I’ve sat down with Pixelkiller @ Burning Legion and he’s shared with me all the frequently asked questions I’ve had about how Dragonwrath works with balance druids.

For ease of reference, I’ve placed the FAQ as a guide.  It can be located here.

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A host of small hotfixes have been applied to live, with only one pertaining to balance druids.  (I was hoping for a 2T12 buff!)

• Starfall should no longer hit enemies with whom the player is not in combat in Grim Batol or the Firelands.

I was aware this was an issue in Grim Batol, but not Firelands. They’ve yet to fix the previously hotfixed (but never actually hotfixed) problem where Starfall attacks CC’d targets.

EDIT: After looking at the patch notes a bit more, I re-read this:

• The Feral druid 4-piece tier-12 set bonus should now interact properly with Primal Madness and Euphoria.

I’m guessing they were referring to the Balance druid 4-piece tier-12 set bonus when they mentioned Euphoria.

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I’ve made a few new Moonkin Guides:

4.2 Tier 12 Best in Slot, and Haste Breakpoints.

Credit for Haste Breakpoints goes to Graylo, as I’m just reproducing his work in an easier to reach place.

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An update to BalancePowerTracker has been released that addresses the issue of the stealth fix to 4T12 and Euphoria.

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MMO-Champion is reporting that 4.2.2 will be released to live servers this week.  There is nothing major in this update except for tooltip changes (to reflect previous hotfixes), such as the mastery nerf to [item]68982[/item].  Do not get too excited, Void Storage and Transmogrification aren’t arriving until 4.3.

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  I was trying to troubleshoot my DPS late last night and figure out why it was so much lower then others who were comparably geared.

This led me to the ‘Custom Lag Tolerance’ setting under ‘Interface Options | Combat’.  If you recall, this was supposed to be Blizzard’s “response” to the /stopcasting macros of 3.0.  I had mine set, as the tooltip suggests, to my general lag to the server, which is 50ms.

Once I disabled the custom lag tolerance (which reverts it to 400ms), my DPS went up by over 10% overall.  Custom lag tolerance defines how soon before a GCD expires can you queue the next spell available.  The problem with it being that you can’t “pre-cast” spells, so you have to cast them in real-time as your GCD becomes available.  This would cause DPS losses whenever I would rotate spells (like applying DoTs and starting a cycle after each Eclipse proc).  This also wouldn’t allow me to “pre-cast” Treants during a hardcast, I’d have to wait for the GCD to become available before I could drop them.

I don’t know why it took me so long to finally turn this off, but I’m glad I did.

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Playing around on live, it looks like a few changes have been made to Eclipse:

• The 4 piece bonus from Tier 12 is now applied  BEFORE Euphoria.  This means you can get 50 energy Starfires.

This is causing ‘predict energy’ in Balance Power Tracker to not fire properly if you have 4pc T12.  If you have both, I suggest you turn off ‘forsee energy’ for now.

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As we all know, Moonwell Chalice isn’t exactly the best trinket for moonkin.

That being said, the buff it provides, still persists even if you remove the trinket.  You can use the trinket in a pre-pot macro before you equip your other trinket, like the Necromantic Focus (which has no internal cooldown).  It’s best to replace the Focus with it and not a trinket like the DMC: Volcano, because the Volcano will trigger an ICD when you equip it.

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I’ve had a few people ask me recently why I don’t pick up ‘Perseverence’ in the resto tree.  Here’s my reasoning why.  If I’m totally off base, feel free to correct me.

With the change to Moonkin Form, we receive between 25% and 30% magic damage reduction as it is.

There is pretty much two types of fights where we take magic damage in Firelands:

Massive Raid Damage – In this case, you’re generally stacked up, there is raid cooldowns going out, and raid healing like crazy.  If I die due to lack of 6% additional magic reduction, there will most likely be plenty dead before me who don’t have the 15% reduction I get from Moonkin Form.  In this case, it’s already a wipe.

You Stepped In Fire And Deserve To Be Dead – See title.

Either way, I really can’t justify sinking 3 points into it.

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  I’m sure you’ve heard of transmogrification by now.  What gear or tier set do you plan on showing off?

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