to change and prioritize a type of damage on the fly.
oh yes either go back to empowerments we had in bfa or remove it entirely and let us use whatever we need. its annoying spamming wrath and then stop and cast 2x starfire. i know they want a kind of “rotation” for the spec but eclipse and the dots are reason balance does zero damage in normal content.
tbh i enjoyed empowerments much more than eclipse. with eclipse you have to think too much like is it worth to go into aoe eclipse now or does the group die too fast and we hit the 20mio elite for the next min
Like everyone stated its a ramp class. But i wouldn’t agree its impossible to do damage.
Id run fury of elune on any key below 20, cause it gives you burst. Not due to furys damage, but the AP it generates. Helps you spam spenders faster.
Also, start tracking your Pulsar proccs. Try to make sure you have pulsar (or incarn) for as many packs as possible. Also, if you have a big pull and you actually dot everything, you should not be starved of AP at that point.
If someone says they have to build up AP after dotting a big pull then they have either not dotted everything, or they’re trolling.
If its a pull of 10 mobs, dotting all of them and going into eclipse should be more than enough to fill your AP bar. Dump, and start spamming starfire.
People say boomie is easy, and to a degree I agree. But to get really good at it takes effort.
And ofc, like everyone already said, the higher keys are better for our damage due to the ramp time.
But manage your pulsar procs better. That can make 20-40k dps overall difference just to do that. Dont waste it.
I’ve seen people mention pulsar tracking but I’m not sure I entirely understand what I can do about it since it’s tied to our main spenders?
The only way to manage it seems to be to not use up spenders for some time (maybe when a big pack is coming up?) but that would also cost me dps while I’m doing it and overcapping ap in the process?
Imo it’s not an easy spec at all because of all the micromanaging and planning ahead which I personally don’t like because it’s kinda tedious. I’ve always loved boomkins and I still like the abilities and how it plays in simple ST fights, but it feels too punishing to zone out even for a moment because you might fall into the wrong eclipse, spend ap before starlord has gone out, not have full ap for boat procs at the start of the eclipse, make sure I’m casting the right filler depending on the eclipse and number of targets which can often conflict etc etc.
There’s all of this micro decision making that’s never ending and you have to do all of it to do even decent damage. I benched the character for now because of all of that but I’ll give it another go at some point for sure.
Another minor pet peeve is that I usually start casting starfire or wrath to enter the right eclipse when the previous one is ending, and that means that I waste one of the 2 procs of 2pc bonus because I’m instinctively trying to re-enter eclipse asap.
not fun class at all. maybe its better at +25-30.