While I am still on my little sabbatical from Wow, Macbook has been kind enough to submit this great post.
Speccing your Balance Druid Appropriately
Introduction
Macbook is a raiding Moonkin on the server Stormscale US. You can follow him on his blog Moonkin. Razorbax gave me the opportunity to guest blog on his blog, and I thought it would be great to keep some posts coming while he is taking a RL break.
So What's the Problem?
As you all may know, the new talents for WoTLK were released just this past Tuesday. Everything we currently knew with our talent builds was essentially shattered, and there was hardly anywhere to turn. Blizz combined Bonus Spell Damage and Bonus Healing, making it even more confusing.
Finding a Spec You Are Comfortable With
When picking your new balance spec, the most important thing is to address what you are going to use it the most for. I am not a firm believer in respeccing all the time for arena, then respeccing for BGs, respeccing for dailies, and then respeccing for raids. But people still do it, and they're paying tons of gold to do it.
So, like I said, the key thing is to make yourself happy. I tried out almost 3 different specs when the patch came out, and finally settled on one that I am more than satisfied with. I picked a full balance spec, 61/0/0 and its working beautiful for me in both PvE and PvP settings.
Find a spec that suits what you do the most. If you hardly raid and mostly do 5mans or 10mans where you may have to pop a heal here and there, then you probably want to go spec some points in the resto build and go hybrid. You'll probably also want to throw some points in Natural Shapeshifter to decrease the mana cost of all the shapeshifting you will be doing. You'll also probably want to pickup Nature's Splendor and Genesis, to both increase the duration of your Rejuvenation and Lifebloom spells, as well as increase the heals each tick does.
If you raid as Moonkin and don't have the pleasure of having a shadow priest in your raid, you'll probably want to go with putting 3 points in Intensity to allow 30% of your mana regen to continue while casting. You probably want to throw some points in Furor, which while drastically (up to 10%), increase your intellect and therefore your mana pool. You'll also definitely need Balance of Power because all Moonkins raiding anything above Kara need to be hit capped (152 hit rating if you have both points in this talent). Full points in Earth & Moon have proved to be amazing for me, seeing as how its essentially increasing all your damage by 13%.
I'm not great at PvP, so I won't even try to tell you guys what to get, I usually just PvP in PvE gear (great damage), and never respec for BGs/Arena.
At any rate, the main thing is that you probably won't want to follow anyone's talent build just yet. No one really knows 100% what they're doing, so your best bet is to decide what you do the most of, and go through each and every talent carefully. Be sure to read the description of each one carefully, as they also made small changes that are hard to see (like at first, I didn't realize that Subtlety was changed so that it only decreased threat on resto spells, no longer all threat). There is now a talent in the Balance talent tree that gives 15% threat reduction.
Healing While in Balance
You can definitely heal while in balance spec. You will even heal very nice amounts. My Healing Touch spells usually heal for 4500 and crit for 6k-7k healing. The problem with healing while Balance specced is going to be your mana pool. Its going to drown rediculously. Still, I have healed many 5 man trash pulls while being balance. For example, if a healer is AFK, we usually keep doing a 5 man with me healing because I can usually keep everyone up. Boss fights though, are a different story, and I wouldn't really recommend trying to main heal anything while balance specced.
Conclusion
The new patch and the WoTLK expansion makes the Moonkin druid a much more viable source of DPS, both single target and AoE. My DPS jumped from around 1000-1200 DPS in a raid setting to over 2000 DPS on some bosses. The merge of spell damage and bonus healing has somewhat complicated things in term of gear (some of my resto set now has more spell power than my Moonkin set), but it is my belief that balance druids can heal 5 man trash pulls and throw useful offheals occasionally if needed.
Anyway's, I hope this helped any of you guys out there, and if you get a chance, check out my blog over at www.Moonkin.info!
2 comments:
Interesting!
Right now I'm primarily leveling. I stayed basically full resto (7/0/54) for the most part, because I was leveling with my boyfriend, who's a hunter with a gorilla. It was nice because we could take on huge amounts of mobs, have the gorilla tank them ALL while the dpsed the crap out of them. I dpsed a little bit (usually hurricaning) while also healing. It was awesome.
Now he's a couple levels above me, and I've been leveling more solo. I decided to respec into more balance, and came up with this weird spec... 33/0/31.
I know, it's messed up. But it gives me huge viability as a healer in instances (a hot commodity these days, seeing as how most people despecced from resto to level), and also gives me enough balance damage to level.
I have moonkin form, AND I have swiftmend (which I use VERY often in healing situations). I'm not sure if I like it enough to keep it at the moment... it's kind of like both trees are watered down, and I think I'd rather have balance be stronger, especially because you mentioned that healing can still be done, even without a strong resto spec.
Wow -- Very interesting spec, I'd love to see what else you picked up.
One thing about trying to DPS without having most of your points in balance: that was the first spec I tried. I tried something which still let me pick up over 10 points in balance (when I was level 70), and my DPS was pretty weak. You have to make sure you pick up at least the essential talents in balance, after deciding what spells you want to use more often.
Thanks for your comment :)
Macbook
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