• Item – Druid T15 Balance 2P Bonus (New) Increases the critical strike chance of Starsurge by 10%.
• Item – Druid T15 Balance 4P Bonus (New) Nature’s Grace now also grants 1,000 critical strike and 1,000 mastery for its duration.

Oddly enough, the 4P bonus is probably weaker than our current 4PC, considering we get additional DoT ticks and get to reforge about 1500 mastery to crit.

What are your thoughts?  I think these are much weaker than T14.

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The 4 piece set bonus has been completely redesigned:

• Balance, 4P — Reduces the cooldown of Starsurge by 5 sec.
  

While an improvement, I have yet to sim it to see what kind of DPS it will provide. I will provide further thoughts tonight.

EDIT: I’m not even sure this is an improvement now that I sit down and think about it.  While this could give more credibility to the [item]45603[/item], due to all of our [spell]93400[/spell], it will be under-utilized.  I really hope that Blizzard wakes up. This is another case of Ghostcrawler really not knowing anything about Balance druids, and really not knowing what to do with them.

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Since I didn’t really have enough time to sit down and crunch the Tier 13 set bonuses, I decided to make a second post actually detailing my thoughts.

2P: Insect Swarm increases all damage done by your Starfire, Starsurge, and Wrath spells against that target by 3%.

This bonus is nice, and definitely better then the junk 2p T12 bonus that we currently have, however, I’m not sure I like it when you compare it to other DPS classes 2piece bonus.  Some of them seem to be pretty amazing, and while I don’t know other classes nearly as well as I do moonkin, seem they’d average more then 3% more damage on their main nukes.

4P: Starsurge generates 100% extra Lunar or Solar energy while Eclipse is not active.

I think unanimously, the opinion on the 4 piece bonus is that it’s extremely weak.  Starsurge is our highest DPS nuke that we have available.  Why we could sacrifice it outside of an Eclipse just to get an extra 15 energy is beyond me.  That being said, it could be fixed very simply:

Starsurge generates 100% extra Lunar or Solar energy while Eclipse is not active, or costs 0 Lunar or Solar energy while Eclipse is active.

This would give us one extra cast IN an Eclipse, and I think would be much more attractive.  But honestly, I’d also like us to see some bonuses that didn’t involve Eclipse.  It’s getting old already.

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Here are the balance druid set bonuses for tier 13:

• 2P: Insect Swarm increases all damage done by your Starfire, Starsurge, and Wrath spells against that target by 3%.
• 4P: Starsurge generates 100% extra Lunar or Solar energy while Eclipse is not active.

While the 2pc is a decent bonus, the 4pc underhelms me, especially against the 4pc T12 bonus.  To get the extra 15 energy, we’d have to sacrifice the extra damage from Starsurge.  The only way I can see this being great is if we get lucky with Shooting Stars procs, but that’s going to throw our timing way off.

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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