Balance Feedback MoP Beta

I love reading peoples opinions, Thanks for sharing your thoughts Hamlet. Forgive me if mine go on a bit.

Starfall, Force of Nature, Starfall, Insect Swarm and Thorns arll feel a bit irrelevant and are the soul reason i feel people are happier to see them go. Perosnally These spells at one point we were happy to have as they gave us more buttons to push but also engaged the theme of the class well. It's their current function that negates their relevance. I would much rather robust versions than a removal of these abilities though esp since balnace druid damage spells are notorious for being bland dps with nothing extra going on. Revise rather than remove to keep the high fnatasy theme of the balnce druid going would be much preferable otherwise you'd return to a 3 spell spec full of utility that every other druid can get but only slightly distinguished from resto but with a lot less depth.

Force of Nature is cool in the sense that you are playing like Malfurion/Cenarius in WC3 and summoning trees, Thorns you read about in nearly every book that mentions druids and has been their from introduction of druids into the warcraft universe. Starfall is such a cool sounding spell, originally having splash damage and behaving and being useable both for AoE and single target purposes because of that made it interesting.. Insect Swarm had the miss chance secondary effect as well as the dps and at least was one additional spell amongst the very simple 3 of SF/MF and wrath and had that very druid feel. Point is they are pillars of the spec and some of the biggest contributors in name (if not in function) to the epic feel of the class.

The point is in streamlining things, so many of the fun aspects were removed off the spells. Insect Swram lost its 2% miss chance becuase of reworking how buffs workd in the game in 3.0. Starfall lost its spalsh damage when AoEs were being nerfed at 4.0 and never got it back when they were rebuffed. Starsurge lost its coolest aspect, it's Surge knockdown.. a consistent pattern that has been bleeding the fun out of the individual abilities to make a tighter system. One of the immediate things you ntoice when playing a Balanace druid compared to shadow priest, mage, elemental shaman and warlock is how no dps spell has any secondary side effect, mindflay slows, frostbolt/frostfire slows, shocks have extra effects, the starsurge knockdown removal flattened the experience considerably.

Now we have a situation where some spells are so bland they might as well be removed, IS lost its damage compnent becuase it imbalanced eclipse making solar more powerful, and it seemed better so far to remove it rather than make it do something interesting like spraead dots and grow extra mushrooms?

Then we come to Incarnation: Here would have been the perfect opportunity to do something interesting with all those spells, like Tree of Life does for resto, add secondary effects to them, that boost dps and alter playstyle slightly becuase it would give people whoo desire extra complexity that option ( the whole reason talents exist for - if A wnats simple flat increase he has that option, if B wants complexity he can take that, if C wants something cool but simple cast and forget he has that), which they do not have right now, they are forced in tier 4 to choose between steady damage (SotF), boring burst (Inc: CoE), and cast and forget burst in treants which look cool . What about a player like me that hey for a little while would like my damage spells doing something different and more enhanced? that is the sort of direction i would have loved Incarnation to go at.

The main issue with Druids of MoP is that Balance spec has had little done to its playstyle apart from tidy up eclipse mehchanic to be smooth for the frist time since WotLK. Celestial Alignment was a nice addition, but only one tier of talents aids dps and 0 glyphs contribute to it as Hamlet rightly points out, makes it boring for damage. Do not get me wrong, I like ALL the talents previewed, and Im amazed how every single one has relevance to the spec or at least useable by the spec , i remember the days when balance would be lucky to have 1 ability it could use in any situation usefully, and now there are 18 albeit you can only choose 6 at any one given time. So yes, I appreciate having them, they give the balance druid utiltiy options it never had, and the glyphs too, and perhaps may finally make it truly competitive in a pvp environment and not so shaky in certain pvE environments. Here is the BUT though.

But I long for more interesting things to dps abilities in an expansion i'm going to be sitting with for another 2 years. I think the key is to greatly improve Incarnation for balance, and give better versions of Insect Swarm, Thorns, Starfall, and return secondary effects to Starsurge and Starfire/Wrath.

With regards to Tier 6. I think its a great idea, it will give a dimension to the spec that it never really had. It is a flavor of the druid as it was originally meant to be, which in a 45 sec duration on a 6min cooldoown is suitable at first glance, and before i criticise i would like to see how it turns out. Saying that though, judging by how the healing and tanking specs heavily rely on certain abilities like swiftmend/lifebloom and Savage defense - for HotW i would suggest for that 45 sec window it opens up the additional spells of the other roles too. It's just exciting that as a balance druid in fight, i can be a feral or guardian or resto proper mid-combt for a brief period to help the raid.

Yet as long as very few dps options remain in the spec Balance druids are not going to be happy with tier 6 lying around when they feel really a bit more on the dps front would be nice.

Personally: Here is what I hope would happen.
Insect Swarm and Thorns returned being interesting. Insects pollinate, transfer things, why can't they spread dots to additional target and cause extra wild mushrooms to to go without doing any damage?

Thorns had pvp uses, and if it ended up working a bit like enh shaman's lightning shield actually adding to your damage occsaionally would have pvE uses not to mention doing something to casters too.

Starsurge most fun compenent, the knockdown could return having its knockdown on a separate 15 sec cooldown

Wrath /Starfire could have secondary effects like overlaod and languish/ignite making them more interesting.
Incarnation could alter spells like Tree of Life does, giving you a slightly different balance playstyle for 45 secs for those who love the extra compelxity whereas HotW gives you a different role for 45secs.

An additional spell like the reverse of lifebloom could also go quite nicely, call it moonflare that morphs into sunflare and it stacks up to 3 times doing damage every second and flaring at the end for a large amount. Incarantion CoE could ofr e.g. cause that flare to now effect multiple targets.

If it is too tight to add dps glyphs for balance druids and another tier to provide more options that benefit the dps role, then at least we should provide more changes to baseline spells and some more cool spec abilities. One option is to have Balance druid have a Call of the Forest spell that summons 1 treant that will cast wrath and roots, but taking the Force of Nature talent will yield 3 replacing that spell like Faerie Swarm repalces Faerie Fire - or rather call the balance ability force of nature and the talent Call of the Forest. And it could do something like spawn an additional treant every few levels, altho they will still all collectively do the same damage.. so by 90 you can have an army of treants like army of the dead.