For those druids who don’t know, sunfire no longer cleaves onto targets unless you spend an extra talent point which has just been moved much further away from the sunfire talent node itself.
My question is, WHY? Baseline sunfire is always a wasted talent point.
Let’s compare the two spells in my spellbook to find out why:
Moonfire
Mana cost: 3000
Initial hit: 2773
Total DoT damage: 29398
Total damage: 32171
Approx damage per mana: 10.72
Sunfire (without cleave)
Mana cost: 6000
Initial hit: 1802
Total DoT damage: 19108
Total damage: 20910
Approx damage per mana: 3.49
Note: I’m a resto druid but the same applies for other specs
So in summary, moonfire is 3x the efficiency of sunfire if the latter does not cleave. So why are these two sunfire talent nodes now so far apart in the tree? Who in their right mind wants to spend one talent point on baseline sunfire?
You’d never use sunfire in raid because you would never ever want to press such an expensive spell when we’re already quite mana hungry as healers. One sunfire is the same cost as one rejuv and just over half the cost of a wild growth. Even if it cleaves you would never press it since most raid encounters require more healing than DPS from the healers and most raid fights are mostly ST anyway…
In M+, you’d never want to press sunfire without it cleaving because it does less damage per cast of moonfire and M+ is mostly AoE.
So here are some suggestions that no one at Blizzard will read:
Move the sunfire talent nodes back to where they were and stop messing up the class tree
Bake the AoE component of sunfire into the baseline node and come up with some better talent rather than just creating pointless filler. (My preferred option)
If you really don’t want to do 1 or 2 for some reason then at least significantly reduce the mana cost of the baseline version of Sunfire and make it so that taking the AoE cleave version of sunfire increases the mana cost. This is not unprecedented - our undergrowth talent works in the same way since it reduces the healing of LB but allows for it to be cast on two targets.
You’re asking for a lot here my friend, Blizzard thinks that spending points on abilitys or passives like Sunfire AoE is a fun and rewarding leveling experience to mimic or improve upon the older class talent trees from before MoP.
Yeah, they’re out of touch extremely, but hey, they are… trying.
When aoe is built into a ability the ability itself can no longer be balanced in a ST fight. What blizzard are doing is allowong the druids kit to be balanced in a ST enviroment and then the AoE nodes will cost enough talents to balance that out in its AoE build.
Otherwise u end up with a class which only has use in a cleave enviroment because everythings tuned around hitting multiple targets.
Is it perfectly balanced, likely not. It never is first time round, we got a late revamp issues are bound to rise, but its obvious what theyre actually going for.
You see this may be what they’re TRYING to do but as my post demonstrates, they have failed to achieve this. If they wanted to balance SF in ST then why does it do half the damage for twice the mana cost? It doesn’t make sense on any level and when you write it out on paper it’s pretty bleeding obvious.
It’s just indefensibly poor game design and combined with the class tree changes for druid (that are offensively terrible) and the guardian reworks, it gives me very little faith in the druid class devs at the moment
You know why they’re doing this? Because they did the druid class tree first before any others, made some bad design choices (like not enough connections between the spec columns, 3-point nodes etc.) and then ran out of time to fix them because the expansion was rushed, AGAIN. So they couldn’t come up with enough spells to put in the talent tree so they split sunfire into two nodes to make the numbers work and called it a day.
No theyre doing this, because the dev who did the druid tree quit mid way through DFs development. And the new dev didnt join til like a month or 2 before the expansions drop.
The reason druids was done “first” was because it wasnt worked on at all they just dropped everytging we already had into a tree to begin testing.
You say does half the dmg. Which is a damage tuning issue, while then commenting on design, number tuning and design are nothing to do with each other.
It’s a design issue because the whole point of sunfire has always been that it’s more expensive because it cleaves onto multiple enemies and seperating this functionality out without changing the baseline spell IS a design problem
I just raised my druid and he got nerfed. It was sad news when I saw today that the talents have changed.
My favorite class that I’ve been playing for over 13 years now looks like a joke. Bears are the worst tank… When a cat deals damage from invisibility, the game breaks… Moonkin, I don’t even want to say anything about a Moonkin.
The bad news didn’t end there for me. Then I went to my main Draktir. I saw that the temporary anomaly through which I spent the main bursts, now a broken talent. The talent spends shields on anything other than players. And I think that I will have to change the role to dps, and wait in queues for 1 hour together with everyone. Since the nerfs to S-tier healers will obviously force a lot of people to switch specializations.
I believe I read somewhere that to be more inclusive, Blizz hired a bunch of people who have an additional chromosome. They must be part of the druid design team now.
I mean, I get that they nerf resto druids due there overperformance in M+ but this sunfire talent change is just a straight up sucker punch right in the face. It not only destroys the dps output but also kills the fun, playstyle and efficiency of druids.
With that being said, the talent tree is uncreative anyway since they pretty much just took half our abilities and turned them into talents. Most of these abilities are absolute baseline necessities to be able to perform. Guess they ran out of ideas or budget since it’s just a small indy company anyway
