Balance Tree Comprehensive analysis: 5/30/08

For the last Beta, my posts were basically a giant list of complaints. The balance tree has been significantly improved since then. So, I want to talk about both the good changes and what still could to be improved. Overall, I was starstruck for a good couple days before I could effectively analyze the talents. This is really only a preliminary look at some of the new changes.

Control of Nature: Should affect Hurricane now that Hurricane has no cooldown. It would make it easier to be used when Barkskin is still on cooldown. (100% interruptible channeled spell = not so good!)

Brambles – Nice change to make it more viable overall. It now gives the lower tiers of the balance tree a talent that is useful for raid instancing, which was lacking before. It gives a nice boost to treant damage, and adds a fun affect to increase PvP viability, too.

Nature’s Reach – Nice change to move the anti-threat ability to the balance tree. It will make balance druids able to focus more in the new talents we got.

Improved Faerie Fire – Now affects spells, too! Took you long enough. Seriously. Thank you for making this talent way more useful for raiding druids to pick up. It now adds a bonus to both the druid and the raid, which increases druids’ viability in groups (which is one of the current main complaints on the live servers).

Moonkin form – Still has useless melee abilities. We’re stuck with this +AP forever, aren’t we? I won’t even bother trying to convince you that it was really just a failed experiment that should go away, lol.

Improved moonkin form –When I crit, I get a buff icon that says it increases my haste by 20%. The spell tooltip in my talent book says it should get “100% chance to gain 100% spell haste.” There is a discrepancy between the talent book & the buff icon I get. However, once the bugs are worked out, I am very happy to see that we get more group viability.

Owlkin Frenzy – Really nice ability.

Typhoon – I think the knock back affect isn’t working. If that worked, I think the ability would look a lot more useful. It gives an interesting way to interrupt casters.

Eclipse – Like someone suggested, it would be more helpful if the two effects had different icons. As of now, if I switch back and forth between the two spells a lot, I have to hover my mouse over the spell icon to see what affect I have. Other than problems with buff management, this is a really neat ability. Edit: March 2009 – I know, I still regret saying this was a nice ability back then, but I promise I spent lots of time bashing it in later posts during WotLK testing.

Gale Winds – It fixes the cyclone range problem that people complained about, and buffs our two new AOE-type abilities. No complaints as of now.

Nature’s Fury – I love the group viability that the debuff adds. Combined with the changes to Imp FF and Imp moonkin, it makes this tree a lot more group friendly. However, it reduces my +healing by 20%. It may be better if this talent was split into two 3-point talents. I don’t want to lose group viability in trade for group viability. We have a lot of nice healing abilities in the Balance tree. Why reduce our ability to be hybrids, and combine that with a debuff effect that makes the talent almost necessary in raid groups?

Edit: March 2009 – I think Nature’s Fury was the talent that later got turned into Earth & Moon. Don’t think this made it to Beta in this form.

Starfall – This really is my new favorite toy. However, there are some things to keep in mind for the future. I’m a little worried about turning myself into a giant agro magnet in groups because we won’t be able to stand at range. It now suffers the problem that the original hurricane had – we have to run in and stand in the middle of the group to have all the ticks hit the targets. To make it worse, the range of the spell changes after the first tick. However, for leveling, this talent makes AOE grinding viable once every 3 minutes when combined with hurricane and typhoon. In addition, it may turn moonkin into AOE group tanks periodically, which may be an interesting mechanic. I really do like the spell, I just see how it could become something that was only situationally useful without any targeting ability at all…