Balance Druid Encounter Notes for Heroic Nighthold: Talents and Trinkets

Gebuz’s Guide, linked from the Class Guides Page, outlines several talent combinations for Nighthold. Many more combinations are possible after patch 7.1.5, as several talent options have been buffed to be more competitive. I tried out a few things the first week, and also looked at top logs. What follows are my plans for this week in Nighthold. Ideas My talents selections are in shorthand and refer to each talent’s position in the Nth row.

Preparing for Nighthold

I realized I did not make a preparing for Nighthold post like my Preparing for the Emerald Nightmare post. The reason? I didn’t have to. I actually read that prior post and followed its advice in preparing for Nighthold. Many of the links now lead to Nighthold information, and the same principles for preparation that applied then apply now. And the preparation worked out pretty well - I did well both as Balance and offhealing (considering my gear and Artifact Power) as Restoration.

Mythic Plus Guide

Balance Druid Gear Spreadsheets for Nighthold

Unlike my Emerald Nightmare Balance Druid Spreadsheet, I did not make these two google docs. However, they are great baseline comparison tools for Balance Druid gear from the Nighthold: Trinket Comparison Spreadsheet; Gear Comparison Spreadhseet. Both were sticky posts in the Druid Discord channel. Check out your class and spec at the Useful Discord Channel List I compiled. More and more, the class Discord channels are becoming the go-to place for up-to-the-minute information about your class.

Get 20% Better at Raiding in One Simple Step

Whether it’s friends asking for tips on a spec, readers wondering if a guide is accurate, or people in trade chat wondering if Thunderfury is their best in slot legendary, people often reach out to me and ask how they can get better at raiding. There are many complicated methods of getting better. We can analyze logs. We can eek out small gains in Simcraft. We can acquire better gear. We can practice our rotation.

Delete your Hearthstone

If you don’t love special events, the recent Diablo-themed Warcraft event may have caused your eyes to glaze over. You may have missed the limited-availability Tome of Town Portal. This toy is obtained easily by killing and looting 5 or so Treasure Goblins. They appear in various places - the easiest place to farm them is the Dalaran Underbelly, where they appear every few minutes. It shares a cooldown with and has the same functionality as a Hearthstone, but it is a toy so it doesn’t take up bag space.

Balance Druid: My Trinket Sims end of Trial of Valor

Hey everyone. I am still around; I simply haven’t had much I wanted to post about. The game and my life have both kept me pretty busy. The Legion class guide compilation and Mythic+ Guide post are still pretty current. I plan to do a significant review of them once Nighthold comes out. In the next week or two, there are a few posts I could make: I joined a new 2-day guild (we are 2/3 Mythic ToV); I have thoughts on Restoration Druid M+ talents; I suspected Feral Affinity was great months ago, and now top Balance Druids are starting to use it in raids.

Legion Mythic Plus Dungeons Guide

EDIT 2017-4-6: Mythic Plus has changed last week with Patch 7.2. This change includes 3 new dungeons, new affixes, and max gear reward at M+10. Aside from that, the below information is still mostly accurate. (Last Revised 2017-1-21, see Changelog below) This guide presents my thoughts and tips on Legion’s Mythic Plus dungeons. I cover general strategy, affixes, and dungeons. This is intended to be a living document, updated with suggestions or as Blizzard adds or changes content.

Use Wowprogress to Pick your Battles

My guild opted to spend tonight progressing on Mythic Heart rather than entering Heroic Trial of Valor. I think this was a great decision. It was motivated in part by worth of mouth recounts, and in part by wowprogress results. Scroll to the bottom of the front page of wowprogress to see how many guilds have downed each boss in the current tier. On Tuesday, the first day Trials opened, less than 200 guilds had killed Heroic Odyn, the first boss of the instance.

Remember to Update Simulationcraft

Remember to keep Simcraft updated! I got better gear and my simulated damage went down. I made sure to use the Simulationcraft addon to import (apparently it can avoid glitches with importing from armory) and updated Simcraft. My simmed damage went up, which was as expected. Thanks to my Shammy buddy who suggested I try updating - it worked. Make sure to keep Simcraft up to date for accurate results.