PvE Balance Druid Stat Priority

Author: bobodingo
Date: July 20, 2022
Updated: March 4, 2023
Expansion: WotLK Classic

Balance Druid Overview

Talents, Builds & Glyphs

Stat Priority

Best Races

Gems, Enchants & Consumables

Rotation & Cooldowns

Best Professions

Best in Slot (BiS) & Pre-Raid Gear

Addons & Macros

Balance Druids have an incredibly simple stat priority, similar to other casters: focus on your hit cap, then followed by haste being slightly better than crit as far as secondary stats go. However, there’s one thing about Balance Druids that makes them unique: haste rating and crit rating have a “soft cap” for us, that we don’t want to go over!

Stat Priority

Hit rating
- Cap: 263 rating / 237 if there’s a Draenei in your party
Haste rating (till soft cap)
- Soft cap: 585 rating
- With raid buffs like https://wowclassicdb.com/wotlk/npc/15447 the haste cap goes down to 401
Spell power
Crit rating
- Soft cap: 45% crit chance
- With 2P T8 and https://wowclassicdb.com/wotlk/spell/33602 the value drops to 35%
Intellect
Spirit

Stat Explanations

Hit rating is your most important stat. If you can’t hit your targets, you’re not dealing damage. You gain a 1% increased chance to hit with your spells for every 26.232 hit rating that you have. In WotLK, you have a 17% chance to miss bosses (level 83 targets) with spells, meaning you need 446 hit rating in order to never miss. That’s a lot of hit rating, but thankfully, there are ways to reduce the amount of hit you actually need — as Balance Druids, we are blessed with 2 different talent that increases our chance to hit.

The first talent is Balance of Power, which increases our chance to hit by 4%. On top of that, as a Balance Druid you can apply the Improved Faerie Fire debuff (or if there’s a Shadow Priest in your raid, they’ll be automatically applying Misery which does the same thing) which increases your hit chance by a further 3%.

This means that you only need 10% increased hit chance, or 263 hit rating. Furthermore, if you have a Draenei player in your party, you’ll get their Heroic Presence aura, which offers another 1% hit chance, meaning you only need 9% increased hit chance, or 237 hit rating.

After spell power, haste rating will be our strongest stat as Balance Druids. Haste increases your casting speed. You gain 1% increased cast speed for every 32.79 haste rating you have.

For Balance Druids, haste has a “soft cap” at 585 rating, unbuffed. The reason for this is that adding more haste would cause your Nature’s Grace procs to push your Wrath to less than 1 second cast time, which is faster than the global cooldown — you cannot cast faster than the global cooldown, thus this means you any haste rating past 585 is wasted. After you have reached the soft cap, you should focus on other stats — mainly crit and spell power.

Spell power is the most straightforward stat, as it simply increases the damage of your spells. Each spell gains a different amount of bonus damage based on your spell power stat. This will be your go-to stat after you have reached your hit cap.

Crit rating is an incredibly straight-forward stat, increasing your chance to get a critical strike with your spells by 1% for each 45.91 crit rating you have.

Crit rating also has a “soft cap” for Balance Druids; specifically, at 45% crit chance, without talents. When you factor in all of our various crit talents (Moonkin Aura, Improved Insect Swarm, Improved Faerie Fire, Nature’s Majesty) then an Eclipse (Lunar) proc would push your Starfire to over 100% crit chance, which wastes some crit rating.

The drop-off after the soft cap isn’t as big as it is for haste, so you don’t have to actively avoid getting more crit — but in general it’s recommended that you focus on other stats, like spell power, after you reach the soft cap.

Intellect increases your maximum mana, and more importantly for us, your spell critical strike chance. You gain 1% increased spell critical strike chance for every 166.67 Intellect you have. Greater Blessing of Kings increases this by a further 10%, giving you 1.1% spell crit chance for the same amount of Intellect.

This conversion rate might not seem great, but a lot of items have upwards of 100+ Intellect, meaning they end up giving you a very nice amount of crit, on top of the crit rating they already have. However, it’s significantly worse than raw crit rating’s 45.91:1 ratio, meaning you will almost never want to socket or enchant this over pure crit rating, when they come at comparable rates.

As Moonkins, we have the Lunar Guidance talent, which converts 12% of our Intellect into bonus spell power. Coupled with the fact that as Moonkins we can definitely use that extra mana, this makes Intellect a very decent stat, overall.

Spirit increases your mana regeneration when not casting. On its own, that’s pretty bad — but thankfully, our Improved Moonkin Form talent causes 30% of our spirit to be converted into spell power. This is by no means a massive amount, which is why Spirit is so low on our priority list, but it’s certainly something — you shouldn’t intentionally stack Spirit through gems or anything like that, but you shouldn’t avoid it either.

About the Author

bobodingo

Sup yall! My name is Bobodingo and I've been playing wow since its release. I'm an avid player trying to make some good, quality content and share my ideas with the rest of the WoW community. I'm always down to have a conversation and bounce ideas off each other!

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Mina

6 months ago

i have 46.63% crit chance without any buff is it hard cap ?

Auranos

2 years ago

Uhh, how TF are you putting haste above crit in prio, wtf?

-4

Reply to Auranos

This seems like a terrible guide, do you have sims? I don’t see how pre raid you would ever prio haste above crit, no way you’re hitting a 45% crit rating even raid buffed.

-2

Author

You would be in fact correct about hitting the 45% with raid buffs, however, haste comes over crit cap as it is easier to obtain the soft cap of 20% with raid buffs. Increasing the cast speed of your spells allowing for more Starfire and wraths will be a more significant DPS increase over the course of a fight than prioing crit cap. It is also tough to hit the crit cap in phase 1 as options are limited without giving up too much SP or other important stats. You will be very close to the soft crit cap with the build I have in the guide and you shouldn’t notice any large difference if you had the extra little %.

boomk

Reply to bobodingo

this is such a bad comment. more Starfire and wraths will be a more significant DPS increase over the course of a fight than prioing crit cap
More starfire doesn’t mean more DPS because if you crit you enter Eclipse which means you can do more dps with less spells and with less mana.

-3

Reply to boomk

crit is more important than haste

-1

If you prio crit, you only come out with a very minor increase and a large loss in haste. In later phase the prio will change but as of right now, I stand firm in my belief that you should hit the haste cap before crit cap as achieving the crit camp takes more stats away then prioing haste.

Centaria

Your crit cap seems to be too high. It only needs to be 75% with the 40% Starfire proc (after that it looses it’s value, as spell dmg becomes #1 priority). So that’s about 28% spell crit on your stat screen: 28% stats + 4% Nature’s Majesty + 3% Impr. Faerie Fire = 35% + 40% Lunar Eclipse = Total 75% Starfire crit.

Having said the above, crit > haste, simply because of Nature’s Grace talent, as it turns crit into haste (much better haste gain than any stats you can try to stack). Ultimately a crit spell does more dmg than non crit, which stacks even better with spell power.

So in summary:
1) Hit cap
2) Crit cap (total 75% on Starfire with all stats + talents)
3) Haste for gcd soft cap (to make 1.5 global cooldown into 1s)
4) SPELL POWER all the way after that and enjoy your awesomeness.

Pew

1 year ago

You’re soo wrong it’s not even funny bro, please learn how to boom.. ty.

Tman

You are dumb, more haste means more casts inside of eclipse. Also prioing only crit during naxx means you have literally no haste at all.

yessir

I’ve played WOTLK for many years. I have tried with both, haste>crit and crit>haste. I did much more DPS with haste>crit than crit>haste.

Limb

Reply to yessir

i followed the haste prio and i’m pumping plenty of dps, fucking fun as hell casting like a mad man!

Reply to Limb

That’s what I like to hear! It really is so much fun to cast a million spells a minute!

Papabair

Agreed. I prio Haste over Crit. Another boomkin in raid, is main spec balance, and they are trying to figure out, with a better gear score, how I’m pulling 1k more DPS than they are, when I’m using this as an off spec, and have lower gear score. At the moment, haste>crit 100%