respec balance for leveling?Follow

currently lvl 44 feral, looking to respec balance... i know it's not the best thing to do, but recently rolled another alt with acouple buddies which is a rogue. both classes are great but gets alittle boring. any info on leveling balance? cookie cutter builds? i only seem to find feral builds. any help? thanks!

I reckon definetly go oomkin. My 70 durid has some healing viability ( i dont heal 70 istances tho,), but as oomkin if you had decent gear, you could heal instances easily up to 70.

Don't forget the Moonkin dance. Worth the talent point IMO.

As a 70 boomkin, I personally love it. Perhaps I've played way too many other mmorpg's as a melee character so it's a welcome change but it is definately worth trying.

For leveling balance you'll possibly end up what I do open with starfire, moonfire, entangling roots and insect swarm. Generally you'll open up with a decent enough amount of damage to start and when you end that series of spells you can just nuke with wrath. I have a macro that I use that looks like this.

/castsequence reset=target Starfire, Moonfire, Entangling Roots, Insect Swarm

If you have Nature's Reach you generally have enough time to get roots off w/o getting hit, but if you do get hit its about one hit and then you just back up and nuke with wrath. About the only problem you get yourself into with this is you can go oom since you'll more than likely lack the Dreamstate/Intensity build right away since you're a lower level. So you can supplement this problem by using Innervate when you're CD caps or just start getting used to using water.

But as for instances and raids go. You can't really expect to top the damage charts, it's possible at lower levels but once you hit outlands it becomes a lot harder. The main thing you'll be best at is supplying a decent dps and a 5% crit rate for your spell dps buddies which is insane on some mages.

Build! Ok heres how I am here. And here comes an explanation.

Imp Nature's Roots is pointless you'll hardly ever be getting hit by things excluding horde if you're on a pvp server, but for the most part its rather pointless to have. Taking up Balance of Power is important because 4% chance to hit is a lot easier to get in 2 talent points than in gear and with the reduction of 4% chance of spells to hit you thats also nice.

Now in the resto side of the tree it's kind of up to your discression. I personally go with Furor because thats an instant ability to shift into Dire Bear form and Bash someone for a quick 3 seconds to get away or set yourself up a little better. Natural Shapeshifter is also a must incase you find yourself in a situation where you need the extra stamina from Dire Bear Form or you're under fire in an area that you can't use travel form so you shift to Cat Form for a lot less mana.

And finally of course 3/3 in Intensity, because any mana regen is the best mana regen. This also goes with Dreamstate because the two coupled together is so nice to have. Unless you're doing something crazy and you have to just bomb out the spells on a boss you generally can make it through just Starfiring w/o dropping below 50% mana.

The build sort of leaves you with one point to allocate how you feel possible. You can put it into Treants if you wish, but I think its too costly for your mana pool and way too reckless, so I put them into Subtlety to drop your threat a little bit. In instances it's pretty damn easy to pull threat if you open with Starfire and Moonfire on a mob and they both crit.

Hope this works for you.

I think the general consensus is that feral is faster leveling with less downtime (especially after you get imp. LotP, which you should have if you are at 44).That being said, if it doesn't fit your playstyle, nothing is stopping you from switching to balance.

You should note, however, that for a while you will really, really, reallyreallyreally suck until you replace your feral gear with caster gear. Unless you don't already have a casting set (even a healing set would be okay) your mana will be extremely low (increasing the already greater downtime) and your damage will be ****-poor compared to cat form.

I tried respeccing balance at ~45, and liked moonkin form, but I simply didn't have the patience to get the right kind of gear, and went back to feral. Unless you are strapped for cash, I would suggest respeccing, trying it out, seeing if it fits your playstyle better than feral, and (if it does) buy some cheap caster greens on the AH. They don't even have to be leather, just have good casting stats (moonkin's armor bonus should make up for any cloth pieces). If you don't like it, switch back to feral. It's really your call.

The general rule I abide by when it comes to gearing a moonkin who is leveling is to take cloth IF it's better than leather. You can normally get by with it because of the 400% armor increase but if you can find a piece of leather thats similiar or just possibly a stat or two worse that's leather I would go with that. I still have a few pieces of cloth armor that I'm wearing at 70 that I'm in the process of replacing with better gear.

As for stats I would go with spell damage > int > sta/spirit like you said. Spell damage is obviously the best choice seeing as it'll increase the over all dps. But you shouldn't really need to stack very high spell critical, (mind you, you do get a 5% increase in spell crit) moonkin is more of a constant damage build than anything else. Go with intellect though because it'll only stack your dreamstate higher and higher and it of course adds to your mp5. The last stat around is once again kind of up to you. You could stack the stamina if you plan on doing a bunch of bg's or you could go with a spirit/intellect if you plan on soloing a lot and want less down time between mobs. Oh and innervate is, of course, directly corrolated to spirit regen so stack that if you wish.

Back when I was around 40-50 I had a pretty high intellect/spirit it was about 250 int 230 spirit if I remember correctly, and doing an instance as a healer or as dps I hardly, if ever went oom.

That's the beauty of moonkin, its versatile. I hope everything goes well with your travels down Moonkin Avenue it's always nice to see another moonkin amongst the throng of feral and resto druids.

::Edit for Spelling::

Edited, Jun 5th 2008 5:51pm by ArexLovesPie

Edited, Jun 5th 2008 5:52pm by ArexLovesPie

Because people have different play styles and enjoy different things. I know I enjoyed being a plate wearing mage with heals while leveling.