Classic Balance Druid Ranged DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents

If you were looking for leveling builds, please refer to our leveling guide for Druids.

While some specializations have lots of options and different builds, Balance Druids do not have a ton of options. You are locked into a minimum of 35 points into the Balance tree, with 31 for Moonkin Form, since the critical strike buff is valuable for other casters, especially Fire Mages later on. The last 4 rows of talents all include absolutely essential talents, such as Vengeance, Improved Starfire, and Moonglow. Moonglow especially provides a great Mana cost reduction to your Balance and Restoration spells, so even if you wanted to go a hybrid build, it would still be worth taking Moonglow. So with the 35 points into Balance, you have 16 leftover, 14 of which must go into Restoration. In Restoration, you can pick up Reflection, which is absolutely critical to your Mana regeneration during a fight, allowing you to get off more Starfire casts before running out of Mana. Insect Swarm is technically not used in raiding, but it is nice to have for outside of raid and in PvP. There are not many other good options for talent choices, so dropping the 1 point into such a good all-round spell is not bad at all.

This means that you have 2 points leftover after going 35/0/14. None of the Feral talents do anything for you, Improved Wrath is useless since you do not cast Wrath ever in raids, Natural Weapons and Omen of Clarity only affect melee attacks, and the remaining Restoration talents are really underwhelming. This only leaves you with Improved Thorns, Improved Entangling Roots, Nature's Reach, and Natural Shapeshifter. Out of those 4 talents, you should have 5 points into them already since you need them to get further into the Balance tree, meaning you have 2 options left to pick from for your final 2 points. Thorns is not an amazing spell for Balance and should not be a priority, leaving Improved Entangling Roots as the last option for your final 2 points. This is not a terrible option, since being able to cast Entangling Roots freely is very useful in PvP, meaning you can run this build and function well in PvP without needing to change talents.