Balance Druid Guide - Talents, Rotations, Races & More

Our stat priority is as follows:

1. Critical Strike %
2. Spellpower
3. Intellect
4. Stamina
5. Spirit

General Consumables

The most important consumable for Balance Druid is, surprisingly, drinking water. Keeping your mana filled up is incredibly important as every action you take, with the exception of auto attacking, costs mana. Despite our talents such as Moonglow and Improved Wrath, a lot of our spells come at a steep mana price, so making sure you have plenty of water to drink when you run out of mana is important.

Food buffs are also extremely important. Not only do they provide powerful stat buffs, but they also give us a heavy amount of bonus experience - every Well Fed buff comes with an additional bonus of 5% Experience gained from kills. While you want to keep your Well Fed buff filled with strong spellpower food such as Smoked Sagefish, any food buff is acceptable as long as it has enough uptime.

As with every class, make sure you have Healing and Mana potions in your inventory - these can save you in a bad situation, or help you take down difficult enemies like elites or mini bosses.

Damage Consumables

WoW Forever introduced a number of lower level Spell Power consumes, all of which are essential for early game levelling as Balance Druid. These include, but are not limited to

Minor Arcane Elixir
Minor Wizard Oil
Minor Mageblood Elixir
Elixir of Wisdom

All of these also have better variants, but are very useful to have when levelling as Balance.

Skinning and Leatherworking are a powerful combination while levelling - Skinning is easy to maintain and use due to its reliance solely on killing mobs, while Leatherworking can put the materials gained to good use crafting some strong early gear. If you aren't willing to make time to create this gear, then the skins can be sold either on the auction house or simply to a vendor, giving you some much needed cash early on.

Engineering at maximum level will always be the advised profession - the utility and damage benefits it provides are without equal.

Alliance

Skyborne

High Order Skyborne and Windshaper Skyborne are the best races on both Horde and Alliance - the incredibly powerful Wind Blessed alone is enough to make this the most powerful choice, but the addition of Elemental Insight makes them even stronger when fighting elemental enemies. Walk on Air is also a fantastic utility choice, and the High Order Skyborne unique racial Read Leyline lets us regenerate faster than usual, making it fantastic for both levelling and end game content when mana is a concern.

Night Elf

While Night Elf aren't a bad race, and their Elune's Light has some strong use applications, they fall behind slightly when compared to the other options.

Horde

Tauren

Tauren's new racial Endurance interacts with our talent Vengeance, increasing the critical strike damage bonus to an effective 206% of normal damage. Combined with how strong Critical Strike rating is as a stat for us, this is a powerful racial that will only get better over time.

When it comes to AoE, Balance can make use of its Hurricane ability to deal damage directly. The spec also comes with a wide range of utility - Thorns and Innervate let it support the groups Tanks and Healers by enabling to fulfil their role more effectively, and their unique class ability Rebirth lets them perform an In Combat Resurrection.

Omen of Clarity is now a baseline ability, and not only can proc from spells but has a buffed proc rate from Moonkin Form; combined with Improved Wrath and Moonglow, our mana consumption is now significantly lower than before, alleviating one of the major drawbacks of the spec in previous iterations of Classic.