Introduction
This guide was written by Koltra, one of the newest additions to the Method raiding roster. Before joining Method, Koltra played in Liquid for Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope, and in BDG for both Vault of the Incarnates and Abberus, the Shadowed Crucible.
Balance Druid Overview
Balance Druid is a specialization that takes your classic “builder-spender” model and expands upon it through amplifying your damage through the application of your damage over time effects: Sunfire and Moonfire.
The core of Balance Druid gameplay will have players maintaining as close to 100% uptime on their Sunfire and Moonfire abilities on as many targets as possible while spending their Astral Power on Starsurge for single target, and Starfall for AoE. Furthermore, Balance Druid utilizes an eclipse system to empower the specialization’s filler abilities, Wrath and Starfire. You will want to enter Solar Eclipse to empower your Wrath on single target, and you will want to enter Lunar Eclipse to empower your Starfire on AoE. If you play with Elune’s Chosen, however, you will enter Lunar Eclipse in every situation.
What has changed
Patch 11.0.5 Changes
With the advent of the 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft, Balance Druid has received significant changes! The goal of these changes were to provide more flexibility around talent selection as well as introduce alternative playstyles. This means you will likely be flexing around a lot more talent points and tailoring the gameplay to what you personally think is best. I will update as new builds emerge and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each.
New talents introduced in 11.0.5 include:
- Whirling Stars: Changes your CDs to have two charges and a cooldown of 100 seconds (note: this can be brought down to 90 seconds with the Potent Enchantments Keeper of the Grove hero talent).
- Astronomical Impact: Increases critical strike damage (not chance!) of Astral abilities by 20%, giving us some much needed Critical Strike scaling.
- Crashing Star: 15% chance for Shooting Stars to instead be a Crashing Star, dealing additional Astral damage and generating 4 Astral Power.
- Hail of Stars: procs Solstice when you spend a free Starsurge or Starfall.
- Sunseeker Mushroom: A choice node with Wild Mushrooms that causes Sunfire damage to proc a Sunseeker Mushroom passively. This is essentially Wild Mushrooms but passive.
- Removal of Starfall as a talent: Starfall is now baseline on Balance Druid. Twin Moons is now in the place Starfall used to be, and Nature’s Grace is now where Twin Moons used to be.
- Change of Nature’s Grace: This talent now no longer does additional damage, but instead only reduces the cast time of builders after you exit an eclipse.
- Adjustment of nodes/slight tuning: Power of Goldrinn is now a one point node and got its damage severely nerfed.
Boomkin is also receiving some additional buffs on the reset of October 29th. This guide has not been created to work around those changes, but it will be updated to accommodate for any adjustments that need to be made afterwards.
Balance Druid TWW Changes
On the transition to The War Within, Balance Druid received a plethora of changes to both the class tree and the specialization tree. Furthermore, the addition of Hero Talents helps supplement existing gameplay, but provides no major gameplay alterations to the fundamental core rotation.
Instead of filling the guide with the abundance of tuning changes that are still a work-in-progress, here are some of the highlights that should help catch up returning Balance Druid while also giving newer Balance Druid players an introduction of what to expect:
- Removal of the core mechanic that Balance Druid has revolved around for three expansions, Primordial Arcanic Pulsar, and reducing the duration of both Celestial Alignment and Incarnation: Chosen of Elune.
- Replacing Primordial Arcanic Pulsar with Greater Alignment to slightly revert the nerfs to Celestial Alignment and Incarnation: Chosen of Elune and provide a small buff to make the cooldown stronger.
- Introduction of new talents, such as Touch of the Cosmos, Stellar Amplification, and Umbral Inspiration.
- Introduction of the two keystone Hero Talents, Elune’s Chosen and Keeper of the Grove.
- Elune’s Chosen enhances Balance Druid gameplay through amplifying Arcane and Astral abilities, such as Starfire, Moonfire, Fury of Elune, New Moon,. Currently, this Hero Talent tree revolves around casting as many Arcane spells as possible to encourage getting more Fury of Elunes out through Lunation.
- Keeper of the Grove revolves around summoning treants through Force of Nature, which in turn provide bursts of damage through Dream Burst. Furthermore, there are a lot of passive buffs littered throughout the tree.
- A redesign of the Druid Class Tree, which sought to reduce some of the strain to take strong utility points such as Feline Swiftness or Remove Corruption.