Stats & Gearing – Balance druid leveling
The Primary stat weight for balance druids is pretty much the opposite of the cat weighting:
- Int > Spirit > Stamina >>>>>>> agility > strength
Intellect is the primary stat for balance druids. It gives you more mana and makes your spells hit harder by giving you more spell power. More intellect makes you a smarter moonkin.
Other useful Balance stats:
- Spirit: Gives you more regen out of combat, and there is a talent in the balance tree that converts spirit into hit rating. You will end up with some spirit on your gear, which is okay – but you still value intellect a LOT more than you value spirit.
- Stamina: This is a stat that makes your health pool bigger. They put it on pretty much everything, and so it’s okay, but it’s not a stat to focus on at all.
- Critical strike rating: This stat will show up on your gear at some point, and this is a good stat for you.
- Hit rating: You probably don’t need much of this on your gear since spirit now converts into hit rating for you, but you may have to pick up a little spirit and a little hit to make sure your spells don’t miss.
- Haste rating: makes your spells cast faster. This is a great stat for moonkin.
- Mastery shows up on gear after level 80. This stat is okay because it increases your Eclipse damage.
- Spell power is a stat that should mostly just show up on weapons, and this is good for you. There may also still be enchants with spell power on them.
What NOT to wear as a balance druid:
- Agility & strength are melee stats that are bad for caster druids. Please do not try to be a spell caster wearing agility or strength gear. You would be better off wearing cloth int gear than wearing agility gear (especially before you learn the armor specialization at level 50). The newer quests should offer you caster leather gear, so you have no excuse to gear badly.
- Dodge, parry, and expertise are also not caster stats. Please do not wear these either.
Balance leveling glyphs:
- Prime: Moonfire (level 25), Insect swarm (level 50), choose Wrath or starsurge (level 75)
- Major: Entangling roots (level 25), Monsoon (level 50), choose Focus or solar beam (level 75)
- Minor: Dash, unburdened rebirth, wild. (The typhoon glyph isn’t good for solo leveling, since it takes away your knockback).
2 Comments
New troll here! I was wondering if you can share gear between balance and resto and if so is that only for leveling or can you do the same at endgame?
good question! For leveling, I would expect high overlap between resto & moonkin gear. At end-game, you end up with Tier set pieces having set bonuses that aren’t shared. So, all “set” pieces end up being different for resto & moonkin. I tend to have other item pieces (ie. bracers, boots, cloak) sometimes shared between my specs. Right now, I only have 3 pieces of gear overlap at level 80. However, the Spirit -> hit conversion in Cataclysm is likely going to increase the overlap in terms of what pieces I wear for both sets, and I would expect more than half of my resto & moonkin gear to overlap when I first start raiding. There is a possibility that I would walk into my first raid with my only gearing difference being my helm & trinkets, with the differentiation between the two sets growing as I get more progressed in raiding.