Karnudge, a Sunfyre’s Nest reader, recently tweeted Ghostcrawler regarding Force of Nature treants not scaling with Solar Eclipse, and here was the response:

Sounds like we’ll be sticking with Incarnation, regardless of the situation.

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• Item – Druid T15 Balance 2P Bonus (New) Increases the critical strike chance of Starsurge by 10%.
• Item – Druid T15 Balance 4P Bonus (New) Nature’s Grace now also grants 1,000 critical strike and 1,000 mastery for its duration.

Oddly enough, the 4P bonus is probably weaker than our current 4PC, considering we get additional DoT ticks and get to reforge about 1500 mastery to crit.

What are your thoughts?  I think these are much weaker than T14.

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I’ve been playing around a bit with Force of Nature, now that it’s been buffed on PTR, and here’s what I’ve discovered:

If you look at the tooltip for the Treant’s Wrath, it will appear to scale dynamically off crit, haste, and mastery (Eclipse state) — it does not.

They do, however, scale with the haste and critical strike at time of cast.  Right now, without any haste proc’d, my treants each cast 7 times.  If Nature’s Grace is proc’d, then they each cast 8, and with Essence of Terror, 9.

With Relic of Yu’lon and Jade Spirit, my treants have a potential for hitting a training dummy for about 377k.  Their damage though is very cooldown/haste dependent though, and the fact that they do not scale with mastery really hurts.

There’s also a pretty hefty delay before the treants start casting, as well.  With all of my haste abilities popped, I should be able to get 11 wrath casts off, where I’m only getting 9.  Under just nature’s grace, or no haste proc’s, I just lose a cast (per tree), but that’s still a considerable amount of damage.I do not think that it’ll be able to contend with Incarnation‘s 25% burst damage for 30 seconds (given that it lines up with Celestial Alignment).  If Force of Nature were to scale with Solar Eclipse (which I think is the intent, since the tooltip numbers do update when you enter Solar Eclipse, the damage just does not reflect it), and also grant all of the casts that it SHOULD grant, then I think it might be able to be useful.

Until then, there are some fights where I could see it being useful, where you don’t have 30 full seconds of incarnation peen available to you (heroic bladelord is an example), but that’s about it.

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Our friends at MMO-Champion have rendered a video modeling tier 15 and season 13 gear on a few races. What do you think?

Tier 15:

Season 13:

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Our friends at MMO-Champion have datamined the tier sets, and the druid tier set looks very interesting!  Maokai, anyone?  Click to enlarge.

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The PTR notes have been released for 5.2, and others have been datamined by our friends over at MMO-Champion.  I’ve parsed the notes to only show relevant balance druid changes.

• Cyclone will now share diminishing returns with Banish, Seduction, Bind Elemental, Hex, Freezing Trap, Wyvern Sting, Gouge, Sap, Hibernate, Paralysis, Polymorph, Ring of Frost, Repentance, and Quaking Palm.
• Displacer Beast has been redesigned. It now triggers Cat Form and grants 50% increased movement speed for 4 seconds after teleporting, and no longer activates Prowl.
• Cenarion Ward now grants 100% increased healing.
• Rejuvenation now costs approximately 9% less mana.
• Revive and Mark of the Wild now cost 55% less mana.
• Faerie Swarm can now snare more than one target at a time.
• Mass Entanglement now has a 30 second cooldown (was 2 minutes).
• Typhoon now has a 30 second cooldown (was 20 seconds).
• The Treants summoned by Force of Nature now deal more damage and healing, and the Force of Nature tooltip will report the capabilities of these summoned pets.
• Soul of the Forest
  • Balance: Now generates 40 Lunar or Solar energy upon leaving Eclipse.

Datamined changes:

• Symbiosis now has a 6 sec cooldown.

Reviewing these changes, it looks like Heart of the Wild may become more attractive.  While mathmatically, Nature’s Vigil will remain unchanged, it loses the power it had when we stacked it with Incarnation.  I still do not think we’ll look at Cenarion Ward — the versatility of Nature’s Swiftness (including the ability to NS rez) is just too attractive.  Cyclone hit ferals hard (they now have a 30 second cooldown), but I’m not sure if the DR change will affect us too much.  I’m still skeptical about Force of Nature.  I think it’s there just to be there.

The Soul of the Forest change seems interesting, but the thing to note is it only affects one side of Eclipse:  Lunar to Solar will still require two non-Eclipsed Starfire casts.  This will shorten the Solar to Lunar, though, only requiring two non-Eclipsed Wrath casts, instead of the previous three.  (And 4 without SotF).  As Hamlet pointed out, as unattractive as Wrath is (especially non-Eclipsed), this may prove to be very useful.

What are your opinions?

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Just saw this tonight in raid.  Pretty amazing.  Stand on a cozy fire for about 10 seconds in treant form and you’re now on fire!

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MMO-Champion reports that 5.1 has been confirmed for tomorrow.  Get ready for item upgrades!

My apologies for not posting much, I’ve been on vacation, and there hasn’t been a whole lot to post.  Between raiding full time and moderating the MMO-Champion Druid Forums, there hasn’t been much blog time.

You can always reach me on Twitter though, @SunfyresNest!

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Hi guys,

I know not a lot has been posted here, there really hasn’t been a lot going on for balance druids.  (For better, worse, or indifferent).  I am still pretty active on Twitter, make sure to follow me @SunfyresNest!  That being said, I’m about to head on vacation where I won’t have internet access.  I’ll see you guys on November 22nd!

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From the World of Warcraft blog:

While we aren’t always able to provide advance warning when an ability changes, there’s still some time before this change goes into effect, and we wanted to offer affected players a chance to plan their strategies appropriately in the meantime.

The following changes are currently planned for retuning the Druid talent, Heart of the Wild:

The spell damage bonus that Heart of the Wild provides to Feral and Guardian Druids will soon be reduced from +500% to +320%.The agility bonus that Heart of the Wild provides to Balance, Restoration, and Guardian Druids in Cat Form will soon be changed to +110%. It was previously +50% for Guardian Druids, and +200% for Balance and Restoration Druids.

Currently, the change is expected to go into effect during next Tuesday’s maintenance.

Goodbye, Moonkat, it was fun while it lasted!

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