Saturday, April 14, 2012

My Ideas for improving Balance PvP

[:1]All constructive criticism is welcome. I have thought this through a bit. If some of it seems over powered, or like it wouldn't fit, just mention it! :D

Wild Mushroom - im starting here. Sadly, as much as they try, i cant see this being an offensive ability. Its basically the same idea as frost trap, but wastes too many CDs and isn't all that practical in the heat of battle.
My improvement - Wild Mushroom (1.5 minute CD) - You spawn (no targeted area required) a wild mushroom at your feet. After 3 seconds, it will release invigorating spores, causing your non-eclipse wrath and lunar spells to act as if they were in eclipse. Lasts 10 seconds. Must be within 15 yards of the mushroom. Can not be cast during an eclipse and upon entering an eclipse, the mushroom will disappear.

(note: i have considered that the spores be a stacking buff, so that people wont just pop haste trinks and get a ton of free eclipsed casts from this. Perhaps 3 / 4 casts and the mushroom will disappear)

(the main idea behind this was that, in arenas, you start off with 0 eclipse energy which is a disadvantage. this will help your dps a bit as you attempt to reach an eclipse)

Barkskin - a nice defensive spell, but not quite as nice as other classes.
My improvement - Barkskin - *same current bonuses, plus* while barkskin is active your Starsurge can not be interrupted, Thorns damage is increased by 15%, and if you are not in an eclipse, you regenerate X amount of lunar or solar energy, which ever is more beneficial, for every % of life you lose (the life percentage is to help lower the power of the eclipse energy generation in a PvE situation).

Starfall / Starsurge - I love them, very nice spells but i have a nice way of improving them in PvP.
My improvement - Starfall - *same current buff, plus* While in Lunar Eclipse, your starfall persists through character movement loss and stuns.

My improvement - Starsurge (i am making this a glyph because it may interfere in PvE) - Glyph of Starfury - When you cast starsurge while starfall is up, it will knock back the enemy for 3 seconds (paying homage to the original buff starsurge had in the beta). This effect cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds.

Entangling Roots - obviously nice for PvP, and when it became instant cast, something magical happened. I thoroughly and completely enjoyed Balance pvp. I had a strong opening, i could take on and defeat opponents! But the other 2 specs are taking advantage of this. Sadly, this upcoming patch is removing instant roots. My suggestion is that, if Balance isn't getting a talent that allows instant roots, that it can be worked into our spec.
My improvement - While in solar eclipse, entangling roots is instant cast. While in lunar eclipse, if Entangling Roots is interrupted, a shimmer of moonlight will silence the enemy (not necessarily the target you were casting roots on, but the enemy who interrupted the cast) for 3 seconds. (This is not an AoE. The enemy will be silenced for a set 3 seconds)

Please share your opinions and for ways to make these fit better / seem more realistic for pvp.
I think these are wonderfull ideas, one thing i might add is that i think taht the boomkin damage reduction should be 25%(maybe lower) to be on par with warlocks.

/signed
I agree with Shaowofsin, I don't understand why a warlock in PvP gear can have ~60% damage reduction and amazing passive healing and pet abilities, and we only get 15%. Our healing is absolutley terrible as balance.

As for the Wild Mushrooms. anything would be better. The problem is, as you've stated, in the heat of battle, they take up way to many global cooldowns. A thought I had was to make them like hunter traps, or to trigger when someone gets within 6 yards of them. Or, give them a cooldown and make them spawn at the feet of your current target and explode immediately, doing exactly what they do now. Minimal damage, and applied slow effect if talented.

Barkskin. I gave up hope ever thinking we are going to get a competitive defensive cooldown. A simple fix would be another talent, or applying this to a current talent, that boosts balance barkskin to 50% damage reduction, but increases the cooldown to 2 min. As of right now, we are too easily bursted down and have nothing to mitigate it.

Starfall. This ability was COMPLETELY overpowered when released in Wrath. Now, I find it semi useless. Every class can either stop it, or outheal it from passive healing they do. ie; DK's, Warriors, all hybrid classes, Warlocks, ect. My thought was to have a glyph to make this a single target, non-channeled spell, having the stars fall onto 1 single player regardless of if i am stunned or silenced after casting it. Lets face it, any class can stop us from casting whenever they want, and as soon as they see the starfall cast, we get locked out or CC'd. We need something besides moonfire spam in most fights because all we have is mobility.

Starsurge. I like the knockback idea, but I don't feel the need for it should we get some of these other improvements.

Entangling Roots. We have a problem in PvP right now WITH instant roots. They take this away and were toast. I already feel like a free kill when I dont have a healer, now I will be. This needs to be talented for balance druids, we have nothing else to rely on. Typhoon is just not reliable, and everything else we do is casted and WITH instant entagling roots I already have a hard time getting casts off. Can't wait for the change =/.

I think the biggest thing we need to become competitive is a reliable defensive cooldown. Every other class has one for either mele, casters, or both. We have a 20% reduction with barkskin and FINALLY getting a 15% overall reduction, which is the same as a shadow priest, who also has disspersion and way better heals.

I enjoy your post, and look forward to see some other ideas!
Yes i was shooting to make barkskin more defensive, but i cant quite think of a unique way to buff it without it becoming simply an "immune" buff like bubble or ice block. I think the 15% incoming damage reduction in moonkin form in the upcoming patch will help us a lot, but i still do feel we need a strong defensive cooldown to use.

The way blizzard has been taking it, it seems as if instead of helping us defensively when someone is attacking us, they want us to take offensive measures (the pvp balance gear set bonus does us nothing for defense when we are attacked, but rather gives us eclipse energy when we are attacked). Tbh, my damage output is the least of my worries when i'm being focused on and i will probably get interrupted if i try to cast wrath / starfire to take advantage of the set bonus. Even with the set bonus buff, i dont think its going to improve much.

And i didn't mention it before, but mastery is near useless to us in Arenas. In some cases i dont even get into an eclipse, meaning my mastery did nothing to help. Our mastery and pvp gear set bonuses are broken. Buffing them isn't going to help. Blizzard needs to rethink them as a whole and come up with 2 new, better ideas that will benefit us more.
Balance pvp can be fixed if we get 25% damage reduction in moonkin form, a 3 second stun added to starsuge, and do a serious redesign on the eclipse mechanic....it is honestly worse than before for pvp. Our damage should not depend on an eclipse buff. We need that damage always active to be a threat. Why did blizzard nerf natures grace hardcore?
Blizzard isn't going to put time and effort into redesigning eclipse for a 3rd time, especially since it is working well in PvE.

I am fine with the way it works now, we don't get to use it much in arenas because we are focused and killed or can only use moonfire since we cant get range to get a cast off, or live long enough through a spell lock.

Defensive cooldown fixes that. 15% damage reduction is nice, but no where near what a lock has, and we dont have the cooldowns mages and priests have. Making us the target caster class.

Just the other day my brother (who heals me) made a comment about how he cant believe how people will go out of there way to attack me, even when there are other players around with under 100k health.
Root MUST be instant for moonkins, or replaced / supported by other instant CC spell. Maybe buff Solar beam so casters can't just run away from it.

Make our heals cheaper so we can kite and offheal ourseves, otherwise we need more defensive CDs or more CC to be on pair with other classes.

Barkskin is a joke. Any other class/spec has better and more defensive abilities.

Blizzard claimed that they want to see Moonkins viable in Arenas, like Warlocks and Mages. Has anybody seen any high-rated moonkin in arena ladder ? Some getting carried to some extent by other classes, but it's rather exception.

They should add resilience stat increases to passive spec summaries. Then they can actively change the amount of resilience that spec receives depending on what class is overpowered in pvp. It can scale with level. Boom.

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