Greetings Balance Druids,

In a future beta build, Balance Druids will receive an all-new talent tree but, in the meantime, we are excited to share a preview of what that new talent tree will look like. Our talent tree design philosophy has changed considerably over the course of Dragonflight’s development. Community feedback and the lessons learned through playtesting helped us identify good practices to follow when constructing a talent tree. Equipped with what we’ve learned, we set out to update Balance’s tree and bring it in line with our current design philosophy.

Connections

With this iteration of Balance’s talent tree, we wanted to increase the interconnectedness of the talent nodes to allow for easier access to different options across the tree. In addition, we wanted to avoid awkward positioning where it was mandatory to take a specific, unrelated talent to reach a desired, potentially gameplay altering, talent. Lastly, we wanted to avoid any situations where taking a talent would provide no benefit because a different talent wasn’t taken.

New Additions

Feedback indicated that there was a lack of new abilities making Shadowlands and Dragonflight Balance play very similarly. With this iteration, we have introduced new options for players to be excited about. Some of those new options:

Umbral Embrace – Dealing Astral damage has a chance to cause your next Wrath or Starfire to become Astral and deal 50% additional damage.

Wild Mushroom – Grow a magical mushroom at the target enemy’s location. After 2 sec, the mushroom detonates, dealing Nature damage and generating up to 20 Astral Power based on targets hit.

Denizen of the Dream – Your Moonfire and Sunfire have a chance to summon a Faerie Dragon to assist you in battle for 30 sec.

Sundered Firmament – Every other Eclipse creates a Fury of Elune at 25% effectiveness that follows your current target for 8 sec.

Starfall

We appreciate the community’s thoughts on our recent change to Starfall and agree with the sentiment: Starfall has a unique identity by being tied to the caster and we want to retain that identity. In the next Dragonflight update, you’ll see our latest iteration of Starfall:

Starfall – Calls down waves of falling stars upon enemies with 40 yds, dealing Astral damage over 8 sec. Multiple uses of this ability may overlap.

Thank you for your patience as we worked on this latest iteration of the Balance talent tree. We’re excited to get it into your hands as soon as possible and can’t wait to see what builds the community will come up with!