Introduction
With Midnight Season 1 well underway, and the biggest bulk of the content already in the rearview, we thought it was time to look back on the current version of Balance Druid and how the changes from the beta cycle have landed now that players have got to play around with it more. It’s not the intention of this post to touch on or complain about damage tuning, but focus more on the overarching concepts that shape the spec and the decisions you make when choosing which builds to play - as well as to provide actionable feedback on the spec’s biggest pain points.
Talent Diversity
To get it out of the way quickly, the current version of Balance Druid is the most fun version of the spec since Shadowlands. During the first season of Midnight, Balance finds itself in a unique position where there are multiple different builds available depending on the fight. To give an example, on Mythic Belo'ren in Patch 12.0.5 on Warcraft Logs, there are only 2 talent nodes that have not been played, Sculpt the Stars and Total Eclipse. This is very rare for something that is essentially a Single Target fight on a penultimate boss.
While this amount of talent diversity can be welcoming for many players, it does also present a knowledge gap. This is when knowing how a talent interacts with another is not always made clear in the game. The talent Hail of Stars is an example of this, where it states that a free Starfall or Starsurge will grant 3 seconds of Solstice. Solstice then states that it increases the frequency of Shooting Stars procs for 6 seconds after entering an Eclipse. Nowhere does it say that spenders cast by Convoke the Spirits or procs from Star Cascade will also grant 1 second of Solstice, or that Solstice fully resets whenever you enter a new Eclipse.
Increasing the frequency of your Shooting Stars procs through Hail of Stars also helps increase your overall Orbit Breaker procs. However, Orbit Breaker is currently untrackable inside the game, and predicting or planning anything around it is impossible. Builds playing Starweaver also raises the importance of playing around Stellar Amplification when there are more than 1 target up, as you want to spend your free Starsurge procs on different targets in order to keep this debuff up. This is an issue since the only way to track the effect is through looking at the Boss Frame, which is already filled up with an onslaught of other unrelated effects in a random order.
Starweaver vs. Rattle the Stars
Historically, the choice node between Starweaver and Rattle the Stars has been one-sided, but the current Balance Druid tier set paired with some buffs to talents that interact with Starweaver is a large part of why there are now a lot of talents to choose from. At its core, the Starweaver gameplay is fun, and alternating what spender you press based on your current proc presents a unique way to approach a fight, as well as increasing the overall amount of instant casts, making it a safe pick for fights that require heavy movement or dodging. However, because of compounding effects from talents that interact with either Starfall or Starsurge, knowing exactly which talent combination it is okay to spend your Touch the Cosmos proc on Starfall can be a struggle for players wanting to learn the spec.
When you talent Rattle the Stars however, the gameplay becomes more predictable, but also less fluid. Since you can not rely on free spenders to proc your Harmony of the Heavens, Starlord and Ascendant Eclipses during the Balance of All Things window at the start of a new Eclipse, your movement becomes more rigid and requires you to be able to plant and spam Wrath in order to pool Astral Power for your new Eclipse. This is similar gameplay to the previous iteration of Balance, but because of Eclipse being turned into a cooldown, the whole cycle of pooling between Eclipse casts can become monotonous.
As for what type of fight each talent is better at numerically, builds that take Rattle the Stars usually win out on either pure Single Target or fights above 6 targets, while the builds using Starweaver are better between 2-6 targets. For raid specifically, Starweaver is good for fights with frequent add spawns, like most of the bosses in the Voidspire raid, while Rattle the Stars is better at fights where the majority is Single Target.
Cooldowns
Cooldown management has been a consistent point of struggle for Balance Druid ever since The War Within, and even though it was alleviated by changes to Whirling Stars and Bounteous Bloom that homogenized your Force of Nature and Celestial Alignment cooldowns, it is still probably the biggest issue with the spec currently. While the added talent diversity is good, it can become a headache to know how you want to use your cooldowns since their value is not being made inherently obvious in gameplay. A spell like Fury of Elune is a great example of this, as it is a spell that feels like it does a lot of damage, when its actual value is almost solely as a resource generator for Keeper of the Grove and an Atmospheric Exposure activator for Elune's Chosen. Even though it's not a traditional cooldown, this also applies to New Moon, as the value of the button is not made very clear. New Moon specifically has felt out of place for a while with current Balance Druid, where it is numerically beaten by Fury of Elune in Elune's Chosen and has too long cast time for too little payoff in Keeper of the Grove.
Eclipse
For many players, this is perhaps the elephant in the room. The changes to Eclipse, turning it from a passive maintenance buff into a traditional damage cooldown has been contentious, and there could have been a whole article discussing the pros and cons specifically. We will not do that however, and instead point out the most glaring issues.
Due to the amount of interactions related to entering/exiting Eclipse, this can present confusing moments when you add in Celestial Alignment and Incarnation: Chosen of Elune that not only enter Eclipse, but also completely cancels your current Eclipse before entering a new one. This interaction made sense in the past, but now that Eclipse is a cooldown, it makes it difficult to not only plan out your own cooldowns, but also to explain the thought process behind why and when you want to cancel an Eclipse early.
As for talents that interact with Eclipse, there are some inconsistencies with when they apply. Solstice and Ascendant Eclipses are both queued effects, which means that they apply slightly later than other Eclipse effects. You could see this in play if you add Starsurge or Starfall in a macro and place it below your Celestial Alignment. If you press it on a new GCD, the spender cast will stack Starlord and Harmony of the Heavens, but not consume the Ascendant Stars from your apex talent. If you pressed this macro with a banked up Starweaver or Touch the Cosmos it will also not grant any duration of Solstice through Hail of Stars since the application from the Solstice talent happens after.
Keeper of the Grove
Undoubtedly the biggest catalyst for the cooldown problems stem from Keeper of the Grove turning Force of Nature into a major damage cooldown. There were steps taken during beta to try and make this easier to deal with in Midnight, but it only served as a band-aid to patch up the fundamental issues with the hero talent.
The talent Control of the Dream exists to alleviate some of the headache this presents, but it becomes confusing when you start adding Fury of Elune into the mix, as it does not benefit from Control of the Dream. Trying to line up your Force of Nature with Fury of Elune while also perfectly juggling your Eclipse and Incarnation: Chosen of Elune cooldowns to not lose usage is very difficult, without any inherent payoff when you do it correctly.
Spells like Fury of Elune, Wild Mushroom and New Moon can quickly become overbearing, and feel like you have too many buttons to fit into a 10-second window, while also trying to spend Astral Power and your Dream Surge stacks. When you look at a damage breakdown after your fight you also see that the biggest majority of your damage comes from either Starsurge or Starfall or effects tied to Moonfire and Sunfire instead of these seemingly disconnected effects you scramble to fit into your cooldown window, and makes you wonder why these effects need to exist at all.
Apex Talents
The introduction of Apex Talents was the "new thing" for class design in Midnight, and there is not really a lot to say here. For Balance Druid these effects are good enough that you play them, without being particularly interesting. The Ascendant Stars buff from your 1st point moves into the "use 3 spenders at the start of an Eclipse" bracket together with Starlord and Harmony of the Heavens.
The damage from the Astral Smolder effect in your 2nd and 3rd point is currently very good, and the addition of the talent has helped even out the spread of secondary stats compared to previous iterations. Where you would previously focus everything on only Mastery, you now also consider Critical Strike a lot more, giving you more options in what dungeon or raid boss to go after during the gearing process. The only downside of Astral Smolder is the same as with every other Critical Strike effect, where you will forever be at the mercy of the RNG Gods. This is however outweighed by the pros.
The last point of your Apex Talents, and the most noticeable one, Ascendant Eclipses. Whenever you enter an Eclipse you send out a Solar Bolt or a Lunar Bolt depending on the Eclipse, and these hits will always crit. The downside of having spells that always crit, is that it removes any form of dopamine whenever you do actually crit, and the spells can therefore be tuned differently to do the same damage every time. Additionally, the damage from Solar Bolt is calculated on cast, which means that it will not benefit from trinkets with queued effects like Vaelgor's Final Stare when you macro them together with Celestial Alignment or Incarnation: Chosen of Elune.
Wishlist For Season 2
Out of everything mentioned here, the most dire issue in need of changing is the needlessly complicated reliance on cooldown management. Now, it's important to discuss the root of this issue by calling out Keeper of the Grove. Force of Nature is an incredibly bland button, made to feel even worse now that Treants of the Moon no longer benefit from Twin Moons. It seems to be the Developer team's stance that pets or summons should only serve to buff the Druid instead of doing damage on their own. At this point, a full-scale rework of Keeper of the Grove is in order. Removing Force of Nature as a spell entirely and creating hero talents that in some way revolve around Wild Mushroom and your spenders instead would go a long way to making a more complete spec.
On the topic of adding power to secondary spells, de-coupling the Fury of Elune and New Moon choice node and consolidating Fury of Elune to be given for free when you spec into the Elune's Chosen tree would go a long way to fixing the issue with both spells. The visual of casting Full Moon is one of the most satisfying things about playing the spec, but the spell itself no longer has any place in the spec. It does not do enough damage to ever be worth the headache involved in lining it up, and the payoff from casting it is completely wasted when your cooldowns don't last long enough to get 2 Full Moon casts while also being able to spend your procs and Astral Power.
In conclusion, it's important to note that while playing Balance Druid has been a positive experience in Midnight, some of the issues outlined in this post present large enough problems to warrant changing. Whether changes happen accumulatively across an entire expansion or saved up for a big rework is impossible to know, but the only thing you can know for sure is that class changes will happen eventually.
