Balance Druid Midnight Gearing Guide

Midnight Season 1 Tier Set Bonuses:

• (2) Set Bonus: Shooting Stars deal 40% more damage and generate 2 additional Astral Power outside Eclipse.
• (4) Set Bonus: Starfall and Starsurge damage increased by 5% and casting them has a 30% chance to strike an affected target with an exploding Shooting Stars that deals Astral damage to all nearby enemies.

Tier Set Discussion:

The Season 1 tier set revolves heavily around Shooting Stars, with the 2pc increasing its damage by 50% in all situations and additionally making them generate more Astral Power whenever outside of Eclipse.

The 2-set and 4-set together both benefit and interact positively with Starweaver, where chaining free spenders from procs saturates the procs from the 4-set and generating longer duration of Solstice through free spenders with Hail Of Stars also increases the rate of your Shooting Stars, making this a considerable part of your damage.

You should still prioritise the gear you use by running a sim for your character, but the lists below will give you a good idea of what items are considered good for Balance Druid, and help you target the right content for each piece of loot.

• Overall
• Raiding
• Mythic+

The generally strongest trinket combination for Balance Druid is Vaelgor's Final Stare and Gaze Of The Alnseer:

• Vaelgor's Final Stare is a 2 minute on-use trinket you want to overlap with your cooldowns, this means sometimes holding your cooldowns to line this up.
• Gaze Of The Alnseer is a mastery stat-stick trinket with a random, stackable Intellect buff.

There are some other trinkets that are good alternatives if you can not get these two, such as Emberwing Feather and Heart Of Wind from Windrunner Spire, Soulcatcher's Charm from Maisara Caverns and Locus-Walker's Ribbon from Crown of the Cosmos.

Emberwing Feather is generally the best on-use trinket from mythic+. It’s not super powerful for Balance Druid, but the other options are generally poor.

There are some other interesting trinkets like Wraps Of Cosmic Madness that has a 2 second channel that does damage, but if somebody in your party or raid dies then you reset the cooldown by 60 seconds. This can be fun and interesting to play around if you’re in a group where you think there will be lots of deaths. It can also be situationally useful for progression in order to burst down a priority add.

Similarly to The War Within, the recommended crafted gear changes a bit as you get deeper into the season.

Generally, you want your first craft to be a weapon since they scale the best with item level, this means crafting a two-handed staff like Aln'hara Cane with the embellishment Darkmoon Sigil: Hunt on it.

For your 2nd embellishment, it depends on what difficulty content you do and how many myth crests you have available. Optimally your 2nd craft should go towards whatever high stat budget slot you are missing; generally this will be in the off-piece slot for your tier, which is Gloves this season for Balance.

Crafting with hero crests is generally not recommended as they are much more valuable being spent on upgrading pieces to hit the Hero of the Dawn achievement.

Later on in the season as you acquire more resources like sparks and crests, you will want to change your crafted items and embellishments around.

Late on in the season you have some choices:

• If you have acquired a good two-handed weapon at myth track already you should craft a 2nd low stat budget slot with Arcanoweave Lining, like Silvermoon Agent's Utility Belt.
• If you have only acquired a One-Handed weapon, then you can swap your your Darkmoon Sigil: Hunt embellishment on the Off-Hand Aln'hara Lantern craft.

Nebulous Voidcores (Bonus Rolls)

The Voidspire: Rolling on Vaelgor & Ezzorak for Vaelgor's Final Stare should be your highest priority as this is the strongest trinket you can possibly get, even at lower item levels.

The Dreamrift: You should eventually spend a bonus roll in here to try and get a Gaze Of The Alnseer.

Nexus Point Xenas: The 2set rings in here, Omission Of Light and Occlusion Of Void are very strong together. Nexus Point also drops some other good loot, so your use won’t get wasted.

Windrunner’s Spire: Windrunner Spire has a decent chunk of items available in its pool, making it a good place to use your bonus roll as you're likely to get an item you need. If you already crafted a weapon, you might however want to use this bonus roll in Feral loot spec.

Ascendant Voidcores

Ascendant Voidcores let you upgrade any max hero or myth trinket or weapon to higher item level, going as high as 298.

Your first upgrade should either be Vaelgor's Final Stare or any myth track weapon. After you have upgraded those two you can go for a Gaze Of The Alnseer to round it out.