Balance Druid Guide
Class Changes for Balance Druid
The developer's notes for Balance Druid in the original 12.1 PTR blue post states that Balance had high Astral Power generation and a lot of free spender procs, leading to moments where you didn't have GCDs left after spending it all. To help alleviate this, they nerfed the proc chance of Touch the Cosmos in order to drive down the amount of free spenders. Additionally, we got some buffs and nerfs to talents and spells.
Lunar Calling received its scheduled tuning, moving down from 120% buff to Starfire to a 100% buff. Since its introduction in The War Within, this talent has received 26 changes in total, starting out as a 40% buff to Starfire and ending up at 160% by the end of The War Within.
After this latest nerf it is currently an increase to press Wrath during Celestial Alignment/Incarnation: Chosen of Elune instead of Starfire, by a substantial amount. Because of the short cast time, you can fit a lot more casts of Wrath inside your static and narrow cooldown windows leading to higher overall AP generation. To put some numbers on this, for the 12.1 PTR, it is currently a 2% increase to only press Starfire during your cooldowns when you have an instant cast from your Ascendant Fires buff, despite Starfire doing 100% increased damage to primary target.
The talents Total Eclipse and Sculpt the Stars both got changes. Total Eclipse had its proc chance buffed and Sculpt the Stars was moved to the spot where Astral Communion is. Total Eclipse and Sculpt the Stars were by far the least picked talents in Season 1, so it would make sense to buff these talents if you wanted to improve talent diversity. Time will tell if this ends up changing anything, as it's likely that the overlooked talent will just end up being Astral Communion now as you are strapped for points at the bottom of the tree once you've taken the mandatory points into the Incarnation: Chosen of Elune/Convoke the Spirits choice node, Starweaver/Rattle the Stars, Harmony of the Heavens and 2 points into Balance of All Things.
Most of these changes don't really make the biggest difference in gameplay, aside from the nerf to Lunar Calling. You'll likely see builds playing Starweaver fall out of favor compared to Rattle the Stars when you lose the Season 1 tier set, especially with the nerf to Touch the Cosmos.
The biggest change on the PTR isn't necessarily gameplay related, but the talent Orbit Breaker is now trackable in the in-game Cooldown Manager, stacking up to 30 times. Since it's now a trackable aura, it is also cancellable, meaning that you can game your stacks during trash packs to guarantee a Full Moon during your opener.
Tier Set
Bark of the Enigmatic Dreamwatcher
2 Set - Starsurge damage increased by 20%. Starfall also deals Astral damage instantly to all valid enemies in range when cast.
The 2-piece is self explanatory. It buffs your Starsurge damage, and does some damage to all targets when you press Starfall. This damage adds a little less than a tick to your overall Starfall damage. There is nothing special about this tier bonus, but with a 20% buff to Starsurge compared to such a small effect on Starfall it does present some uneven values between Single Target and AoE. This is however amended a little by the nature of the 4-piece, which has its own issues.
4 Set - Your damage is increased by 10% while in any Eclipse. This bonus wanes to 2% at the midpoint of the Eclipse, then waxes back to 10% at the end.
The tooltip or description of this tier set is maybe not fully clear. At the start of any Eclipse window, including ones from Celestial Alignment/Incarnation: Chosen of Elune, you do 10% more damage, then the value of the buff gradually goes down until it reaches 2% and starts rising again before ending at 10% as the Eclipse ends. This effect seems like it has depth, while in reality it further enables the already existing gameplay of pressing Wrath twenty times before sending three Starsurge casts, either at the start or at the end of your Eclipse.
The 4-piece buff is trackable in the default Cooldown Manager tab, under the name Akil'zon's Clarity.
Opinions
I'd like to preface this section saying that while these are the writers opinion, they are largely based on experiences from having played the spec at a high level and having delivered feedback through forum posts or conversation with class developers. At the end of The War Within and heading into the Midnight beta, the feedback from Balance Druids was about the emphasis around planning your cooldowns, and pointed towards overwhelming usage of 3rd party tools like the Dreamgrove.gg Planner and Lorrgs. While using 3rd party tools for your cooldown is common practice at this point, the thought process behind why you are sending your cooldowns very often gets lost in translation, especially when the game does not do a good enough job at explaining it to you.
On the beta heading into Midnight, there were steps taken to remedy this, more or less homogenizing Force of Nature and Celestial Alignment, by changing Whirling Stars from 100 seconds to 120 second recharge. However, with the addition of Eclipse as another 2 charge cooldown, and the adjustments to Bounteous Bloom and Sculpt the Stars, the cooldown management and planning is starting to look incredibly spreadsheet-y again. Ideally the entire framework around Force of Nature should be changed, moving it from an active ability into a passive. Planning all of your other cooldown windows around the different versions of Force of Nature, mixed with Control of the Dream has been the main source of headache for any aspiring Balance Druid player. Pressing the spell has also never felt rewarding, seeing as the individual Treants provide very little value outside of the unnoticeable Harmony of the Grove buff.
Over to the tier set, which is arguably the most sensitive topic. With the addition of the Akil'zon's Clarity buff from the 4-piece, it is unclear how this will end up affecting gameplay. For anyone who paid attention to the Dryad's Favor tier set during the 11.2 PTR, the current situation bears a striking resemblance. They are both tier sets with very static timers for exactly when you want to use your hardest hitting spells, which in 11.2 ended up in the situation where Haste had no value compared to other stats that buffed your damage output, and that you were sending both of your Celestial Alignment charges within the same cooldown window. The likelihood of this happening again is also increased with the change to Bounteous Bloom, making your Harmony of the Grove window be 14 seconds instead of 10, meaning you can fit way more casts at 10 stacks on the 4-piece bonus.
With the developers' notes states that they reduced Astral Power generation and free spenders, this means that you will be generally casting a lot more builders. This is problematic however, when New Moon and Wild Mushroom are the only options you have other than Wrath as a builder, and they are both not very good buttons. New Moon could do with a buff in general, to see if it could fit inside the current cooldown climate, as the spell feels like it has been lost and forgotten. The static nature of the tier set mixed with the reduced Astral Power generation we also effectively lost a sizable amount of movement GCDs, which could greatly impact where Balance lands in the raid meta.
The nerf to Lunar Calling is strange. The entire Elune's Chosen tree is built around pressing Starfire, and with Wrath now being the preferred builder for most Single Target scenarios, it begs the question, why does the talent exist? In my opinion, the talent should change the property of Wrath, the same way it changes Thrash for Guardian Druid. Hitting the tuning correctly between Wrath and Starfire is difficult enough to begin with, and gets exacerbated by adding effects like Lunar Calling.
The most difficult thing to get right with Balance Druid is the tuning goal between Starsurge versus Starfall, and the tuning goal of making sure you are casting the corresponding builders for both Solar Eclipse and Lunar Eclipse. These are consistently an issue for every tier, and gets made worse by the number of seemingly random talents that interact with them, but that is a general side effect from having almost 50 different talent points to spend on your respective Hero Talent and Spec Talent trees.
