wow Dragonflight Beta Balance Druid Dev Notes: September 21st

[Staff 1,488]

A new talent tree is arriving to Balance in a future DF Beta build, as Blizzard preview of what it will look like, as well as a big Starfall change! 

Balance September 21 (Source)

Greetings Balance Druids,

In a future beta build, Balance Druids will receive an all-new talent tree but, in the meantime, we are excited to share a preview of what that new talent tree will look like. Our talent tree design philosophy has changed considerably over the course of Dragonflight’s development. Community feedback and the lessons learned through playtesting helped us identify good practices to follow when constructing a talent tree. Equipped with what we’ve learned, we set out to update Balance’s tree and bring it in line with our current design philosophy.

Connections

With this iteration of Balance’s talent tree, we wanted to increase the interconnectedness of the talent nodes to allow for easier access to different options across the tree. In addition, we wanted to avoid awkward positioning where it was mandatory to take a specific, unrelated talent to reach a desired, potentially gameplay altering, talent. Lastly, we wanted to avoid any situations where taking a talent would provide no benefit because a different talent wasn’t taken.

New Additions

Feedback indicated that there was a lack of new abilities making Shadowlands and Dragonflight Balance play very similarly. With this iteration, we have introduced new options for players to be excited about. Some of those new options:

• Umbral Embrace – Dealing Astral damage has a chance to cause your next Wrath or Starfire to become Astral and deal 50% additional damage.
• Wild Mushroom – Grow a magical mushroom at the target enemy’s location. After 2 sec, the mushroom detonates, dealing Nature damage and generating up to 20 Astral Power based on targets hit.
• Denizen of the Dream – Your Moonfire and Sunfire have a chance to summon a Faerie Dragon to assist you in battle for 30 sec.
• Sundered Firmament – Every other Eclipse creates a Fury of Elune at 25% effectiveness that follows your current target for 8 sec.

Starfall

We appreciate the community’s thoughts on our recent change to Starfall and agree with the sentiment: Starfall has a unique identity by being tied to the caster and we want to retain that identity. In the next Dragonflight update, you’ll see our latest iteration of Starfall:

• Starfall – Calls down waves of falling stars upon enemies with 40 yds, dealing Astral damage over 8 sec. Multiple uses of this ability may overlap.

Thank you for your patience as we worked on this latest iteration of the Balance talent tree. We’re excited to get it into your hands as soon as possible and can’t wait to see what builds the community will come up with!

[Boomyboomyhey 0]

What if Stellar Flare talent was a replacement for Starsurge and also if had a passive effect that it could proc (become instant cast) based on your Sunfire and Moonfire damage?

Stellar Flare (talent)

“Replaces Starsurge

Burns the target for (xx.x% of Spell Power) Astral Damage, and then an additional (xxx.x% of Spell Power) damage over xx seconds. Your Moonfire and Sunfire damage have a chance to make your next Stellar Flare instant.

Generates x Astral Power”

It would give an optionality to give up on single target damage and to go for a heavy AoE build and would bring back the most fun aspect of boomkin in Cata and MoP (spamming dots and starsurge procs)

This would also reduce the current boomy dynamics of either choosing starsurge or starfall and not being able to rotate between the two abilities properly, as Stellar Flare would not cost, but generate Astral Power (so it would not compete Astral Power with Starfall)

Stellar Flare being only a castable ability makes it unviable both in PvP and PvE. I feel like Stellar Flare will remain an useless talent if they don’t make any significant changes.