One of the lesser known ‘features’ of Euphoria is the fact that it cannot proc if you are more than 35 energy towards your next Eclipse.  There really has been no explanation for this.  It’d be nice if there was one.

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I’ve been getting a bit more into PVP, so I’m going to start introducing some more PVP posting.  To start, a gripe of the week:

  Okay, Blizzard.  I understand that Retribution Paladins were pretty derpy in PvE and needed a boost.  Great.  I’m glad they’re buffed.  That being said:  Couldn’t you have found a way to do it to Retribution Paladins only?  I’m tired of getting smashed in the face by Protection Paladins with their vengeance stacked to the max, and dead before I can even get a [Soothe] off.  I really feel sorry for the classes that can’t wipe Vengeance.

Okay, let’s hear YOU sound off about your PVP gripes.

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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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Here’s a few rants that really have no other place, or enough worth to be their own specific blog post.

You may have seen the post on MMO-Champion recently talking about the new Raidbots.com, which automatically analyzes World of Logs parses.  At the time of posting, Moonkin were #2 in the charts.  I am happy to say that we are now on top!  Here’s today’s analysis: (Click to enlarge).

Onto my second rant.  Training Dummy etiquette. Nothing burns my feathers more than another caster class running up and using the same training dummy that I do.  The ones that bother me are those who put magical de-buffs on the bot, which will inflate my damage.  This is really annoying, especially when there are plenty of spare bots to go around!

Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

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First off, let me just state that I am extremely happy that we have Latin American servers, just like we have servers all over the globe.

That being said, I am absolutely sick and tired of being stuck with players from Warsong and Ragnaros when attempting to do random dungeons.  I understand that Blizzard wants us to be patient with “new players”, and to “guide them”, which is why they throw everyone together into one big melting pot when pulling players for random queues.  That being said, if there is a language barrier, there will be no “guidance”, as it’s impossible to communicate with the players.  The Latin American servers should draw from their own, separate, pool of players, so everyone who ends up in a dungeon together can effectively communicate.

Often times you’ll get thrown into a group with multiple Latin American players, and they cannot be removed due to having reached the kick limit, so you’re forced to wipe needlessly for hours, or leave the dungeon queue.  This further penalizes yourself, as often you’re waiting 30+ minutes for a queue, and now have to wait 15 minutes to requeue on top of that.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who experiences this frustration.  And as I said, it’s not against the Latin American players themselves.  I am happy that they can experience the same game I can, however, I think it would serve everyone’s best interest if they had their own cluster of random dungeons, so everyone can speak the same language and be on the same page.

</rant>

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I was all excited this morning to see our guild reach guild level 3, as I’ve been leveling Archaeology and the 10% speed boost would have been welcomed.  Much to my surprise, I realized that ‘Mount Up’ does not apply to Swift Flight Form.  I really hope this is an ‘oversight’ which will be hotfixed in soon.

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Special edition:  Two part Gripe of the Week!

First off, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’d know I’ve been leveling a warlock.  (The post Shattering level changes are pretty amazing, and leveling is both easy and fun).  One of the neat talents that a Destruction Warlock has is [Backlash].  Basically you have a chance on melee strike to proc an instant shadow bolt or incinerate.  Neat, right?

Here’s the even NEATER part.  If this procs while you are casting shadow bolt, the current shadow bolt does NOT consume it!  Awesome!  Now why can’t they do that for [Shooting Stars]?

Also, I’ve been all excited and as soon as I saw Lissanna re-tweet that the [Moonkin Hatchling] was available on the US Blizzard Store, I hopped on over there and bought my own little moonkin.  Here’s the problem.  It’s my “time of the month”.  That’s right.  11/29 happens to be my “renewal day”, and in the eyes of Battle.net, my account is “Pending” and not “Active”, which prevents me from doing basically any sort of account maintenance, which includes adding a digital item!  I have to wait until Blizzard actually renews my subscription automatically tomorrow for my account to be “Active” again, and add my (already paid for) Moonkin Hatchling!

I will hopefully have a cool screenshot of my new troll druid with his (sigh) Tauren Moonkin Hatchling soon.. as well as another neat screenshot I took.

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So another patch is released, and guess what.  Sunfire and Shooting Stars still are not fixed.

THANKS BLIZZARD.

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Let me first start out with this:  If these forms go live, I’m done with my druid.  Blizzard will have exemplified what they really feel about the balance druid class if they can’t be bothered to design new moonkin forms.

All druid forms used to be placeholders.  They said this in alpha (before classic WoW was released), and it took until Wrath of the Lich King to update bear and cat forms.  Then, worgen and troll druids made an appearance, and you’ve seen the amazing work that’s gone into creating worgen and troll bear and cat forms.  Now, even the tree of life has a new model, which, at maximum, has a 16.67% uptime.

With all these changes, you’d think that even if Tauren and Night-Elf moonkin didn’t get new models, they’d at least make neat Worgen and Troll models, right?

Wrong.  I present to you the newest Worgen and Troll moonkin forms on beta. (Courtesy Lissanna@Restokin). Notice how the troll form has TAUREN HORNS and the Worgen have NIGHT-ELF EARS.

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Have you noticed lately that everyone is crying “Nerf Moonkin!”, and that it generally comes from classes that have had insanely high DPS numbers all along (and now actually have to compete for the #1 spot)?  Let me make a few things clear.

Moonkin were not “buffed”.  They were fixed.

• Moonkin used to have a 400 haste soft cap and a 42% crit (raid buffed) cap. After this point, Wrath did not benefit from haste and starfire did not benefit from crit.
• Insect Swarm and Moonfire previously did not benefit from haste, or crit, and moonfire was on a 3 second timer.
• Insect Swarm and Moonfire did not benefit from Eclipse.

Now, moonkin actually benefit from haste and crit at ALL levels and on ALL spells.  This allows us to scale properly, unlike before where we effectively received 50% effectiveness from any gear upgrade we received at high/ICC gear levels.

The moonkin got up from the back of the bus, and they’re not going back.

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