I’ve had this idea for quite some time, and talked about it briefly, but I’ve sat down and thought about it a bit harder.

Astral Alighment

5 minute cooldown

“You instantly align yourself with the nearest Eclipse. If you are currently are neutrally aligned, the Eclipse will be random.”

This would both solve our issue in PVP where we are extremely weak in Arena until we get crit enough to Eclipse (LOL at that dumb mechanic), as well as RBGs.  Trying to hard cast against any decent arena or RBG team is nearly impossible.  This would also solve our lackluster DPS whenever we are on a boss after a wipe and do not have enough critters left to start in Solar Eclipse.

Thoughts?

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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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I was able to pick up the [Moonwell Chalice] today, and I began doing some tests with a fellow balance druid friend.  I realized that either my thinking of how Mastery works has always been WAY off base, or they’ve changed how Mastery affects Eclipse since the start of 4.0.  If I’m way off base, I’m not the only one, because I know other balance druids who shared the same thought.

The tooltip for Eclipse is misleading.  The damage reflected by the tooltip is based on the mastery value when you actually proc the Eclipse buff.  I had mistakenly understood that your Eclipse actually maintains this value of damage, even if additional mastery falls off.  (Such as which is provided by the Chalice or [Theralion's Mirror].).  This is not the case.  The damage you do under Eclipse is reflected by the amount of mastery you currently have.  If mastery falls, your Eclipse damage will fall as well (although the tooltip will not reflect such).  If you gain mastery after proc’ing Eclipse, your Eclipse damage also increases, without a change to the tooltip.

This is going to cause me to re-think how I value mastery.  I realize I’m probably a giant tool for not understanding this a lot sooner, but I know I’m not the only one.

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A few hotfixes went in today.  One you’ll be happy with, one… not so much.

• It is no longer possible to cancel Lunar Shower by right-clicking the buff, or canceling it via a macro.
• Starfall is no longer hitting targets that are within 40 yards if they are not in combat with the druid or his/her party/raid members. It is targeting all hostile characters in combat with the druid’s party/raid members, is not hitting Stealth characters, is not breaking crowd control effects, and is not targeting nearby critters.

The change to Lunar Showers even further clarifies how useless the talent is now.  As for Starfall, thank god they fixed it.  Also glad to see it ignores CC.

An undocumented “change” that I’ve noticed:

The game now is apparently smart, and if you have 0 Energy, it’ll cancel the Eclipse buff as soon as you cast something.  This is overtly annoying as your lunar/solar energy is set to 0 whenever you change zones.   To test this, acquire Solar Eclipse and then relog.  When you log in, you’ll have Solar Eclipse.  As soon as you sunfire a mob, the Eclipse is gone.

This wouldn’t be so annoying if Blizzard managed to preserve your lunar/solar energy whenever you changed zones or relogged.

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Okay, so Wish of the Week (Abbreviated… WoW?) isn’t exactly a standard here, however I did kind of vent about one wish I’d like to see on Twitter to positive results, so I figured I’d talk about it here and get opinions.

I really wish that we had a 5 minute (or so) cooldown ability that would allow us to instantly push into the nearest Eclipse.  This would alleviate a lot of issues that we see.

• Arena, where you start at 0 Eclipse and do next to no damage until you manage to Eclipse
• Changing zones, where you currently maintain your Eclipsed state, but reset to 0 energy (meaning one cast will bump you out of Eclipse)
• Death in a raid/party — currently if you die/wipe, you start out at 0 energy and no Eclipse, which means you have a pretty large ramp time to start really churning out DPS.

And should you not meet any of these previous 3 requirements, having a 5 minute cooldown where you could jump from one Eclipse instantly to another (which would be great when you have cooldowns ticking) would be a nice, small boost to DPS.

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Had to share this with you guys. Here’s what’s new with Moonkin in next patch :

Many crowd control abilities no longer cause creatures to attack players when they are cast. The creature will not attack the player when the crowd control wears off, and nearby creatures will not become hostile to the player either. However, if a visible player gets too close to the target creature, the creature will remember and attack the player when the crowd control effect wears off. The intent is to make it easier for dungeon groups to manage crowd control assignments and pulling packs of hostile NPCs. The abilities affected by this change are: Hibernate, Entangling Roots [...]

Entangling Roots and the equivalent spell triggered by Nature’s Grasp no longer deal damage.
Innervate now grants an ally target 5% of his or her maximum mana over 10 seconds, but still grants 20% of the druid’s maximum mana over 10 seconds when self-cast.

Balance
Insect Swarm now generates 8 Lunar Energy for druids with Eclipse.
Moonfire now generates 8 Solar Power for druids with Eclipse.
Sunfire now generates 8 Lunar Energy for druids with Eclipse.

Glyphs
Glyph of Innervate now causes the druid to gain 10% of his or her maximum mana over 10 seconds when Innervate is used on a friendly target, in addition to Innervate’s base effect.

Allright so basicaly a buff to our damage, but a nerf to our utility. The CC change is pretty sweet, you don’t have to be scared of slow-on-taunt tanks anymore. Innervate : Really? 0.5% mana per second? I know I’m not wasting this 3min cooldown for another guy’s  500 mana! Hello new glyph choice. Monsoon or Focus, probably. I believe the Solar power changes are on apply only, which means you don’t get 8 power each tick (that would be awesome though), but hey, it does accelerate our transitions a bit. I believe that’s how the spell worked in beta (correct me if i’m wrong).

Any thoughts on this guys? How have you been performing in ZA and ZG with your druids? I find myself on top of dps alot of times. Getting those new epics help out too. Haven’t stepped in any raid so far. Guild pretty much dead. Server pretty much dead. Just enjoying the moonkin life.

Tune in later for more news!

Source : MMO-Champion

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As promised, there have been some more PVP tweaks made in the latest 4.0.6 builds.

• Moonkin Form now grants 15% damage reduction instead of increased armor. In addition, shapeshifting in or out of this form now breaks roots. Note this is not stated in the tooltip.
• Sudden Eclipse now restores 20 Solar or 13 Lunar Energy. Up from 5 Solar or 7 Lunar.

The change to Moonkin Form is nice, it’s basically giving us Disentanglement.  I’m curious to see if they meant “all rooting effects”, (such as frost nova).  I’d hope so.

The Sudden Eclipse change (4pc PVP bonus) seems like a pretty drastic one, although I would have expected it to grant 20 lunar and 13 solar energy.

Your thoughts?

I apologize for the tardiness in my posts.  I have been really busy working away from home (but in sunny Southern California) the last few weeks, and will continue to be working here through June.  I’ve stopped raiding at this point and you guys are my only connection to my World of Warcraft world!  Also, kudos to Balourd for stepping in and posting in my absense.

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• Soothe is now instant cast, down from 1.5 sec cast.
• Moonfire and Sunfire now costs 9% of base mana, down from 18% of base mana.
• Fungal Growth now has a 100 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Total Eclipse now increases bonus damage from Eclipse by 16%, up from 12%. Each point of Mastery now increases the bonus by an additional 2%, up from 1.5%

Blizzard apparently acknowledged that Moonkin mastery was too weak and provided a slight tweak to the numbers.  Now, each point of mastery will provide a 2% boost in Eclipse damage. (Up from 1.5%).  Since Total Eclipse also provides us with a base mastery value of “8″, that is going to boost the standard Eclipse from 37.5% (25% + 12%) to 41% (25% + 16%).

What does that mean to you?  Well, crit and mastery numbers were trending about on par for each other before this build, and should now give mastery a decent edge over crit.  As haste values were still leaps and bounds over both, I don’t think we’ll see a change of haste being our prime stat.

Moonfire/Sunfire’s base mana cost was reduced from 18% to 9%, but that is most likely just a tooltip clarification. (I’ll verify this later, but I believe the mana cost was already halved when the base damage was buffed by 50% in a beta build).

The fungal growth change is handy, as I’ve often been out of range of my mushrooms and unable to pop them.

The soothe change was just reverting to 4.0.1 behavior.  I’m not sure why they changed it in the first place.  (Probably to offset the small mana cost we face versus the larger focus cost of a hunter, but it’s still a silly way to do it).  Since I’m no longer doing heroic Arthas, I don’t really care either way.

What’s your opinions?

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While the other changes I announced did not make the patch notes (they were in previous beta builds that got rolled into 4.0.3a), the following change was made to the 4pc PVP set.

• PvP set bonus redesigned. While not in an Eclipse state, critical attacks against the druid restore 5 Solar or 7 Lunar energy, whichever is more beneficial. This effect can only occur once every 6 seconds.

I must admit I’m a bit underwhelmed.  5 Solar or 7 Lunar energy every 6 seconds?  That’s really not enough.

Personally, they need to somehow make a glyph, or an ability, that allows you to instantly proc an Eclipse.  Give it .. say, a 3 minute cooldown.  Even a 5 minute cooldown.  You just need it once in arena.

Also, give me threat reduction on barkskin.  Thanks.

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Apparently Blizzard does read my blog, because a stealth change was added onto the PTR regarding Eclipse:

The Eclipse buff still reads: “…Cancelled when (Wrath|Starfire) causes (Solar|Lunar) Energy to reach 0.

However, Starsurge now cancels Eclipse when Lunar Energy reaches 0, as well. In case you were wondering, this is how I was able to proc both Eclipse, was to Starsurge from one Eclipse to another.

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