Balance Druid Frequently Asked Questions — Dragonflight 10.0.7

While tuning is ever ongoing in the Blizzard office, the tools that Balance Druid has at its disposal are as good as they have ever been. Lots of utility options as well as strong talent builds for single-target, multi-target, and hybrid encounters should make them a high-priority class in most dungeon, raid, and PvP groups.

One drawback of the Balance Druid class is its ineffectiveness in what can be referred to as "lower difficulty content". This mainly applies to dungeons as raid encounters can only get so short. Many classes have many instant damage spells and abilities at their disposal that Balance Druid does not. If you are running content that is outgeared or of lower level, you may not find Balance Druid as competitive with other classes.

On Horde, Troll performs better on the Horde side and Night Elf is the best for Alliance. There are some more utility-driven choices, such as Highmountain Tauren or Worgen for additional mobility.

There are no Haste caps for Balance Druids. All damage-over-time effects scale dynamically with your Haste and other stats. Due to a limited duration buff in Eclipse, there can be minor Haste breakpoints but they happen so frequently that they can largely be ignored.

You can learn more about Haste and the other stat priority for Balance Druid on our stats page.

Double-dipping is when a spell or ability gets to gain the same benefit twice. The reason this is relevant to Balance Druid is because of our Mastery effect and the Astral damage type.

Our Mastery increases the damage of our Eclipse, but it only affects the active damage Eclipse type. So, in Lunar Eclipse you gain an Arcane damage buff and in Solar you gain a Nature damage buff. When you use Celestial Alignment, you gain the benefits of both Eclipses simultaneously.

Astral damage is the combination of both Arcane and Nature damage, meaning when we have both Eclipses up we gain the Mastery effect twice, thus "Double-dipping". Starsurge, Starfall, Stellar Flare, Shooting Stars, Fury of Elune, and New Moon are all considered Astral damage.

Solar Beam is the iconic Balance Druid interrupt that interrupts the main target and silences enemies around your target. This has been a great utility option in the Balance Druid kit for multiple expansions and has even had encounter strategies made around this powerful tool.

The issue is the location of the talent, both on the specialization tree, and its spot on the tree. Solar Beam has to compete with all of our damage-increasing talents and on top of that, it is gated behind multiple poor two-point talent nodes. Getting to Solar Beam costs three Talent points which is too much to give up unless the spell is vital.