Class Talents
The Druid Class Tree talents are quite straightforward and there is very little flexibility for Balance Druids.
There are a few talents that are actual DPS increases in the tree and they are: Nurturing Instinct and Lycara’s Teachings. Those 2 talents are must haves and should always be picked.
Some defensive talents that you can pick up are Well-Honed Instincts, Thick Hide, Ursine Vigor and Renewal. All those are must haves in my opinion, giving you some solid tankiness. Furthermore, Frenzied Regeneration gives you an option to heal yourself when you need to “sit” in Bear Form.
Improved Barkskin and Matted Fur are also talents that you should highly consider when picking talents. The shield from Matted Fur is often underwhelming due to scaling off of Versatility (a stat we don’t often prioritize), but it enables you to easily reach Well-Honed Instincts, one of our best defensive options. Increasing Barkskin’s duration by an additional four seconds is also great to help mitigate long duration damage intakes.
Heart of the Wild, while not often taken, can be a niche option that enables us to have two charges of Frenzied Regeneration, which can be useful in fights where you often have to utilize Bear Form in quick succession in order to survive incoming damage.
For the utility side of things there are quite a few things to be considered. We benefit from being a hybrid class in this regard, so a lot of our class tree is filled with solid utility options. Cyclone, Typhoon, Nature’s Vigil, Improved Stampeding Roar, Hibernate, are some examples of this. Usually you want to have most of those in your build but you can pick and choose depending on the situation and your group composition.
Here are examples of what builds I use for both Mythic+ and Raid.
For Mythic+:
This talent tree works very well on most affix combinations, giving you a lot of utility, damage and defense value. Also if you would like Remove Corruption to remove Poisons and Curses for different dungeons you have a few options on which talents you can drop: Improved Stampeding Roar, Incessant Tempest, Nature’s Vigil, Innervate, Ursine Vigor can all be dropped depending on what you would like to keep.
For Raiding:
For the raid build the main difference to the Mythic+ build is investing into the 2 points of Feline Swiftness for the extra mobility. To do this, you need to spend a total of four points to go into Thrash, Rip, and then the two in Feline Swiftness. However, you may need to make adjustments depending on the fight. For example, if your guild wants you to have Stampeding Roar more often or if you need Typhoon to knock adds on Fyrakk, you can drop these four points and get the talents you need for the fights.
Talent Builds
There has been no major tuning or play style changes, and it is expected that builds that performed well in Patch 10.2 will continue to perform similarly well even with the addition of the 10.0 tier set. This is largely due to the tier set being fairly undertuned, leading to little benefit from significantly changing your playstyle.
Single Target
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A few notes about this build:
- Wild Surges is currently too good to pass up, and since we are taking this talent, we will need a third DoT to be able to proc waning twilight. That’s where Astral Smolder comes in.
- No longer playing with Radiant Moonlight so we no longer have 2 Full Moons.
- Astral Smolder got buffed to be 8 seconds instead of 4 and got a small damage buff. This increases our Waning Twilight uptime by quite a decent amount.
- Umbral Embrace is simply not good enough to compete with the new Astral Smolder.
- Rattle sims a lot higher than Starweaver currently, despite previous beneficial interactions between Starweaver and the Vault of the Incarnates tier set.
- If there are spread adds that spawn periodically, investing points into Starfall and Lunar Shrapnel can be accomplished by dropping the fairly insignificant points in Nature’s Balance and Warrior of Elune.
- If you feel you need to “funnel” off of small, stacked adds, such as on Tindral Sageswift, you may consider dropping the two points in Denizen of the Dream and Friend of the Fae to put into Radiant Moonlight and Wild Mushroom. You’ll find that this enables you to consistently get your Primordial Arcanic Pulsar to proc at high value times, such as during the damage amp on the shield of Tindral.
Council of Dreams Build
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This build excels in situations where bosses are often spread and live for an extended period of time. As a result, you are not reliably able to proc Astral Smolder on them, so you will have to resort to using Stellar Flare to apply Waning Twilight.
You will want to use small windows of bosses being stacked to get as much Full Moon cleave value as possible, such as when Urctos gets dragged over a priority target. However, never lose charges of moons to accomplish this.
You will often want to enter Solar Eclipse in this build if bosses are not stacked, or only one boss is stacked on one other.
Stacked "Funnel" ST Build
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This build is fairly niche, but can see some play in Season 4, particularly on Tindral Sageswift.
This build allows you to do some form of stacked AoE damage through Wild Mushrooms and the cleave of your Full Moon with Radiant Moonlight without overinvesting in AoE talents.
Furthermore, Warrior of Elune can provide some additional benefit by allowing you to rapidly generate Astral Power with your Starfire cleaving onto multiple targets.
The goal of this build is to enable you to generate more Astral Power than you would otherwise be able to, and is useful for ensuring that your Arcanic Pulsar lines up with the damage amp on Tindral.
2 Minute Convoke Build
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This build enables us to have an option to have our cooldowns on a two minute timer, rather than the three minutes that you typically play with.
Its use is also fairly niche, but could be (based on kill timing) stronger on fights such as Gnarlroot (where you’d consider dropping the Nature’s Balance and Warrior of Elune points for Starfall and Lunar Shrapnel) due to being able to gain the use of your cooldowns on pull and on the 2-minute damage amp.
There was some play of this build on Smolderon and Tindral Sageswift in Season 3, which functioned similarly to how Feral Druids would play their cooldowns. If you choose to play this build, I would strongly encourage pairing it with 2-minute trinkets such as Ashes of the Embersoul or Spoils of Neltharus.
Mythic+
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This is a standard build that is largely built around playing mobs that live long enough to consistently get your ramp off. If you expect the mobs to die too fast to reliably multidot, you can instead opt for a slightly burstier build that takes Wild Mushrooms and even Fury of Elune at the cost of some overall throughput and single target. This might give you some additional throughput on lower keys in particular, but be aware you are still going to be out-burst by almost every other class in the game.
If your tank is comfortable with it, use Twin Moons to apply Moonfire to every mob while the tank is gathering the mobs. Beware that they may not have put too much damage into mobs yet, and avoid aggro appropriately while you do this.
The second point in Ursine Vigor may also be necessary to live one-shots on higher keys. The point in Improved Stampeding Roar is entirely optional and can be shifted if you feel you need this second point.
Hibernate, Typhoon, and Improved Stampeding Roar may be shifted to obtain Remove Corruption as necessary if you feel you are playing a dungeon or affix that requires Remove Corruption.