Talent Builds
Keeper of the Grove Single Target
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This build utilizes the Keeper of the Grove Hero Talent tree to amplify your core rotation. Summoning treants using Force of Nature causes you to gain stacks of Dream Burst, which cause your Wrath or Starfire to deal damage to your target and nearby enemies.
The general idea of this build is to summon your treants on cooldown and pair it with your Celestial Alignment and Convoke the Spirits, delaying if killtimes allow.
If you think movement is not a concern, you may instead opt to replace the point in Soul of the Forest for the second point in Umbral Intensity. It is my opinion that there are no fights where you would make this change aside from potentially Sikran. The gain for doing so is INCREDIBLY minor, and if there is a situation where you would need the Astral Power for even one Starsurge to move, then it already wasn’t worth it.
While using Whirling Stars, you want to try to pair your Celestial Alignment with as many cooldowns as possible. Therefore, ensure you have a charge available to pair with both your Force of Nature as well as your Convoke the Spirits. Now that Celestial Alignment is on a charge system with Whirling Stars, it is perfectly acceptable to hold your cooldowns as long as you’re not overcapping on charges. Plan appropriately for each encounter and figure out what and when your guild might need damage!
Keeper of the Grove Light Cleave
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With Starfall becoming baseline, you often do not need to make too many adjustments to your talent profile to be able to do AoE now. This build trades the point in Nature’s Balance to include a point in Twin Moons, which is fairly DPS neutral on Single Target, but allows you to more efficiently apply Moonfire to additional targets. You would consider playing this on fights where the main priority is single target damage, but the fight might feature some cleave at points, such as Ulgrax or Bloodbound Horror.
Currently, I suggest playing this build on Ansurek as well, but make sure with Whirling Stars, you send your cooldowns based on what your guild needs. For example, one of the strengths of Balance Druid is being able to Starfall all Summoned Acolytes, allowing you to do a lot of damage to them while simultaneously cleaving the boss. It is important you play to that strength as much as possible to get full value out of Whirling Stars. If you find yourself using both charges to prog P2 more, however, you may find it better to play Orbital Strike instead.
Keeper of the Grove Large Add Cleave
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This build excels in situations where you need to cleave targets that live long enough to where it’s justified to take the Aetherial Kindling talent. This is useful on flights such as Broodtwister Ovi’nax as well as Silken Court.
Some adjustments you might consider making include swapping Whirling Stars for the initial parasite burst on Broodtwister Ovi’nax. Furthermore, playing Bounteous Bloom is solid on Silken Court in order to match the damage amplification that occurs roughly every minute on the Mythic version of the encounter.
Mythic+ General Build (Keeper of the Grove)
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You continue the normal playstyle of applying dots and spending Astral Power, using your trees as an additional way to apply Moonfire.
You may elect to replace the point in Incarnation: Chosen of Elune for Convoke the Spirits if you feel your single target is a bit lacking. Your burst will be incredibly high every 2 minutes, and if you allow your Spymaster’s Web trinket to stack to 40, you will have unparalleled sustained AoE damage every 4 minutes.
Other adjustments you might be able to make include swapping Denizen of the Dream for Elune’s Guidance when paired with Incarnation: Chosen of Elune. If you feel you want to play with more spenders, you may consider taking Bounteous Bloom for 1 minute burst.
Elune’s Chosen Mythic+ Build
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This build is likely the strongest Mythic+ build available currently, but requires more group coordination and set-up time. Therefore, it is likely for the majority of players, the Keeper of the Grove build will be stronger in lower keys as well as in pick-up-groups.
With the Elune’s Chosen build, you will have to spend time manually dotting targets with Moonfire and playing around your 2 minute cooldown Incarnation: Chosen of Elune, whereas the Keeper of the Grove build is more flexible with timings and is easy to adjust to whatever your group decides to do.
Class Talents
The changes to the Druid Class Tree in The War Within have caused talents to be a little less straightforward for utility, and as a result, you will have to pick and choose what to sacrifice in order to pick up all the utility you might want in the tree. For Druid talents that enhance actual throughput, however, there aren’t too many nodes to select from.
There are a few talents that are actual dps increases in the tree and they are: Nurturing Instinct, Lycara’s Teachings, Rising Light and Falling Night, Starlight Conduit, as well as Lore of the Grove. Those talents are must haves and should always be picked.
Some defensive talents that you can pick up are Thick Hide, Well-Honed Instincts, and Renewal. All those are must haves in my opinion, giving you some solid tankiness. Furthermore, selecting Frenzied Regeneration gives you an option to heal yourself when you need to “sit” in Bear Form.
Improved Barkskin, Oakskin, and Natural Recovery 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 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, and Oakskin increases the Damage Reduction from Barkskin by 10%, which is too good to pass up.
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. In The War Within, it became a lot more difficult to pick up all utility, so you will have to 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 build enables you to obtain all of your important CC, such as Typhoon and Incapacitating Roar without sacrificing too much defensive capability.
If you do not need Remove Corruption, you may instead substitute the points in Rejuvenation and Remove Corruption to obtain either Feline Swiftness, or Verdant Heart and Natural Recovery.
Healers do not often require Innervate, but if you find you really want to have access to Nature’s Vigil, you may consider removing Ursoc’s Spirit and Matted Fur. However, in higher keys, increasing the amount of HP in Bear Form is often very strong to help prevent one-shots from occurring.
Coordinate with your group to figure out what you can go without to ensure the dungeon goes as smoothly as possible. Sometimes, even Typhoon may be unnecessary depending on group composition.
For Raiding:
For Raid content, here is the build I often find myself playing. The purpose of this build is to provide as much group utility as possible through picking up Improved Stampeding Roar, Innervate, and Nature’s Vigil while still maintaining strong personal talents, such as Feline’s Swiftness.
Spec Talents
With the changes made in The War Within, a lot of talents that were previously high priority in Dragonflight are no longer as attractive. Furthermore, there are an incredibly low amount of talents that alter gameplay or provide anything beyond a bland buff to the specialization, with nearly 85% of the talents being completely passive buffs, such as increased damage of something, increase the rate something ticks, or reduce the cooldown of something.
As Primordial Arcanic Pulsar was something that the specialization was largely based around as a whole, a lot of the talents that were designed to interact with it that remain in the tree despite its removal are a bit weakened as a result. This includes talents that enhance the strength of your cooldowns, such as Incarnation: Chosen of Elune, Elune’s Guidance, as well as the new Greater Alignment.
Furthermore, abilities that are coded as Astral damage and benefit significantly from the maintaining of both eclipses in cooldowns took a bit of a nerf due to being in cooldowns much less often in The War Within. These include Fury of Elune and New Moon (and subsequently, Radiant Moonlight), Orbit Breaker, Power of Goldrinn, and Umbral Embrace. Lastly, as Pulsar allowed Balance Druids to enter and leave eclipses more frequently, any talent that encouraged you to rotate eclipses no longer work as well as they used to, such as Nature’s Grace, Solstice (and Orbit Breaker, by extension), Astral Communion, Sundered Firmament, and Balance of All Things.
Instead, the direction Balance Druid has shifted towards reduces the importance of cooldown uptime, favoring a shorter baseline Celestial Alignment and pairing it with Convoke the Spirits.
Furthermore, as both Hero Talents shift more power to your builder abilities, Starfire and Wrath, you will take more talents that buff those builders, such as Umbral Intensity, Nature’s Grace, Umbral Embrace, and Umbral Inspiration. This also causes us to avoid talents that empower our spenders or talents that create additional Astral Power, as the opportunity cost of pressing additional Starsurges is higher than it has ever been as it does not build towards anything other than Starlord stacks and takes away from the feedback loop of pressing Wrath/Starfire to empower further Wrath/Starfires due to Umbral Embrace procs.
Hero Talents
The two new Hero Talents that are offered to Balance Druid include Keeper of the Grove and Elune’s Chosen.
Keeper of the Grove
Keeper of the Grove focuses primarily on enhancing your Force of Nature.
By itself, Force of Nature was fairly underwhelming the past few expansions due to the clunkiness of Pet AI as well as the overall low tuning of the damage the trees provide. Instead, the Hero Tree augments the power of these treants by causing the act of summoning them to cause you to proc Dream Burst, which add an additional burst of damage to your subsequent wraths. The remainder of the tree is entirely passive.
Harmony of the Grove provides a significant buff to your abilities while the treants are active. Aside from the capstone Harmony of the Grove, some of the stronger ones include Grove’s Inspiration, which increases the damage your Wrath and Starfire do, and Cenarius’ Might, which provides haste when you enter an eclipse, much like the old version of Nature’s Grace.
Elune’s Chosen
The other Hero Talent selection, Elune’s Chosen, enhances the core of the specialization by providing significant generation of Astral Power and shifting power to Starfire.
This Hero Tree takes the potent Fury of Elune or New Moons and strengthens their power, causing them to provide additional, passive effects. Furthermore, Lunation provides an interesting, albeit small positive feedback loop to the specialization.
However, it becomes fairly restrictive in its design due to the inherent opportunity cost of casting New, Half, and Full Moon versus Fury of Elune, and also forces you to choose Lunar Calling to help cycle Lunation faster.