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.

Stats for Balance Druid Wotlk

Stat priority

10% hit cap > Spell Power > Crit (Until 30%) > Haste (600) > Crit > Haste

Balance Druid Stats Overview

*Hit Cap

For a caster the hit cap is 17% plus, with 4% with [Balance of Power] and 3% from [Improved Faerie Fire], 10% is the hit rating necessary to hit with spells for a Balance Druid.

Spell Power

Spell power is the best stat for a Balance Druid after hit, the spell power will increase the damage output of the spells.

Critical Strike

Balance Druid DPS revolves around getting [Eclipse] to proc, without it the damage is really low, doesn’t matter how fast the spells can be cast, without a crit there will be no eclipse proc and no DPS, below 30% crit a good amount of time can be spent casting Wrath/Starfire without a eclipse proc.

Haste

Haste reduces the global cooldown by a small amount and increases the speed of the casts, however, the global cooldown will never go bellow 1 second, so any haste past this point is useless, wrath will stop benefiting from haste quickly, however Starfire will still do. Having too much haste will also reduce the benefit of [Heroism]/[Bloodlust] greatly, specially if within a solar eclipse when it is used.

Stats Breakdown without increasing effects

33 hit rating ≈ 1% to hit

33 expertise rating ≈ 1 expertise

33 haste rating ≈ 1% haste

45 critical chance ≈ 1% critical

1 stamina ≈ 10 Health

1 intellect ≈ 15 mana

1 agility ≈ 1 attack power

1 strength ≈ 2 attack power

1 critical chance ≈ 84 agility

14 Armor Penetration ≈ 1% Armor ignore