To whom it may concern,
I am a multi-cutting balance druid player with an experience back from battle for azeroth.
Starsurge:
- Starsurge has been weak ever since dragonflight beta, this is because of the talent inflation and with the pulsar build back in the day.
- The following is in the blue post of changes in dragonflight:
- Starsurge – Costs 40 Astral Power (was 30). Damage reduced by 35%.
- Ever since this nerf has gone live, starsurge has never seen the light of day. This nerf was a quality of life nerf and a huge damage nerf for balance druid. For some reason this change is not reverted even though starsurge is really bad and the ratio of starfall and starsurge should be 50/30, it is the perfect range as this is good in terms of quality of life and damage.
- Starsurge base cost should really be 30 and anything higher than that is just bad, if its about other talents have a reduce cost then just remove the reduce cost talents and leave starfall and starsurge as 50/30 like it always have been.
- I am speaking historically, shadowlands starsurge was the optimal and best way for starsurge, balance druid single was really good.
- This change has been brought because of pulsar damage inflation, even though pulsar is removed starsurge cost is still 40, I mean blizzard come on just revert this 30 and starsurge will be good again.
Starfall:
- Before I proceed with starfall suggestion, there is going to be a lot of hate on this suggestion. I am saying this preemptively just hear me out and consider this change.
- Starfall is a unique ability that no other aoe ability in this game has this feature, which is obvious and it’s the widespread aoe damage.
- This feature was really cool whenever they brought it back in shadowlands (btw I played the legion version and shadowlands version) but with time it has become really bad to play with.
- It is having the same effect as grippy hands as blizzard are trying to design bosses around starfall usage.
- As much as this ability is really fun, it has become a liability. For example, in every council boss blizzard has to reconsider starfall, and its like they keep nerfing starfall just because of this feature and it really sucks, like most aoe raid profiles, starfall is useless. Because of how adds get one shot and starfall its considered as a slow ramp ability.
- I suggest starfall should be reverted to a targeted area instead of having it widespread, similar to rain of fire. Even though rain of fire has a big downside of having the adds stay still or destro warlocks become useless, rain of fire was really strong ability in many patches in the past.
- No matter how fun starfall is now, its not that fun in raids as there are many classes have better profiles that balance druid (am talking about huge aoe burst instead of slow ramp.) In mythic plus it doesn’t matter how unique the ability is as long as your class deals damage then you are in.
- Believe it or not starfall is really strong in mythic plus but balance druid are not taken in mythic plus just because of how starfall is unique, instead they are brought because of how strong their damage is.
- If starfall is reverted, it should also be buffed, because if it is an area targeted ability it means that it has a huge downside, just compensate that the a damage increase on the ability and it should be fine, at least balance will be strong on small bursts.
- Perhaps maybe there should be a talent where starfall duration is less and it deals more damage and that would promote its small window of aoe burst damage, as this is what is missing for balance druid.
As we are stepping into the new expansion, I hope the developers take a look at this post and consider some changes of how to compensate balance druid in raids, since balance druid damage for the last 2 expansions was really bad.