For my druid i swapped to balance at lvl 58 because:
- prior to lvl 58 outland greens and quest rewards, leveling as balance it's simply gimped by the gear (lack of any serious spell dmg hurts)
- I could get dreamstate and intensity (spirit on gear and spell dmg are the way to go imho, crit is the last stat to look at since it's so expensive on item budget)
Leveling to 70 has been a blast (always had around 100 mp5 while casting), I soloed quests that with my first druid (feral) I couldn't do alone.
Speaking about elite quests if a mob is rootable, just spam roots and nuke until it's dead..
For immune mobs (like the masteries in nagrand or the overseers in the forge camps) dot and run in travel form while your mana regen works for you (a feral druid would run OOM in few shifts.. I kited the overseers to zangarmarsh :P ), I came up with the idea of kiting because I couldn't find a group and I was leveling an hunter as well.. balance druids are wonderful kiters imho!
My build at lvl 58 was this one:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
For melee mobs:
- from range pull with starfirex2, the mob will be beating on you in the same moment you finish the second SF
- cast root rank 1 (bind it on your mouse for increased profit :P), it's ridicolous cheap and you don't cast roots for dmg but for the cc
- strafe or turn 180° with mouse and run back and cast Insect Swarm while doing it, don't use moonfire since it's less mana efficient and has an high chance to break your roots
- starfirex2 (or less if you crit at least once)
- profit!
In this way you're taking a very little amount of damage from melee mobs (the most annoying ones due to the common interrupts and knock backs).
Starfire it's mana efficient, scales well with spell dmg, the only downside it's the lack of push back protection.. stick with it
Wrath is only good when you're doing difficult quests or you need to nuke down an add, very mana inefficient
Insect Swarm cheap in terms of mana, does some decent damage, you can cast it while you're gaining range and doesn't never ever break the roots
Moonfire I used it only for dofficult mobs or on adds for dealing some dmg while i was killing the main target, not mana efficient and tends to mess up your root and run back strategy
Balance of Power is good because your roots have less chances to be resisted or broke, spend 2 points in it
Force of Nature is very good for dealing with adds or tough mobs (never counted their dmg but with my outland greens they would do at least 4-5k dmg by themselves)
RUNNING OOM at some point you'll run out of mana with you innervate on cd, you have two choices mainly:
- equip your feral ap stave and random feral greens you come by questing (closet gnome or outfitter for fast gear swapping) and start punching a random mob to death while you gain something like 200-300 mana for each proc (30% of your ap becomes mana with 14 proc per minutes, a slow weapon means an higher proc chance) and you're gaining around 200mp5 while not casting; It's a unique mechanic and I'm sure blizzard didn't intend us to switch gear for maximizing the mana gain :P
- just sit back and drink for 20-30 seconds
the first choice takes a little longer but in the process you're gaining xp, I always did the first thing since I play on a pvp server and I couldn't simply drink/alt+tab
Those are my personal opinions (I'm just a casual player) that I came with while leveling as balance, I hope you'll find them useful
Balance is the fastest way to lvl up? No!
But it's a really fun spec to play, and it's more flexible than feral (healing early outland instances is just a matter of grabbing some +healing quest rewards and your mana regen can't be matched by any feral druid)