Class Wishlists for Midnight
Death Knight Wishlist
Druid Wishlist
Hunter Wishlist
Mage Wishlist
Monk Wishlist
For a brief breakdown of the changes coming to each specialization in Midnight, check out our Midnight Class Survival Guide.
Midnight Class Survival Guide
Druid Wishlists for Midnight
Our Druid Writers, Tettles (Balance), Guiltyas (Feral), Pumps (Guardian), Voulk (Restoration), discuss the most significant issues plaguing their specs as well as the must-have changes they'd like to see prior to Midnight's launch in just a few short months.
Balance Druid Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Continued builds surrounding procs
2.
Further iteration on Eclipse
3.
Hero Talent VFX
4.
Pop off moment
5.
Minor Talent Updates
Continued builds surrounding procs
As of writing this, I've been thinking Balance has been trending in the right direction over the course of the Beta. You're currently playing a bout around Starweaver and Touch the Cosmos in order to give you maximum Hail of Stars uptime. This is fairly atypical for Balance Druid considering that we haven't played any of these talents for 2 full expansions. Nontheless, they're a refreshing change of pace all things considered giving us procs to a fairly procless spec. Now with that being said, there is a downside that must be addressed. That is that you are Starfall on single target in order to get more procs and because Starfall just does a lot of damage currently with Meteorites. I WOULD HEAVILY PREFER IF THE BUILD WOULD STAY AND WE WOULD JUST NOT STARFALL ON SINGLE TARGET. I think the spec has been horribly bland for an extended period of time, and while Blizzard is doing a good job of trying to push it in the right direction, if we just play the same build we've been playing for 2 expansions it will still be bland.
Eclipse
This brings me into point 2. I don't think Eclipse is going to get changed any further, but I wish it would. Eclipse is still a maintenance buff that you're required to pay attention to, yet I don't feel like the payoff is there. Optimal Eclipse usage doesn't feel any different than suboptimal eclipse usage. There are a lot of talents and modifiers for Eclipse, but none of them change how you play or how it feels to play.
Elune's Challenge / Nature's Grace / Total Eclipse
These talents need a bit of updating. Elune's Challenge, while a good idea, feels a bit awkward to use at times as you're not fully in control of your Astral Power. Orbit Breaker, Shooting Stars, and Sundered Firmament are all sources of "random" Astral Power generation, which can make Elune's Challenge a bit strange to use. I think it just needs a bit more iterating on, because I think it's a really cool talent yet it doesn't feel usable.
Nature's Grace was previously a staple of our talent tree, now it just does not make any sense with the manual button press version of Eclipse.
Sculpt the Stars does not make any sense. Would never be taken. There is no gameplay surroudning it.
Total Eclipse is probably one of the coolest talents we have that has been added, yet it impededs on Celestial Alignment too much. I think the general vibe is that it's supposed to feel like you're proccing your cooldowns, yet it really doesn't have that feel like Pulsar did. It just ends up encroaching on CA a bit too much where either Celestial Alignment needs to not be Eclipse Based or this needs to feel a bit different whenever you actually proc the Total Eclipse. I love the gamble nature of it though.
Balance Druid Guide
Feral Druid Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Gameplay Improvements - Generators
2.
Unique strength
3.
Bleed Tracking on the CDM
4.
Minor Chomp Improvements
5.
ST vs AOE talents
Rotational Gameplay
Feral Gamerplay in midnight has a problem, it's dull. I understand that a lot of the purpose of this expansion class changes is to simplify specs, and thus, for players like me who enjoy complex decision making, it was always going to be worse, but it's gone way too far. This is one of the least enjoyable or interesting iterations of Feral druid ever created, which is a shame. When the changes were first previewed, I was actually fairly optimistic. I think the initial vision for the spec would have been less complex yet still appealing. The removal of Thrash, however, changed all of that.
The first version of the rotation seemed like it had a clear vision, maintain bleeds, Bite with excess combo points, Thrash on CD, and Shred to generate combo points. Removing Thrash makes Shred or Swipe your only generators and the rotational house of cards falls apart.
There are a couple of potential solutions to the rotational gameplay problem that let you press a few more buttons. The return of Brutal Slash or Thrash, all the rotation really needs is pressing one more button in the rotation, just a bit of a break between pressing Shred and Finishers. Both of those buttons solve the problem, giving you one more button to push in single-target and AOE. Thrash is the simpler, less complex option; Brutal Slash is the more interesting option. Alternatively, Circle of Life and Death could be made baseline, reducing the duration of bleeds significantly, which gives the rotation more variance and decision-making pressure.
Bleed Tracking on the CDM
With Midnight removing most forms of snapshotting, leaving only Tiger's Fury Blizzard introduced new icons for snapshotted bleeds, the intention being that now there was some form of UI support for the MASSIVELY simplified mechanic (2nd time btw). Unfortunately they missed out the part of making it work with the new cooldown manager tracking. There a couple of problems with bleed tracking on the cooldown manager.
The icon shown on the cooldown manager is the icon that would be applied if you cast the bleeds now, so if you have Tiger's Fury bleeds applied but don't have Tiger's Fury up, it will only show you the normal icon, If you have Tiger's Fury up but have regular bleeds applied the Tiger's Fury bleed icon is shown. Pandemic is also a problem, Blizzard has a default feature that will show you a border around the icon on the Cooldown manager when your bleed is in "Pandemic", unfortunately with bleeds that have variable duration like Rip, this doesn't work. The Blizzard Cooldown Manager will show you the pandemic as if it were a full-duration bleed, meaning that it frequently gives you the wrong information. Whenever you apply Rip with Primal Wrath or with less than 5 combo points, it is lying to you. This is the kind of thing that I think they really have to get right if they're going to remove our ability to develop solutions ourselves.
Talents
This is the section I'm going to jam in all of my assorted complaints and wishes for Feral in Midnight, so buckle up:
I love Chomp, it is one of the sole shining lights in Feral's design for Midnight, It's not perfect however. While I think many of the complaints I've seen around Chomp, or design suggestions, miss the entire point of the ability, I do think that one complaint I've seen floating around has some validity. Chomp is very hard to use in CDs. Drufearr from the Dreamgrove Discord very kindly put together an addon for us that tracks when Chomp would have been usable, with a 20 second CD to simulate us having the talent, at the moment just playing the rotation normally without any extra effort to get into Chomp windows means you can use about 75%+ of the available usages, obviously with gameplay tweaks that will go up. Still, it IS very hard to use it on pull during lust and CDs, you either have to delay your CDs an extra few seconds, or you have to dump energy pre-pull with Swipe (Not very intuitive). I think it would b ea good change to make the ability free to use regardless of energy during Berserk to alleviate this tension a little bit.
That's not the only problem with Feral's talents. However, Feral's talents leave you with minimal choice on single target, if you are specializing for a pure single target fight (a fairly common outcome), there are a few sections of the tree where you run into HEAVY bottle necks, most notably the middle section of the tree where you basically have exactly the number of talents that work on single target to progress. Coming from TWW, where we have a wealth of choice, this is a shame.
While It's generally a good thing to have lots of AOE talent choices, since AOE is a more variable fight style than single target, we now have a LOT of them, which leads to the aforementioned problem. Still, also, there's now a real concern that in order to be effective in AOE you'll have to sacrifice significant single target, this is a long-running problem for Feral. Still, with even more AOE talents to pick up it's only going to be inflated.
Feral Druid Guide
Guardian Druid Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Make Tanking More Appealing
2.
Rework Swipe
3.
Hero Talent Balance
4.
AoE Taunt
5.
Ironfur Rework
Make Tanking More Appealing
Tanking is generally the scariest role for new players to learn and pick up. It has the highest risk and the lowest reward.
Even the most experienced players dislike or even refuse to tank dungeons and raid encounters often out of fear that they will make a few mistakes and wipe the group, which is embarrassing and absolutely part of the current learning curve all tanks experience.
Tanking should be fun. Experienced tanks should be able to do good DPS if they play well and opt into higher damage builds and inversely, tanks should also have the opportunity to have extremely safe builds with short cheat deaths and loads of extra defensive utility whilst only contributing very low DPS.
I believe greatly widening the gap between defensive builds and offensive builds could solve the recent tank scarcity. This would likely look something like, tree pathing changed so that all the big DPS talents are on one side and all the big defensive talents on the other.
Rework Swipe
Swipe is an iconic Druid tank ability that has no synergy with any part of our toolkit and has little to no value in any of our rotations. Guardian has struggled with a lack of initial AoE threat options and Swipe could absolutely fill that gap. Give it a short 10-15 second cooldown, buff the damage it does significantly 10-20x and maybe make it grant a stack of Ironfur and cast a Frenzied Regeneration. Alternatively, give it a talent choice option to make it completely passive, similar to Prot Warrior's Devastator and have it at least generate some rage.
Hero Talent Balance
For Guardian Druid in The War Within, Druid of the Claw was the best raiding hero talent option the entire expansion and Elune's Chosen was the best Mythic+ hero talent option for the entire expansion. There really wasn't any attempt made to try to balance those so they were closer in power for the other content. Not enough has changed in Midnight for that to be any different so far.
Guardian Druid Guide
Restoration Druid Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Better Raid Frame Options for HoT Tracking
2.
Changes to Dull Talents - Especially in Tier 3
3.
The Apex Node
4.
Mana
5.
Ability Tuning
Dire Raid Frame Improvements
Resto Druid was hit hardest by the raid frame restrictions going into Midnight, and it is rough healing with it on Beta right now. It can be difficult to tell who has Rejuvenation on them and it can feel like you spend half the fight battling your frames instead of the boss. The ability to filter what you see, and being able to set specific positions on your frames for specific HoTs are both essential UI components that we've been able to do via addons since the game was released decades ago.
Talent Revamps
Druid received some interesting talent revamps going into Midnight - some less warmly received than others. The most striking was moving Ysera's Gift - previously a dull tier one talent - to tier three. This section of the tree contains many talents that define Resto Druid gameplay and having a passive that has been uninteresting since its introduction in Mists of Pandaria moved to the business end of the tree was confusing. You can tune it up to make it strong, but tuning can't fix how little it adds to your gameplay. Our old foe Regenesis continues to hold a key talent position in the middle of the tree. It might find more use as a 1-point talent that's tuned accordingly. A near 0% play rate over the past seven seasons is telling.
Master Shapeshifter restores less of your mana bar in Midnight than before. The talent works well as a way to improve how you spend downtime, and it can create interesting mana gameplay - but only if the number on it is good. It should probably be closer to its War Within iteration.
Ability Tuning - Regrowth vs the Field
Regrowth has become more and more of our healing output over the last few years, and in Midnight, it becomes even more powerful via new talents like Intensity and Nature's Bounty. Those talents have a positive impact but need counterbalances in improvements to Rejuvenation and Wild Growth. There were some very good changes in this area in a recent build but more might be required. Resto Druid works best when all of our heal-over-time effects are strong instead of one dominating.
Our new Apex node, Everbloom is very strong in Mythic+ but a bit rough in raid right now for its four-point investment. It is a difficult problem to fix because it fundamentally isn't a great healing format for raid, and while you can throw bigger numbers at it, you eventually just make it overpowered in smaller group content and acceptable at best in larger groups.
Restoration Druid Guide
