[Balance] Buff?

[vorchun]

OK means OK. You do not have to be in 4/4 of the top guilds in the world clearing Mythic content the first week to be considered OK.

Obviously it means that! Just ask that dude posting bullshit about no boomkins in world-first kill. He also conveniently forgot to mention there were also no rets, elems/enhs, muti/sub rogues etc, like 3/4 of all dps specs in the game. They all are not viable and not OK, right? Class-stacking? Nah, never heard of it.

I won't even mention that post I replied to was about mythic+ DUNGEONS, not raid. But hey, let's ChickenChaser whine, it seems he can't do anything else.

[Blizzyb]

Its snapshotting the Fulmination trinket its literly the only way this class is even somewhat viable atm... Expect big buffs in 7.1 or else alot of the top raiders you see playing moonkin will be rerolling for nighthold. In the next 2 weeks Im going to probably be leveling a warlock to go with my mage in case we don't get a 7.1 Buff.

Care to elaborate on this some more? I did a decent amount of searching on the trinket for balance druid, but couldn't find anything. Sounds like this trinket is clearly BiS and changes your play style as well.

[wing5wong]

Balance is pretty bad right now. in raids and mythic+ and there is a good chance going into 7.1 we are either buffed or have our damage redistrubed in a way that helps our damage IE moving away from dots to single target so they can buff us without fear of us becoming multidot gods.

I wrote a little bit about it here trying to drum up discussion but didn't really turn into much.
http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20749805139#1

Il add to it when i get home. We are currently 5/7M, and with hunters, mage, spriest and even warlock available we just dont stand a chance.
I was in for dragons, and perform well there, but everything else, even ilgynoth, we are far surpassed by other classes.

You have no idea what're you talking about, right? I successfully cleared multiple +7-10 on my boomkin, I was usually top dps on bosses, and kept on par with others on trash. Nobody cares if boomkin can't do gazillion dps on lower difficulties trash, spec isn't about that.

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Balance is ok right now, anybody saying otherwise have no clue how to play it. Try DH maybe?

7-10 is easily cleared. How about a 15?
You're telling some of the best boomkins in the world they have no idea how to play it.

I think that's the thing: balance is just okay.

When you compare it to all specs, it's mid pack. In the context of raiding, though, where pretty much each class is playing the top spec of its class, balance shifts lower overall so it's generally—in the context of a raid—a below average spec.

Overall moonkin damage is fine. It's within a standard deviation of the median damage done. But you'll never shine on a boss. No balance druid should expect to be in the top five of any kind of boss encounter (single target, spread council, clumped aoe, etc.).

That's not a terrible place to be, of course. It's fine. You can do all the content you want. But generally, specs in that position of being fine but never excelling aren't brought to more competitive raid spots. If you want to bring the player rather than the spec, you can bring a moonkin and be just fine. But when you hold the players equal, ie you're at the high end of gameplay, you don't really have any incentive to bring a moonkin. And then, unfortunately the way the wow community works, that attitude trickles down to less competitive raids and pve content.

And overall, I really like the mechanics of the spec. I really like the way it plays in raids. I enjoy M+ dungeons as well.

Exactly this. Why bring a middle of the pack dps when you have multiple top tier dps classes available. Balance is literally bottom of the barrel on EVERY. SINGLE. EN boss, right next to our ele shaman bench partners.

For mythic+ with friends, sure, you can compete and finish them. Balance is fine for that.
For non progression raiding, balance is 'ok'

[Madus]

Our dots are weak. Thats whole problem and yes we should be gods on dot fights. If Spec with 3 dots is not god on dots fight then its retard design.

[Beckers]

LOL. Did you not look at my armory on that post???.. lol I held multiple top 5 world ranks and at end of progression last tier was one of the top 6 Overall druid in the US..... I'm literly telling you the reason that Exorsus ran 0 moonkins. Method ran 0 Moonkins, Limit ran 1, Serenity ran 1 (But Nagura herself had said a week before she was gonna probably sit then she got helm) And many other guilds ran 0-1 at best while running 3-4 hunters 2+Spriests and even More warlocks than Boomkins.....

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...841&dataset=90

THIS IS NOT OK.

Or this
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...854&dataset=90 The fight where balance should be king Multidot fight. But were Dead last of every caster....

Or heres even better the end boss.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10#boss=1864 Were dead last of all casters not called ele.. and Even below almost every melee.

Boomkin has a low skillcap without the helm. so If your playing in some normal mode guild where half the raid doesn't know how to dps and arn't all grinding dungeons and have 2+legendaries each in their bags Balance druids are fine. If your playing in a real Progression raid guild and you don't have the legendary helm (Or even if you do as I'm linking 90+% logs so alot of those druids do have it) Your basically in the raid for the innervate. Your barely better dps than an Unholy dk of similar skill... Now if your Gape or Nagura or something and have the helm and play your class at a 99.999% Yes you can compete but if you don't have the helm your literally not worth your raid spot in Mythics Unless your better than the players your playing with.

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Its snapshotting the Fulmination trinket its literly the only way this class is even somewhat viable atm... Expect big buffs in 7.1 or else alot of the top raiders you see playing moonkin will be rerolling for nighthold. In the next 2 weeks Im going to probably be leveling a warlock to go with my mage in case we don't get a 7.1 Buff.

Our dots are weak. Thats whole problem and yes we should be gods on dot fights. If Spec with 3 dots is not god on dots fight then its retard design.

Solid points... Have you made an official forum post or just fan-site rants?

[paror]

LOL. Did you not look at my armory on that post???.. lol I held multiple top 5 world ranks and at end of progression last tier was one of the top 6 Overall druid in the US..... I'm literly telling you the reason that Exorsus ran 0 moonkins. Method ran 0 Moonkins, Limit ran 1, Serenity ran 1 (But Nagura herself had said a week before she was gonna probably sit then she got helm) And many other guilds ran 0-1 at best while running 3-4 hunters 2+Spriests and even More warlocks than Boomkins.....

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...841&dataset=90

THIS IS NOT OK.

Or this
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...854&dataset=90 The fight where balance should be king Multidot fight. But were Dead last of every caster....

Or heres even better the end boss.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/10#boss=1864 Were dead last of all casters not called ele.. and Even below almost every melee.

Boomkin has a low skillcap without the helm. so If your playing in some normal mode guild where half the raid doesn't know how to dps and arn't all grinding dungeons and have 2+legendaries each in their bags Balance druids are fine. If your playing in a real Progression raid guild and you don't have the legendary helm (Or even if you do as I'm linking 90+% logs so alot of those druids do have it) Your basically in the raid for the innervate. Your barely better dps than an Unholy dk of similar skill... Now if your Gape or Nagura or something and have the helm and play your class at a 99.999% Yes you can compete but if you don't have the helm your literally not worth your raid spot in Mythics Unless your better than the players your playing with.

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Its snapshotting the Fulmination trinket its literly the only way this class is even somewhat viable atm... Expect big buffs in 7.1 or else alot of the top raiders you see playing moonkin will be rerolling for nighthold. In the next 2 weeks Im going to probably be leveling a warlock to go with my mage in case we don't get a 7.1 Buff.

^this. I dont have the helmet,acually I have the chest wich is worthless for moonkin (3/7 mythic, most likely killing 4th one tonight) I am not competitive at all on rankings,while I can still do good on certain bosses (spider) . I am rerolling for next tier if buffs arent comming in fast.

[Teph]

Care to elaborate on this some more? I did a decent amount of searching on the trinket for balance druid, but couldn't find anything. Sounds like this trinket is clearly BiS and changes your play style as well.

Not 100% sure about it, but it seems like you need the Legendary helmet aswell. Pool - trinket procs - cast all your Starsurges(maybe some empowered wraths?). But i don't have the helmet so it doesn't matter anyways. lalalalalalalaala great system lalalalala

[Dumdidum]

Care to elaborate on this some more? I did a decent amount of searching on the trinket for balance druid, but couldn't find anything. Sounds like this trinket is clearly BiS and changes your play style as well.

Lunar/Solar Empowerments snapshot the mastery value the moment you get your first stack and keep it as long as you dont lose your stacks.
So while you wait for the trinket to stack up you spend all your empowerments and the moment you are at max mastery you use starsurge, so both empowerments are buffed, in a perfect scenario you have enough ap for 2 starsurges and 2 moon charges rdy and keep both empowerments buffed longer, but when you can only generate more ap with lunarstrike/wrath you only drop solar empowerment and always keep one charge of lunar empowerment so your lunar strike always has the snapshotted mastery.
Ofc the legendary helmet, changes this up a little, because you can generate much more empowerments.

Short: -clear empowerments while waiting for max mastery -> starsurge
-never drop your last lunar empowerment charge

[Teph]

Well, this seems then just like a thing that will get hotfixed. Btw is the 825 version better than 825+? Not the first time i heard people prefer lower versions of dungeon trinkets(or is it just a display bug in wol?).

[ChickenChaser]

Care to elaborate on this some more? I did a decent amount of searching on the trinket for balance druid, but couldn't find anything. Sounds like this trinket is clearly BiS and changes your play style as well.

Stormsinger Fulmination Charge

It stacks to 10 stacks of 650-750 mastery each. At 10 stacks you make sure you have 0 empowerments then starsurge at 10 stacks and for the rest of the fight never let lunar strike go below 1 empowerment. Empowerments are not updating Dynamically so assuming you never drop that first stack Every LS you cast the rest of the fight will have ~7k mastery snapshotted onto it. doing about 5% overall damage from the snapshot alone not counting the fact the proc still gives good damage to starsurge/wrath for the time its up.

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Well, this seems then just like a thing that will get hotfixed. Btw is the 825 version better than 825+? Not the first time i heard people prefer lower versions of dungeon trinkets(or is it just a display bug in wol?).

Im yet to see one higher than 825 and with progression over for us i'm not exactly grinding EOA for 8 hours a day trying to. If I get a better one ill use it but I do 1-2 EOA's a day and eventually ill have it.

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Solid points... Have you made an official forum post or just fan-site rants?

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20749805139#1 If you want to chip in over there

[Madus]

Solid points... Have you made an official forum post or just fan-site rants?

lol at official eu forum...

Well, this seems then just like a thing that will get hotfixed. Btw is the 825 version better than 825+? Not the first time i heard people prefer lower versions of dungeon trinkets(or is it just a display bug in wol?).

Its old as legion alpha so "hotfix" is not gonna be hot.

[Jyggalag]

Sustained ST is good (with helm) though sadly not the best by any means.
Ramp-up time at the start of an encounter is one of the highest in the game so if mobs die quickly then you're useless.
Save incarnation, AP, Full Moon and some empowerments and burst can be insane if done right. Very strong in PvP for same reason.
Cleave is weak and AoE is worse - LS needs a buff to the cleave component and Starfall needs a massive buff in terms of damage and a reduction in AP cost as it's very expensive to start AoEing with it or chain them atm.
During M+ if you've just pulled 20 mobs at once into a massgrip and the idea is to kill them within a stun rotation then you can leave your balance druid at home.

[wing5wong]

Added some thoughts from my own personal experience.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...9805139#post-7

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lol at official eu forum...


Its old as legion alpha so "hotfix" is not gonna be hot.

Hey, ive been reporting natures balance tooltip not mentioning all sunfires since alpha - its being fixed now =S

[paror]

Added some thoughts from my own personal experience.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...9805139#post-7

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Hey, ive been reporting natures balance tooltip not mentioning all sunfires since alpha - its being fixed now =S

Saw the post, quite good actually. Currently I have not touched FoE since mythic +. as the radius is way too small for the costs, Why wouldnt it be bigger? Such a weird spell. With mythic + 9/10/11 Tanks need to kite sometimes wich completly destroys FoE

On emerald nightmare mythic it's really clunky to use FoE and am mostly running single target cookie cutter.
Having a 4/7Mythic progress I can tell you that (without the helm) we are fucking shit and with it no where near mages/shadowpriest(even locks).

I am leveling my mage to 110 this weekend, I can not go another instance (progressing) with horrible horrible dps....

[Irefusetodie]

I don't think number tweaking will solve anything unless Blizzard makes Balance the top single target spec for ranged. It's a strict design/mechanical issue in my opinion. No ST or AoE burst. No real cleave outside of fairly mediocre DoTs. We lose single target DPS in order to AoE while Fire mages and MM hunters don't really lose much. Basically all of our damage is sustained damage, which is the biggest issue.

The only place that Balance does well, in my opinion, is in sustained mass AoE. My 96% parse H-Il'gynoth parse has me casting Starfalls for an average of 1.12mil damage, not including DoT empowerments. In order to do that damage I had to focus on Ichors and lose essentially all damage to Corruptors/Flayers/Horror. I intentionally ignored the mechanics of the fight and intentionally did the fight wrong, at least for our strat, just to parse and see how much damage I could do.

Meanwhile, the fire mage focuses priority targets and then bursts the Ichors for 10 million damage in a 10 second window with Living Bomb, Dragon's Breath, a Flamestrike, and all of his passive cleave (Fireball, Phoenix Flames splash, and Ignite). He outdamages me on Ichors while doing the fight properly because fire mages kit, mechanics, and overall design is just better.

Edit. Balance isn't "bad" and the sky isn't falling. Balance just has issues and can't perform as well as other specs. There's always top performers and then there's always those beneath them. Balance can pull the numbers to clear any content. Said content just might be a bit more difficult with a Balance druid over a mage/hunter/priest.

[boz0]

We have a great occasion to be heard with the Legion QA this friday. How about we make a collective effort to give visibility to our issues?
Just tweet #LegionQA, and maybe post the link here so we can cross-like the messages.
Mine's here : https://twitter.com/bo_z0/status/786141666088321024

[Ilnezhara]

I think that's the thing: balance is just okay.

When you compare it to all specs, it's mid pack. In the context of raiding, though, where pretty much each class is playing the top spec of its class, balance shifts lower overall so it's generally—in the context of a raid—a below average spec.

It's also a low skill cap, low RNG spec. Compare the increase in damage from 50th to 75th percentile moonkin to that of feral or spriest. The latter go up drastically as the percentiles go higher. Moonkin doesn't go up nearly as much. So, there's not really much point to saying 'you should play better'. Playing better doesn't buy a moonkin as much dps as it does other specs.

Overall moonkin damage is fine. It's within a standard deviation of the median damage done. But you'll never shine on a boss. No balance druid should expect to be in the top five of any kind of boss encounter (single target, spread council, clumped aoe, etc.).

That's not a terrible place to be, of course. It's fine. You can do all the content you want. But generally, specs in that position of being fine but never excelling aren't brought to more competitive raid spots. If you want to bring the player rather than the spec, you can bring a moonkin and be just fine. But when you hold the players equal, ie you're at the high end of gameplay, you don't really have any incentive to bring a moonkin. And then, unfortunately the way the wow community works, that attitude trickles down to less competitive raids and pve content.

And overall, I really like the mechanics of the spec. I really like the way it plays in raids. I enjoy M+ dungeons as well.

Low RNG... you've never had to play against another Moonkin in raids, have your. It's unknowingly infuriating to see him have 10 more Goldrinn procs totalling a free million damage.

[bubbadubba]

Funny, looks to me like they're above most specs. You also forgot Paladins.
Some of those specs for the same class aren't interchangeable, either. You can't just replace an Elemental Shaman with an Enhancer.

This is also looking at 75% percentile, anything above and boomkin starts lowering in numbers until you get the perfect legendary.

[thedeisel]

Low RNG... you've never had to play against another Moonkin in raids, have your. It's unknowingly infuriating to see him have 10 more Goldrinn procs totalling a free million damage.

I don't think you quite understand what relative low rng/low skill cap means. It means compared to other specs.

Have a look here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

When you plot 20th through 99th percentile for Nythendra Mythic going by 10s, you get the following results:

Balance has the 6th lowest increase in DPS when you go from 50th percentile to 99th percentile. So, in other words, playing a Balance druid well and getting very lucky buys you relatively little damage compared to other classes.

If you'd prefer a more robust measure, you can look at the slope. This is the rate of increase as you go from 20th to 99th increase. Here Moonkin fares a bit better, weighing in at 10th. In other words, as you increase skill and luck, Balance druid dps increases more slowly than:

Arms, Arcane, Shadow, Fury, Feral, Ret, Enhancement, Windwalker, MM hunter, Fire mage, Survival Hunter, Havoc DH, BM and Outlaw.

These comparisons include low-played specs like Frost DK and Mage, Affliction lock, Survival Hunter, Sub Rogue, etc. If you strip out those Balance looks like it fares a bit worse in terms of relative standing on these measures.

So, it's a relatively low skill, low rng spec. That's not to say there isn't any RNG. That's not to say there isn't any skill required. It's just saying that compared to other classes, Balance has less RNG and gets less benefit from being played well.

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Back on topic:

I don't think there's much reason to expect Balance to become competitive at high end raiding this expansion and certainly not before Nighthold. The problem that Moonkin is suffering from is one that Blizzard tends to be very bad at fixing.

Call it the Elemental Shaman/Ret Paladin problem. At least this problem affected those specs quite strongly in WoD. It's the problem that the spec doesn't shine at anything. It's fine at this and fine at that but never really great. Those problems simply don't get fixed by blizzard and last entire expacs if not longer (see: elemental shaman). If that kind of thing matters greatly to you, then this isn't the expac to play your moonkin. We had a pretty great run from Cata through WoD as the premiere hybrid caster. Now it's Shadow Priest (until or unless they severely reduce the impact of Surrender to Madness).

[boz0]

So, there were some answers relative to balance druids in the QA, though definitely on the cryptic side :

Lots of class balance issues with mechanics problems (eg Balance Druid) impacting raid and Mythic+ desirability. What plan for 7.1?
Balance and number-wise is an ongoing process to make specs competitive. However each spec has strengths and weaknesses. For Balance Druids, things like Solar Beam and Typhoon are very useful for Mythic+ Dungeons (eg Solar Beaming imps in Court of Stars). Blizzard would prefer to double down and make those mechanics shine.

What about "bring the player not the class?" In many ways, Ion feels that class importance has been lessened too much. In Burning Crusade, the importance of class balance was an extreme jigsaw puzzle, and that was a problem. In the process of fixing that, Blizzard moved away from mandatory class setup.

Ideally, the playerbase should play all difference classes. The playerbase is best-served if they want some of everything. When it's just "we want a ranged dps" then raid leaders will look for the top-performing spec. But if specs have unique cool abilities, then raid leaders would be interested in multiple specs, not just one.

If all else is equal and you're picking a group among strangers, the community is better served when you pick specs that aren't already represented in filling out a group. There is definitely a lot of work to still get there! Perhaps by reintroducing abilities for utility or synergy.

With Mythic+ being a huge part of Legion, are there any plans to help specs that don't have strong consistent AoE so they can partake in higher Keystones?
The goal is to have areas of strength and weaknesses; eg a Demon Hunter can melt AoE while a Feral Druid can do single target DPS like no other. Consistent AoE is emphasized as a good attribute in strong farming clearing runs, or speedruns of lower-level Keystone runs.

However, at higher keystone levels with Fortified and Tyrannical, players are not clearing content quickly. Some affixes even make AOE a terrible idea. So other specs like Shadow Priests have a place to shine.

One challenge is community perception, ie it doesn't matter if you're good if people think your spec is bad and reject you from groups. This is a challenge for Blizzard; they are working towards improving visibility and perceptions as to how viable specs actually are. They recognize this is a huge factor in player experience.

What do you think? Do we have hope for improvements come 7.1?