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Shifting Perspectives: An additional dimension for the balance druid rotation
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we ready our spreadsheets for battle. Well, it looks like those who said the balance rotation was dull carried the day. Insect Swarm isn't back, but interesting developments are afoot. A few days ago, Ghostcrawler dropped a minor bombshell on the balance rotation, and I'd like to do a bit of theorycrafting and explore the implications. Ghostcrawler We are experimenting with some changes to the rotation. No promises that these changes will stay, but we definitely look forward to your feedback (both in terms of theorycrafting and how fun it is). Shooting Stars should occur much more frequently, and Starsurge should be a more important (read: high damage) button. Additionally, we're adding a new passive that has some interesting implications. Should you choose to ignore it, your DPS will likely be only a few percentage behind someone who uses it optimally, but it should hopefully provide some more varied gameplay. To use some game designer jargon, we're happy with Moonkins' macro level rotational gameplay, but think they needs some more mirco-level decisions. Shooting Stars chance increased from 20% to 50%. Starsurge damage increased by 30%. Fae Empowerment: New passive for Balance Druids. When you cast Faerie Fire, you gain Lunar Empowerment and Solar Empowerment. Lunar Empowerment: Increases the damage of your next 3 Starfires within 15 sec by 15%. Solar Empowerment: Increases the damage of your next 3 Wraths within 15 sec by 20%. Please note that these changes are straight DPS buffs, and we don't think Moonkin need a buff right now, so we need to reduce overall damage (probably across the board) so that overall DPS stays the same. These nerfs may take a few builds, because we need to evaluate if these rotation changes are worth doing. source
Shifting Perspectives: Comparing T12 boomkin gear against T11
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. Balance news comes at you every Friday -- learn how to master the forces of nature, and know what it means to be a giant laser turkey! Send questions, comments, or something you'd like to see to tyler@wowinsider.com. Last week, I allowed the unthinkable to happen: I allowed myself to be out-DPSed by an elemental shaman. It was a terrible day, one from which I don't think I shall ever recover. It happened the day that I had finally gotten my new, shiny four-piece bonus. I was eager to try it out, estatic that I finally got myself out of that god-awful dress. Then something just fell through. This week was more of a redemption, but I will still never forget losing out that one time. If anything good did come of it, at least you could say that it got me thinking. Upgrading from tier 11 to tier 12 should be a pretty big deal. The set has more and better itemization, the set bonuses are pretty spectacular -- so what could possibly be the issue? This week, we'll be talking about how tier 12 is great but not the bundle of roses that you might think it is. Depending on the encounter in question, which tier is actually better can change on you. Given that, should you ever go back to your old tier 11?
Shifting Perspectives: Balance post-starpocalypse
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. Today we step into the muddled love life of Murmurs and discover that he's returned with one of his exes. Starfall is back in style once again, and everyone wants to be on the winning team. If you thought that this post was going to be about the new, totally rad druid changes, then you will be completely disappointed. Such trivialities are so far beneath my station that I wouldn't even waste my time with such refuse. I kid. I'm giddy as a schoolgirl on candy laced with illegal substances right now. I am serious about this article not being about the druid changes, though. Instead, it's going to be all about the new love in my life. The apple of my eye, the yin of my yang, the Hooch of my Turner. If you're thinking about Lady GaGa right now, then stop. The court order was very specific that I'm not allowed within 50 miles of her any more. Instead I've moved on, or rather back, to my old flame Starfall. By now I am sure that there are plenty of people that have grown tired of me ranting on about my love for Starfall. To those people, I say this: Get over it! Okay, okay, seriously though, pending any new drastic shifts in the space-time continuum, this will be my last post about Starfall. I'm going to get all of my expressions of love for it out of my system in one go. Without further ado, let my mushy, gross, open-mouth tongue-kissing of Starfall begin.
Shifting Perspectives: Changing Eclipse
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we're going to be looking at the most common gripe of the balance druid. That fickle little talent that every balance druid loves to hate: Eclipse. What's really wrong with it? How can we make it better? Why do we misname the procs? Every time that I visit the Damage Dealing or Druid forums, I often feel like I am back in Wrath of the Lich King beta. During that time, every day there was some thread about some balance druid issue that needed to be addressed, usually it was Eclipse. For those that currently take up an issue with Eclipse, I want to personally apologize for the state that it has come to today. Although I am not a design for WoW, nor do I have any direct influence on the design philosophy of any class, I can't help but thinking every day that I, along with several other notable figures, paved the way for Eclipse to become what it is today. For those that do not know what I am talking about, let me explain. During WotLK Beta, Eclipse was a terrible talent. By terrible, I don't mean that it was on par with Genesis. No, it was worse than Genesis. Eclipse was so bad during the early stages of Beta that there was more than several incarnations of the talent where it was a DPS loss to spend any talent points into it. Eclipse started out where you could only gain one proc every minute and the proc was either 10% increased damage to Wrath or 10% increased crit chance to Starfire. I shouldn't say it was all Eclipse's fault that it sucked, at the time the Glyph of Starfire had no extension limitation which certainly complicated the matter as well. Even without that, though, Eclipse simply wasn't worth it. There was no point in proccing Eclipse to buff Starfire at that point because 10% was too at the mercy of RNG to have a noticeable effect, and Wrath did not play well enough with Nature's Grace at the time to make its Eclipse proc viable.
Shifting Perspectives: Are DoTs worth it?
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we are going to explore the issues surrounding the use of damage over time effects in a balance druid's rotation, as we figure out if they are pewpew worthy, or just plain peew. If you are like me and have played a balance druid since before people knew that druids had a spec that wasn't restoration, then this question isn't a new one to you. The sad truth of the balance spec is that a vast majority of our damage potential is tied up into our main nukes; Starfire and Wrath. Moonfire and especially Insect Swarm have, for the most part, always been at the bottom rung of our damage potential. Back in The Burning Crusade, when balance was first considered to be 'viable' by the mainstream, Insect Swarm was never used in a raid setting due to its poor damage. Although Moonfire held strong, by the Sunwell level, balance druids were able to get so much haste and crit that even our staple of staple spells was left in the dust. Swing around to Wrath of the Lich King, and there have been some major strides to fix this issue. When the expansion first came out, there were two key talents, Nature's Splendor and Improved Insect Swarm, added to boost our DoT damage. Even then, Insect Swarm was falling too far behind by the time players were in Naxx level gear, but this time around there was some quick work on the part of the development team to remedy the situation. Insect Swarm had its scaling and base damage increased to be viable once again. Not to mention that our three standard issue PvE glyphs have all centered around our DoTs. However, we are no longer in Naxx, we are now in Icecrown Citadel, and the issue of DoT damage is coming up once again. Are Insect Swarm and Moonfire holding up in terms of damage? Is their scaling sufficient to keep them in our rotations? Let's take a look.
Shifting Perspectives: Balance 101
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we're preening our feathers, practicing our dance moves, and polishing up on our slaughtering skills. There has recently been an in pouring of requests to make starter guides for all of the various classes and specs. Originally I refused such a topic on the standing that any player that wishes to play a balance druid is already 100 times more awesome than every other player out there and wouldn't possibly benefit from such a things. Then a guild mate of mine showed me the light. Balance druids themselves are quite an amazing bunch, but balance druid alts are a completely different story. In all honesty though, even the veteran balance druids cannot agree on talents from time to time. I figured, after a few threats of maiming, that a beginner's guide would actually be a really good thing; providing the caveat that some of the more controversial talents be explored more in-depth.
Moonkin may receive a buff soon
Balance druid performance has been noticeably lagging in raids. While moonkin have long had a problem being too easily +haste-capped with Wrath, there's another issue on the not-too-distant horizon in the form of the "lunar +crit cap." Essentially, when a lunar eclipse procs and the player turns to the Starfire portion of the rotation, the combination of raid buffs, gear, and procs make Starfire crits all but inevitable. While this may sound like a welcome DPS increase, it does have the unhappy result of the spec seeing increasingly less benefit from the +haste and +crit that exists in abundance on Icecrown raid gear. Blizzard has known about this for a while, but the issue with Nature's Grace and the soft +haste cap isn't easily fixable without impacting both Restoration and Starfire (where the NG proc is still useful), and the +crit cap is the effect of unintended stat inflation in Wrath. Enter Zarhym on Wednesday to announce news of a possible change to the Earth and Moon talent in a future mini-patch, granting 2/4/6% spell damage to the moonkin, up from 1/2/3%. While this isn't set in stone (and Balance players are already aware that an overhaul to the Nature's Grace issue probably won't happen until the Cataclysm content patch at the earliest), it's been greeted as a decent short-term fix. It's also a means of improving the scaling of what remains the moonkin's best stat (+spellpower). Zarhym did warn that the change may not go through in this form, and we're also waiting for news on when this mini-patch will hit. Stay tuned for future announcements.
