Balance Druid - 8.3.7 PVE GUIDE

[Sirlordington]

Balance Druid

In this guide, you will learn the art of being a star laser chicken. This will cover both M+ and Raids. Balance druid is a utility BEAST in BFA, not only does it bring solid single target and aoe dps to any group but also some solid utility like AOE interrupts.


Main Spells

-Sunfire: AoE Dot that does Nature Damage over 12 seconds, keep it on the target AT ALL TIMES

-[b]Moonfire: Single Target DoT that does Arcane damage over 22 seconds, also keep on target AT ALL TIMES

-Wrath: Single target spell that does nature damage, this will be your main single target astral power generation ability

-Lunar Strike: AoE spell that does Arcane Damage, its best utilized in AoE situations to gain astral power

-Starsurge: A single target spell that spends astral power and empowers your Wrath and Lunar Strike, making Wrath hit harder, and Lunar strike cast faster.

-Celestial Alignment: Our Big CD, gives us 40 astral power and increases our damage and haste by 15%

-Starfall: An aoe spell that spends astral power, use this on 8+ targets because it got heavily nerfed since Legion

Stats


Stats are straightforward...


Crit>Haste>Vers>Mastery


If you have mastery on your gear, don't worry... its not worthless but Crit is by far the best stat.


Essences


Essences go as follows:

Major: Vision of Perfection
Minor: Conflict and strife and Essence of the Focusing Iris, and Reaping Flames when 8.3 eventually launches

These are the main essences you will use for literally 99% of situations, Vision of Perfection gives you part of you celestial alignment (or Incarnation, more on that later) and it does very well with a specific Azerite Trait(more on that later). Conflict and Strife minor gives a buff that gives a stack of vers and Iris minor gives a buff that grants haste.

The alternative is Essence of the Focusing Iris major, Conflict and Strife minor and Vision of perfection minor for low level keys


Talents




Level 15 Row:

-Natures Balance is the best for overall dps, it generates Astral power every 2 seconds and is the main choice for Raids.

-Warrior of Elune is never used because its can only be used in so little situations

-Force of Nature is good for m+ when the tank is in trouble

Level 30 Row:

-Tiger Dash is a decent choice if you want raw movement speed, but lasts too little to be viable in most situations

-Renewal is a strong self heal but I don't recommend you take it because of a little something in the tier 45 row.

-Wild charge is the best option on this row. It good old disengage for your chicken form, a leap for cat form, a reverse grip to your friends in your normal form and a charge for your bear form. Best talent by far for utility.

Level 45 Row:

-Feral Affinity gives you 15% movement speed. Its only good for transmog runs if I'm honest.

-Guardian affinity grants you 6% damage reduction, its decent if you're doing any content where you know an ability is going to be a 1 shot...But for most situations
just going into bearform and using barkskin gives decent enough soaking power

-Resto Affinity is the default choice, whenever you think your healer is too busy to heal you, cast swiftmend on yourself and you're good to go. Also the passive heals 3% of your max health every 5 seconds. If you're at full health, it'll heal someone else.

Level 60 Row:

-Mighty bash is a stun

-Mass Entanglement is a mass root

-Typhoon is a knockback that interrupts

Typhoon is best for 90% of scenarios because it can interrupt things that can't usually be interrupted in m+

Level 75 Row:

-Soul of the Forest is the weakest talent here. it makes Lunar and Solar Empowerment do more damage but honestly, this talent is not worth it.

-Starlord is the safe and reliable option here. It makes your Starsurge and Starfall give 4% haste for 15 seconds stacking up to 3 times. Basically the Tomb of Sargaras
Tier set bonus. Its a good option nothing more to say

-Incarnation is the more bursty option. It makes your replaces your Celestial Alignment and grants you 10% Crit for 30 Seconds. It goes well with Vision of Perfection is the default m+ option for most players.

Level 90 Row:

-Stellar rift makes Starfall do more damage and gives it a bigger radius...but starfall is so weak that this talent is a joke.

-Twin moons is the default talent if you have more than 1 target. It makes your starfire duplicate onto a target without the dot, very useful.

-Stellar Flare gives you another dot to manage. Its the only choice fight without any adds.

Level 100 Row:

-Shooting stars is the default choice for raids and mythic plus(if you don't want to manage another spell). It gives your dots a chance to drop a falling star doing Astral damage and generating 3 astral power. In raids, this is the only choice in bfa, in m+ it depends.

-Fury of Elune is a great talent for when you're doing big pulls, it calls down a beam of energy that follows the target and dealing Astral Damage over 8 seconds. It gives you 40 Astral power over the duration and is a fun alternative to Shooting Stars in dungeons, in raids its just not as good though.

-New Moon is basically the artifact weapon ability from Legion. I wont go into detail but its by far the worst talent here, don't take it.


Azerite

The Main Azerite trait you want is Streaking Stars, and you want 3 of these. While in Celestial Alignment, when you deal damage with a spell you call a Streaking Star, that does damage as long as the spell isn't a repeat of the previous ability. Stacking this 3 times will give you a big boost in damage.
The other trait you want is Overwhelming Power, that gives you 25 stacks of Overwhelming Power which give you haste, but 1 stack is removed every 1 seconds or every time you take damage. As we said in the stats section, haste is good.


Corruption

Infinite Stars is the best single target option. It calls down an Infinite star that does Arcane damage and increases the damage from the next Infinite Star by 25% stacking up to 10 times.

Echoing void is the AoE option. Your dps spells build the Echoing Void. Each time it builds, it has a chance of dealing 1.5% of your health as shadow damage to all enemies until no stacks remail.

Rotation

The rotation is mainly a priority list.

Apply and maintain your dots on the target.

Cast Wrath when you don't have any empowerments and you need to generate AP. If you can cleave 2 targets, Starfire becomes your AP generator ability.

Cast Starsurge to consume Astral Power. Starsurge will grant you charges of Ecliple(lunar empowerment and solar empowerment), which cap at 3 and are consumed by casting Starfire and Wrath. AVOID capping your Eclipse and Astral Power.

That's it from me and it from me, and I will hopefully see you rockin the laser chicken of the stars in The Battle for Azeroth!

[Firetemp95]

Nice job bro! Keep it up and let us make guides for everyone!

I wish you, happy hunting!
Firestabby

[Firetemp95]

Bro,fix the links of the images. Its [img]url link[/img]

I wish you, happy hunting!
Firestabby

[Sirlordington]

Should be fixed now, forgot to set the links to public.

[Firetemp95]

Still no,bro

I wish you, happy hunting!
Firestabby

[LethalFactorLK]

Sirlordington wrote:

Should be fixed now, forgot to set the links to public.

you need to have more than 10 posts for [img] tags to start working

[Sirlordington]

No problem, the important thing is that the info is there for anyone who needs it