Balance Druid DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents (Legion 7.2)

Table of Contents

• +Introduction
  • 1. Class Overview
  • 2. Patch 7.2 Changes
  • 3. Patch 7.1.5 Changes
  • 4. Contents
  • 5. ChangeLog
• +Easy Mode
  • 1. The Basics
  • 2. Talent Choice
  • 3. Stat Choice
  • 4. Basic Rotation
  • 5. Cooldowns
  • 6. ChangeLog
• +Spell Summary
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Main Resources
  • 3. Basic Abilities
  • 4. Cooldowns
  • 5. ChangeLog
• ×Builds and Talents
  • 1. Talent Choices
  • 2. Tier 1 (Level 15) Talents
  • 3. Tier 2 (Level 30) Talents
  • 4. Tier 3 (Level 45) Talents
  • 5. Tier 4 (Level 60) Talents
  • 6. Tier 5 (Level 75) Talents
  • 7. Tier 6 (Level 90) Talents
  • 8. Tier 7 (Level 100) Talents
  • 9. ChangeLog
• +Artifact Traits and Relics
  • 1. Artifact Progression
  • 2. Relic Choice
    • 2.1. Single Target
    • 2.2. Multiple Target
  • 3. ChangeLog
• +Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities
  • 1. Single Target Rotation
    • 1.1. Opening Rotation
  • 2. Multiple Target Rotation
  • 3. Cooldown Usage
  • 4. Optional Read: Mastering Your Balance Druid
    • 4.1. Mastery: Starlight
    • 4.2. Artifact Ability
    • 4.3. Lunar, Solar, and Stellar Empowerments
    • 4.4. Emerald Dreamcatcher Playstyle
      • 4.4.1. Opening Rotation
      • 4.4.2. Rotation Priority System
    • 4.5. Detailed Cooldown Usage
      • 4.5.1. Tier 1 Talents
      • 4.5.2. Tier 5 Talents
      • 4.5.3. Tier 6 Talents
      • 4.5.4. Tier 7 Talents
  • 5. ChangeLog
• +Stat Priority
  • 1. Basics
  • 2. Getting a Better Understanding
    • 2.1. Statistics Priority
  • 3. ChangeLog
• +Gems, Enchants, and Consumables
  • 1. Gems
  • 2. Enchants
  • 3. Consumables
  • 4. ChangeLog
• +Macros and Addons
  • 1. Macros
    • 1.1. Generic Macros for Druids
      • 1.1.1. Rebirth
      • 1.1.2. Remove Corruption
    • 1.2. Specific Macros for Balance Druids
      • 1.2.1. Starfall Cursor Macro
  • 2. Addons
    • 2.1. Generic Addons for Druids
      • 2.1.1. ElvUI
      • 2.1.2. Boss Mods: Deadly Boss Mods or Bigwigs
      • 2.1.3. GTFO
      • 2.1.4. Omen Threat Meter
      • 2.1.5. Parrot or Mik's Scrolling Battle Text
      • 2.1.6. Weak Auras
      • 2.1.7. Recount / Skada / Details!
      • 2.1.8. Grid and GridClickSets (Optional)
      • 2.1.9. TellMeWhen
    • 2.2. Specific Addons for Balance Druids
  • 3. ChangeLog
• +Gear, Legendaries, and Best in Slot
  • 1. Best in Slot List
  • 2. Tier 19 Set Bonuses
  • 3. Legendary Items
  • 4. Loot Competition
  • 5. ChangeLog

General Information

On this page, we present the viable talent choices for Balance Druids in World of Warcraft Legion 7.2. We detail what each of the talents do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other pages of our Balance Druid guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

About Our Reviewer

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Xirips, one of the best Balance Druids in the world, who raids in Method. You can follow him on Twitter and you can watch his stream on Twitch.

1. Talent Choices

Level	Choices
15	✔ Force of Nature	✔ Warrior of Elune	✔ Starlord
30	✔ Renewal	✔ Displacer Beast	? Wild Charge
45	✘ Feral Affinity	✔ Guardian Affinity	✔ Restoration Affinity
60	? Mighty Bash	? Mass Entanglement	? Typhoon
75	✔ Soul of the Forest	✔ Incarnation: Chosen of Elune	✘ Stellar Flare
90	✔ Shooting Stars	✘ Astral Communion	✔ Blessing of the Ancients
100	✘ Fury of Elune	✔ Stellar Drift	✔ Nature's Balance

Talents can be freely changed when out of combat and in a rested XP area (such as an inn or a capital city). Moreover, Tome of the Tranquil Mind and Codex of the Tranquil Mind can be used to temporarily allow players to change talents anywhere, as long as they are out of combat.

2. Tier 1 (Level 15) Talents

✔ Force of Nature

✔ Warrior of Elune

✔ Starlord

• Force of Nature is an active ability with a 1-minute cooldown that summons 3 Treants for 10 seconds. Force of Nature is targeted in an area, and the treants will taunt and attack targets in that area while they are alive.
• Warrior of Elune is an active ability with a 45-second cooldown which causes your next 3 Lunar Strikes to be instant cast.
• Starlord passively causes your Lunar Empowerment Solar Empowerment to reduce the cast time of their affected spells ( Lunar Strike and Solar Wrath respectively) by 20%. This effect does not stack.

In this tier, we recommend Starlord as the default choice in raiding and dungeon content.

Force of Nature can be a viable choice for priority target damage in AoE situations, while Warrior of Elune is is viable for heavy AoE damage.

3. Tier 2 (Level 30) Talents

✔ Renewal

✔ Displacer Beast

? Wild Charge

• Renewal is an active ability with a 90-second cooldown. It heals you for 30% of your maximum health, it is usable in all shapeshift forms, and it is off the global cooldown.
• Displacer Beast is an active ability that teleports you 20 yards forward, activates Cat Form, and grants you a 50% increase in movement speed for 4 seconds.
• Wild Charge is an active ability that is off the global cooldown and which differs based on the shapeshift form you are in, as follows:
  • No shapeshift form: you fly to an ally's location.
  • Travel Form: you jump to an ally's location.
  • Moonkin Form: you leap backwards.
  • Bear Form: you charge an enemy, immobilising them for 4 seconds.
  • Cat Form: you leap behind an enemy, dazing them for 3 seconds.
  • Aquatic Form: your swim speed is increased by 150% for 5 seconds.

In this tier, you will have to choose between movement and survivability. For a movement increase, Displacer Beast is by far better than Wild Charge in almost every way, and should generally be the default choice (though Wild Charge may have some niche usefulness on certain encounters).

Alternatively, during fights with heavy damage (or progression raiding in general), Renewal is a good source of self-healing that can help keep you alive. The choice between Renewal and Displacer Beast is yours.

4. Tier 3 (Level 45) Talents

✘ Feral Affinity

✔ Guardian Affinity

✔ Restoration Affinity

• Feral Affinity grants you the Feline Swiftness passive ability, which increases your movement speed by 15%. Additionally, you gain access to the Feral-spec abilities Shred, Rake, Rip, Ferocious Bite, Swipe, and your energy regeneration is increased by 35%.
• Guardian Affinity grants you the Thick Hide passive ability, which reduces all your damage taken by 6%. Additionally, you gain access to the Guardian-spec abilities Mangle, Thrash, Ironfur, and Frenzied Regeneration.
• Restoration Affinity grants you the Ysera's Gift passive ability, which heals you (or a nearby ally, if you are at full health yourself) for 3% of your maximum health every 5 seconds. Additionally, you gain access to the Restoration-spec abilities Rejuvenation, Healing Touch, Swiftmend.

As the default choice, we recommend Guardian Affinity, since the Frenzied Regeneration is very useful during progression content. Restoration Affinity, which will provide you with a steady stream of healing, can also be viable, though. Restoration Affinity is also a good choice for dungeons and world content.

Finally, while movement speed is always valuable, we feel that Feral Affinity is a poor choice which simply cannot compete with the other two talents here on progression content, where survivability is paramount. When doing non-progression content, however, it can be a viable choice.

5. Tier 4 (Level 60) Talents

? Mighty Bash

? Mass Entanglement

? Typhoon

• Mighty Bash is an active ability with a 50-second cooldown, which stuns the target for 5 seconds. It is usable in all shapeshift forms.
• Mass Entanglement is an active ability with a 30-second cooldown, which roots the target in place for 30 seconds, with the root effect spreading to nearby enemies. Damage done to rooted targets may break the effect. Mass Entanglement is usable in all shapeshift forms.
• Typhoon is an active ability with a 30-second cooldown. It knocks back all targets within 15-yards in a cone in front of you, dazing them for 6 seconds. It is usable in all shapeshift forms.

The choice between these talents is largely irrelevant in terms of DPS performance. You will simply choose the one which you prefer most, or which best suits the encounter mechanics. That said, Typhoon will probably be the most useful talent in the majority of fights.

6. Tier 5 (Level 75) Talents

✔ Soul of the Forest

✔ Incarnation: Chosen of Elune

✘ Stellar Flare

• Soul of the Forest increases the damage bonus from Lunar Empowerment and Solar Empowerment by an additional 20%, and reduces the cost of Starfall by 20 Astral Power.
• Incarnation: Chosen of Elune replaces Celestial Alignment. It lasts for 30 seconds (up from Celestial Alignment's 15), during which time it increases your spell damage 40% (up from 30%) and it causes your Lunar Strike and Solar Wrath to generate 50% more Astral Power (just like Celestial Alignment). It does not trigger the global cooldown.
• Stellar Flare is an active ability that places an Astral damage DoT on the target. Stellar Flare benefits from the increased damage provided by Stellar Empowerment (applied by Starfall).

The best choice in this tier is Incarnation: Chosen of Elune, in all situations except when heavy sustained AoE damage is required, in which case you should take Soul of the Forest. Using Soul of the Forest will result in a single target DPS loss compared to using Incarnation, though, so you need to determine if you can afford this loss.

Stellar Flare is too situational to ever really be worth taking.

7. Tier 6 (Level 90) Talents

✔ Shooting Stars

✘ Astral Communion

✔ Blessing of the Ancients

• Shooting Stars passively causes your Moonfire and Sunfire ticks to have a 10% chance to create a falling star, which deals Astral damage to the target and generates 4 Astral Power.
• Astral Communion is an active ability with an 80-second cooldown, which generates 75 Astral Power.
• Blessing of the Ancients is an active ability with a 15-second cooldown that allows you to switch between the Blessing of Elune and Blessing of An'she buffs. It is important to note that you will always have one of these buffs active if you have the Blessing of the Ancients talent.
  • Blessing of Elune increases the Astral Power generated by Solar Wrath and Lunar Strike by 25%.
  • Blessing of An'she grants you 2 Astral Power every 3 seconds.

These 3 talents are well balanced. Blessing of the Ancients is a good default choice. Shooting Stars is the best choice for extended multi-target cleave damage against 2+ targets for the majority of the fight.

Astral Communion does not scale with Haste and therefore it ends up lagging behind the other two talents, despite the massive amount of Astral Power that it generates. We do not recommend it.

8. Tier 7 (Level 100) Talents

✘ Fury of Elune

✔ Stellar Drift

✔ Nature's Balance

• Fury of Elune is an active ability with a 1-minute cooldown. It deals Astral damage in a small radius every second, and costs 6 Astral Power to cast and 12 Astral Power per second after that, and lasting until you run out of Astral Power. You can re-cast Fury of Elune while it is active in order to change its location, free of cost.
• Stellar Drift increases the radius of Starfall by 30%, its damage by 60%, and allows you to cast while moving as long as you are inside Starfall's radius.
• Nature's Balance causes Lunar Strike to extend the duration of Moonfire by 6 seconds, and Solar Wrath to extend the duration of Sunfire by 4 seconds.

Nature's Balance is the recommended talent against a single target, while against multiple targets you should use Stellar Drift. Currently, there is no situation in which you should take Fury of Elune.

9. ChangeLog

• 22 Apr. 2017: Clarified that Wild Charge when in Travel Form causes you to jump to the location of an ally, and not to fly to them.
• 27 Mar. 2017: Made small adjustments to tier 1, 3, 5, and 6 talent evaluations.
• 19 Jan. 2017: Updated tier 5 and 7 talent evaluations (changing the recommendations somewhat).
• 12 Jan. 2017: Updated tier 3 talent section to make Feral Affinity look less bad (although it is still not recommended).
• 09 Jan. 2017: Updated talent descriptions to account for Patch 7.1.5, and slightly changed the evaluation of tier 6 talents.
• 16 Dec. 2016: Updated the description of Restoration Affinity.
• 27 Nov. 2016: Updated tier 3 and tier 7 talent recommendations, and changed the Shooting Stars recommendation to 4+ targets.
• 02 Nov. 2016: Fixed a small issue where we were still referring to Thick Hide's old 10% damage reduction (it is now 6%).
• 25 Oct. 2016: Patch 7.1 updates
  • Added a mention that Incarnation is now off the global cooldown.
  • Updated Guardian Affinity's description (Thick Hide now passively reduces damage by 6%, down from 10).
• 02 Oct. 2016: Revamped tier 1, 3, and 5 talent sections.
• 29 Aug. 2016: Updated for Legion's launch.
• 28 Jul. 2016: Revamped tier 5 and 7 talent discussions.
• 19 Jul. 2016: Corrected an error where we were recommending Astral Communion (in tier 6), whereas this talent is only viable if you can pair it with Fury of Elune (tier 7), which is not currently the case. We now correctly recommend Blessing of the Ancients.
• 18 Jul. 2016: Updated for the Legion pre-patch.