|
Copied from my forums post:
Balance Druid Raiding DPS: Trials and Tribulations
I’m not going to say in this post anything that hasn’t been said, at length, by numerous people. I’m also not going to point fingers at people and classes. I will let you know that I feel that Balance Druid raiding DPS is falling behind, and why. I played during Classic and Burning Crusade, and have seen the buffs and utility come and go, so understand that not everyone can shine all of the time. I just want to put all of the information facing us into a single post so that perhaps we can all see the problem that we are facing, and try to make a better, more informed gear decision.
Out of the box, fresh Balance Druids are awesome. We can gear quickly, and tend to outburst other classes. It’s true that classes still beat us, and should, but at level 80, with no real gear ups, in blues, we should be doing on par with any other DPS class. This gear progression quickly sees benefit in Naxx gear and even the beginnings of Ulduar gear.
However, this is where Balance Druids run into trouble. What we’ve learned so far is that
A) Balance Druid DPS is in line with other DPS, as Blizzard insists that it is
B) We gear and scale along with other classes.
This is where a lot of people get expectations about what we should be doing post Ulduar. However, we barely keep in line, and in some cases fall drastically behind the other DPS classes at Ulduar and above levels of gear. This is where our talent points begin coming in. Blizzard was very, very kind to us in talents. Ours are amazing, hands down. They have 3 major drawbacks for raiding though.
A) We have a 10% hit cap (7% from talents) – This means that I wear at most, 3-4 pieces of gear with Hit on it before it’s almost useless. Now, every class is struggling with low hit cap, which is a good thing, so I’ll leave this alone.
B) We have a low soft haste cap – Between 15 and 17% haste on a character sheet, our wrath (about 45% of overall DPS) begins acting like an instant. Since the other spell (Starfire) that we cast accounts for about this percentage of DPS as well, we come to the conclusion that after about 550 Haste rating, the value that Haste adds is cut nearly in half.
C) We also have a very low Crit cap. Usually about 40% crit on your character sheet (very possible in Balance Druid) , with the buffs available in a 25 man raid, and our Starfire has 100% crit chance during Eclipse. This effectively cuts crit in half for DPS value after this point, as only Wrath is benefitting from it.
**40% from Eclipse, 3% from Improved Moonfire, 3% from improved Faerie Fire, 5% from Scorch(and like), 3% from Totem of Wrath, 4.25% from idol
Now, the purpose of this post isn’t to argue the exact math, so I know I am approximating. The math has been done many times on ElitistJerks and these forums, and the numbers are solid. I am paraphrasing because we all cannot understand the statistics and theory crafting involved with the numbers as they are sometimes presented. Both B and C above list ideal numbers, with eclipse being up 100% of the time, and we all know that is not true.
Another great problem with our DPS comes in with having so much of our damage tied into our eclipses. We all know that chance to proc is never 100%, and this can lead to massive strings of no uptime at all. It’s not common or true anymore, but there were logs floating around in Naxxramus days where it had not procced during an entire fight ~3 minutes.
Balance Druid suffer greatly right now due to having no static damage going on. White swings from Melee, Passive AoE, Wanding, etc are all not available to us, and thus, to the designers to help us increase in this area. This is also why movement hurts Balance Druid as much as, or more than, any other raiding class.
Finally, as far as raiding goes, come our glyphs. The biggest DPS glyph a balance druid has for minor glyphs is the Glyph of Mark of the wild. This, with 2pT10 will be a nice boon in a fight. There really are no other minor glyphs that we can use to increase DPS.
We do have some options for Major Glyphs, with Glyph of Moonfire, Starfire, and Insect Swarm leading the fight. Glyph of Starfall and Focus are nice, but they are less common, and overall, just not worth as much. I won’t argue the pros and cons of each individual glyph, as again, they have been covered in detail before.
To sum up, admittedly, undocumented research, the problem with raiding has little to do with our class and core abilities, and much, much more to do with our talents. The huge bonuses built in to each talent are astronomical at early gearing levels, but as we approach the caps, our increase rapidly reaches a limit on gear progression. More and More of each stat is available, but we still see less and less of a benefit.
As we reach our caps, our talent tree is very slim, and often, we do not have enough talents that would increase our DPS for all of our talent points.
The challenge for the game designers becomes clear: the fix for Balance Druid isn’t going to be easy. Itemizing leather to have tons of spell power, and starving us for other stats would do it, but we would see Elemental Shaman fighting us for it, and possibly paladins. Changing our talents reworks the core of how the class work, and could do more harm than good. Buffing our spells each time is simply going to cause the same problem occur in Cataclysm; ie Balance Druid will start strong and ahead of other classes, causing other classes to call for a buff, which will likely happen. But as content progresses during that expansion, we will quickly reach our soft caps and fall behind other raid DPS.
It is frustrating to be a class that in Naxx, led DPS charts, and still made a good showing in Ulduar. However, with the advent of 10 man hard modes in Ulduar, many Balance Druids where showing up and doing decent damage. As the raid as a whole geared, however, the Balance Druid quickly became the 11th man, losing spots in the hard mode raids for other classes. Now, through ToC and ICC, we are quickly approaching being the 26th man. Our class gets compared to raid composition, and then the 5% crit buffed weighed against the other classes to see if it was worth it.
I have no illusions that the same is not going on for elemental shamans specifically, but several other specs of other classes as well. The problem with being a hybrid DPS though, is that our other specs are drastically different. If I choose to progress with guilds through ICC, I have to look at converting to Melee, a tank, or a healer. I can’t change into another spec of ranged DPS. It is frustrating that the melee versions of druids and shamans are doing so well right now, while the ranged versions are starved for necessary changes.
The same talent issues we have with gear and raiding occur in PvP. With so much of our damage and cooldowns tied to crit, playing in an environment with resilience on our gear lowers our crit percentage to a point where it is almost 100% negated by our opponents resilience. This effectively eliminates 20% haste from our gear as well, and negates many of our talent points. It’s not intended to be, but is an incidental nerf to our class to correct the fact that, without resilience, PVP would be a giant free for all of killing everyone in at most, a handful of attacks.
All in all, Balance Druid is quickly losing it’s viability in end game situations. Many, many end game guilds only have Balance Druids along for their crit buff. I know that there are also guilds that love and cherish the versatility of the Balance Druid, and the fact that we bring combat rezzing and backup healing in critical moments. However, if you take a look at top ranked arena team compositions, Balance Druids are rarely present in 3’s, and almost non-existent in 2’s and 5’s. Our PVP survivability has been addressed often, and we can live, provided we kite, refresh dots, and the other player is silly enough to follow us and not just laugh and run away. Now, losing our raid spots to other classes is effectively meaning that post level 80 Balance Druids are toys, and not really contributing members to many raids.
Our fix, when it comes, will not be easy, and may change the way that Balance Druids are played entirely. The current number of spells that we cast in combat is effectively the cap on our DPS, and not our gear or our numbers. We see benefit on only ½ of our rotation at a time on crit or haste in the end game, and lose our talent points in PVP. Blizzard has built Balance Druid much too strongly on crit, and given us limited availability to use Haste in both PVP and PVE encounters. We will most likely see new spells, buffs, and/or procs in the future. The question becomes, can we hang on until the help comes, or will it be too late for this spec, and will we need to rebuild?
My moonkin will never be my alt, but in the near future, it may be my secondary spec so that I can continue to progress through raid content.
|
