moonkin-eclipse
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Shifting Perspectives: Balance druid gearing from Firelands
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 your questions, comments, or something you'd like to see to tyler@wowinsider.com. A few weeks ago, we talked about the various items that you can get from the new daily quests as well as items that you can get from the new raid faction, all of which are really good things. This week will be about new valor point items and items that you can get from boss drops themselves. While gearing is a little bit different in this expansion than it has been in previous expansions, there is still a little bit of choice and options involved. Before getting started, the first thing that we need to keep in mind is not to forgo items from the previous tier. Tier 11 gear is still really, really good, and if there are slots that you could still use from that raid, then I would highly suggest trying to find ways to go back and get them. Firelands isn't a cakewalk for most guilds out there, so it is important that you gear yourself as best as you possible can. With the change to justice points and the nerf to the actual raid content, it shouldn't be too difficult to get your hands on a lot of the items.
Shifting Perspectives: Building a better balance druid rotation -- gaming Eclipse
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 your questions, comments, or something you'd like to see to tyler@wowinsider.com. Out of all of the emails that I get, out of all of the posts that I see on the official forums and other sites, the single most common problem that people have as a balance druid is damage -- which for as a damage-dealing spec only makes sense, right? I mean, it would be a little bit weird if the largest problem we saw from balance druids was that they weren't tanking well enough or something. The thing is, most of these people aren't "bads." More often than not, these aren't people who haven't a clue how to spec, gear, or enchant. They probably do follow the rotation that's listed on the official forums sticky or in one of my guides. All in all, these aren't bad players -- they just can't seem to get something right. Something isn't clicking. Well, let's talk about what that something is.
Shifting Perspectives: A first look at balance druids in patch 4.2
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 your questions, comments, or something you'd like to see to tyler@wowinsider.com. If you keep tabs on the goings-on in the WoW world, then you probably know by now that the initial notes for the upcoming raid patch 4.2 have already been released. While 4.0.6 was supposed to be the large rebalancing patch for Cataclysm and many classes didn't see any significant changes during 4.1, it seems as though Blizzard may have broken down and changed course for this next installment. There isn't yet much information released in the current patch notes, and most classes aren't seeing any changes as of yet, but balance druids are certainly looking at something that is going to vastly shake up their current playstyle. This is the earliest release of the PTR, and things are probably going to change, but one thing about the PTR is that feedback needs to be given, no matter how absurd or unlikely the change might be.
Shifting Perspectives: Total Eclipse, part 2
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 your questions, comments, or something you'd like to see to tyler@wowinsider.com. Last week, we talked about the mastery stat and how it influences Total Eclipse. This time around, I would like to delve into the innate concept of Eclipse itself. Mastery, as you may recall, is a rather tricky stat that has a lot of scaling potential to cause some issues in certain situations. The entirety of Eclipse hinges upon a few basic principles, the first of which is uptime. Given that Eclipse's uptime is determined by number of spells cast (which cannot be changed by any means), there is an average expected uptime that can be balanced around. When you take certain measures to extend Eclipse's duration, such as multi-DoTting or Sunfire spamming, then you effectively change Eclipse's uptime, which causes distortions in mastery scaling. But, again, this was last week. As you have probably already noticed, the same fair warning we gave last week applies: This will get deep and possibly mathy. As an additional warning: I'm rather unwell at the moment and rather drugged up on various medications that I couldn't even begin to pronounce. If you end up getting a bit lost or I'm totally off base on something ... all I can offer is my apologies.
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.
