How To Improve As Balance Druid — Shadowlands 9.1

Eclipse is the new class mechanic for Balance Druids. Getting inside an Eclipse activates your Mastery and buffs your fillers. There is only one action that takes a higher priority than getting right back into your Eclipse and that is Starfall.

Every time you enter Celestial Alignment ( Incarnation: Chosen of Elune when talented), you reset your Eclipse counter. This lets you pick the next state that you are going be in: Solar for single and Lunar for multi-target. When coming out of your cooldowns or a Primordial Arcanic Pulsar proc, know which one you want to enter before you finish so that you do not end up with 1-stack of each spell.

Nearly every Dungeon and Raid encounter requires players to take certain action to avoid mechanics that would otherwise damage or kill your character. Normally, moving to a safer location is the best way to handle these mechanics.

Balance Druids have several abilities they can use to handle movement. They have instant casts in Starsurge, Moonfire, and Sunfire, as well as mobility spells like Wild Charge and Dash. Knowing what to use, how to change your rotation, and how to combine these abilities can lead to maintaining your rotation seamlessly through short and medium distances of movement.

Generally, you want to predict mechanics and pool for movement to the best of your ability; a dungeon or raid addon will help highlight mechanics you need to watch out for.

On multi-target this is significantly easier. Stellar Drift is a strong talent which you can use that allows you to cast while moving. Make sure you maintain the facing requirement of your spells, be sure to always be casting, and remember to maintain your Starfall.

The Balance Druid multi-target rotation is a bit more complicated than the single target one and the difference between optimizing your multi-target and being unoptimized is great.

Starfire can do an excessive amount of damage in cleave situations meaning you want to spend the bulk of the Astral Power reserves inside of Lunar Eclipse while still maintaining Starfall. When you are talented into Soul of the Forest, you even end up capping Astral Power if you are hitting six or so targets as Starsurge will no longer be worth casting.

Due to how poorly Wrath scales on multi-target, it actually is low on the priority list even inside Solar Eclipse. Use Solar Eclipse to apply Moonfire which will help to generate more Astral Power during the Lunar segment of the cycle with Shooting Stars. If there are eight targets or more that are in cleave range of Starfire, use Starfire over Wrath after all targets are DoTed.

Continued practice will help you get the flow of how to play each end of the Eclipse cycles.