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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I got bored today and created some more parses for the different level 60 talents.  I ran four parses for Soul of the Forest and then Incarnation, before I realized that Incarnation was actually broken and not giving any bonus damage while in Eclipse.  Essentially, the four ‘Incarnation’ parses became baseline parses (where no level 60 talent was used).

I ran one parse for Force of Nature.  I didn’t bother running more as my damage was right in line with my baseline parse, and I really don’t see the RNG for Treants really changing a whole lot.

Comparing Soul of the Forest to baseline, the talent adds between 550k-900k damage during a 3 minute fight.  Force of Nature only added a bonus 158k damage.  It’ll obviously need to be tweaked — and quite a bit — for it to be in line.  Also, while the ‘Wrath’ tooltip for the trees makes it look like it inherits your Eclipse damage and haste, it does not.  Those are probably two good starting points to bring the damage back in line.  They’ll also probably need to revert it’s damage as well.  (The damage was halved when the cooldown was extended.).

Here are the parses if you’d like to see them:

SotF Mean: 5.7 mil, Baseline Mean: 5.08 mil, FoN mean: 5.27 mil

Soul of the Forest (parse 1) — 5.6 mil

Soul of the Forest (parse 2) — 5.8 mil

Soul of the Forest (parse 3) — 5.88 mil

Soul of the Forest (parse 4) — 5.51 mil

Baseline (parse 1) — 5 mil

Baseline (parse 2) — 5.24 mil

Baseline (parse 3) — 5.06 mil

Baseline (parse 4) — 5.03 mil

Force of Nature (parse 1) — 5.27 mil

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Here’s parses of all three talent options at level 60. The results are surprising, and I’m going to re-run them to validate.

One thing I did notice, however, is that Soul of the Forest does not proc after Celestial Alignment.

Since I could not get Darnassus to myself, you’ll have to look directly at my damage summary and not the overall.

Incarnation:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/yjjjwxkqb8ai9679/

Soul of the Forest:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/oaeudsjlxm393k4z/

Force of Nature:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/hi4b5ufvsjxbaad7/

Hercdeisel was kind enough to crunch these through Comparebot for us. Here’s the results.

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