Balance Druid Midnight Playstyle and Rotation Guide

Balance Druid General Rotation

Keep DoTs up on your priority target at all times (Moonfire & Sunfire). Try to only refresh DoTs during movement or when your DoTs have less than 30% of their duration left; this is referred to as a “pandemic window”.

If you are playing Keeper of the Grove, use Force Of Nature within 15 seconds and in conjunction with cooldowns like Eclipse or Celestial Alignment.

Enter Celestial Alignment or Incarnation: Chosen Of Elune as appropriate on the fight. Typically, you will want to ensure your cooldown is getting high value when it is pressed. This can be accomplished by pairing it with Bloodlust, trinkets or during damage amp situations. Research fights beforehand to determine when it is best to use your cooldowns, which in most scenarios will be on pull.

1. If you are playing Keeper of the Grove, it is often beneficial to hold your cooldowns to ensure they line up with Force Of Nature. However, make sure you’re not losing any uses to do this! This is incredibly killtime dependent.
2. If you are playing Whirling Stars, you will have two charges of your Celestial Alignment. Make sure you absolutely never overcap on these charges (note: if you are playing Keeper of the Grove’s Control Of The Dream hero talent, it is acceptable to sit on two charges for up to 15 seconds maximum).

Use Convoke The Spirits with Celestial Alignment. If you are playing Keeper of the Grove, make sure that Force Of Nature is Active.

Use Fury Of Elune on cooldown or New, Half, and Full Moon to prevent them from overcapping. With Moons, it is acceptable to hold charges until your next Celestial Alignment or Incarnation: Chosen Of Elune, but it is never acceptable to overcap.

Spend Astral Power using Starsurge on Single Target and two targets, and Starfall on 3+ targets in AoE/Spread Targets. If you’re talented into Aetherial Kindling or Starweaver then cast Starfall on 2+ targets instead.

Enter Solar Eclipse and cast Wrath as your filler on 1 or 2 targets, and enter Lunar Eclipse and cast Starfire as your filler on 3 or more targets. During your Celestial Alignment or Incarnation: Chosen Of Elune windows you cast Wrath up to 3 targets and Starfire on 4 targets and above.

Note: If you are playing Elune’s Chosen you will go Lunar Calling for every situation.

Opener

Elune’s Chosen Opener:

1. Wrath twice at 3-4 seconds left on the pull timer and from max range
2. Starfire
3. Apply Moonfire and Sunfire to the target
4. Press Fury Of Elune
5. Use Celestial Alignment or Incarnation: Chosen Of Elune paired with trinkets, racial abilities, and a potion.
6. Use Starsurge as much as you are able to in order to dump Astral Power before Convoke
7. Press Convoke The Spirits whenever below 40 Astral Power or after 4 Starsurge casts
8. Spend your remaining Astral Power and proceed with normal rotation.

Keeper of the Grove Opener:

1. Wrath twice at 3-4 seconds left on the pull timer and from max range
2. Apply Moonfire
3. Apply Sunfire
4. Force Of Nature
5. Celestial Alignment + Starsurge on the same global
6. Dump the rest of your AP on Starsurge (2-3 Starsurge)
7. Convoke The Spirits whenever at less than 40 AP
8. Dump AP into Starsurge
9. Spend your Dream Burst stacks

This opener is also how your basic cooldown window looks, with the exception of the first 3 points. It is good to refresh Sunfire regardless of duration before using your cooldowns in the middle of a fight to avoid spending a cast on refreshing during cooldowns. Keep in mind that your Force Of Nature Treants will usually reapply Moonfire.

You want to align trinkets and damage potions with your Celestial Alignment press.

Multi Target

1. Keep your Sunfire and Moonfire on all the targets in the pull (take note if the targets will live long enough to justify the DoT application).
2. Spend your Astral Power on Starfall on two or more targets and do not overcap on Astral Power.
3. Press Fury Of Elune on cooldown if you are playing Elune’s Chosen.
4. Spend your Astral Power on Starfall to obtain three stacks of Starlord.
5. If you are playing Keeper of the Grove, use your Force Of Nature on cooldown.
6. Use Starfire.
7. Ensure uptime of Waning Twilight with Wild Mushroom (if talented).

Cooldown Usage

As Balance Druid it is incredibly important to ensure you’re utilizing your cooldowns properly. Making sure you’re getting max value out of them is key to getting everything out of the spec, so you should build a thought process that includes things such as:

• Am I going to get full use of the cooldown?
• Is there another point in the fight that might be better suited for these cooldowns? (Damage amps, priority add spawns, lust, trinket availability)
• Will I lose a use by holding these cooldowns?
• Will excessive movement inhibit the full value of the cooldown?

Handling both cooldowns and movement as a Balance Druid in raid revolves heavily around being proactive and planning ahead for the fight, either through tools like Lorrgs.io or just looking up other peoples timers on Warcraftlogs.

The fundamental idea behind Balance Druid cooldowns is to maximize your uptime of Eclipse while also making sure your Convoke The Spirits stays on cooldown, you don’t overcap charges of Celestial Alignment and you are overlapping your Force Of Nature casts with either Celestial Alignment or Eclipse.

The usual flow of Balance Druid cooldowns in a regular single target fight starts with using Force Of Nature, Celestial Alignment and Convoke with an on-use trinket in your opener and then doing the same thing again every 2 minutes.

If you are playing Whirling Stars you will have 2 charges of Celestial Alignment and therefore have a floating charge you should overlap with Force Of Nature whenever possible.

Planning cooldowns for mythic+ as a Balance Druid is slightly easier as you generally won’t have to worry about aligning Convoke The Spirits here. Your thought process should be to plan your Incarnation: Chosen Of Elune windows around your on-use trinket timer. If you’re wearing 2 passive trinkets you should just send your cooldowns whenever you can to avoid overcapping on charges of Incarnation.

Keep in mind that to get full value of your cooldowns you should not use them at the end of a pull or in a pull with low target count unless you are overcapping on charges.

Movement and Positioning

Dealing with movement, same as handling cooldowns, revolves heavily around planning ahead and being proactive. You should try to be aware of what is going to happen in the particular fight 10-15 seconds ahead and already have a plan for how you’re going to deal with it.

The general approach to dealing with movement is to let it dictate your Astral Power spending and generating, using instant casts like Starsurge or Starfall whenever you are forced to move; this is where the importance of planning comes in, because if you get caught out with a mechanic and you don’t have the Astral Power to spend you are potentially losing out on several casts worth of damage.

Utilizing tools like Wild Charge is also very good since you can use instant casts like Starsurge and Starfall during the animation.

You can also use windows of movement to refresh Sunfire and Moonfire, but this should be your lowest priority option.

Balance Druid is a spec very reliant on maintaining casting uptime. More casts means more Astral Power, and more Astral Power means more spender casts which equates to more damage.

This also plays into utilizing your defensives properly to reduce the amount of times you need to shapeshift into Bear Form, as shapeshifting effectively kills your uptime. Druids are often relied upon to use tools like Stampeding Roar which automatically shifts you into Bear Form, and it’s important to communicate with your party or raid leader on the best moments for you to use this.

Defensives

Baseline defensives on Balance Druid are unfortunately poor and largely stem from the fact that Druid is based around having access to Bear Form. To work around this, you have to make sure you are using your defensives appropriately, which will often include needing to use Bear Form.

Barkskin is your main defensive tool that you will need to keybind to something that is easily pressable, since it is your first line of defense against incoming damage. It is a one minute cooldown button and allows the Druid to take 30% less damage over the course of 12 seconds. You always want to press this proactively before incoming damage, as pressing it after a damage event does nothing. This is NOT on the global cooldown, so there is little excuse for not using it!

Aessina's Renewal was a new talent added in 11.1 in a choice node with Renewal that makes you instantly heal 10% of your max health whenever you’re hit by an ability that does more than 12% of your max health. This was not played after its release as the active choice in Renewal was better, however with the release of Midnight pre-patch Renewal has been removed so you are forced to take Aessina's Renewal for an extra passive healing effect.

Well-Honed Instincts is a free Frenzied Regeneration that gets applied to your character when you drop below 40% health. It will place a debuff on you for 120 seconds (or 90 if you’re playing Perfectly-Honed Instincts) that prevents you from receiving this effect again. It is important to note that when this is applied to your character, you will not retain the Frenzied Regeneration after you shapeshift. If you see that this procs and you shift into bear, you lose it entirely, causing it to be incredibly frustrating to work around. Furthermore, if it procs and you need to do something like break your root on Tindral Sageswift, it will disappear from the act of shapeshifting.

The last thing we have access to in our caster form is really just small and largely unimpactful offhealing through Regrowth. You’ll find that this doesn’t move your health bar too much, so it is really only used in times of complete desperation or downtime. In 95% of scenarios, you’d rather go Bear Form and cast Frenzied Regeneration to heal yourself.

With Keeper of the Grove, you can proc instant casts of Regrowth through Blooming Infusion, which also provide 8% Damage Reduction through Protective Growth. Regrowth is a 1.5 second cast, which is the same as the global cooldown, meaning that whether you use the instant casts or not is only relevant for movement and not for damage uptime. Having Regrowth active also procs Forestwalk, increasing your healing received.

Bear Form

Outside of caster form, our defensive toolkit expands with Bear Form, and the main ability that comes with it: Frenzied Regeneration.

By itself, Bear Form allows you to increase your stamina by 25% and your armor by 220%, which is a great boon for when you need to survive large bursts of damage. In raid, however, the vast majority of damage that you as a ranged DPS will take is magical, and it is rare that you will use this armor increase, with the last relevant time being years ago in Castle Nathria on Sludgefist. However, it is quite honestly one of the strongest defensives in the game by itself, but comes with significant tradeoffs to your baseline defensives and your overall damage; pressing Bear Form means you stop doing 99% of your damage until you resume playing in Moonkin Form.

Frenzied Regeneration synergizes inherently with Bear Form, as it is just a 32% heal over the course of 3 seconds.

Heart of the Wild

Heart Of The Wild is getting some changes for the Midnight pre-patch and is now a 2 minute cooldown spell that gives you an effect depending on your current shapeshift form. Using this in Bear Form increases your max HP and retains its effect after shifting back to Moonkin Form. Using this without a shapeshift casts an empowered Wild Growth that heals up to 5 allies.