moonkin-mastery
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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: Total Eclipse, part 1
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. Eclipse is probably a rather worn topic for many balance druids. People love it, people hate it. The new design is great, the new design is terrible. It's too mathy, it doesn't function well in PvP, it's too gamey. There are a lot of positive and negative things that can be said about Eclipse. No matter your side of the fence, there are always attempts to improve upon Eclipse, to make it more viable for PvP or less annoying in PvE. A fair warning, as I attempt to deconstruct both the Eclipse system itself and the common suggestions that arise: It will be impossible to avoid all math. Theorycrafting may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I promise to keep it as minimal and easy-to-understand as I possibly can -- for both our sakes.
