Classic Balance Druid Ranged DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

Your actual rotation as a Balance Druid is extremely simple, and is listed below.

• Starfire.

Sadly, Balance Druids do not have any depth to their rotation. You will cast Starfire as many times as possible from start to finish. The only change to your rotation comes in the form of down-ranking, where you can choose to use lower ranks of Starfire if you think that you might run out of Mana before the end of the pull if you keep using the max rank. Starfire's max rank is 7, so it is worth having Ranks 5 and 6, maybe even 4 on your bars as well, just to make sure you can always last as long as possible. This is also why having Mana consumables is critical as a Balance Druid, so you can cast more times without needing to slow or stop.

A common question is why would you not use your other damaging spells, such as Moonfire, Insect Swarm, or Wrath? You cannot use them for a few reasons. First, Moonfire and Insect Swarm are damage over time spells that take up a debuff slot on the boss, of which only 16 are available for the whole raid. These are incredibly important slots, and your DoTs are too weak to be used for them. This leaves only Wrath, which is simply less Mana efficient and worse damage than Starfire, making it not worth ever using.

While you do not have any DPS cooldowns as a Balance Druid, you do have some important utility cooldowns. Innervate is a great Mana recovery tool, but most raids will require you use it on a healer instead of on yourself. Entangling Roots is sometimes needed for control, and Tranquility can be used in bad situations when the raid needs a bit of extra healing. It is important to remember that you have a versatile toolkit as a Balance Druid, so do not focus too hard on damage when you can help improve a bad situation by doing something else.

For heavy AoE pulls, definitely make use of Hurricane for some nice burst AoE damage.