Upcoming Patch 10.2 PTR Druid Changes: September 21st

Let’s talk about Balance and Feral Druids! There are a couple important changes coming in the next PTR build.

Balance

We’ve been reading your feedback and agree that it’s important for Balance Druids in PvP to have the option to reduce Celestial Alignment’s cooldown by 2 minutes to coordinate burst phases with the rest of their team. Orbital Strike worked very well in that regard, and also made Celestial Alignment a very prominent visual. So we’re going to change it back to its previous design and position in the talent tree.

One goal we had behind changing Orbital Strike’s design was to give Balance more and different options to do damage quickly at the start of dungeon packs, or when adds appear in a raid fight. To pursue that goal in a different way, we’re tweaking Balance’s Mastery, Astral Invocation. Astral Invocation increases damage you deal to targets with Sunfire or Moonfire on them, with double the bonus to your Astral spells. We like how it prioritizes applying and maintaining your DoTs – we want it to be important to keep Sunfire and Moonfire rolling. However, we’re not happy with how much damage you lose when it’s not practical to put your DoTs up, such as against enemies that die quickly.

In 10.2, we’re changing Astral Invocation to give 2/3rds of its value at all times, and the remaining third when you have Moonfire and Sunfire on targets, like it currently works. The maximum power level is the same, but this means that when you start casting Starfall on raid boss adds, you’ll have most of the benefit of Astral Invocation right away. In dungeons you may enter Eclipse so you can start casting Starfall before you finish applying Moonfires. The goal is greater flexibility while keeping DoTs important.

We also found a couple bugs where Astral Invocation wasn’t increasing the damage of a few abilities, like Orbital Strike and Power of Goldrin. We’ve fixed that, and in some cases reduced their base damage to keep their tuning as intended.
Correction: Upon review, the only ability not currently affected by Astral Invocation is their PvP talent Star Burst. There are no changes to Orbital Strike’s or Power of Goldrin’s tuning in the next 10.2 PTR build. Apologies for the error.

Finally, we swapped the positions of Aethereal Kindling and Lunar Shrapnel in the talent tree. The thinking is that increased damage is always useful, but there may be cases you don’t need extended DoT durations.

Feral

In 10.2, Feral Druids will be able to cast Innervate in Cat Form. Let’s talk about it. Some design philosophy incoming.

One priority we have for druids is to maintain clear and flavorful identities for their various forms. If you want to intimidate your foes with a roar, you have to be a bear. If you want to rip and rake your foes, you have to be a cat. For fantasy reasons, we try to restrict casting spells in Bear Form or Cat Form without a perk like Predatory Swiftness or Lunar Inspiration. We’ve bent this for gameplay reasons, such as allowing Guardian Druids to cast several spells as a bear because they’re usually unable to shift out without dying. Generally, if players can play around their form restrictions, we try to keep them in place.

Which leads us to friction. Friction is when something is harder than it could be. Shifting out of Cat Form to cast Innervate has more friction than simply casting it from Moonkin Form. However, friction is not always bad. Dealing with friction takes flexibility, creativity, and quick thinking. Feral Druids must find a safe place to shift to cast spells. Dealing with friction successfully can be rewarding. High level M+ keys have friction, but that’s why they’re fun! Figuring out how to overcome friction in the moment can help the game keep from getting stale.

So why change it now? Simply, the difference in friction for using Innervate as Feral vs. other druid specs has proven higher than we want in practice. That’s also why we’re not changing Rebirth – it’s harder for Feral to cast Rebirth, but the difference in friction is at an appropriate level.