Balance Talent proposal

[Hushkawnek]

So I got really bored yesterday and came up with a mostly new talent field for Balance. I posted it in Class Development on the official forums too, and I'm looking for opinions on this and a conversation to distract me from the lack of progress in Alpha. Take a look and give some feedback!

A few things to note: Moons and Astral Communication are baseline, as are Incarnation and the active affinity abilities given through talent choice (more on that in the given tier). Stellar Flare was the one oddity I couldn't decide whether to have baseline or remove outright, but it's noted throughout regardless. The point was to have a defined goal for each tier that only lets gameplay compete as opposed to viability (ST vs AoE or movement vs healing). Lastly, legendary effects I didn't address below I sort of grouped into a returned glyph system (OI, IFE, LatC, RM, PoE).

Tier 15 - Movement
Tiger Dash - Activates Cat Form and increases movement speed by 200%, reducing gradually over 4 seconds. 25 second cooldown.
Wild Charge - Grants a movement ability that varies by shape shift form. 15 second cooldown.
One With the Dream - Go into hibernation, causing your body to fall asleep and become untargetable but allowing your targetable spirit to roam free and for the next 8 seconds. Activating this ability causes you to wake at the location of your body. 1 minute cooldown.
Comments: Wild Charge is good as it is on live, and the desire to remove Displacer Beast is understandable; therefore Tiger Dash stays, but with reduced cooldown to make it competitive. Renewal is also replaced due to inability to align with the tier theme, so a new talent has been conceived that is somewhat similar to warlocks’ Demonic Circle, but with considerable timing restriction.

Tier 30 - Crowd Control
Typhoon - Strikes targets within 15 yards in front of you with a violent typhoon, knocking them back and dazing them for 6 seconds. Usable in all shapeshift forms. 15 yard range. 30 second cooldown.
Mass Entanglement - Roots the target and all enemies within 15 yards in place for 30 seconds. Damage may interrupt the effect. Usable in all shapeshift forms. 30 yard range. 30 second cooldown.
Cyclone - Tosses the enemy target into the air, disorienting them but making them invulnerable for up to 6 seconds. Only one target can be affected by your Cyclone at a time. Usable in all shapeshift forms. 20 yard range. 10 second cooldown.
Comments: Mighty Bash was never a good fit as a melee ability for a ranged spec. Cyclone is therefore implemented with a lower cooldown than the other two due to being single target, and bash was moved to Bear Form.

Tier 45 - Affinity/Defensive
Restoration Affinity - You gain Ysera’s Gift, which heals you (or an ally if you are at full health) for 3% of your maximum health every 5 seconds. You also learn most other Restoration abilities, most notably Swiftmend, Tranquility, and Stonebark (self cast).
Guardian Affinity - You gain Thick Hide, reducing all damage taken by 6%. You also learn most other Guardian abilities, most notably Frenzied Regeneration and Mighty Bash.
Feral Affinity - You gain Feline Swiftness, increasing your movement speed by 15%. Additionally, you gain most Feral abilities, most notably Protection of Ashamane, granting you 100% dodge when you enter Cat Form for 5 seconds (cannot occur more than once every 30 seconds).
Comments: These were changed a bit with the assumption that the “base” spells originally learned by each affinity have returned as baseline. The idea behind having a relatively full functionality to a chosen affinity is with the idea that no other spec scales properly (if at all) with any of Balance’s stats. Therefore none benefit from mastery, Restoration is limited by mana, and Guardian and Feral similarly by agility and attack power. Additionally, each comes with its own style of a defensive, and neither Guardian nor Feral grant Survival Instincts but rather take a roundabout way to encourage shapeshifting.

Tier 60 - Single Target
Power of Goldrinn - Starsurge has a chance to summon the Spirit of Goldrinn, which immediately deals X arcane damage to the target.
Astral Fortune - Starsurge has a chance to refund 15 Astral Power upon cast.
Interstellar - Casting Starsurge allows you to cast while moving for the next two seconds.
Comments: Restructuring talents to focus one tier on single target attacks allows for various gameplay tweaks and for an artifact trait to be reimplemented in a reasonable manner. One has a straightforward damage increase in a roundabout fashion (the “easiest”); one gives additional resources to work with; one grants increased movement.

Tier 75 - Area of Effect
Stellar Drift - Increases Starfall’s radius by 30%, damage by 50%, and allows you to cast while moving while within Starfall’s radius.
Shooting Stars - Moonfire and Sunfire (and Stellar Flare?) damage over time has a X% chance to call down a falling star, dealing X astral damage to other targets within 5 yards.
Meteor Shower - hell if I know, open to suggestions
Comments: Stellar Drift is a static increase on AoE damage and includes the movement freedom it is known for. Shooting Stars is divorced from its AP generation, which is featured in another talent, but retains its damage that scales with number of enemies. Meteor Shower is an idea for some other AoE ability with an effect I haven’t been able to come up with yet.

Tier 90 - Astral Power Generation
Celestial Rage - Lunar Strike’s cleave is enhanced, increasing its range to 10 yards, it’s ancillary damage to 70% of base, and generating 3 Astral Power per additional target struck.
The Stars Align - You generate 3 Astral Power every 2 seconds, and your Astral Power does not deteriorate below 50 outside of combat. Replaces Astral Communication
Blessing of the Ancients - Grants either Blessing of Elune, increasing Astral Power generated by Solar Wrath and Lunar Strike by 25%; or Blessing of An’she, giving Moonfire and Sunfire (and Stellar Flare?) damage over time a 10% chance to generate 4 Astral Power. 15 second cooldown.
Comments: Generation was grouped together in a better manner; Astral Communication is assumed to be baked in. While Celestial Rage only affects LS, I wanted to try and stick only to AP generation and not damage; with this in mind, the cleave mechanisms should be baked in rather than in the talent. The Stars Align is the old Blessing of An’she with some umph; it was never used anyway. BotA has Elune unchanged but An’she representing the portion of Shooting Stars related to generation, and the idea of switching between the two should make it suitable for transitioning between ST and AoE fights on the fly.

Tier 100 - Rotation
Stellar Eclipse - Lunar and Solar Empowerments can now stack up to 5 times, and Stellar Empowerment now increases the damage of Moonfire, Sunfire, and Stellar Flare by X% but is affected by multiple Starfalls.
Dreamweaver - Starsurge reduces the cast of Starsurge by 5 for the next 5 seconds, stacking up to 2 times. Starfall reduces the cost of Starfall by 10 for the next 6 seconds, stacking up to 2 times.
Astral Swiftness - Starsurge and Starfall buff the caster, increasing haste by 3% for 20 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times, but gaining a stack does not refresh the duration.
Comments: The second and third options are direct ripoffs of the Emerald Dreamcatcher legendary and our tier 20 four set. They represent opposing playstyles of stacking spenders on top of each other or spacing them out for the best effect. Stellar Eclipse is a quirky one I came up with that attempted to remove the penalty of excessively stacking spenders on top of one another.

[Deleted]

Tier 15:
Tiger Dash cooldown (45 secs) is okay I think, we should wait and see how all specs perform.
Wild charge is okay as it is (even though I think it should be baseline, but whatever)
One with the dream: very cool idea. I would increase cooldown to atleast 2 minutes or more, its basically an "oh-shit" immunity button so it should be balanced around this fact. Targettable spirit should also have like 50% of max hp, or maybe be unhealable and lose 12,5% hp every second. There is so much cool interactions I can think of with this kind of ability, it could transform you into a wisp giving you extra movement speed so you could activate it and run to some spot quickly to soak some damage freely.

TLDR: very solid tier even for every druid spec, not just balance, fun detected, therefore never going to happen.

Tier 30:
mighty bash is okay, just make it astral bash (spell effect), im tired of getting parried/dodged when using it. I would keep cyclone as PvP talent (and maybe make them usable outside of PvP as well)

Tier 45:
affinities are passive crap, we all know that, they are boring and do not provide stuff they should provide, they should come with 5-10 minute cooldown ability that gives you enhanced affinity (for example you could effectivelly heal your raid, as moonkin with resto affinity it could give you 10 minute cd tree of life talent and while in tree form you could cast all those spells and tranquility for about 30 seconds and then you would get maybe -10% damage done debuff for 1 minute...ćool situational ability, guardian affinity could allow you to press that sweet incarnation which would allow you to effectively tank and maybe be usable while CCed)

ah well, any change here would mean fun, and thats a nono

Rest is kind of hard for me to imagine because you propose a lot of changes, but I 100% agree we need to separate AoE and ST talents into separate tiers, choosing between either AoE or ST is not fun for me. I miss fury of elune though, its okay, it just scales horribly. I would put it there instead of unspecified meteor shower.

I think it would be more realistic to just shuffle existing talents around and maybe replace one or two of those dps talents. Such vast changes to dps talents would require a lot of testing and I dont think they are going to do that. Out of all legendaries maybe those bracers could be incorporated, its fun mechanics.

[Hushkawnek]

I agree everything I put at tier 60 onward is a total shakeup, but it was an attempt for talents to actually be...talents. It's a crazy notion but using talents to change the flavor of the class and alter the manner in which ST is approached, AoE is approached, AP generation is approached was the target. If we were to put it in Legion terms, OI/IFE is the best leggo combo for ST, while if the helm was just a hair more powerful, it would pull out in front on DPS but be a bigger nightmare (no pun intended) to perfect - more risk for more reward.

As for the affinities, they're nothing special right now, and it was an attempt to change that flavor as well. We have barkskin right now; taking Resto enhances it to stonebark or ironbark or whatever for an enhanced defensive and some quick heals. Feral gives enhanced dodge or something of the like for a M+ situation where you have adds pounding on you. And guardian would bring pure sweet beef with a decent self-heal. That affinity tier has so much potential.

And like...we have no flavor whatsoever related to the Emerald Dream, which is the theme of druids in general, and that just blows my mind. Bear, cat, tree, fine. Space chicken, kinda weird but whatever. Harmony? Dreams? Nightmares? Pssht lol

[gobio]

"Go into hibernation, causing your body to fall asleep and become untargetable but allowing your targetable spirit to roam free."
How is the body in "real world" not target-able? And when druid is asleep they are supposed to be in the dreamworld, how is that "spirit" target-able.

What happen when you die "as a spirit"? Do you die "as a spirit" or do you just "wake up"?
If you just die as a spirit what happen to your un-target-able sleeping body? If you just wake up that is just OP on top of it making no sense.

[Deleted]

"Go into hibernation, causing your body to fall asleep and become untargetable but allowing your targetable spirit to roam free."
How is the body in "real world" not target-able? And when druid is asleep they are supposed to be in the dreamworld, how is that "spirit" target-able.

What happen when you die "as a spirit"? Do you die "as a spirit" or do you just "wake up"?
If you just die as a spirit what happen to your un-target-able sleeping body? If you just wake up that is just OP on top of it making no sense.

Thats a balancing issue, idea itself is nice and can be worked upon further, as I wrote its an "oh shit" button and should be treated accordingly. Your spirit could have 50% hp and when it dies your body takes that damage as well. Many cool things could be done with it.