[Balance] State in 7.2 / 7.2.5

[branbib]

40AP Starfall make Starfall incredibly efficient single target. Already in 7.2.5 with the lost of T19 4pc, it's more efficient than Starsurge. The only thing making Starsurge a better spender single target is the talent build supporting it (starlord, Inc, nb). Adding Stellar Flare to Starfall's damage makes it incredibly potent.

Stellar Flare actually increases the total damage done by Starfall single target more than Stellar Drift. It's just prohibitively expensive without SotF.

The flaw with your logic is that you're talking only about efficiency. You can't just compare SS vs SF with complementary talents, because the SS rotation generates a lot more asp in the same amount of time than SF rotation on singletarget. It's also dependant on the boss kill timers obviously because Incarnation benefits more from IFE than CA. Etc,etc.

[Hellshout]

I do believe if what @thedeisel says comes true and SFall > Surge, then Blizz will find a way to nerf SFall(not buff Surge ofc) so that we remain that same as now.
We'd be like a warlock regarding DoTs, but also with an AoE twist and some ST spell if we're capping AsP. Kinda OP.

[Polarthief]

I do believe if what @thedeisel says comes true and SFall > Surge, then Blizz will find a way to nerf SFall(not buff Surge ofc) so that we remain that same as now.
We'd be like a warlock regarding DoTs, but also with an AoE twist and some ST spell if we're capping AsP. Kinda OP.

Except Starfall is only better on ST if you're also using Stellar Flare. This is also outperformed by Incarnation with the ring, which makes this irrelevant and proving StFl is just a suboptimal choice regardless.

[Deleted]

Well I for one am glad that StFl is suboptimal. The playstyle is just meh

[Polarthief]

Well I for one am glad that StFl is suboptimal. The playstyle is just meh

I don't disagree, but I would like to see the QoL made a lot better. I still think making it a passive that combines MF and SF (which also cleaves because it's partially SF) into a single Astral DoT would be more fun while also providing an intro/easy talent.

Conflict Resolution for this MegaDoT idea:
- LATC adds 10% damage (since it's only half moonfire) and hits a second target. If you have 2 packs of mobs ~11-20y apart, LATC saves you a global.
- ShS has 2x the chance to proc per tick since it's 2 DoTs combined; half the proc triggers, double the proc chance. Basically unchanged.
- Double-dips on CI and applies both debuffs. CI works exactly the same way for all other spells.
- NB might need to be changed for this, otherwise, it just gives the time to the megadot (basically making it unlimited duration).
- Stellar Flare gets affected by both the Moonfire and Sunfire traits as well as anything else that affects Moonfire and/or Sunfire (like I said, it combines the two DoTs).
- Wax and Wane gets 2 stacks per cast.
- Maybe let it gain partial Mastery scaling when not in Starfall? Should be made at least slightly competitive with Inc/SotF
I think that's all the potential "but what about XYZ?" questions.

[thedeisel]

The flaw with your logic is that you're talking only about efficiency. You can't just compare SS vs SF with complementary talents, because the SS rotation generates a lot more asp in the same amount of time than SF rotation on singletarget. It's also dependant on the boss kill timers obviously because Incarnation benefits more from IFE than CA. Etc,etc.

In general, I agree that we need sims to work out all the details. But SS rotation doesn't generate much more AP than Starfall.

Nature's balance can be taken and still there's a 12% AP/D efficiecncy advantage of Sfall over SS single target. So we don't need to worry about saving GCDs from sunfire refreshes. Let's just focus on starlord for AP generation because that's where the big advantage comes from (again, assuming that we don't starsurge at all during Sfall maintenance, which is false).

With Bota:E, at 30% haste:
Unempowered wrath is 8.67 AP/Sec
Empowered wrath is 10.4 AP/sec [I can't remember if Starlord is additive or multiplicative with haste, but I just assumed multiplicative to make SS look as strong as possible]
Empowered LS is 9.36 AP/sec

With a SS rotation, all you're substituting is 1 empowered LS and 1 empowered Wrath for 2.22 unempowered wraths. Your AP generation over that time frame, in other words, goes from 22.22 to 25. So, you generate 10% more AP using Starsurge but you get 12.5% more damage out of the AP you generate using Starfall.

This napkin math matches what we can already see in sims. With 7.2 sims, a keep Starfall up and use SS only to avoid capping AP rotation with SotF and Stellar Drift does equal damage to a normal single target rotation with the same talents. Keep in mind that with the Starfall centered rotation you still generate plenty of AP to get off Starsurges. So, the assumption above that a starfall rotation uses 0 benefit from Starlord is false. Even in 7.2, with SotF, Starfall can keep up with Starsurge without Stellar Flare.

If you go full single target build and normal Starsurge rotation, of course, your damage goes up a bit more than 12%. But that also includes taking Nature's Balance instead of Stellar Drift.

With the ring, the question is how much Incarnation buys you. The baseline of the spec, though, has changed greatly once you have SotF essentially baseline because Starfall and Starsurge are now on a par baseline for single target damage. The reason is that the optimal usage of AP is to keep up starfall while using extra AP for starsurges. Incarnation allows you to pop out more starsurges but Stellar Flare gives a longer term sustained damage. How does it shake out? overall, like I said, we need sims and my guess is that it'll be highly dependent on legendaries.

But the point is that SotF effectively baseline radically reshapes the spec in a way that makes it very non-obvious how to best play to the spec's strengths based on previous versions of the spec. I'm not saying it's a slam-dunk no-brainer for Stellar Flare. I'm saying there's a very good chance that if fight lengths don't work out well (or you don't have the right legendaries), Stellar Flare with a Starfall-primary AP expenditure strategy will be the superior single target option.

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Just to update with some current 7.2 T19 sims:
Baseline for all sims: Starlord and BotA
Starfall focused rotation: use starfall as AP spender unless Stellar Empowerment is on the target, cast starsurge when there's more than 2 seconds left on Stellar Empowerment and AP is above 60.

With that logic, Stellar empowerment has about an 84% uptime with SotF builds and with Incarnation builds that drops to about 76%. The SotF builds also get off about 20% more Starsurges than Incarnation builds with a Starfall focused rotation.

SotF + Stellar Drift: Starsurge rotation is is 1.5% more damage.
SotF + NB: Starsurge rotation is 5.6% more damage.
Inc + Stellar Drift: Starsurge rotation is 9% more damage.
Inc + NB: Starsurge rotation is 12.8% more damage

Best Starsurge roatation (INC + NB) is 6% better than best Starfall Rotation (SotF + Stellar Drift).

Just realized that the relics for this test heavily favor starsurge rotations: 2x Dark Side relics, 1x Empowerment. The legendaries were OI and LaTC. So, relics tilt starsurge, legendaries tilt starfall. I'll redo it more carefully and go legendary by legendary for OI/LATC/IFE (I'm just setting aside ED for now) but big picture it seems like this would all stay pretty similar since the relic and legendary effects go at cross purposes.

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Let me just try to TL;DR everything I've been saying:

SotF basically puts Starfall and Starsurge on a par single target.

That means that we face the following question:
Which is the bigger increase in single target damage and by how much?
Using SS and spec'ing for INC + NB or maintaining Sfall while using extra AP on SS and spec'ing Stellar Flare + Stellar Drift?

If the second choice is within a few percent of the first then it radically reshapes what Moonkin is as a spec. Moonkin goes from a spec that has to chose whether to do all damage to one target (and spec pure single target) or equal damage to all targets (and spec aoe) to a spec that gets a very impressive amount of very cheap/practically free cleave while doing basically max single target dps.

[Slippykins]

Here's the sims from what you were saying:



I ran the same gear as in the legendary comparisons post, had to add back in the Stellar Empowerment damage to StFl as it's not currently being applied in simc. The builds with "_SF" denote that the "keep Stellar Empowerment up" APL is being used, whereas builds without that suffix follow the default APL.

Essentially, you are correct that maintaining Stellar Empowerment to as close to 100% uptime is the best option when using SotA and StFl, and Starsurging when you don't need to Starfall. And it performs significantly better than just Starsurging. But this is definitely confined to SotA + StFl -- if you compare these numbers to the legendary rankings from a week or two ago, it's about 18% less DPS than 4pc + ED/OI.

Still good to think about! I think it might be a consideration on fights where we're taking SotA and there are only a few permanent targets that can all reasonably be hit by Starfall.

[thedeisel]

Interesting, thanks for running that via Simcraft.

What does 'Mod. Stfl DPS' mean?

Two questions:

1. Falling Star is incredibly potent, I'm pretty sure it has the most impact on its damage of any trait on the tree. Are the starfall sims you ran using the same SS relics you used before? I wonder what kind of max dps you can get if you build relics for a starfall? Something like 2x Falling Star + 1x Sunfire or something like that. It'll be pretty easy to go into the next tier with a great Falling Star relic since one drops off Trilliax so lots of warforge opportunities. Might eke out another 1% or so with Stellar Flare.

2. I assume soul of the arch druid has no stats in the sim? Or are all the stats force normalized to the #s stated in the Legendary comps?

Anyway, I do love this stuff and given the free cleave potential of this kind of build and how much more robust it is across real world encounter mechanics than ED, I'll be tinkering around to see how much value can be extracted from it.

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It's interesting, I've been playing around more with sims as well and am not getting the same results as you.

Here's what I did. I built a 915 character with no legendaries and no set bonuses. Gear was at 31% haste, 51% mastery from gear, 8% vers, 12% crit. Trinkets were 910 whispers and 900 metronome.

From there I did two different builds.

One build was a pure single target build. I enchanted haste, added 3x 915 SS relics, went INC/NB, had it cast Starsurge.
I manually added in the 7.2.5 buff to Starsurge and the 2pc crit bonus based on the crit rate.

The second build was Starfall focused build. I enchanted mastery (experiments with different enchanting setups revealed that starfall rotations benefit more from mastery enchants) and filled in 3x 915 Falling Star relics. For legendaries, I experimented with OI, IFE, and LatC. OI came out the highest, so I used it alone. Since I'm not working with 7.2.5 sims, I had to do some manual adjustments to account for Stellar Flare and SotF. First, I had to see how spending AP on stellar Flare reduces Starsurge damage. To do that, I compared Starsurge damage under an SotF SS roation to Starsurge damage under a Stellar Flare-Starsurge rotation. Second, I had to see how SotF derived Stellar Flare uptimes affect Stellar Flare damage. There's already some uptime on Stellar Empowerment from OI so it's not a pure increase from casting Stellar Flare. Last I had to nerf Starfall Damage to reflect the Stellar Drift nerf.

So, the only change this doesn't incorporate under 7.2.5 is the T20 4pc and higher AP cap.

The result that I got was that the full single target build with IFE+OI was only 1.6% more single damage than the Arch Druid + OI + Stellar Flare + Stellar Drift build. Overall, those builds were 16% increases from the baseline single target build (3xSS relics, SS single target, INC/NB, no legendaries, 7.2.5 SS buff, T20 2pc SS Crit damage), which is almost exactly what slippy had (17%).

Obviously that's a pretty different result than Slippy is getting from me comparing the Starfall focused builds and Starsurge focused builds even though we're getting similar results on Starsurge focused builds. One starting point that I'm noticing is that Slippy is getting higher uptime than me. My SotF Starfall rotations are only getting 85% uptime and they cast a similar number of starfalls and starsurges. Are you getting that result as well slippy in terms of the starfall:ss cast ratio? I wonder if your APL is being more cautious in favor of maximizing uptime on Stellar Drift and mine is playing more aggressive with Starsurging?

[Slippykins]

Interesting, thanks for running that via Simcraft.

What does 'Mod. Stfl DPS' mean?

Two questions:

1. Falling Star is incredibly potent, I'm pretty sure it has the most impact on its damage of any trait on the tree. Are the starfall sims you ran using the same SS relics you used before? I wonder what kind of max dps you can get if you build relics for a starfall? Something like 2x Falling Star + 1x Sunfire or something like that. It'll be pretty easy to go into the next tier with a great Falling Star relic since one drops off Trilliax so lots of warforge opportunities. Might eke out another 1% or so with Stellar Flare.

2. I assume soul of the arch druid has no stats in the sim? Or are all the stats force normalized to the #s stated in the Legendary comps?

Anyway, I do love this stuff and given the free cleave potential of this kind of build and how much more robust it is across real world encounter mechanics than ED, I'll be tinkering around to see how much value can be extracted from it.

- - - Updated - - -

It's interesting, I've been playing around more with sims as well and am not getting the same results as you.

Here's what I did. I built a 915 character with no legendaries and no set bonuses. Gear was at 31% haste, 51% mastery from gear, 8% vers, 12% crit. Trinkets were 910 whispers and 900 metronome.

From there I did two different builds.

One build was a pure single target build. I enchanted haste, added 3x 915 SS relics, went INC/NB, had it cast Starsurge.
I manually added in the 7.2.5 buff to Starsurge and the 2pc crit bonus based on the crit rate.

The second build was Starfall focused build. I enchanted mastery (experiments with different enchanting setups revealed that starfall rotations benefit more from mastery enchants) and filled in 3x 915 Falling Star relics. For legendaries, I experimented with OI, IFE, and LatC. OI came out the highest, so I used it alone. Since I'm not working with 7.2.5 sims, I had to do some manual adjustments to account for Stellar Flare and SotF. First, I had to see how spending AP on stellar Flare reduces Starsurge damage. To do that, I compared Starsurge damage under an SotF SS roation to Starsurge damage under a Stellar Flare-Starsurge rotation. Second, I had to see how SotF derived Stellar Flare uptimes affect Stellar Flare damage. There's already some uptime on Stellar Empowerment from OI so it's not a pure increase from casting Stellar Flare. Last I had to nerf Starfall Damage to reflect the Stellar Drift nerf.

So, the only change this doesn't incorporate under 7.2.5 is the T20 4pc and higher AP cap.

The result that I got was that the full single target build with IFE+OI was only 1.6% more single damage than the Arch Druid + OI + Stellar Flare + Stellar Drift build. Overall, those builds were 16% increases from the baseline single target build (3xSS relics, SS single target, INC/NB, no legendaries, 7.2.5 SS buff, T20 2pc SS Crit damage), which is almost exactly what slippy had (17%).

Obviously that's a pretty different result than Slippy is getting from me comparing the Starfall focused builds and Starsurge focused builds even though we're getting similar results on Starsurge focused builds. One starting point that I'm noticing is that Slippy is getting higher uptime than me. My SotF Starfall rotations are only getting 85% uptime and they cast a similar number of starfalls and starsurges. Are you getting that result as well slippy in terms of the starfall:ss cast ratio? I wonder if your APL is being more cautious in favor of maximizing uptime on Stellar Drift and mine is playing more aggressive with Starsurging?

Interesting! So, the gear and relics are exactly the same as in the legendary comp post, from memory I believe relics are SW/SS/LS. No stats on the ring for the moment, but once the ring goes through more iterations and it's confirmed, I'll be able to go through it in more depth. At the moment it almost feels like wasting time a bit simming the ring when it's unlikely the current form will be pushed to live. More than likely it'll get some stats.

For T20 2pc and 4pc, as long as your character has them equipped the sim will run them fine. Same with the 11% SS buff if you set ptr=1 at the top of your sim. The excel output I posted above is adding back in the Stellar Empowerment damage to StFl, as I noticed StFl damage was unchanging when the APL used Starfall and when it didn't, implying StellEmp wasn't being applied.

Other than that, the only APL change I made for the Starfall sim was to add a

debuff.stellar_empowerment.remains <1

to the Starfall lines so that it just treated Stellar Emp as another DoT, so to speak. Didn't look at the SS:SF ratio.

Lastly, could be due to gear differences. 935 ilvl avg equipped vs. 915, as well as I purposefully bumped Whispers to 925 and had T20 4pc included in the ST sims. I've noticed simc being very sensitive to gearing and stats recently, so I wouldn't be surprised if some results can be minimised with differing gear.

Edit: I'll be doing relic comparisons once the tier begins so I can be sure no other changes will be made. Falling Star could be pretty good.

[joltcola1234]

The idea of rolling all three dots (moonfire, sunfire, stellar flare) into one "mega dot" sounds terrible to me.

I've played balance since wrath of the lich king and that might be something that made me move on to something else.

I'm for quality of life changes to SF, either making it instant cast or removing the AP cost, but not rolling other dots into it.

[Polarthief]

The idea of rolling all three dots (moonfire, sunfire, stellar flare) into one "mega dot" sounds terrible to me.

I've played balance since wrath of the lich king and that might be something that made me move on to something else.

I'm for quality of life changes to SF, either making it instant cast or removing the AP cost, but not rolling other dots into it.

It wouldn't also put StFl in, it'd just be MF/SF, and it's also a suboptimal talent (on purpose) for the sake of making the rotation easier for players who are just learning, for players who are lazy, or in niche circumstances, when DoTs are a huge part of your DPS (massive/consistent AoE situations), and even then, SOTF would probs be changed.

It's also a talent, meaning you wouldn't have to take it.

[Deleted]

Hello people,

i am going from warlock to balance druid as my main. i recently got the emerald dreamcatcher which is really nice.

but i see that balance druids are among the lowest ST dps in the ranged team. and AOE being alright but not amazing. (warcraftlogs)

how is this going to be in 7.2.5? and what would make it better?

you can read about the state of moonkin spec here: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/...3397674?page=5

in 7.2.5 dont expect many changes, the behavior of developers since the launch of the legion tells us they are happy with current state of moonkins and all they care about is that we dont devolve into "moonfire spam" for highest dps. All current problems of this spec have been identified some 6 months ago, I have not seen any relevant blue post or video comment regarding these problems (apart from famous quote "we bring utility instead").

Dot get me wrong, if you are looking for a change of taste druid is amazing class overall (you can fill literally any role in the raid which is unique in this game) and balance has really amazing animations and graphics (its subjective I know). There are some really cool mechanics and some shitty ones that can be fixed in a day...but willingness to do is just not there. Minor changes indicate nobody from developers plays this spec (which is never good).

[Deleted]

How would StFl be good with the ring? Inc still beats it in pretty much every situation, and it doesn't scale in ANY way with SOTF (non-Stellar Emps/AsP cost reduction for Starfall)

The problem with StFl is that it's just 100% inconvenient to use:
- Not instant (can't cast on the go)
- Takes AsP (like why?)
- 24s duration (IMO too short for multi-dotting shit with it, especially given the above 2 things)

No, pretty much every Balance who uses the ring (which will be most of us) will be running SOTF+Inc. StFl is pretty dead and Blizzard wants to ignore that, sadly.

After testing the new ring and stellar flare in mythic demonic inquisition, its really strong and I personally love the stellar flare gameplay, its super easy to manage and keep up, as long as u insure that u always have a starfall up by holding on to AP rather than constantly spending u shall never have unempowered stellars unlike without the ring which just could not work. I believe stellar flare with the new ring may achieve the best parses on inquisition.

[Polarthief]

After testing the new ring and stellar flare in mythic demonic inquisition, its really strong and I personally love the stellar flare gameplay, its super easy to manage and keep up, as long as u insure that u always have a starfall up by holding on to AP rather than constantly spending u shall never have unempowered stellars unlike without the ring which just could not work. I believe stellar flare with the new ring may achieve the best parses on inquisition.

"Hold on to AsP instead of constantly spending", like constantly spending AsP on multiple targets? :X

I just can't stand the spell because it doesn't feel fun to cast. It's just completely unsatisfying.

[thedeisel]

The way to think of Stellar Flare is that it basically increases your Starfall-derived damage by ~25% if you have stellar drift or ~31% (those numbers shift around a little depending on your mastery and how many traits you have into falling star). You get three starfalls per stellar flare, so for each target you have, you're really only barely increasing the cost of your damage (~3 ASP per target, or 7.5% more AP with SotF, 5% more without SotF. Plus of course you get the actual damage of Stellar Flare.

So, if a fight is good for starfall usage because of sustained targets being available, SotF ring + Stellar Flare is going to be incredibly potent. Demonic Inquisition is a pretty great fight for the SotA/StFL setup.