Browsing various forums lately, I’ve seen many myths being professed about how our DoTs work.  To be honest, I recently learned more myself.  Let me quickly tell you what IS true and what is NOT true with DoTs.

DoTs will dynamically scale with:

• Critical Strike Rating

This means if you gain/lose crit while the DoT is ticking on a target, the DoT’s crit rate will change as your crit rate changes.

DoTs do not dynamically scale with:

• Damage buffs (i.e.:  Eclipse)
• Haste
• Spellpower

This means the DoT will maintain whatever Eclipse buff, haste and spellpower over the duration of the DoT.  This is why it’s important that we use Insect Swarm prior to Moonfire/Sunfire, as we want the haste granted from Insect Swarm to be applied to the more damaging of the DoTs, which is Moonfire/Sunfire.  This is why it’s also smart to berserk, if a troll, at the beginning of an Eclipse, as your DoTs should each gain ~2 ticks each.

This has been a public service announcement.

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With 4.0.3 going live today, I have updated the balance druid rotation page.  You can find it in the list of pages to the right.

With Sunfire now ticking properly, you will want to cast Insect Swarm before Sunfire while in Solar Eclipse (and of course before Moonfire in Lunar Eclipse).  After extensive testing on PTRs, it looks like Sunfire on average does much more damage per tick then insect swarm, thus we’ll want that DoT to be hasted.

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In the last beta build, Nature’s Grace was updated to also proc off Regrowth.

A lot of resto’s are happy with this, but considering they’re going to be stuck with the 60 second cooldown, I don’t see it as that HUGE of a difference.

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A few of you might have been luckily chosen to be in the Closed Beta already, and if you are, you have experienced the new changes to deal with our haste soft cap.

It seems developpers have listened to our whining, because most of the changes asked for were delivered :

Haste caps and Nature’s Grace — We’re addressing the haste situation in a few ways. We’re going to up the cast time of Wrath to 2.5, up from 2 sec base (so 2 sec after you get Starlight Wrath). This should help the clipping issues. In general, your haste and crit stats won’t be as inflated as they were in Wrath of the Lich King so it will be more unlikely for you to reach caps for those stats. However, we are also considering short term haste power gains to scale off of your existing haste values. What that means is that instead of just increasing your haste by 20%, it instead will increase the haste value on your paper doll (or rather, the sum of how much haste you have itemized) by a percentage. So the more haste you have, the stronger the effect of Nature’s Grace is.

I think these changes are very interesting. This will make Haste once again a very valuable stat (one of our masteries, should you remember), this will push back the haste soft cap and the haste won’t be as inflated as in WOTLK’s retarded ilevels.

You guys make sure to check out the whole article about Eclipse changes and Nature’s grace changes on MMO-Champion

Bets are open. Who says we’re going back to BC era, when haste was stacked like no tomorrow ?:)

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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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