State of the Balance Druid

The Balance Druid in Cataclysm is one of the most interesting and complex DPS classes ever put forth by Blizzard. People who don't play Balance often know very little about the class (among other reasons, because the mechanics are new and unique). And for people who do play Balance, it's often not obvious how to optimize your play. You often have you use your judgment, and a solid high-level understanding of the way the class works is important. This post is a basic analysis of the current Balance spec, intended for both groups.

The first part of the post is basic information that should be review for people playing Moonkin, but might be interesting to others. The second part is commentary on how it all plays out in practice.

Basic Mechanics

First, just a few simple points of mechanics, distilled out to give anyone the basis they need for the later discussion.

1) Nukes and DoT's. For the most part, Moonkin have cast-time spells and instant-cast DoT's. For a given unit time, a DoT has a much higher DPET (damage per execution time) than a nuke, assuming the DoT will tick out fully. So you cast DoT's until they're up on all available targets, then fill with nukes. Most people understand this from other classes, but I'll point out that Moonkin DoT's are quite strong.

2) Eclipse. At the core of Moonkin DPS is the Eclipse system. Simplified greatly: at any time a Moonkin is either inside or outside of an Eclipse state. When in Eclipse, he does about 50% more damage with most spells. The eclipse lasts until he's cast a certain number of nukes (ignoring other spells), and then it expires. Once out of Eclipse, he has to cast a certain number of nukes again to get back into Eclipse. Roughly speaking, it takes around 15 seconds to get into or out of an Eclipse.

2A) Lunar vs. Solar. There are actually two kinds of Eclipse, Lunar and Solar. You have to alternate between them. The only important difference for now is that Solar buffs both our DoT's and our best AoE spell (Wild Mushroom), while Lunar buffs one of the DoT's and not Wild Mushroom.

3) Lunar Shower. One of our DoT's, Moonfire, does have a direct-damage component. You can spam Moonfire for the repeated direct damage hits, mostly wasting the DoT. A talent called Lunar Shower greatly increases the damage of the direct damage portion, so long as you continually move. While moving, Moonfire DD spam does around 80% of the DPS of nukes.

4) AoE. Our best AoE spell is Wild Mushroom. It takes 3 GCD's to plant 3 Mushrooms, and then they can be detonated at any later point. You can detonate once every 10 seconds. As described above, the detonation does much more damage if you are in Solar Eclipse at the time.

Putting it all together

After thinking about the above, a few basic points that should already be familiar to Balance players emerge:

On a single target, you keep DoT's up and fill with nukes. The result is that you cycle in and out of Eclipse repeatedly (again, in roughly 12-15 second intervals). The huge DPS oscillation between Eclipse and non-Eclipse doesn't matter too much, since it all averages out.

If a particular phase of a fight requires high DPS at a certain time (AoE pack, burn phase, transition of some kind, there are numerous examples), you want to have Eclipse up for it. But there are few ways to control when an Eclipse comes. In fact, there's only one way, which is to stop nuking. This is why Lunar Shower serves such an important function (aside from its clearly intended function of providing a DPS option when the player is forced to move)--it's a way to do reasonable DPS for a short while while holding the Eclipse meter in place. But you don't want to simply hold still in an un-Eclipsed state, doing even weaker DPS. So to properly plan an Eclipse for a certain point, you need to stretch the prior Eclipse using Lunar Shower until it's time to speed through the uneclipsed phase to start with a new Eclipse at right time.

With multiple targets, the picture gets more intricate. Primarily because a new option appears: abandoning nukes entirely and using only instants (thus freezing the Eclipse bar in place). The downside is that when all targets are dotted, your only filler is Moonfire DD spam, which is weaker DPS than nuking. The upside is that you can remain in Solar Eclipse 100% of the time. That perpetual Solar Eclipse buffs all the DoT's you keep refreshing on all the targets (and Wild Mushroom if you add that in as well), which can easily outweigh the downside if you have many targets available.

There are many further complications I'm not even getting into. Those interested can look at this section of my Moonkin guide:
http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t110353-...ced_Techniques
The point of this section was merely to get everyone familiar with the most prominent mechanics.

Analysis

The first big point which is hopefully becoming clear by now is that this spec is rather complicated to play well. Mastering the basics of DPS such as keeping DoT's up and using the right nuke to advance Eclipse in between still leaves a substantial DPS deficit compared to experienced players (I'd wager, a much larger gap than with most classes). No matter much you optimize what you're doing, there's virtually always a way to squeeze out a little more DPS. Subtle and sometimes difficult tricks surrounding things like the 4T11 set bonus (discussed in my guide) can add significant amounts of damage. It is not an easy class to play extremely well, and nearly impossible to play perfectly.

There are two main sources of complexity to focus on. First is Eclipse planning. As outlined above, a key aspect of the class is the alternation between high- and low-DPS phases, with a rather long period, and there's an (albeit slightly awkward) way of controlling when they start and end. The upshot is that DPS a fight well often requires quite a bit of long-term planning. Many classes have to prepare a bit for a strong DPS burst, such as Rogues pooling energy or DK's filling up on Runes. What sets Moonkin apart is the time scale--Solar Eclipses are critical for e.g. AoE (as noted, to the tune of over 50% DPS), and they come nearly a minute apart in ordinary play. This frequently creates a decision of whether to extend an Eclipse until the next AoE phase (or whatever else it is), which requires Lunar Shower spamming for many seconds, or to try to cycle all the way around to another Solar. If you try the latter and miss it, you're stuck outside of Eclipse doing anemic DPS when the important moment arrives.

Even aside from setting up Eclipses for particular high-damage moments in a fight, ordinary Eclipse management has lots of little nuances. For example, when forced to move and DPS with instants for a while, you can't move the Eclipse bar. If you're outside of Eclipse when this happens, you're in a worst-of-both-worlds scenario--spamming Lunar Shower with 0% Eclipse uptime. The ultimate result of all this is that as you get familiar with each particular encounter, you almost have to come up with an Eclipse schedule for the entire fight (at more complex fights you do literally this), and accidentally exiting Eclipse at the wrong time can significantly impact your DPS for the next minute or more.

The second main source of complexity is DoT refreshing. I won't go into as much detail here since many classes have similar mechanics. The main point is that DoT's read many stats (such as spellpower, haste, and Eclipse status) at the moment of casting, and retain them for the whole duration of the DoT. Given the number of various buffs and procs we have constantly appearing and disappearing (Nature's Grace, Eclipse, 2 trinket procs, Lightweave, Synapse Springs, Power Torrent, Bloodlust, Volcanic Potion, Berserking, and still more), it's a challenge to refresh DoT's with buffs up whenever possible, without excessively clipping, interfering with other DPS spells or standing in fire. There's a lot of DPS to be found merely in making sure you cast "good" DoT's whenever possible, especially while moving.

So how does it all play?

This post has contained quite a bit of exposition so far, since one of the goals was to inform people who weren't already familiar with the class. But the real point is to answer the question, how well does this all play out in practice?

To be honest, the answer is largely given by your reaction to everything above. It probably sounds fun for some people and decidedly not fun for others. I do find it a lot of fun myself, but I think there are a few critical elements that make it so:
--Ability to control Eclipse. This was missing in the WLK Balance design, and makes a whole world of difference. I point this out largely because as things turned out, our main method of controlling Eclipse is basically due to an accident. Lunar Shower was introduced as a method of doing respectable DPS when we were forced to move (another big complaint from WLK). But it, combined with the fact that DoT's happened to not advance the Eclipse bar, has worked well enough so far. Fun bit of trivia--if you turn on beginner tooltips, even on live servers, the Moonfire and Insect Swarm tooltips say that the spell advances the Eclipse bar.
--Low randomness. Random elements aren't necessarily bad with DPS classes, but with one that has the huge amount of planning required like ours does, it's best that there's little to none. Every spec needs some random element, in fact on the beta I once said in feedback that we need at least one proc to react to, just so there's something the player has to watch for (this was before Shooting Stars was added). But it's good that there isn't much more than that. Partially because, as noted above, random short-term buffs, combined with DoT refreshes, winding up providing a lot for advanced players to pay attention to.
--Different spell usage in different situations. On a single target, we use the basic Eclipse cycle. On two targets, basic Eclipse cycle with extra DoT refreshes. On four targets, the 100% Solar rotation. On two targets with heavy required movement, the 100% Solar rotation. On either of the last two that last for less than ~1 minute, the 100% Solar rotation with Starsurge mixed in. On many spread targets, tab-dotting. On many clumped targets, Wild Mushroom with DoT's in between. On many clumped short-lived targets, Wild Mushroom with Hurricane or Typhoon. All of these so far are things I do on at least one fight in the current content. And I haven't even touched the utility options that Moonkin have in addition to DPS.

That last one is possibly the most important. It has two other important ramifications I want to touch on:
1) Part of the reason the class is hard to learn is that there's no one DPS rotation. People tend to focus on the "Patchwerk rotation" first when learning a class, but in the case of Moonkin, more often than not, I'm probably doing something else during real encounters. People who are starting to learn the class often learn the basic rotation on a target dummy but are still basically lost in many real raid situations. This is inevitable when the "basic rotation" has a period that's nearly a minute long. The class currently requires learning a variety of techniques that you use in various situations.
2) Moonkin were thought of as one of the best DPS classes in the game at the beginning of Cataclysm, and after a few nerfs and adjustments, are still doing rather well. I sometimes get asked whether Moonkin are currently overpowered. Hopefully this whole discussion makes clear why that's so hard to answer. It's not a question I'm really getting into in this post, but just a few comments:
--One way that Moonkin stand out is having a strong tool for basically any situation, as I just described. Moonkin have the potential to be near the top of DPS meters at basically all current encounters, but the reason isn't so simple as "our spells to more damage than other classes'," or anything like that. Our single-target DPS isn't even amazing, but as I mentioned, basically every fight has something other than single-target DPS in it. We basically always have a strong way to approach AoE, or movement, or multi-target situations, or burst, for good DPS.
--But as this whole post as outlined, the skill cap is rather high. Moonkin often place high on meters in top guilds, but many players have a lot of trouble matching the numbers of those players. You can do extremely high DPS as Moonkin right now, but it takes a lot of effort, and merely mastering the basics can put you quite far behind.

Conclusions

In nearly all the aspects I mentioned in the previous sections, I think all DPS classes in WoW should be more like the current Moonkin. Eclipse, in particular, is exactly what a DPS resource should be. It's a true resource, in that you have to spend Eclipse energy whenever you're doing maximum DPS (nuking with Eclipse up). When it runs out, your DPS goes down, and you have to spend time getting it back. It differs from other DPS resources with similar mechanics (e.g. Rogue Energy) in the long time scale. An energy bar fills in less than 10 seconds, but we take much longer to get back to a fresh Eclipse. So it feels like a resource, in that it requires long-term management, but unlike mana (the worst of all DPS resources), it doesn't ever run out--it just requires you to cycle around to the beginning again.

Similarly, the array of tools to handle different situations is a case where, if there's an imbalance, other classes should be made more like the Moonkin, not the other way around. Having to master a variety of different spell usages adds variety and skill to the class.

I've often commented that DPS classes tend to be one-dimensional. Someone theorycrafts everything up, and the only correct thing for players to do is follow their advice. Other "playstyles" are by definition incorrect. The class can be easier or harder because it might require more or less attention, but there's little true decision-making. You learn what to do and then you do it. In all this, the current Balance Druid is probably Blizzard's best attempt so far at proving me wrong.