Balance Druid 7.2.5 Patch notes

[Malmmoc]

I agree with everything you said, Mewseph, but, I think one thing to account for in how people feel about the subject is that both hunters and mages damage tends to be tuned above ours, as well as having better movement, which adds up and probably shouldn't be. That is a matter of opinion I guess.

[gobio]

Movement is just one thing. It is the whole restrictive package that makes balance druid feel limited and without reward. (Am mostly compare to shaman because thats the alt I play)

For single target fight.
- our talent, for rows that actually matters, is ALL restrictive for single target DPS.
- our optimal means to get ST DPS done is all restrictive. Your resource builder is designed to all spent on your main target (to keep the dot rolling), your resource spender is also designed to be all spent on your main target (T19). Not to mention the new passive that tells you to DPS your main target or else.
- our handling of adds (that needs to dye asap) is pathetic if you build ST, which to be honest happens too often in NH. Krosus, for example, the planning and result to handle those adds for single target set up balance druid is NOT rewarding at all, unlike shaman (regardless of talent set up) which simply say "watch me do this". Same for the guldan eyes.
- Also for movement, Shaman has talent to help that problem (although that talent involves strange rotation that many shaman could not find success on), on top of that the talent that helps movement also is enhance ST DPS. Balance druid is completely opposite.

With all that said. With balance druid having a whole package of restriction on ST damage, our ST DPS is still far from the best (not to mention the pre 7.2.5 version of ED which somehow managed to also add HASTE and INTERNET PING restriction on top of the complete package of restriction). What is the "balance" in that?

[Mewseph]

I feel, or rather have the opinion of, that different classes will performed their roles differently and have varying weaknesses and strengths because of that.

When you directly compare our movement strengths and correlate it with our ST performance you're trying to build a bridge between mechanical class differences (Movement) and number differences (ST DPS), which is honestly an easy, but erroneous, approach to take when it comes to balancing performances. It just doesn't worth like that.

If you're unhappy with the movement options that Balance has (Which is actually pretty good) then ok, maybe you'll be happier playing a hunter or mage. If you're unhappy with our ST performance then ok, that's a legitimate concern but it's not related to a mechanical problem within our class but rather a numbers issue, which is a whole nother thing.

I get the feeling a lot of people just want to play a spec that's good at everything, all the time and almost always without regard to HOW it plays. That will never happen, and when it has in the past (See Resto shaman in SWP) then those specs crowd out other specs who are good, but not good enough relatively. It's straight up bad game design.

The biggest things hampering Balance as a spec right now are; Opportunity cost between ST/AoE/Burst talents or dead talents, and number tuning for ST. Our spec plays well (if predictably) from a playstyle point of view, our utility is good, if not broken (Fuck you Innervate), and our performance in AoE is niche (40yard spread with ramp time) but easily the best in the game. We've had it better at times, and worse at others, right now our spec is doing just fine for me to be happy playing it.

[Polarthief]

The other thing I would change about our movement options is to make Wild charge(Moonkin) like Gust of wind instead of Disengage, even then I'd still probably take Displacer beast of the time.

Yes please for the love of fuck yes. I never liked bouncing backwards. Forwards is a much better option.

I get the feeling a lot of people just want to play a spec that's good at everything, all the time and almost always without regard to HOW it plays. That will never happen, and when it has in the past (See Resto shaman in SWP) then those specs crowd out other specs who are good, but not good enough relatively. It's straight up bad game design.

The biggest things hampering Balance as a spec right now are; Opportunity cost between ST/AoE/Burst talents or dead talents, and number tuning for ST. Our spec plays well (if predictably) from a playstyle point of view, our utility is good, if not broken (Fuck you Innervate), and our performance in AoE is niche (40yard spread with ramp time) but easily the best in the game. We've had it better at times, and worse at others, right now our spec is doing just fine for me to be happy playing it.

Which is definitely what some people want (read: FOTM rerollers), though I'm not too happy with our ST tuning. Movement is fine (perfect if they make WC like Gust of Wind), AoE is great (albeit so many talents are required to even bother AoEing), and even defensively (if you're willing to sacrifice DPS to go Bear Form) we're fine too. Are we #1 at anything? No, not at all, but we're still in a pretty solid place, and we'd be, well, "Balanced" (haha) if they made our ST DPS a few notches better.

Oh and fix our stupid dead talents. StFl, AC, and FoE really need reworks, but they'd be more likely to get bandage fixes that just makes them brokenly better than the other choices.

[wewe]

Meh I should have been clear about what I meant...
Movement(heavy movement) for me equals Mechanics which equals Lower Uptime on target.
Boomkin is really good at predictable light movement there is no arguing with it BUT when it comes to movement that costs UPTIME on targetwe suffer more then most other range specs. (this can be easily tested in simc)

So to not muddy things up with what movement is (ex. i don't even consider Krosus beams "movement", which might be wrong for some people) lets talk about UPTIME on target.

Hypothetical scenario: every range player loses X seconds of UPTIME on boss every Y seconds. To be clear here i mean that nobody can attack the boss for the X seconds, and this can be a realistic scenario (ex. soaking back line on Krosus). Now the more frequent these events are or with longer duration, arguably, Moonkin loses more and more DPS compared to other specs.
This is my experience and opinion which for anyone who want to bother checking objectively can be easily checked with simc. The "Light movement" and "Heavy movement" profiles basically do this. They make you do nothing for X seconds with Y frequencies.

There is a reason we were parsing the lowest average on krosus progression, and it's not because we were 24/24 on Patchwerk ST.

[Polarthief]

Hypothetical scenario: every range player loses X seconds of UPTIME on boss every Y seconds. To be clear here i mean that nobody can attack the boss for the X seconds, and this can be a realistic scenario (ex. soaking back line on Krosus). Now the more frequent these events are or with longer duration, arguably, Moonkin loses more and more DPS compared to other specs.

If DoTs (CI) don't fall off, I don't understand how an Elemental Shaman or SPriest is suddenly better than us, even with something like soaking the back line on Krosus.

Also losing uptime during Voidform is absolutely devastating to an SPriest. That'd be like us losing uptime during CA/Inc, except they have to go into Voidform constantly and we only deal with CA/Inc every 3m (bit less with IFE). Plus, even light movement can fuck them royally if they don't have an instant (PS: SPriests have VERY few instants; at least we can spam Moonfire which does a crapload more damage).

Consider Trilliax, which I would consider as "Heavy Movement". SPriest basically does next to nothing during this time, while if you don't have SD, you can spam Moonfire and maybe even get a Starsurge or two out. If you do have SD, you can Starfall and, oh look, you're literally not affected AT ALL.

The worst case scenario for Balance in losing uptime is if a target disappears/goes immune/whatever-the-fuck-the-reason-is and our DoTs/CIs fall off. Other classes can just reapply DoTs, but that's a solid 2 globals and a few extra seconds (in total about 7-8s) to get CI back up to max.

[wewe]

Highly dependent on frequency and duration. The most affected are arcane, boomy, spriest, destro and ele. Surprisingly ELE and SPriest are less affected then i would expect. SPriest seem to be affected more by duration then frequency.
ex. on the "Heavy movement" profile boomkin is second to last(Arcane) losing ~25% dps compared to Patchwerk with the profiles i'm using.
Simulations are not 100% full proof but it's the only objective thing we got.

If DoTs (CI) don't fall off, I don't understand how an Elemental Shaman or SPriest is suddenly better than us, even with something like soaking the back line on Krosus.

Yet SPriests were above us at every % level on krosus during progression.
But yea at this time NH is meaningless and we will see how we fair on ToS. I'm personally afraid of Avatar.

[Myztikrice]

That's because we didn't have Wax and Wane during progression. Also SPriests get more damage out of their dots than we do, so as long as they're still ticking on the target it doesn't matter as much if they're not doing Mind Flays in between, whereas on progression if the only damage we were dealing was our DoTs we sucked.

[huth]

Keep in mind that Wax and Wane now also stacks from Sunfire, not just Moonfire, so we're stacking it faster and can keep it up with relatively little loss even with NB.

[Polarthief]

Yet SPriests were above us at every % level on krosus during progression.

Possibly because they weren't being picked. This isn't an accurate representation.

Keep in mind that Wax and Wane now also stacks from Sunfire, not just Moonfire, so we're stacking it faster and can keep it up with relatively little loss even with NB.

Which is just oh-so-nice and I've been looking forward to it since I discovered that on the PTR months ago (since I tend to pull with SF instead of MF when using LATC in the world). Small personal gain but I'm happy nonetheless.

[wewe]

Wax and wane helps. When we can cast moonfire we end up with a dps loss % in the middle of other range specs. When we can't we end as top 3 most dps % loss. And yes in a lot of cases spriest is worse then us, tho the APL seems a bit iffy for them because their dps loss swings quite a large amount even if changing Uptime loss frequency or duration by only small increments.

Possibly because they weren't being picked.

You mean at the start of NH SPriest were not in raid on Krosus? If so then it's not true. Boomkin and spriest had similar number of parses ... pretty sure SPriest even had a bit more.

[Polarthief]

You mean at the start of NH SPriest were not in raid on Krosus? If so then it's not true. Boomkin and spriest had similar number of parses ... pretty sure SPriest even had a bit more.

Picked for the orbs. The only real downtime is being picked by that.

(inb4 burning pitch: At this point you can go wherever, it really doesn't matter)

[Mewseph]

Simulations are not 100% full proof but it's the only objective thing we got.

I disagree with this. Sims are a tool, not an 'objective' representation for measuring performance. They're inheriently flawed due to the dynamic nature of boss encounters. You can get a pretty accurate figure for stat weights to gear set comparisons on Patchwerk sims, but I don't put much trust into anything outside of that. Practical game play and actual performance mean more than Sims.

This is my experience and opinion which for anyone who want to bother checking objectively can be easily checked with simc. The "Light movement" and "Heavy movement" profiles basically do this. They make you do nothing for X seconds with Y frequencies.

When is anyone ever doing nothing for X seconds outside of a phase transition or a CC/immunity raid mechanic? That's a seriously poor way to measure 'light movement' and 'heavy movement', because any decent player will never be doing nothing. Sims suck at simulation the dynamic nature of raid encounter mechanics.

[Slippykins]

Don't sim light movement or heavy movement for Boomkins, because our APL has no movement or AP pooling conditionals. All you will get is junk.

[wewe]

I disagree with this. Sims are a tool, not an 'objective' representation for measuring performance. They're inheriently flawed due to the dynamic nature of boss encounters. You can get a pretty accurate figure for stat weights to gear set comparisons on Patchwerk sims, but I don't put much trust into anything outside of that. Practical game play and actual performance mean more than Sims.

Simc is a tool and as any good tool you need to learn to use it. Out of the box a lot of stuff can't really be represented. If you actually start fiddling around with events, apls and whatnot you can get fairly accurate representation.
With the vast differences of opinion in the community on how moonkin performs I trust the sims I DO and my experiences way more then anything else. But that is just me. I don't tend to take anything on face value. I need to see it for myself. But then again I'm just a random no-name boomkin on the forum.

When is anyone ever doing nothing for X seconds outside of a phase transition or a CC/immunity raid mechanic? That's a seriously poor way to measure 'light movement' and 'heavy movement', because any decent player will never be doing nothing.

Ehh, you are stuck on the notion of movement, which is my fault since I wasn't clear enough of what I was saying.
Moving on, yea there is a lot of times when you do "nothing", when you are not in range of boss and there is a lot of instances when that happens or in boomkins case whenever you go into bear form and that is quite a lot in early progression.

I'll say it again. I'm only interested in how much dps we lose compared to other ranged when we have downtime. And that can be simulated with doing nothing for X seconds every Y seconds.

Don't sim light movement or heavy movement for Boomkins, because our APL has no movement or AP pooling conditionals. All you will get is junk.

It doesn't have moonfire spam either(but that can be added easily), but i don't actually care about movement for which you actively prepare, so for what i wanted to check it's fine. Also for most of the sims I did I used raid_event=stun instead of movement since that is more in line in what I wanted to check.

[Armorek]

Consider Trilliax, which I would consider as "Heavy Movement". SPriest basically does next to nothing during this time, while if you don't have SD, you can spam Moonfire and maybe even get a Starsurge or two out. If you do have SD, you can Starfall and, oh look, you're literally not affected AT ALL.

Can you clarify why I would want to take SD on what is essentially a non-AOE fight though? Like even in mythic I don't think SD is optimal for the spec in terms of dps. NB just seems to be a better choice. To be clear though my experience in mythic is limited to like 3-4 kills. I'll be the first to admit I could probably improve on dps issues with movement or with just general dps issues altogether. But it seems kind of silly that Boomkins purposefully need to spec incorrectly, for a ST fight that has heavy movement, in order to keep up with other classes.

[Malmmoc]

Can you clarify why I would want to take SD on what is essentially a non-AOE fight though?

During beam phase you drop starfall around the boss to allow yourself to cast on the move the whole time. The gain from that is larger than the loss of using starfall instead of starsurge and the loss of not using NB.

[Armorek]

During beam phase you drop starfall around the boss to allow yourself to cast on the move the whole time. The gain from that is larger than the loss of using starfall instead of starsurge and the loss of not using NB.

Yeah, I'm aware SD lets you cast while moving. Just figured NB was the better talent in a pure ST fight. Too bad I won't be able to give this a shot and see how my DPS improves. Maybe I can try it out in a pug or something.

[Mewseph]

Most fights with heavy movement but not a lot of cleave I run Stellar drift with Oneths, saving a proc for when I know high movement is coming up. I prefer running Oneths on most fghts anyway, never liked using ED.

[elynos]

Yeah, I'm aware SD lets you cast while moving. Just figured NB was the better talent in a pure ST fight. Too bad I won't be able to give this a shot and see how my DPS improves. Maybe I can try it out in a pug or something.

Because of wax and wane the global used to cast moonfire and sunfire isn't a waste. NB is just a bad talent and needs to be reworked.