WOTLK Beta talent feedback: 9/12/08

Balance Tier 1:

• Starlight Wrath – Hasn’t changed. Good tier 1 talent for pvp & pve balance druids to pick up.
• Genesis – This is much more useful for resto druids than it is for balance druids. Doesn’t effect overall DPS of moonkin enough to pick it up, based on the talent point cost.

Balance Tier 2:

• Moonglow: Would be more useful for both balance & resto if it included the new nourish spell so that nourish won’t get outshined by regrowth…
• Nature’s Majesty: Crit increase includes heal spells, to make it appealing to resto druids. Crit is nice for moonkin.
• Improved Moonfire: When my moonfire inscription glyph reduces the initial damage of my moonfire to less than 200 damage, having an increased crit chance does basically nothing but proc nature’s grace. However, crit for people without the inscription is useful, and all types of balance druids will probably pick this up, since the first camp gets a 10% increase return on their DOT (twice what you’d get from genesis) for only 2 talent points, even if they aren’t making use of the crit by having starfire refresh it…

Balance Tier 3:

• Brambles: This looks like a PvP talent now that there are a lot more choices for druids in the first few tiers. With the number of choices people are making, this one is going to be very situational whether or not to pick it up. Treants having a chance to daze is underwhelming.
• Nature’s Grace: This was moved earlier in the tree so resto druids can get it. This is a lot of fun with improved Regrowth for resto druids. Still as useful as ever for balance druids. (1 talent point)
• Nature’s Splendor: Increased duration of DOTs & HOTs –Good for resto healing. Something I could “take it or leave it” for balance druids. This has some sort of strange synergy for a “DOT” moonkin spec. With only 2 dots to support this talent line, and all the glyphs supporting this, I’m not sure what the direction for moonkin is supposed to be. (3 talent points)
• Nature’s Reach: increased range of balance spells & reduced threat. Obvious choice for PvE druids, and okay choice for PvP. Most druids probably pick this up.
• Tier 3, overall, has a TON of talent points.

Balance Tier 4:

• Vengeance: This costs a lot of talent points and makes me sad, but I need it so I pick it up anyway. It might be possible to reduce the point cost of Vengeance and move something from tier 3 (to make it less crowded) into tier 4 (to give more options, I’d suggest moving Nature’s reach or brambles to tier 4?)
• Celestial focus: removed pushback (thank you) and added a flat 3% haste bonus. I haven’t quite decided if this talent is good or not yet. In theory, haste would increase our damage, and the stun chance is okay for PvP.

Balance Tier 5:

• Lunar Guidance: Still underwhelming because of the reduction. However, the change to furor (increased int) seems to almost make up for the reduction. I’d still like to see a balance talent that increases your crit based on spirit.
• Insect swarm: We’ve started picking up more talents that help this scale, along with the glyph that gives it more damage when we give up the minus 5% to be hit.
• Improved insect swarm: Along with the other DOT talents in the lower part of the trees now, this encourages us to keep insect swarm & moonfire on the target, and is a better talent than Eclipse because it lets us choose what spell we want to cast, instead of choosing for us.

Balance Tier 6:

• Dreamstate: Druids picking up intensity from the  resto tree will probably skip this talent, since it will give PvE druids less regen. This talent may end up being for a PvP build that isn’t based on having spirit at all. There are up to 10 talent points to spend on this tier. I suspect that only hybrid/healer druids will pick up this talent as the trees are now.
• Moonfury: I think I always whine about talents that cost 5 points, but we’ll all pick this up anyway. It’s necessary for helping our direct damage spells scale well.
• Balance of power: Helps both PvP (with reduced chance to be hit with spells), and PvE (increased chance to hit with spells).

Balance Tier 7:

• Moonkin form: No complaints now that we have a mana regen proc, instead of melee for mana.
• Improved Moonkin form: I’m sad to lose my proc chance, but a flat 3% haste increase to the entire raid kinda seems worthwhile. Makes celestial focus feel kinda lame for raiding single-target DPS moonkin.
• Improved Faerie Fire: This is now the worst talent in the balance tree. This is redundant with the shadow priest talent that applies the spell hit based off their SW:Pain, so it’s easier to convince shadow priests to spec for it in raids. Faerie Fire lowers our DPS because we have to refresh it every 40 seconds. Either: Make the +hit applied with the starfire DOT, increase the duration of Faerie Fire, or just give this +hit to someone else and free up talent points or just replace this talent altogether.

Balance Tier 8:

• Owlkin Frenzy: Nice for PvP specs that get hit a lot. Nice for soloing. Nice for protecting hurricane when you AOE in PvE. Something that may be easy for raiding single-target damage druids to skip in favor of other talents.
• Wrath of Cenarius: Obvious choice for increasing the damage of wrath & starfire.

Balance tier 9:

• Eclipse: The proc-based effect still isn’t worth it even at the current design. The cooldown was never really the problem. The fact that starfire & wrath have different base DPS is more of the problem. This talent may or may not increase your overall damage, depending on how lucky you are and how good you are at math & “power-shifting” between spells.
• Typhoon: Knockback should be instant, not delayed. Otherwise, knockback is relatively unhelpful.
• Force of Nature: These trees die really easily, but do a fair amount of damage and can now be controlled by the pet bar, so their overall AI is smarter.
• Gale Winds:  People who do mostly single-target damage can easily skip this. I’m not sure how the damage reduction is affecting us, since I haven’t had a chance to play with it.

Balance Tier 10:

• Earth and Moon: Scales worse with additional ranks than it did before, so people investing 5 points would be refreshing a 12 second debuff every 1.5 to 3 seconds. This talent is only worth 3 points. This talent can be skipped altogether for raiders if the warlock or death knight (with the right spec) wants to keep up the effects that don’t stack with this. Either add a secondary effect that only benefits the druid, or just reduce this to 3 points since no one should ever spend more than that in this talent unless drastic point reductions are made earlier in the tree for us to have spare points to burn for no reason.

Balance Tier 11:

• Starfall: Not worth it for PvP druids if this continues to be a buff on the druid that can be: dispelled, interrupted by stuns, purged, spellstolen (and thus used against the druid) without the druid being able to do anything about it. Not to mention the fact that people in PvP would be able to just run out of it’s range if they happen to not have the ability to do any of the above listed counters. This talent is limited to being useful only for AOE druids grinding in PvE instances or for solo AOE grinding combined with hurricane.