Ghostcrawler has again attempted to explain away Eclipse, but basically admits that it’s implementation failed.  What I find funny is that he admits it’s become “too powerful”, yet they buffed the spell repeatedly in WotLK instead of buffing us in other areas.

“The purpose behind Eclipse was to encourage Balance druids to cast something besides their hardest hitting spell over and over again. From this thread it appears at least some of you were content with a “rotation” like that, but you’ll have to believe me that it was a very common complaint we heard from druids as to what they disliked or why they didn’t play Balance.

Now it’s possible to base a rotation around a single spells. Mages are designed to do just that. However, they also have a lot of procs, cooldowns, secondary effects and other situational events that mean that even though you’re getting most of your damage from one button, you’re managing a lot.

We could have gone that way with Balance druids. We didn’t largely because part of the kit of Balance is balance, and we thought that manifested itself nicely in switching between Arcane and Nature spells, or Starfire and Wrath, or Lunar and Solar.

The problem with Eclipse (as I’ve stated many times, so I find the comments that we won’t address the issue to be a trifle unfair) is that it now accounts for so much of Balance’s damage that the random element can be punishing. Having to shift positions right when you get a proc should be a little bit of a bummer on the level of missing a few crits in a row, and not a devastating blow to your dps.

We’re keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element. ”

I’m expecting them to turn Eclipse into charges, although I’m not sure why they can’t do that now, but instead forcing us to wait until Cataclysm.

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Ghostcrawler actually admitted that his pride and joy, Eclipse, was fundamentally broken, that Moonkin are overly penalized on movement fights, and it’s over budgeted for a talent.  What is the world coming to?!  Now let’s see if he’ll try to fix it.

“As I’ve said before, the goal isn’t merely to get you to use Starfire and Wrath. The goal is to have a rotation that is more than just 12121212 or even 111222111222. RNG is something we actually want. The best players should be the ones who can pay attention and react to situations, not the ones who can mash their keys the fastest (or download the most recent macros).

The biggest problems with Eclipse are:

1) It’s too much of a damage increase. Here we see the problem with overbudgeted talents. The RNG wouldn’t be an issue if the magnitude of those random rolls wasn’t so huge.

2) It suffers too much from movement. Losing an Eclipse proc when you have to run is a problem, particularly given point 1. Now we have no problem with classes taking a dps hit when they have to move and we don’t even mind of some specs pay a heavier penalty than others. But it’s a problem when the delta between dps when moving and dps when not moving is so great. “

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Ghostcrawler commented recently about wanting to give balance druids more burst damage for PVP, and admitted it might spill over into PvE as well.  He also mentions they don’t plan on changing Tranquility to raid wide.  Sorry restos.

“The patch notes are not done. While, frankly, Tranquility is not something we’re going to mess with, we do want to add more burst to Balance for PvP purposes. If some of that spills over into PvE for more damage overall, I don’t think many druids would complain.“

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Ghostcrawler commented about a suggestion for a Wrath glyph to raise both it’s cast time and damage co-efficient in an effort to fix our hastecap.  He wasn’t a fan.  Apparently because some bad balance druids could be confused by the intent, we shouldn’t implement it, instead of making them actually LEARN THE CLASS.  I’m not a fan of having to wait to Cataclysm, either.

“I understand the intent and it’s clever in a way, but we would be hesitant to introduce a glyph that would actually be a bad glyph for players who weren’t capable of benefiting from a bunch of haste. There are some glyphs with a kiss / curse vibe, but usually not this severe, and with a curse that really isn’t a curse when you consider that it lets you benefit more from haste in the long run.

It might make more sense if you tucked it away where only endgame focused players could reach it (like an idol that dropped off an ICC boss), but even then it would almost need a warning label explaining what it was trying to do. “

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A suggestion was made on the forums to buff Owlkin Frenzy and also give it on “on-use” type proc.  I’m not sure if that’s where I’d look at to fix moonkin DPS, but nevertheless, Ghostcrawler nixed the idea:

“I don’t think Owlkin Frenzy would be a good area to buff Balance burst damage in PvP. It’s very dependent on actually being the one focused. That almost by definition is not “on demand.”

I also don’t think it’s a great place to buff them for PvE. There are fights without a lot of predictable raid damage, and void zone diving shouldn’t be critical in keeping your dps up.“

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Ghostcrawler posted the following about Nature’s Grace:

I agree Nature’s Grace is a big part of the problem here. We changed Gift of the Earth Mother for pretty similar reasons. However, Nature’s Grace is a Really Big Deal. We honestly keep talking about changing it, but we’re also paranoid about screwing it up because Balance dps is dependent on it. NG is probably an overbudget talent, but in this case if we nerfed iit, we’d have to mess with Balance in a lot of other areas to compensate. We’ll almost certainly do it at some point, but I worry about messing with it for 3.3.

I’m glad he finally realizes something the rest of the community has been complaining about for a long time.  A lot of our DPS is situated around one or two talents (Nature’s Grace and Eclipse), and they have no short term method of ever fixing it.  Now if he could only admit that Eclipse is broken.

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