Balance druid history post #1:  Here is an old feedback post from Beta of burning crusade (10/12/08). Look at how far we’ve come (and how long it’s taken to fix problems).

Balance druid analysis:
Part 1: What is a moonkin, anyway?
Part 2: Why Mele-moonkin still doesn’t work right (why I like “clothfeather” instead of “panzerkin”).
Part 3: A look at the balance talent tree tiers.
Part 4:  Conclusions and Suggestions for improvement.

Part 1: Why be a moonkin?
Balance druids are those that prefer ranged spell casting as their source of DPS instead of cat or bear form.  There are two types of moonkin: clothfeathers (aka. Featherkin) and panzerkin (definitions taken from Plainswander’s moonkin FAQ http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11872694&pageNo=1 ).

Clothfeathers tend to wear magecloth gear, specifically for the stupid amounts of damage it allows them to do, the tradeoff is that they lower their armor to non-moonkin levels, and wind up being as squishy as a baseline druid. They will kite, root-and-scoot, and starfire from range.

Panzerkin on the other hand wear heavy leathers, and often supplement it with a bunch of crit gear. They’re basically big feathery bricks. Hitting them with melee damage is kind of like hitting a wall with a stick. However, their nuking damage is significantly lower than the Clothfeathers. (this is the category “mele-moonkin” would fall under).

Why Mele-Moonkin Still Doesn’t work:
Druids aren’t really a hybrid class the way Paladins and Shaman are. They are a shifting class. We are supposed to change roles, and have to specialize our gear selection, and usually talents, to fit a chosen role (healing, mele dps, casting dps, or tanking). Generally, they can be good at any one of these four roles at any point in time, but they specialize their gear to be closer to what their “parent” class would be. Sometimes, hybrid gear lets us be able to use the same gear for more than one role, but we can’t really mix these roles together, unlike paladin or shaman, since they require shifting inbetween separate forms. We don’t have the right abilities to maintain any form of real DPS while trying to mix mele and casting at the same time.

Trying to cast and mele at the same time causes melekin these three main problems:
1) High casting interrupts,
2) lower spell damage through gear since we have to pick up more mele stats and talents, and
3) limitations on weapons due to swing timers.

The mele changes to Moonkin form are pretty much pointless for any balance druid who considers themselves a “clothfeather,” since mele’ing is just about the last thing this type of balance druid should ever be doing. We are geared and spec’d for increases to our spell DPS, and we don’t have any way to do significant enough mele dps to warrant taking extra mele damage and encouraging spell interrupts. Even with all the increase AP you have given us, our “white” damage still isn’t high enough. Most weapons moonkin pick up have poor dps, because we have only been interested in the caster stats for so long. Weapons for casters aren’t designed for actual mele dps. Even if we just want to keep up a moonfire dot, we have to time our casting around our swing timer, making fast weapons preferable to slow weapons, but most weapons designed for druids are too slow.

Since we don’t have a way for starfire & wrath to not be interrupted, trying to mix (low dps) mele with highly interruptible spell damage is counter-productive, and causes us to lose more mana from having to shift and heal. Clothfeathers who mele are going to die a lot faster than those who root and nuke from a distance. Moonkin simply gives them a little extra defense from rogue ambushes in PvP and adds that we can’t crowd control.

Panzerkin who sacrifice DPS for armor have even worse spell casting stats, so having to worry about their Attack power numbers causes EVERY single stat to be highly important to them. They have to worry about the armor rating, so they avoid wearing cloth. They need intellect, spirit, and mana/5 to keep their mana pool a decent size. They need Stamina to keep them alive. Now, they have to worry about their attack power to get more mana regen. This is really counter-productive.

Panzerkin also need too many talent points to get a good spec that has both mele and casting in focus, which is just really too hard to do with the ridiculous number of talents in the balance tree. They get bogged down in the bottom of the tree, where they need to pick up Nat Shifter, Nat Weapons AND imp moonfire. That is 13 talent points just on one tier to have a good mele-moonkin spec.

Overall Balance Talent Tree analysis by Tier:
Tier 1: Balance druids going for moonkin usually put 5 points into Imp wrath, since it increases our dps by a fairly significant amount. PvP druids (balance, feral, or resto) will invest at least 1 point in Nature’s Grasp as a PvP escape, and ferals usually put 5 points in it to unlock Nat Weapons.

Tier 2:  A lot of talent points. Imp moonfire is required to unlock vengeance, so any balance druid is forced to put points in this talent. Natural shifter will be important for people with moonkin form, since shifting will cost so much at level 70.  Control of Nature looks like it will be important once we get Cyclone.  Natural Weapons will be the talent most often skipped on this Tier by Balance druids, but feral druids tend to love this talent.

Tier 3: Most people skip improved thorns & omen of clarity (ferals take OOC with Nat weaps), leaving Nature’s Reach as the only talent on this tier that people usually take. This is okay since most druids will spend a lot of talent points in the first two tiers.

Tier 4: Vengeance is considered a “must have” by balance druids, so most balance druids take this.  Improved starfire is useful, but it tends to be skipped by PvP druids, since Starfire gets interrupted A LOT since we have no way to prevent it from being interrupted (besides barkskin, which increases the casting time).

Tier 5:  Lunar guidance seems like a good investment, especially if you pick up dreamstate from tier 6 and pick up a bunch of Intellect gear. However, intellect tends to not be a very high stat on leather spell damage gear. Nature’s Grace is one of my favorite balance talents. Moonglow is a great talent, too.

Tier 6: I almost always skip moonfury, since it doesn’t scale with gear, and doesn’t feel like it is worth the talent point investment.  Balance of power looks useful for both PvP and PvE, since I tend to not have a lot of +hit with spells on my gear.

Tier 7: Dreamstate is a great talent, since it helps prevent moonkin from going oom so fast. Moonkin Form crit increase is nice, but the mele bonus seems like a band-aid effect.  Improved Faerie fire is useless at this point in the tree, and I seriously doubt that many druids will ever take this talent. It would be okay if it was accessible to Feral druids (rank 3 or 4?), but at rank 7, it serves no purpose.

Tier 8: Twilight’s Wrath is everything that moonfury should have been – a damage talent that scales with gear, YAY!

Tier 9: Force of nature is a novelty talent; but it is one that I have heard druids ask for so many times over the last two years that I think some druids will take it just for fun. It doesn’t have great damage, but I like my little tree buddies anyway. At level 70, I probably will skip this talent in favor of Nature’s Swiftness, but I will likely keep it leveling up.

Part 4: Conclusions and Suggestions. :

Changes you could make to the balance tree to make Mele panzerkin a better build (which would help featherkin, too)…

Combine redundant talents: For example, imp starfire and imp wrath are both designed to speed casting times. Combining these would save us from having to invest 10 points just on the speed of our spells. You could make Imp moonfire the tier 1 talent, then make the combined imp wrath/starfire the Tier 2 requirement for vengeance. This would be really nice.

Make Vengeance more accessible: for a must-have talent, needing to invest points in Imp Moonfire makes it hard to get Natural Weapons & Omen of clarity, which hurts Panzerkin, since they will have to either invest too many talent points in those tiers of the trees, or have to chose between OOC & vengeance.

Increase the Synergy between mele and spell casting : I’ve said this at least 100 times over the last year: druids need a way for Starfire and Wrath to not be interrupted. I begged for this talent at Comic-Con this summer. Maybe I should have bribed with cookies… Barkskin isn’t a good defense against interrupts because it makes our cast times a second longer, which seriously hurts our ability to output damage. We need some better way to be able to cast our nukes while being in mele range to be able to increase the synergy between our casting and mele dps for Melekin to be able to work.

An option for dealing with  interrupt problems: Control of Nature is on our “busy” tier, and Imp Fairie Fire isn’t a good talent where it is (inaccessible to feral druids). Swap the two of them. Then, add starfire and wrath to Control of Nature, and reduce the % from 100 to 70 (or even 60). This would give us a nice talent at the higher tier of the tree, which ALL balance druids will love, and make imp FF accessible to ferals.

You could also just add a 50% chance to not be interrupted straight to imp starfire. Honestly, there are tons of ways you could do it that would work, and it is really the biggest thing that melekin needs to be able to be able to cast in mele.

Thank you for reading,
Analiss