[Druid] Balance Druid Concerns

#1 - April 15, 2012, 2:15 a.m.

I'm mostly concerned with the depth of this spec. The rotation that we now appear to have on the beta servers seems very watered down and very linear and has no player involvement at all.

Refresh MF/SnF at beginning of eclipse, cast proper nuke until next eclipse, repeat. In lunar you would also pop Starfall.

The majority of our talents seem very lackluster for Balance Druids. Only the 4th tier has anything interesting for us to chose from. The rest of the talents have purely PVP uses. Some talents are even worthless. I know that Blizz wanted talent choices to be a difficult one and it certainly is, for the wrong reason. It's difficult because it's hard to determine which talent I should take, for the sake of taking it.

For example, look at the 6th tier of our talents. HoTW encourages shifting to a cat or bear to OT or heal which could eat up our eclipse energy, Dream encourages us to throw out a heal every once in awhile, diminishing our overall DPS and would really only be usefull with Tranquility which is useable once a fight, and lastly we have Disentanglement which is clearly a PVP talent. In this case, I would take Dream because it does the least damage to my DPS and actually provides a boost to my Tranquility. That is not an exciting talent choice but it's the best choice and our other tiers are just the same.

I understand that Blizz wants us to be able to take up other roles in certain situations but that is not a model that I, nor many many other people are not wanting to fill. Why should I waste MY DPS uptime when other DPS don't have to? Having utility is nice, but it can also be a burden. A burden which some other classes such as Hunters and Mages don't have to fill.

It's probably too late now but the way that the talent system should have panned out is each Specialization should have it's own unique talent tree, much like how it is today on live servers, but with the same setup that you have now. 3 choices per tier, 6 tiers, all choices which would have benefits for that Spec.

Overall Im clearly not happy with the direction Balance Druids, or Druids in general, are going. While shapeshifting is a part of our class, we shouldnt be made to switch roles to maximize effectiveness. I dont play Balance to be a utility, I play it because I like to compete on DPS with other classes. Watering down the rotation makes it less challenging, and encouraging us to shapeshift to cat or heal makes it less fun. We need an overhaul before it gets too late.

What do my other fellow Boomkins have to say? Im curious how you all feel about your class.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#46 - May 17, 2012, 8:01 p.m.

We are in fact experimenting with adding Insect Swarm back to the rotation.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#119 - May 19, 2012, 5:32 p.m.

If we add Insect Swarm back, it would not be just to have another dot to manage, but to give players some way to interact with solar or lunar power more. There are other ways to do that too, so it may not ultimately be Insect Swarm. The rotation is close to where we want it, but it needs just a little more to play with.

At the 5000 foot view, the point of the Eclipse mechanic to begin with was to cast X spells for a time, then switch to Y spells with the Druid having some control over when or why that occurred. We don't think killing critters to get the bar moving or gaming it so that you stayed at one side of the bar forever really delivered on the vision for Eclipse. However, those tactics did give players some control -- a way to game things so that more clever players could extract a bit more performance out of the mechanic.

We are concerned that we are too far to the other extreme now, where the game UI tells you whether to use your solar buttons or lunar buttons and you really aren't making any strategic decisions. We want to introduce some relatively simple, elegant mechanic to give you more control over how much lunar or solar power you have. Maybe that's Insect Swarm. Maybe it's something else. Try it out over the next few builds, keeping in mind that it may take a bit before we have something we are satisfied with.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#174 - May 22, 2012, 4:51 p.m.

Increasing Hurricane's damage so that we actually use it for AoE is a great start. Giving it an Arcane version so we can AoE in Lunar is almost getting there! But then you totally forget about Wild Mushroom, which is currently our strongest AoE ability. Either it's back to being worthless, or we're still stuck forcing a Solar Eclipse.

Mushrooms don't benefit from Eclipse and really it's targeted more at something you set up before targets arrive. You then use Hurricane once they're there. That's the intent, anyway, and if it's not there yet, then we'll get it there.