An interesting idea for Balance Treants

[Christhewak]

Having just leveled an Elemental Shaman upto 85, an idea struck me with their Elemental Mastery talent and the following Talent Feedback (ranks 1 2 and/or 3).

Basically, the idea would be for something similar with Treants. At the moment, a base 3 minute cooldown with no room for manverability. For example, cast them at the start of the fight, when one has all their procs and buffs up, and then later on in the fight just before hero to get the most out of them. That's all very well, however, if you were wiping on a fight (lets say patchwerk style), and you were able to get both sets of trees out every fight, so once with buffs, once with hero.
At the end of the night, looking over logs, your Treants will not of even done 5% of your overall damage, which, for a 3 minute cooldown, i think most of us will agree, is pathetic.

Which, leads me onto the thoughts i were having. In keeping with Talents now (I agree nothing will happen now, but might in MoP, and will subsequently need to be jiggled around then) There could be an additional point into either the Fungal Growth talent, or perhaps the Force of Nature talent, that has a very similar effect to the forementioned Feedback talent. As to where the casting of either Wrath or Starfire will reduce the cooldown upon our treants by 1 or more seconds per cast, and in addition, (again as talents are now) raise the damage of Treant's by say 10/20/30% per point.

I can see drawbacks of having to stack talent points in the balance tree for something like this to work, we might lose damage buffs elsewhere, or lose functionality which could hinder us in some regards, but upon our single target, even with the nice little buff to our T13 4set, we're still behind lacking output. (for the average chicken without BiS and a legendary this is true)

What would be other peoples thoughts on something like this, or any positive/negative effects this might have on class or spec?
Thanks

[Alskonda]

The treants will get a major overhaul with the talent tree. They will differ, depending on what role you currently are playing, so I guess it will be like the paladin guardian angel.

[huth]

Yeah. We should wait to see how they work in MoP before we think about changes, especially since it is very unlikely Blizz will change anything before then.

Personally, i'd prefer to see them work like 2T12/Gurthalak/Bane of Doom, i.e. we get a chance to summon x treant(s) on doing y that will attack our target for z time, but that's just me.

And if we still have to deal with that ridiculous reticule in MoP, i'm going Incarnation even if it is slightly weaker.

[Christhewak]

Well, i stuck with T12 2p for a long time (I wasn't fussy about gear upgrades on non hc pieces) and that burning tree we had was even more useless than even 1 treant every fight, total damage for a nights raiding was 1% at best, so not sure i'd be happy with something like that again.. unless they upped proc chance and damage done

[Deleted]

yeah trees usually do between 1-2% of your overall damage, and seeing as on demand burst is an aspect balance is lacking Force of nature could be the spell to sort that out. Something like immediately putting you into an eclipse state when spawned and then again when they die 30 seconds later could give us an extended period of Oomph beyond the 10 seconds of an eclipse.

[huth]

Well, i stuck with T12 2p for a long time (I wasn't fussy about gear upgrades on non hc pieces) and that burning tree we had was even more useless than even 1 treant every fight, total damage for a nights raiding was 1% at best, so not sure i'd be happy with something like that again.. unless they upped proc chance and damage done

That's more of a game balance issue, though. I'm talking mechanics here, not numbers. If they stayed as an alternative to Incarnation, they would have to provide a similar level of benefit of course.

Also keep in mind that the T12 treant doesn't scale with anything except CoE, so his contribution goes down as your gear improves. That obviously wouldn't be the case for what i'm talking about.