I long stopped playing my druid as a Balance spec because she would get destroyed solo’ing and her single target damage was terrible. The only two saving graces were AoE situations where she could channel hurricane or multi-dotting where you would see 3+ foes up. I’m not a PVPer so I cannot tell you whether or not the Balance spec was OP or underpowered (although my friends say they are or were OP). However, the article talking about various nerfs for the Balance spec in 5.4 make me believe that Blizzard should just not even make them viable at this point.
Early on in Mist of Pandaria, I tried leveling as a balance druid since my Cataclysm gear was focused on the spell casting side. Although I always chose gear for both specs while leveling, I did notice that after completing the Jade Forest, my druid encountered a lot of difficulties and I quickly switched back to feral once I had enough gear. The problem is that Balance is a really tough spec for soloing to start. You have two instant spells in Moonfire and Sunfire but rely on your energies to decide whether or not to use Wrath or Starfire.
While Wrath has a low casting time, Starfire does not even though the damage might be slightly better. To compensate, you have to either start off in your solar phase or use something like Typhoon to keep your enemies at bay. In most cases, Typhoon is one of the worst spells to use as a solo PVE player because more often than not, you’ll end up knocking back multiple mobs, which will end up overwhelming you quite quickly. In those situations, you can try multidotting your enemies up quickly since in these cases you’ll probably catch 1-2 extra mobs at worst.
With the nerf to procs for Starsurge, you’ll now face a new problem in that you’re best quick offensive proc no longer will be triggering as often. This will weaken the Balance DPS even further in add heavy fights. The problem is that right out the door, Balance has a huge difficulty in climbing the DPS charts. Some classes like mages get a lot of DPS straight away, but the Balance has in my experience been excessively mediocre. I believe in previous patches for this expansion, Balance has been near the bottom if not directly at the bottom.
What really sucks for Balance is that they’ve suffered quite a bit in this expansion with many high movement fights. Take situations like Lei Shi or Lei Shen where you have the pushback phases. In those situations, you pretty much have to rely on lucky procs to get out inches for your DPS. Otherwise, you have to just hit with weak instant casts. For Tortos, Balance could do decently since they could dot up Tortos, turtles and even bats while trying to evade the swirling turtles and then just use their procs to nuke down the turtles. In the future, they’ll just be forced to run and pray that a proc occurs.
The sad thing is that when I switched from Balance back to Feral I noticed an immediate skyrocket to my DPS. My balance spec had a decent weapon but I mostly just used the crafted Inscription weapon until I found a Sha Touched polearm. Up until that point though, I could easily hit up to 70k+ as a feral without trying. Sure Feral has a slightly trickier rotation but a lot of your DPS ends up being from straight auto attacks.
On top of that Feral is just the way to solo. Your instant heals occur often and is part of your rotation and you never have to deal with waiting before your damage can start ticking. Your only major issue is energy and it’s pretty easy to manage. AoE situations aren’t a big deal either since your Swipes will kill things in 1-2 blows.
It’s kinda sad that Balance is such a poor class to play because there’s a lot of tools that could make it a far more fun class overall. But this nerf is just too much and will make me stay Feral until they figure out how to up Balance’s DPS or reduce the cast time of Starfire to something reasonable (or closer to Wrath).