[Balance] Druid Guide- Warlords of Draenor Edition

[Deleted]

Does anyone know which ones are the best trinkets? I have sandmans 3/3 , imperators mythic one and copeland.. I am not entirely sure imperators one is actually better

[Foxziim]

nice /tenchar

[Deleted]

Don't forget that our 2 piece also has this affect: "Reduces the cast time of Wrath and Starfire by 12%" add the 20% reduced cast time from Euphoria and the fact that a large amount of fights utilize Starfall over Starsurge (between 20% and 40% of your overall dmg), it is clear that haste is not better than either crit or mastery.

Haste appears stronger on simcraft because the fundamental flaw of simcraft which is that it over-values single-target, and it doesn't properly account for movement and error in play even when set to heavy movement.

As to why simcraft randomly takes a dive on haste when it overvalued it previously, I have no answer for you, but I can tell you that haste is not better than crit/mastery even if simcraft is telling you it is. My advice is take any piece you can get with mastery + crit on it and accept those that happen to have haste + mastery/crit - in Highmaul you hardly have much of a choice anyways.

Also Blackrock tends to have multistrike on almost everything, so we get shafted with one of our worst stats at the end of this tier lol.

I have to disagree with multistrike being the worst stat but the benefit of crit/mastery is greater. Also i have to agree on the gear part of your post. It is still the beginning of the expansion and I do not trust any data for stat priority and rather prefer to test it for myself as you can see below.

Kaldonir and the rest. I have come to the realization that there is indeed a haste breakpoint. That point must be around 7,7 and 8,5% of base haste.
My priority stat so far is Critical and with the alteration of some gear i dropped at 7,03% crit with the dps difference being around 1-2k depending on the fight.

I have raised haste back to 8,22% and balanced crit/mastery stats, pending further testing.

[iddqd]

Little question:

often enough in dungeons, the boss is engaged when my eclipse bar is still running. So if it happens to be on solar side, shall i still cast starfire (witch CA, which says that every spell gets its maximal eclipse bonus) or do i have to switch to wrath then?

[Deleted]

the proper thing to do is use Astral Communion so you can switch over to Moon and then use Celestial Alignment to start your rotation.

[Deleted]

Does anyone know which ones are the best trinkets? I have sandmans 3/3 , imperators mythic one and copeland.. I am not entirely sure imperators one is actually better

according to simcraft crap you should use sandman/quiescent runestone and get a shards of nothing from twin ogron to replace the sandman.

[Tatuin]

I might be bit stupid here now. But is there any dmg diffrent betwen sunfall and starfall?

[Deleted]

I might be bit stupid here now. But is there any dmg diffrent betwen sunfall and starfall?

nope, just the other variables that come with it

[Sloth11]

Hello, I have two quick questions. I apologize if they have been discussed in the thread, but I didn't see it mentioned in the OP.

1. In the icy veins guide it mentions to only cast celestial alignment When you are in lunar eclipse. I was under the impression that celestial alignment gave you the benefits of both eclipses while active. If that's the case, why would it matter where you are on the balance power?

Edit- I think I just realized why...so starsurge gives you lunar empowerment?

2. The icy veins guide also said that you should use starfall on fights with 3+ targets. Does this mean you should not use starsurge at all, or does it mean you should only use your shooting stars procs to starfall.

[Keiyra]

You figured out the first answer (lunar empowerment for stronger starfire's during CA)

As for the second, it means don't use starsurge at all for 3+, use all the charges on Starfall. Starfall is VERY strong.
With current gear I'd say you could prolly use all your charges for starfall on 2+targets (its great on twins).

(obvious caveats of if 1 targets is essential to burn down fast, then feel free to starsurge that target - or of course if you happen to get lucky and shooting star procs actually cap out your charges while starfall is running, then pop off a starsurge. Never want to sit at cap and waste future procs)

[Sloth11]

You figured out the first answer (lunar empowerment for stronger starfire's during CA)

As for the second, it means don't use starsurge at all for 3+, use all the charges on Starfall. Starfall is VERY strong.
With current gear I'd say you could prolly use all your charges for starfall on 2+targets (its great on twins).

(obvious caveats of if 1 targets is essential to burn down fast, then feel free to starsurge that target - or of course if you happen to get lucky and shooting star procs actually cap out your charges while starfall is running, then pop off a starsurge. Never want to sit at cap and waste future procs)

Thank you!

Quick follow up on the celestial alignment question; is it ok to be just anywhere on the lunar side, or do you actually need to have a lunar eclipse?

[KUGamer]

Can someone help me with a weakaura? I use the minor glyph so I can see what my toon looks like when I am in moonkin form. I just want a weakaura that yells at me if I am in combat and not in moonking form.

[Keiyra]

Thank you! Quick follow up on the celestial alignment question; is it ok to be just anywhere on the lunar side, or do you actually need to have a lunar eclipse?

Anywhere on lunar side is good enough - and at the start of combat, before you bar has moved, it'll count as lunar as well. I mean its not the end of the world if you use it on solar side, but lunar is preferred. (don't forget you can always use AC to force an eclipse change quickly if u want)

[Xelvani]

Hi all,

Just re started playing wow and obviously went to icy veins for the basics. But now that I've got a better hang of it i decided to sim my toon and found that crit is better than mastery. Although small, it is still better.

Then i simulated some of the top boomkins so i could have a good idea about the gear to stat differences. From pretty much all of those sims, led to crit being a much larger value than mastery. The difference between crit and mast was much more than the diff between mast and multi(which is third).

My question is why does pretty much every boomkin I see gem/enchant for mastery instead of going crit?

[Caterpillar]

Hey guys,

i am seriously concerned about my dps right now. My main spec is resto but i am asked to go Balance from time to time. I share most of my gear with the resto set (stacking mastery and haste), except neck, cape, trinkets and the 680 ring. So it's basically not optimized for Balance, nor is the weapon enchant. Nevertheless, i feel that my dps is too low for ilvl 654. I just did a 15 minute rotation on the dummy with only MotW and the whispering crystal (no pots). I went with SotF and Euphoria - which i read is the best Combo for single target, the result was a mere 17200 dps. I know that raid buffs were missing, but that's nowhere the 22-24k single target dps my mates are doing on Patchwork fights like butcher with similar gear (650-655).

My general rotation was:
Keep CA on CD when in lunar
Don't cap on starsurge procs
Cast starsurge on entering lunar/solar to have the empowered spells near the Peak
Refresh dots with Peak buff (i failed once or twice with moonfire in the fight)
Cast starfire / wrath depending on lunar / solar when not empowered

I have macroed CA with moonfire and the trinket, so i may have clipped the dots when entering CA. This also means i only used the trinket every 3 minutes (too lazy i know, but using it every two minutes will not increase my dps by like 3k).

What the heck am i doing wrong? Is it my gear, or is it because boomkins suck on the dummy without raid buffs? I would gladly switch my weapon enchant to mastery, but i don't know if the mastery also procs for heals. Can anyone tell me their dummy dps with similar gear?

Here's my armory (logged out with Balance gear):
http://eu.battle.net/wow/de/characte...leger/advanced

This is the recount window (can't WoL the dummy):
http://s24.postimg.org/d6i7cgw2t/lol_dps.jpg

Something to note: Sunfire hit the tank dummy as well, so the 17200 should be even lower actually

[wootie]

Thanks for the guide! Hard to find anything boomie related.

[ceelion]

-snip-

Sharing your gear with resto stacking haste is going to be mostly what kills the extra 2k dps I'd say. Its one of our worst stats, just above versitility and possibly multi. As well once you get proper off pieces (rings, back, etc.) you'll jump dps since spirit is literally usless for us and represents 0 dps there over if it was any other stat.

[Caterpillar]

Sharing your gear with resto stacking haste is going to be mostly what kills the extra 2k dps I'd say. Its one of our worst stats, just above versitility and possibly multi. As well once you get proper off pieces (rings, back, etc.) you'll jump dps since spirit is literally usless for us and represents 0 dps there over if it was any other stat.

Seems I looged out with the resto gear yesterday. I only share the leather pieces and weapon with my resto gear, so no spirit in moonkin form except from one ring which is 655 and has mastery (my old was 630 with versatiliy/haste which i think is worse).

Is haste really that bad for balance? The stat weight comparison on the first page lists it just slightly below mastery/crit. Are those ratings outdated?

[Deleted]

Hi all,

Just re started playing wow and obviously went to icy veins for the basics. But now that I've got a better hang of it i decided to sim my toon and found that crit is better than mastery. Although small, it is still better.

Then i simulated some of the top boomkins so i could have a good idea about the gear to stat differences. From pretty much all of those sims, led to crit being a much larger value than mastery. The difference between crit and mast was much more than the diff between mast and multi(which is third).

My question is why does pretty much every boomkin I see gem/enchant for mastery instead of going crit?

because they saw it on a website and blindly follow it...

[ceelion]

Seems I looged out with the resto gear yesterday. I only share the leather pieces and weapon with my resto gear, so no spirit in moonkin form except from one ring which is 655 and has mastery (my old was 630 with versatiliy/haste which i think is worse).

Is haste really that bad for balance? The stat weight comparison on the first page lists it just slightly below mastery/crit. Are those ratings outdated?

I don't think that it's nessicarily that it's bad, more of the other stats bringing more to the table, mostly because starfall is an insane amount on dps on most bosses and haste has 0 effect on it as opposed to mastery, crit and multi.

because they saw it on a website and blindly follow it...

Every sim in here has mastery as the best stat... most of those websites get their stat weights from math and math doesn't lie. I'd say if the top boomkins are doing it (paragon's boomkin for example) than its right and the sims that Xelvani was running aren't set up correctly since that seems way more likely then the big time boomkins not doing their research properly.