Balance Druids brings utility to the raid, casting innervate on healers, using rebirth, increasing spell haste, and applying 13% spell power debuff. For guilds starting in ICC the Typhoon knockback can be a great addition in certain fights like Deathbringer Saurfang pushing the blood beasts and allowing more time to DPS. The big downside of Balance Druids is movement, where they can barely do any damage with the dots and might lose precious seconds of [Eclipse], lowering their DPS.

Talents for Balance Druid Wotlk

Balance Druid Talents outside ICC, or with high damage

Balance Druid Talents with Typhoon for ICC

Wotlk Classic Balance Druid Talent Tree With Multiple choices

The missing 4 points in the above druid talent tree can go into [Improved Insect Swarm], [Typhoon], [Force of Nature] or [Gale Winds].

[Improved Insect Swarm] is great for a seasoned player, for new players it can be a loss of DPS when trying to keep the dots up for the bonus. Balance druids DOTs are weak in WOTLK and are only useful as fillers in movement, the more gear a druid has, the less valuable these points are.

[Typhoon] is useful for less geared groups that require control on some mobs, like in Saurfang in ICC.

[Gale Winds] is a great DPS booster for [Hurricane], however not many tanks will be able to deal with that amount of damage and in WOTLK Classic it will cause a balance druid to die often.

[Force of Nature]can increase DPS when stacked with Bloodlust/Heroism, the swing time of the treants is increased by the haste buff, but since it’s all physical it won’t be a great increase. Another reason players don’t pick [Force of Nature] is because the treants go wild and can aggro other mobs.

Balance Druid talents

In ICC many bosses have ads that can be pushed back to give more time for the raid to DPS them down, the difference on the builds above is -10% spell range and 15% threat reduction, the threat can mostly be disregarded has Balance doesn’t generate any considerable threat on a single target, the reach can make an impact in some fights but won’t make a difference with good positioning, and this point will go to [Typhoon].

Glyphs

Major

Glyph of Starfire

Glyph of Starfall

Glyph of Moonfire

Minor

Glyph of Dash

Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth