Gray Matter

Lets Make it Offical

2013-03-05T16:32:00.001-06:00

I've gotten several emails and such asking about the blog and such, so I guess I should explain what has been going on lately. As all of you can see I haven't written a blog post in over four months at this point. In fact, I haven't logged into WoW in almost as long. I didn't plan on taking an extended break from the game (I still have an active account actually), but it just kind of happened after a couple of things happened both ingame and IRL.

I am still a big fan of the game, in particular I love raiding and the community that can develop around a guild who raids together. I love the struggle. I love the triumphs. I love the stupid inside jokes. Unfortunately, I've found those aspects of the game increasingly hard to find over the past few years. As I've said several times before, Cataclysm was a very tough expansion for me guild wise. Prior to cataclysm I had been in only 3 raiding guilds over 4 years, but during that one expansion I spent time in 6 or 7 different guilds. Most of them fell apart or were on the verge of falling apart when I left. It was a tough time and I considered quitting the game many times. However, I decided to take a second shot at a guild I have a lot of respect for thinking that if it worked out, it could be the long term home I've been looking for.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out. My trial was rejected for what I think are fairly nitpicky reasons. At about the same time I was laid off from my job and it was the straw that broke the camel's back (For the record, I have a new job now.). I didn't have a reason for logging in anymore, and that was good because I didn't feel like logging in anymore. I didn't mean to take a break for 4+ months, it just kind of happened.

Quick Edit: I have gotten a couple of comments asking what kind of guild would reject my trial. The simple truth is that just because I wrote a blog about moonkin doesn't mean that I'm an amazing raider. There is a lot more to raiding then knowing the theory. I've never claimed to be the best moonkin and can say for a fact that there are a lot of players out there better then me.

While I do think the reasons told to me for rejecting my trial were nitpicky, I also know that I could have performed more consistently. At the highest levels of raiding the little things matter a lot and I left myself open to critisism on a couple of occasions. Also, I think trialing at the start of an expansion when everyone is excited about the game was a mistake.

So, what does the future hold for me and this blog? I honestly don't know.

At this point, I doubt I am done with the game forever. I still feel the urge to log in and see whats going on every so often, but haven't done so yet. At the very least, I'll probably buy what ever expansion comes and try it out.

In terms of the blog, I think I'm done. I won't say I'll never write the blog again, but I doubt it. The blog has gotten increasingly hard to write over the years. When I started there were very few moonkin blogs and none of them were doing theorycrafting. On top of that, the theorycrafting was very simple in the beginning. However, over time it got harder, and Moonkin became more popular and attracted more theorycrafters. As time has gone on my blog has become tougher to write and less and less relevant. Given all that, it is probably time to put the blog to rest. But who knows, If I get back into the game in a big way maybe I'll get back into the blog in a big way as well.

I do want to say a few thank you's if this does end up being my final post.

First and foremost I must thank all of my readers over the years. I never imagined that the blog would become as big and influential as it was for a time.

I also want to thank Blizzard, GC, and the developers I had contact with (Chris and Chadd). Thanks for making a great game and getting me into Betas.

Thanks to Phaelia for providing a guide and helping my blog to grow early on. I wish you were still around.

Thanks to the many moonkin over the years who helped the blog both directly and indirectly over the years. This is by no means a complete list: Erdluf, Lissanna, Murmurs, Hamlet, Relevart, and many, many others I am forgetting at the moment.

A big thanks to all my great guildies over the years. Necro, Jeeves, Abid (rip) at FoC; Dchaney, Lotsapots, Doom, Ardin at WA. Sevrenwinter, Myraxa, Osmand, Keahe, Auro, and Syni at LoE. Finally at Skunkworks Infinitum, Neatpete, and Olducu thank you for your support.

10 vs 25: The Korean Test

2012-10-25T15:29:00.001-05:00

In case you haven't seen it yet, here is the news from Korea.

We received several feedbacks regarding raid instance lockouts and 10/25 rewards, and we appreciate your opinions and deep interests. We thought that Korean players wish to enjoy the most hardcore contents more flexibly and according to their play styles. Therefore, from the upcoming patch we decided to change the raid instance lockout rules for all KR servers. Raids, as usual, will be reset every 7 days following maintainance checks. However, after 5.1 patch 10 man and 25 man raids will have seperate lockouts.

From now on, players could play raid instances, such as Mogu-Shan Vaults, in both 10 man and 25 man difficulty. Normal and Heroic difficulty raid of same instance will share same lockout as usual. Furthermore, the loots of 25 man raids has been buffed, and will offer higher iLV compared to same 10 man instance. For example, Terrace of the Endless Spring in 25 man difficulty will drop loots with iLV of 504, wile 10 man will drop 496.

We wish that players will further enjoy the contents and gain satisfactory rewards, and decided to offer the system that suits most well with the KR players. -- From MMO Champion. Translation by PrairieChicken.

Here is the TL:DR version.

10s and 25s will be separate lockouts in Korea. Meaning that one took can run both a 10man raid and a 25man raid every week
The 25man loot is being buffed to a slightly higher ilevel then 10man loot.

Let me get three things out of the way before I talk about this more.

At this point this is only happening in Korea, and there is no indication that it will eventually come to US or EU servers. Some of you probably remember that the Korean servers had two lookouts per week for Firelands and Dragon Soul during Cataclysm, and that change never came to the other game regions. So this could be a way to test the change in a relatively small region before exposing it to the wider population, or it could just be an adaptation for marketing purposes. I'm going to assume for this post that it's a test.
We know VERY little information about this change. As far as I know Blizzard hasn't said anything about what is intended or how this will affect other systems.
There is NOTHING Blizzard can do that will make everyone happy. Just looking at the MMO Champion thread there are a lot of people that like the change a lot. There are others that are threatening to quit the game over it. In short some people will love this. Others will hate it. Just keep it civil.

This Seems a Little Strange

It's not surprising that Blizzard might be testing a new way to differentiate 10 and 25 man raiding. Over the past couple of months many of the big wigs at Blizzard have said that they aren't pleased with how 25man raiding has declined since WotLK. I also don't think it would surprise anyone to know that I personally wouldn't mind if the system reverted back to WotLK standard for all regions. However, given what we know I do find this change a little strange.

Though I personally didn't have a big problem with it, I do agree that there were some problems with the WotLK model that Blizzard needs to address one way or the other. For example, 10 man strict raiders were not recognized appropriately in WotLK. With that in mind, I can't recall any instance where Blizzard revert a large change back to an early version. Usually they try and create a new system that address all of the issues. For example, look at the Moonkin rotation during the MoP Beta. When many people complained that the Moonkin rotation was to boring and simple they added Fae Empowerment. When Fae Empowerment didn't work out they didn't revert back to the old rotation. They came up with a new one.

That's why this is a little strange. Given the little information we have, this Korean format sounds like a reversion to the old WotLK format. While I wouldn't have a problem with that personally, I have never thought that was a realistic possibility and still don't. If history is any guide Blizzard would at least try to address the WotLK issues, and that is why I think there is more to this change then we currently know.

How this Might Work

Interestingly, there is a way for 10mans to receive inferior gear from bosses, but still have gear that is equal to 25mans in the long run. For the record, this idea came to me while I was reading through the MMO Champion thread, but I can't find the post that caused it. As a result I don't know if this idea is a moment of inspiration or plagiarism on my part. Either way I think it's an interesting idea.

As you may remember, Blizzard planned to revamp the Valor system in MoP. Instead of allowing players to buy gear with Valor points, players would be allowed to upgrade their gear with Valor points. Obviously this change didn't make it into the release patch, but Blizzard does plan to included in patch 5.1 before the next tier.

What if the 25man gear was already upgraded when it dropped but couldn't be upgraded again with Valor points?

I can see pluses and minuses to this idea, but I must admit that it sounds like a great idea to me.

Pros:

Differentiates the 10 and 25 man formats without completely delegitimizing the 10 man raiding.
Lessens the burden of Valor farming on 25man raiders and raid leaders, making the format more attractive.
Encourages pugging for people that want an extra shot at loot.

Cons:

It will probably make it harder for 10man raiders to gear up, and be a bit of a disadvantage in the overall progression race.
The 25 man raiders will need some way to spend their valor points, if they don't need it to upgrade their gear.

As I said before, Overall I like this idea and would like to see it implemented in the US realms. Let me know what you think.

5.0.5 Gear Guide is Up, Sort Of

2012-09-24T17:01:00.001-05:00

I've gotten most of the gear guide done, but I'm not sure I will be able to finish it before leveling starts tonight. So, instead of delaying it I've posted a fairly rough version. I think the valuations are 95% right, though there are probably a couple of issues. As always if you see a problem or something doesn't look right please let me know.

I will try and get the list done before raiding starts next week but it probably won't be until Thursday or Friday since I will be leveling myself.

Also, this list is based off of WoWhead, and it isn't always accurate for new expansions like this. Some of these items may not exist or might have the wrong data. To be completely honest there are a couple of items that look fishy.

I hope this help and thanks for understanding about its incomplete nature.

Another Look at 10 vs 25

2012-09-23T00:32:00.001-05:00

The 10 vs 25 debate is nothing new to me or this blog. I've been talking about it for years and have gotten called names for having my opinions. When Blizzard announced that 10s and 25s would be equal in Cataclysm, I like many bloggers and players predicted that it would destabilize the 25man format and raiding as a whole even before the expansion was released. I've used numbers to show that the number of people participating in 25mans has dropped dramatically with each new content patch since 10s and 25s were made equal.

So when Ghostcrawler says that he doesn't like the current situation with 25s and that "Entropy will cause 25s to break down into 10s without strong counter force," all I have to say is we told you so.

I still think that the addition of 10man raids in WotLK was based upon false assumptions about what made Karazhan and Zul'Aman popular in TBC. I still think that the unequal design of WotLK could have worked if Blizzard had given more appropriate rewards to 10man raiders and limited access to both formats. Instead of trying to fix the problems they created, they tried create a new systems and end up creating new and bigger problems.

Yea, I'm little bitter, but you can't unring a bell. As much as I and many other people would love for Blizzard to revert some of the changes they made in WotLK and in Cata, I don't thing any of us are deluded enough to thing Blizzard would ever do that.

The question is how do we move forward? Are 25mans worth saving? If so, why? And finally, how do you save 25mans?

Why are 25s Worth Saving:

It shouldn't come as a surprise to any of my regular readers that I think 25s are worth saving. However, I will admit that I sometimes have a hard time articulating why. Let me try again.

Epicness: To be completely honest I don't find this to be a very strong argument. Though I have read all of the books I don't consider myself a lore nerd, and have considered WoW more of a puzzle game then a story that I'm playing through. That said, WoW is a very story driven game.

We are the solders on the front lines in a battle for the universe, and have had to fight forces of unimaginable strength. With that in mind it seems a little strange to me that 10 adventure's can band together and save Azeroth from demons, old gods, and elemental lords. If that's the case why wouldn't the faction leaders just form a raid team to take care of it?

I realize that this is just a game and you can't apply logic in a lot of these situations. I also realize that some of this is explained by having Thrall use the Dragon Soul or having Cenarius and the Archdruids help with Rag. Plus, 25 is just as arbitrary a number as 10 in this respect, but raids were designed to be the place where players get into the big fights and take down the big bosses. Therefore, I think you should need a big group to conquer these foes and 10 people just isn't a big group.

This is an MMO, not an RPG: When the Cross-Realm Zones were introduced with patch 5.0.4 quite a few players complained because they didn't like the increased competition. Blizzard responded by basically saying "tough, this is a multi-player game." I completely agree with that response. Blizzard should emphasize the Mulit-player part of MMO, but they should also emphasize the Massively part which they have done nothing but undermine since the first expansion.

There are plenty of game styles out there were you can get together with a small group of friends to fight bosses and complete challenge, but where else can you join 24 other people in the fight to the evils of a fictional world? I'm not a video game expert by any stretch of the imagination, but MMOs are the only place I know of where this is possible and it's one of the aspects that made MMOs so awesome in the first place. Without it, MMO's are just another RPG.

There is Demand for 25mans: I can't say this with scientific certainty, but there is a lot of demand for 25man raiding out there. Over the past two years I've been in a lot of guilds and talked to a lot of people. I have heard a lot of 10man raiders say they would prefer a 25man raid, but can't find one that fits their schedule or that is on their server. On the flip-side I have yet to hear a single 25man raider say they would prefer 10s, and have only heard of one new 25man guild

The problem is supply, not demand. People will take the path of least resistance everything else being equal. As a result players who prefer 25s stay with their guild now that it's 10s because it's easier not to move or they can't find a 25 guild that fits their needs. There are guild leaders who let there guild turn into a 10man guild because it's a lot easier to form a 10man team out of your remaining 20 then finding 5 new players.

The Free Market Solution:

If you know anything about free market economics then you know that you fix a supply problem by increasing the rewards for the supply. This is why Alaskan Crab fishermen get paid so much. We as a society really want the crab, but only few people are capable of supplying it and willing to accept the risks. Therefore they charge a lot of money for the crab and we pay it.

This is the big problem with 25mans currently. They require a lot of extra work to maintain because your roster is 3 times as big, but the only reward for leading a 25man raid is your own personal preference and a miniscule amount of extra gear. The question is how can Blizzard increase the rewards of 25man raiding without gutting 10man raiding and reintroducing some of the old problems.

How Not to Save 25mans:
I think it's clear that Blizzard really under estimated how significant of an advantage 10s have over 25s. To counter that advantage 25s need an incentive that is just as significant, but can't be so strong "that all the 10s players stampede back to 25s."

Gear is a Poor Motivator: This isn't to say that Blizzard can't motivate players with gear. They do it all the time. However, there are only two ways gear can motivate players and I don't think either is very good at balancing the additional logistical challenges of 25man raiding.

Quality: This is the first way gear can motivate a player and it is extremely powerful. It is one of the key ways Blizzard has motivated players since the beginning of the game, but when they split 10s and 25s in WotLK it proved too strong. Players who were motivated by gear ran 25s and forced 10s into an inferior role.
Quantity: The issue with Quantity is that it is too weak of a motivator. Sure, the players will get their gear a little sooner, but what happens after they get it? You can't equip helmets, so after you get the items you want Quantity is unimportant. This is how Blizzard tried to reward 25s in Cata, but it obviously didn't work that well. They are doubling down on it in MoP, but I expect it will work just as well.

Separate Achievements has Problems: A common suggestion from this past week is that there should be separate realm first 10s and 25s. While Ghostcrawler seemed to be interested in the idea, I have a couple of issues with it.

The first problem I see is that it's too weak to fix the problem on its own. Realm firsts are only important if they are an actual achievement. If there's only one guild competing to be the first on the server, as is the case on many servers, then it's not really much of an achievement. It would also be diminished if it happens significantly after the 10man feat was achieved. Finally, it offers absolutely no incentive for the guild that comes in second, which is unfortunate because realm firsts are determined by time spent just as much as they are determined by skill.

The second problem is how do you prevent a 25man guild from getting the 10man achievement? Obviously, you can make the two achievements mutually exclusive and that would prevent the guild that got the 25man realm first from getting the 10man version. However, how do you prevent the #2 25man guild from getting the 10man achievement?

This isn't to say that I think there shouldn't be separate achieves for 10s and 25s. In fact I think 10s and 25s should be rewarded separately, and the fact that they weren't was the biggest problem with the system in WotLK in my opinion. However, creating a system that rewards them separately and fairly is going to be quite difficult now that 10s and 25s are treated equally.

How to Save 25mans:

It's right to point out that the "logistical" or "organizational" burden largely falls on the leaders and that the most effective incentives would be focused on them. If this were up to the free market the best raid leaders would find a way to get compensated with free gametime or something, but there are too many opportunities for abuse if Blizzard tried to reward guild leaders directly. So Blizzard needs to find indirect ways to reward them.

Give Players/Leaders a Tangible Reason to Prefer 25s: As I said before, people will generally take the path of least resistance. If a guild is faced with the choice of recruiting 5 new people and stay in 25s or downsize to 10s, it's pretty clear that downsizing is the easier option if everything else is fairly equal. Therefore making players/leaders give up something by converting to a 10man gives them an incentive to stick it out and preserve the format.

This would work for a couple of reasons. First, if the raid leader likes the reward they have more reason to recruit rather then give into the easier path. Second, if the players like the reward they are more likely to help the leaders recruit, relieving some of the burden on the leaders. Third, if players like the reward, then they are less likely to accept the downsizing and will be more willing to change guilds to gain the reward. As a result, there is a larger pull for 25s to recruit from which should make it easier.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if there are a couple of 10man raiders who are fuming mad and asking why 25man raiders deserve perks that wouldn't be granted to 10mans. To be completely honest, I don't think that argument is without merit. I don't think that the average 25man raider does something more then the average 10man raider that makes him more worthy of perks. However, this entire post is based on the assumption that 25s are worth saving. You don't have to agree.

Give them Free Consumables: One of the best ways to motivate people is to give them stuff. In this case the trick is to give them something strong enough to cause them to make an effort to raid 25s, but not so strong that people feel like they have to raid 25s. In my opinion free consumables could come close to striking that balance.

What if when you walked into a 25man raid there was a guy standing there handing out flasks and food that could only be used in 25man raids. From the officers stand point this is a win because they no longer have to worry about Cauldrons and Feasts. They also don't have to deal with the questions about when they are going to be dropped or with waiting for everyone to arrive before dropping them. From, the players stand point this makes 25s slightly more attractive because they then know that they won't have to farm mats or buy them off the AH. Granted many guides do supply these things so there was little worry in the first place, but I do think it makes 25s more attractive for the player if only a little.

Conclusions:

Yes, I believe that it is in Blizzards best interest and in the best interests of the game to save 25man raiding. If you disagree that's fine and I can understand why you may reject what I'm suggesting in that case. However, there are a lot of people that don't want 25s to die, and some of them are important people at Blizzard.

So if 25s are to be saved then Blizzard needs to take some bold steps. The first is to recognize and accept that the 10 and 25 man formats are inherently unequal and can't be treated as if they are equal if they want both formats to survive. The second step is to reward players, leaders, and builds in a way that tries to counter that inequity. I know 10man players won't like that but it is what is required if 25s are to survive. If Blizzard isn't willing to do that to save them, then they might as well go ahead and kill them now.

The New Raiding Guide Is Up!

2012-09-19T13:20:00.003-05:00

I've updated my Raiding guide to reflect the changes made in Mists of Pandaria. There is a link above your you can use this link. I haven't updated the gear guide yet, but hope to make it available soon. Please keep a couple of things in mind while you use it.

My primary focus in the game is as a PvE Raider and my guide has the same focus. What I say in the guide may not apply if your primary focus is PvP, leveling or Challenge Modes.
There are exceptions to everything. I try to make as few assumptions as possible in this guide, but I'm sure it is full of them anyway. While you can adapt your play to your situation, I cannot adapt this guide for every possible situation or exception.
Finally, this guide is based upon the theorycrafting communities best efforts from Beta using the tools we've had available. However, things can change when you have millions of new eyes looking at the new data with the release of a new expansion. Don't be surprised if the conventional wisdom changes over the next two months to reflect new information. I will try and keep this guide updated with new information but I suggest that you also keep an eye on Elitist Jerks and other fan sites for new information.

Finally, I am completely open to corrections or suggestions if you have them. Please feel free give them in the comments below or send them directly to my e-mail. That said, please give as much detail as you can in your comments. Just saying "Your rotation is wrong" doesn't help anyone.

Level 85, Patch 5.0.4 Survival Guide

2012-08-27T23:24:00.000-05:00

The Pre-Expansion patch arrives tomorrow with a lot of changes to adapt to quickly. Granted, this is traditionally a pretty lazy time for raiding and Min/Maxing your toon might not be 100% necessary. That said it is a good time to get a feel for some of the new mechanics and figure out your UI before it does matter in a months time.

When reading the information below, I would like you to keep a couple things in mind.

First, this is a level 85 guide based on the information I have available at the time it this was posted. A lot of this is likely to be relevant to level 90 raiding as well, but there are some differences and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of design changes between now and Sept 25th as well.

Second, I've been doing a lot of analysis using Simulation Craft over the past couple of weeks. Without it significant portions of this post would not be possible, because maintaining my own excel based simulator was a pain in the butt. So I want to thank Starfox and everyone involved with Simulation Craft for maintaining such a great tool.

Important Changes To Remember

The DoT Revamp: Insect Swarm is out, but Sunfire becomes it's own button. Basically, we lost a DoT to put a slightly different one in it's place, but that's not the only change. The duration of Moonkin DoTs are also significantly shorter now at 14 seconds instead of 18, and the DoTs no longer proc Nature's Grace. Nature's Grace now occurs when you enter Eclipse.

Specialized Eclipses: The two Eclipse buffs have never really been equal, but for the first time they are now designed to be different. Lunar Eclipse now favors single target DPS with Starfire being a bit stronger then Wrath and the ability to cast Starfall as soon as you enter Lunar. Solar Eclipse favors AoE DPS as it always has but with a new design. Hurricane is a bit stronger then Astral Storm and Wild Mushroom is still buffed by Solar even though it should no longer be a regular AoE tool.

New Cooldowns: Moonkins will have the potential to have multiple cooldowns in MoP. The only standard cooldown is Celestial Alignment and it does requite some skill to use it correctly, since it consumes all energy when used. The other cooldowns are from talents or other spells which I will tlak about later.

Astral Communion: This is a major quality of life improvement for Moonkin and the critters of Azeroth. With the release of 5.0.4 you can set up your Eclipse prior to the pull of the boss, and if there is downtime in a fight you can skip the phase that you are out of Eclipse. For PvPers with the set bonus can cast AC while moving.

Higher Eclipse Uptime: Euphoria is no longer a random proc but a constant benefit that always doubles energy generation out side of Eclipse. This significantly increases Eclipse uptime

Talent and Glyph Changes

Tier 4 Talents: This is the DPS or Output tier of the talent tree and honestly it's the only significant choice a moonkin has to make before level 90 and Tier 6. I've run a lot of tests on these talents using Simulation Craft and have gotten fairly consistent results about which is the best. Here is the current ranking:

Incarnation > Force of Nature > Soul of the Forest

In every test I ran at level 85 Incarnation beat the other two choices by a significant margin. If you read Elitist Jerks you may have seen some comments that suggested SotF is best at some gear levels, but those tests were done at level 90 and I wasn't able to find any situation where that is the case at level 85. That said, I do think Soul of the Forest is probably best for leveling with quests.

The Other Talents Tiers: Most of the choices in the other talent tiers are fairly situational and not all that significant to be completely honest. I expect to use this build as a general rule, but what you choose depends on the situation and personal preference.

Another Glyph Revamp: I'm not sure if Glyphs can go through an expansion without getting revamped. In MoP the Prime Glyphs have been eliminated and with them most of the reasons why a Moonkin should care about glyphs at all. I honestly don't think I'm being overly dramatic in my assessment either. Any moonkin could pick their glyphs at random and it wouldn't significantly hurt them. However, there are five that I think are a bit better for raid PvE then other choices available.

I am picking Glyph of Rebirth, Glyph of the Moonbeast, and Glyph of Stampede. I'm sure that GoR will still be requited my many raid leaders since it reduces the risk that a battle rez is waisted, and there is really no reason for a Moonkin not to pick it up. GotM is great if you frequently heal yourself or pop Tranquility for the raid. GoS is nice because it gives me an those near me an extra speed buff without having to shift forms.

The other possibilities are Glyph of Stampeding Roar and Glyph of Innervate. Both could be useful in the right situation, but I think the others I've chosen are more universally useful. As far as Minor glyphs go, they don't matter at all. Pick which ever one makes you happiest.

New Rotations

Please keep in mind that I am speaking generally with regard to the rotations below. There are exceptions to all of them depending on the situation, but I am not going to go through all of the exceptions.

Starting Rotation: The main thing you are trying to do with your starting rotation is maximize your buffs and cooldowns.

Use Astral Communion until you are one Wrath away from Lunar Eclipse.
After the pull cast Starfall and then Wrath. This uses your Starfall cooldown and immediately resets it by entering Lunar Eclipse.
After entering Eclipse cast Incarnation, followed by Moonfire and Sunfire to get both DoTs on the target.
At this point you want to start casting towards Solar Eclipse. Cast Starsurge on cooldown and fill the rotation with Starfire. Also make sure to recast Starfall when it falls off, and before you leave Eclipse.
Once you leave Eclipse Cast Celestial Alignment and recast Moonfire no matter how much remains to apply both Moonfire and Sunfire
Again cast Starsurge on cooldown and fill the rotation with Starfire. Also make sure to recast Starfall when it falls off. It's also a good idea to cast a Moonfire at the end if both DoTs don't have much time left.

With this rotation you are casting three Starfire's fairly quickly, getting two Nature's Grace Buffs and a whole lot of buffed nukes and DoTs.

Single Target Rotation: After the Starting rotation, the single target Moonkin rotation is fairly close to what you are used too, but with less guess work. Here are the main things you want to remember.

The buffed DoT should always be recast when you enter Eclipse no matter how much is remaining on the current uneclipsed DoT. For example, if you have 6 seconds left on MF and you enter Lunar Eclipse recast MF on the target.
In my testing I found very little benefit to clipping a DoT at the end of Eclipse. My Simulation Craft tests did indicate that you could improve your DPS by 0.20% by clipping a DoT with 3 or 4 seconds left at the end of Eclipse, but that benefit is so small and risky that it's not really worth it.

Recast DoTs when they fall off, however I would recommend that you delay the casting the DoT if you are one nuke away from entering the Eclipse relevent to the DoT's school. Simulation Craft didn't show that doing this made a significant difference but I have a feeling that has more to do with the gear level I tested then anything else.

Cast Starsurge and Starfall on cooldown and fill with Starfire and Wrath depending on the direction.

Incarnation should always be used at the start of an Eclipse and then cast normally until you leave that Eclipse. Then Celestial Alignment should be cast followed by Moonfire. Then cast Starsurge and Starfire until the end of CA ending with a Wrath or Moonfire depending on what you have time for. Incarnation and Celestial Alignment should aways be used in this way to maximize their benefit.

AoE Rotation: The Moonkin AoE spells are changing in two big ways in MoP.

First Hurricane now has a Lunar version called Astral Storm and both have been buffed compared to what we saw in Cata. Astral Storm is a little bit weaker then Hurricane, but is buffed by Lunar Eclipse. This means that you want to be in Solar for AoE if possible, but AoEing in Lunar Eclipse is a lot better then it was if you get stuck.

Second, Wild Mushroom is much easier to use, but was nerfed quite a bit. Wild Mushrooms should only be used for AoE if they can be placed ahead of time. Otherwise they don't keep up with the improved Hurricane. Also, it is important to remember that they are still buffed by Solar Eclipse despite there being some talk of them not being buffed by either version.

Movement Rotation: Movement DPS hasn't really improved for Moonkin in MoP but it is a little different then what we have on live currently. Lunar Shower still has problems, but it no longer generates energy in MoP. Therefore you can spam MF or SnF while moving, but be careful which one you spam because you don't want to overate and eclipsed DoT with the uneclipsed version. Wild Mushroom is also still available for movement DPS and as said before is now easier to use.

Stat Changes

Hit Cap Change: For casters the base chance to miss a Skull level boss is being reduced from 17% to 15% in patch 5.0.4. This means the hit cap is shrinking from 1743 to 1535.

Crit > Haste = Mastery: The stat equation is getting flipped in MoP. It's clear that Crit Rating should be the best secondary stat for most players at level 85.

How players will value Haste and Mastery is not clear at all, and really depends on the individual. Some of my tests slightly favored Haste. In other's Mastery was a little bit better. How you value these stats depends on what gear you have an you have reforged it. I had to run 3 or 4 simulations to figure out what was the best set up for reforges. If you are looking to maximize your gear you will have to do the same.

Other Changes

Balance Power Tracker: This is the addon I used to track Eclipse in Cata and there is a new version for MoP. You can find it here.

Fewer Heals: Many of the healing spells Moonkin are used to having are no longer standard for druids. If you have self healing macro please realize that you only have Rejuv and Healing Touch after the patch.

No More Stat Sticks: The Ranged weapon socket is being removed from the game which means no more relics for druids.

Things You Won't see

Tier 6 Talents: These talents require level 90 and obviously won't matter until MoP is released and we level up. Therefore there is no point in talking about Dream of Cenarius vs Nature's Vigil in this post.

Symbiosis: The Symbiosis spell is gained at level 87 and not available at this point. That said, I think it's a big disappointment for PvE.

Fae Empowerment: This was a failed experiment that was scrapped a little over a month ago. If you are Moonkin three is no reason to cast Faerie Fire unless your raid needs the debuff.

Nerfs and Random Stuff I Missed

2012-08-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

The end is near and it's time for me to stop being slack and write another blog post. At this point in development the big changes have been made, but there are a lot of little things to talk about. Plus, as I prepare for the release I am discovering some things that I've missed. Lets take a look.

Nerf, Nerf, Slight Buff:

Over the last three beta builds we've seen a lot of balancing changes. Most of them nerfs, and to some this looks like the sky is falling, but really it's not. Please think back to June 25 when Ghostcrawler said:

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. However, don't be surprised when you see them (source)

Yes, that quote is from a month and a half ago and the straight DPS buffs GC was talking about was Fae Empowerment which no longer exists. However, just because they got rid of Fae Empowerment doesn't mean the nerfs weren't coming after all. When they got rid of FE they didn't revert back to the old design. They changed Euphoria so that Eclipse has a much higher uptime. They made Sunfire a separate DoT with a separate button to push. And they buffed the heck out of both Moonfire and Sunfire to make Moonkin a more DoT centric spec.

In short, those were a lot of buffs and Moonkin became a bit overpowered on the beta, and the modeling was showing that. In my opinion the best modeling available right now is coming from Simulation Craft and prior to these nerfs there were models having Moonkin Doing 141k DPS with Dream of Cenarius and 126k without it. Those are very high numbers and put Moonkin well ahead of the other classes. Moonkin needed a nerf, but the question now is if Blizzard has gone to far.

I usually put a lot of trust in the numbers produced by Simulation Craft, and that is why I'm worried that Blizzard has been a little heavy with the nerfs. Here is a link to the Simulation Craft results. You may see something different then what I'm saying, because they do get updated, but at the time of this posting Moonkin DPS in this ranking is well behind most of the DPS classes. Moonkin are doing around 100k DPS with most of the other DPS specs doing between 115k and 125k.

While these results are a bit distressing it is important to not panic and view them with the proper perspective. First its important to remember that Simulation Craft is not perfect. I have a lot of respect for the Simulation Craft developers, but with the amount of changes coming through it's not unreasonable to assume that there are some bugs in the system that skew the data. Blizzard does have it's own internal models, which they claim disagree with the Simulation Craft numbers.

At this point it's impossible to tell which model is right, but the models are really the starting point rather then the end. Models are built on assumptions. They can end up being very wrong if those assumptions prove to be incorrect, and players have been very good in the past about proving those assumptions wrong. Take the Solar Cleave rotation as an example. It wasn't anticipated by Blizzard and made all of the balancing done before the expansion useless because players didn't play in the way that Blizzard had expected.

This is the reason why it's best to balance the game around actual game data when possible. And remember Blizzard isn't shy about making changes quickly with hotfixes if one class turns out to be way overpowered or another proves to be significantly behind. Right before Cataclysm Moonkin were extremely over powered due to the DoTS and we were nerfed within a week. If the proves to be an issue this time, I trust that Blizzard will make the necessary adjustments.

Dream of Cenarius: How Did I Miss This?

Dream of Cenarius Nourish, Healing Touch, and Regrowth increase the damage done by your next 2 Moonfire or Sunfire casts by 100% (build 15961)
In Build 15972, the damage increase to Moonfire and Sunfire is being reduced to 50%.

I am embarrassed to admit that the change to Dream of Cenarius happened without me even noticing it. That said, I'm glad it's getting nerfed. My only question now is if it's enough.

The 100% version of Dream of Cenarius was extremely powerful. The Simulations done by Starfox with Simulation Craft showed that it was by far the best talent option in the Tier 6 talents. However, from a moonkin perspective it is a bad design and created a situation where players would use the talent in a way that was not intended by Blizzard.

Please remember that Tier 6 is not intended to be a DPS tier. The DPS tier is tier 4. Tier 6 is and has always been the "Hybrid" tier where Blizzard is trying to get players out of their specialized roles that we have barricaded ourselves in for the past 8 years. We could argue whether the Hybrid concept is a good idea or not. Many people including myself have argued that it's not a good idea, but the fact of the matter is Blizzard is committed to it and we have to deal with it whether we like the concept or not. So the question becomes, what should a Hybrid talent look like for players?

Ideally, a Hybrid talent is one that allows you to perform an alternate role at a reasonable strength for a limited amount of time. From a Moonkin perspective all three Tier 6 talents fit this idea of a Hybrid pretty well. Heart of the Wild is a activated buff that buffs a Moonkin's healing and tanking ability temporarily. Dream of Cenarius ideally allows a Moonkin to use a buffed heal or a resto to use an improved DoT. Nature's Vigil caused your primary role to perform the secondary role in a limited sense temporarily.

The problem with Hybrid talents, is that why would anyone ever rely on one. If you know your going to need extra healing at one point in the fight you bring an extra healer, not moonkin who can pop HotW or NV. If a Moonkin can rely on the healers to heal him up a majority of the time why would he pick up Dream of Cenarius. My point is that the need for a Hybrid talent is rare and unpredictable and as a result these talents would be useless 90% if they relied on their Hybrid ability alone to make them interesting. This is why Blizzard added the DPS aspects to the talents, to what I must admit are varying degrees of success. Nature's Vigil is the true winner in this regard, since it allows a Moonkin to heal by DPSing and Resto to DPS by healing. Adding 6% Intellect to HotW isn't an elegant way to make it useful, but it does get the job done. Dream of Cenarius is where the real mistake was made.

The 100% version of Dream of Cenarius wasn't a mistake because it was weak or wasn't useful. In fact the problem was that it was too useful and minimized Hybrid aspect of the talent. As I said above, ideally a hybrid talent should buff the secondary role temporarily, but Dream of Cenarius did the opposite. It created a situation where your secondary role buffed the primary role so that players would cast heals even if they weren't need purely to get more DPS. On top of that it turned Tier 3 into a DPS choice as well because Nature's Swiftness then became mandatory to maximize Moonkin DPS.

In short, I think the Dream of Cenarius nerf is a good thing.

The New Gem Design:

You may remember that I made a series of "MoP Wish List" posts, and in one of them I talked about changes I would like to see made to the Gem system. Though that post got a lot of positive response from readers, but I didn't see any official changes until recently when I as making the first gear list for MoP.

In the past Primary stats like Intellect and Secondary stats like Haste have been treated as equals when it comes to gem itemization. The Brillant Queen's Garnet gave 50 Int and the Quick Lightstone gave 50 Haste. In MoP, that appears to be changing with the Brilliant Pandarian Garnet providing 120 Int but the Quick Sunstone providing 240 Haste.

When I first saw this I was excited, because I thought it might change the way we consume gems, but it doesn't. All it does is shift the focus away from the Red Gem to the Yellow gem for most classes. It may make Blue and Green gems slightly more valuable as well, but I would have prefered to see a more radical change.

Balance Rotation: Take 3

2012-08-02T20:45:00.005-05:00

The end is near, and that's not a big surprise. People have been guessing that it would be a late summer early fall release for months. With the expansions cinematic being released on August 16th and the new novel Tides of War coming out on August 28th, it wasn't hard to guess that the expansion things were almost done. Then Blizzard made it official by announcing the release date of Sept 25th.

In years past, I would have taken this as a sign that almost everything was done. The rotation was the rotation and it was up to us to make the best of the tools we have been given. However, that is not the case this time with Blizzard making significant changes to the rotation just two months before MoP's release. It's hard to say how much time we have to influence these the design at this point but lets take a look.

Fae Empowerment: We Barely Knew You

The first big change is that Fae Empowerment has been removed and rightfully so. Fae Empowerment was a failure on almost all fronts. At first, it provided little or no DPS boost even when used perfectly and lowered DPS when used incorrectly. Blizzard did fix the DPS problem by increasing the duration on the buffs, increasing the buffs, and adding Astral Empowerment, but that wasn't the ability's only problem.

The original goal was to spice the moonkin rotation up a little bit by making it more dynamic and adding a little more choice. Unfortunately Fae Empowerment did neither. Instead of making the rotation more dynamic it added another predictable button to an already very predictable rotation. In the end, FE became a very complicated ability with three different buffs that didn't add anything significant to the rotation.

Given how close we are to the release of Mists, I think it is important to give Blizzard some credit for scrapping this change and trying something new. It would have been easy for Blizzard to move forward with Fae Empowerment despite it's problems, and force us to deal with it. No matter how the new changes turn out, we have to give Blizzard some credit for trying something new this late in the game.

The Big Changes:

MMO Champion has datamined most of the changes and you can find them here on their web site, but there are three main changes that I want to focus on.

Moonfire and Sunfire are now two different buttons. Plus, both spells have been buffed and the duration of both spells has been increased to 18 seconds.
Critical Strikes from the nukes will now extend the duration of one or both DoTs by 2 seconds depending on the school of the nuke and DoT. Nukes no longer refresh the DoT for the full duration during Eclipse.
Euphoria doubles the amount of Eclipse energy generated outside of Eclipse.

There are a lot of other little changes as well but these are the main three that will significantly change how a Moonkin is played in MoP. Don't be at all surprised if we see more balancing changes to other spells and probably the Mastery bonus as well. As a result, it's hard to say definitively how this will affect the rotation since we don't know what the final numbers on all of these spells will be, but there are really only two ways it can go: DoT Clipping and No DoT Clipping.

No DoT Clipping: If the moonkin rotation returns to the traditional strategy of letting the DoTs run out before you cast them again, this could be a pretty interesting rotation mechanically. The core of the rotation would be the nukes generating and consuming Eclipse energy, but the DoT casts would vary because we can't predict how often DoTs would be extended. Not only that, since Starfire only extends Moonfire and Wrath only extends Sunfire, then the two DoTs will quickly fall out of sync and would make tracking the DoTs more challenging.

In theory this sounds great because it would create a fairly dynamic rotation that I think most players would enjoy. However, I'm not sure this play style would generate the best DPS give what we've seen in Cataclysm.

DoT Clipping: What we've learned from Cataclysm is that Clipping a DoT is sometimes the best option if it causes toe spell to receive a significant buff that it wouldn't have otherwise. This is why it is often a good idea to recast Sunfire and Insect Swarm as we leave Solar Eclipse even if they have just 5 or 6 seconds left. Having the Eclipsed DoT up for an additional 12 seconds over the normal version could be worth the GCD it costs to cast, and that could be a big problem for the "fun" of this rotation. It would also completely undermine the benefit of having Crits extend the DoTs.

The problem is that Eclipse could act like a timer and determine when it is best to recast DoT rather then the duration of the DoTs themselves. For example, if Sunfire has just 5 seconds left as you leave Solar Eclipse Clipping the last couple of ticks off the spell is likely a good idea if the Eclipse buff is strong enough. What if you are entering Lunar Eclipse but you already have a normal Moonfire on the target with 10 seconds left? If you clip the moonfire then you are cutting off more then half of the DoT. If you don't clip, then your Starfire Crits would be extending an inferior version of the DoT.

I don't know the answers to these questions, but if Clipping is frequently the best option in MoP, then the rotation will be very static and boring rather then the dynamic rotation I illustrated in the No DoT Clipping strategy.

How to Avoid Clipping:

The primary cause of the clipping problem is the strength of Eclipse. If the Eclipse buff is too strong then the DoTs hit like a wet noodle without it. Therefore, we clip some DoTs to maintain the stronger version on the target. If Eclipse was weaker, the difference between a normal DoT and an Eclipsed DoT would be smaller. As a result Clipping would be less desirable because the benefit to clipping would be smaller as well.

My toon Graylow on the live servers currently gets more then a 50% buff from Eclipse, which I think most would agree is a very significant buff. That is why it often makes a lot of sense to clip in Cata. In the current Beta version of MoP Eclipse is is even more significant. Not only has the base buff been increased, but the per point increase has been buffed and a new raid buff was added that gives every raid member 5 points of mastery. If I copied Graylow over to the Beta servers today, Eclipse would buff his spells by 76% with full raid buffs.

Blizzard knows that the MoP Eclipse numbers are too high and I know that they plan on nerfing Eclipse at some point in the future. The changes to Euphoria alone made a nerf to Eclipse necessary since it significantly increases the uptime of Eclipse as a whole. However, I would argue that a more significant nerf is necessary then one that would be based solely upon the increased uptime of Eclipse. In fact, I think that the Eclipse buff needs to be weaker then what we currently see on Live. The base buff needs to be less then the current base of 16%. Total Eclipse should provide fewer then 8 points of Mastery when it is trained at level 80. And the Mastery per point increase should be less then the current 2.0%.

I don't know what those numbers should be. It's actually more complicated then it sounds, because you have to adjust it in such a way that doesn't destroy the value of the Mastery Stat. However, if Blizzard wants to avoid widespread clipping in MoP then they need to nerf mastery more then they are probalby planning./

Other Thoughts:

A Movement DPS Improvement: I'm not sure if this is an intended outcome of the change or a happy accident but this actually helps a Moonkins movement DPS a little. As you guys know, Lunar Shower and spamming Moonfire was intended to be the primary source of movement DPS for moonkin in Cata. Unfortunately, there are several problems with that strategy and it didn't work out as in tended. One of the big problems is that spamming an uneclipsed Moonfire would overwrite an Eclipsed version of Sunfire or Moonfire.

Changing Moonfire and Sunfire to be two separate buttons eliminates that problem. With a little heads up play a player can realize that he Sunfire on the target is buffed with Eclipse and therefore they should spam Moonfire if they have to move and not worry about overwriting the Eclipsed spell. Granted this isn't that big of an improvement because Lunar Shower still has other problems like ramp up time, but it does help a little.

Is Crit the Stat of the Future? Crit has been the least favorable DPS stat for most of my WoW career. There was a brief period in WotLK were it was better then Haste, but that was the exception rather then the rule. However, Blizzard has made three changes that should make Crit Rating a much more desirable stat in MoP.

No Crit from Int: In case you didn't know (and I assume some of you don't) Intellect no longer increases you a players Critical Strike chance in MoP. While I know some of you will bemoan the loss, but this is actually good for the value of crit since Crit Rating has very high diminishing returns. This will lower a players base crit chance and as a result increase the overall value of Crit Rating.

Shooting Stars based on Crit: Having Shooting Stars procs based off of DoT crits rather then DoT ticks increases the value Crit rating for obvious reasons. Having two DoTs again actually makes this impact more significant now because more DoTs means more Crits. That said, I don't expect this impact to be huge since Shooting Stars has only a 30% chance to proc on the crits.

Nuke Crits Extending DoTs: Again, if Nuke Crits extend the duration of the DoTs then that obviously improves the value of Crit rating. That said, this impact will be significantly diminished if Clipping happens frequently in MoP.

I don't know where crit will fall in the stat hierarchy in MoP, but I won't be surprised at all of Crit becomes more valuable then Mastery on a point for point basis. My guess is that Crit will end up falling between Haste and Mastery as the second best Secondary DPS stat. I will have to do some testing on this later.

The Lunar and Solar Similarities: In Cataclysm Lunar and Solar are quite different, and Solar ended up being the better buff because of the number of spells it affected. In MoP Blizzard has made several changes to correct that. Hurricane now has a arcane version called Astral Storm. Insect Swarm was eliminated balancing out the DoTs, and now that Moonfire and Sunfire are two separate buttons it is difficult not to notice how similar Lunar and Solar have become.

I know that number wise Lunar favors single target DPS and Solar favors multi target DPS, but in terms of structure there are really only two difference left. The first is that each has a unique spell that they buff. Lunar has Starfall and Solar has Wild Mushroom, but all of the other Druid DPS spells have version for both types of Eclipse or are buffed by both types of Eclpse.

The other difference is the cast time of Wrath and Starfire and as a result the amount of energy each of them generates. While they still have different cast times, that difference has been shrinking. After talents Wrath had a cast tome 1.5 seconds and Starfire was 3.0 seconds prior to Cataclysm. In Cataclysm the difference is much smaller. Wrath now has a base cast time of 2.0 seconds and Starfire's base cast time was lowered to 2.7 seconds. Wrath's cast time was increased to avoid creating a haste cap, and Starfire's cast time was lowered to make the Eclipse energy math work out better.

I agree with both of those changes, but two spells that used to be 1.5 seconds apart are now just 0.7 seconds apart. I now wonder why there is any difference at all. Is there any situation in PvE or PvP where Wrath has an advantage for being 0.7 seconds faster? Why not just increase Wrath's cast time and energy generation to match Starfire. This would make the Eclipse energy math much easier since all spells would then generate 20 energy.

Starsurge, Fae Empowerment, & Other Stuff

2012-06-29T22:58:00.002-05:00

The class balance thread on the forums and the recent beta build are providing new goodies to talk about for moonkin. Blizzard apparently has heard the criticism that some people think the moonkin rotation is boring and is taking steps to add more variety. It's also important to note that these changes are intended to be DPS neutral in the long run and we should expect to see nerfs in other areas in the future as well.

Starsurge and Shooting Stars:

* Shooting Stars now has a 50% proc rate, up from 30%.

* Starsurge damage was increased by 30%.

From my PvE perspective I like these changes for several reasons. If you think back to the Cataclysm Beta, Starsurge has really become a shadow of it's former self. It was built to be this powerful spell that felt substantial, but it was nerfed for what most people thought were PvP reasons and then Wrath and Starfire were buffed to make for breaking Solar Cleave. As a result, Starsurge became this nuke with a cooldown that was slightly better then your standard spells. We hit the button because that was the best button to hit at the time but there was no excitement for having it line up correctly or having Shooting Stars proc at the right time. I don't know how this will affect PvP, and frankly I personally don't care. I'm just glad that Blizzard is trying to restore Starsurge as a significant spell.

The change to Shooting Stars is more interesting. It's hard to calculate the exact impact of this, but there are two things we can be sure of. First, it will boost the value of crit which I think we need. Crit has never been an exceptionally strong stat for Moonkin, but until Cataclysm it at least felt like it had a purpose because procced Eclipse and Nature's Grace. In cataclysm the only purpose Crit had was to get it off our stats as quickly as possible either through reforging or finding new gear. Hopefully this change will make crit a more significant stat that can compete with Haste and Mastery.

The second impact of this change is that it actually brings some variety to the moonkin rotation when transitioning between Eclipses. Blizzard has been talking about doing this for a couple of months and suggested things like reintroducing Insect Swarm, adding Astral Communion, and adding Fae Empowerment (more on that later), but all of these ideas were either not implemented or were kind of half baked with regards to changing the moonkin rotation. This is the first change that has a realistic chance of preventing the moonkin rotation from being a long string Starfire or Wrath casts and it's implemented so simply by just changing a proc rate. This is a clear example of how sometimes the simple solutions prove to be the best.

Fae Empowerment:

Fae Empowerment (New) - When you cast Faerie Fire, you gain Lunar Empowerment and Solar Empowerment. Lunar Empowerment Increases the damage of your next 3 Starfires within 18 sec by 20%. Solar Empowerment Increases the damage of your next 3 Wraths within 18 sec by 25%. Druid - Balance Spec.

My first impression of Fae Empowerment wasn't that good. It's an interesting idea, but it has several issues that prevent it from sitting right in my head.

My first concern is that it's too much of a trap. In the Blue Post, Ghostcrawler described Fae Empowerment this way: "Should you choose to ignore it, your DPS will likely be only a few percentage behind someone who uses it optimally." That sounds all well and good, but there is a third category of players that his comment does not address. What about the players who use Fae Empowerment sub optimally, and how does it impact there DPS?

To the inexperienced player, Fae Empowerment looks great on the surface, because casting Faerie Fire can buff 6 spells by 20%-25%. The problem is that Fae Empowerment is that it has a cost that isn't obvious to many players and could potentially reduce the players DPS rather then increasing it. That cost is the Global Cooldown, and it lowers the players DPS in a couple of ways. First, that is a second to 1.5 seconds where you aren't doing any damage since Faerie Fire has no damage of it's own in Moonkin Form. Second, it increases your eclipse transition by the GCD amount and as a result lowers your DoT and Nature's Grace uptimes. These two things may not sound like much, but they can easily drag total DPS down by one or two percent. That is a pretty big gap for a buff on a limited number of spells to make up.

Secondly, I'm very happy that they increased the duration from 15 seconds to 18 seconds. I made a post on Elitist Jerks about the timing needed to maximize Fae Empowerment and it was tight even at high gear levels. To optimize Fae Empowerment you need to cast three Wraths and three Starfires around an Eclipse transition while maintaining the rest of your rotation. That means along with the nukes you also need to cast Moonfire, Starsurge, and Starfall if you are transitioning into Lunar.

The Elitist Jerks post has some tables that detail how long it would take to cast all the things that need casting at various haste levels. Unfortunately my computer is not letting me create those tables in this post, but the summary is even at a high level of haste in a best case scenario getting all of the spells cast in 15 seconds was very tight. In a live situation with lag and other delays, I think it would be impossible. The increase to 18 seconds will make this easier of course, but I would prefer it was even a little longer then that.

Third, there is a fairly high risk of not using all 6 empowerment buffs. I need to test this on a more robust simulator like SimulationCraft, but in my homegrown simulator I was frequently hitting Eclipse early due to Starsurge casts and Euphoria procs and having to skip some of he empowerment buffs or slow down my the eclipse transition.

What is Fae Empowerment's Purpose?

Finally, I'm beginning to wonder if Fae Empowerment is really worth all of this effort. What is it's purpose? What is Blizzard trying to achieve?

The goal of Fae Empowerment seems to be two fold. The first stated by Ghostcrawler on the forums was that it is to give players more "micro level choices." The second is to address a frequent player complaint by breaking up the rotation a little and give the players another button to push. In my opinion it's not succeeding on either level. There is no real choice since the times you want to use FF and Fae Empowerment are very predictable. It also doesn't really add anything to the rotation since it is just one predictable button an eclipse cycle.

I'm sure that Fae Empowerment can be adjusted in such a way that it makes sense to use, and I'm sure that we will see more modifications soon. That said, I personally think that while the moonkin rotation may be a little boring, this version of Fae Empowerment isn't adding a whole lot and may actually be harming DPS.

Other Stuff:

Wild Mushroom: now damages all enemies within 8 yards, up from 6. Now allows 5 mushrooms, up from 3.

A small change, that doesn't appear to be entirely accurate. I tested it out in beta and the range has been increased to 8 yards which is great for us. However, at this point it still only allows us to place 3 mushrooms. In all honesty I would prefer that they increase WMs damage then increase the number of mushrooms we can put down. Having to spend time to put two more mushrooms down in what usually is the same place as the other three seems like a waste.

Item - Druid T14 Balance 2P Bonus - Your Starfall deals 20% additional damage.

Item - Druid T14 Balance 4P Bonus - Increases the duration of your Moonfire and Sunfire spells by 3 sec.

The T14 set bonus have actually been in the files since April, I just never got around to commenting on them in the past. The seem to be fairly standard stuff. It's hard to judge how strong they are at this point since the rotation in a bit of flux, but I'm sure they will be fine.

The Unofficial Ghostcrawler Q&A

2012-06-22T14:39:00.006-05:00

Ghostcrawler has hit the forums recently and is answering a ton of questions about class design and mechanics in an effort to get more feedback from the theorycrafting player bases. He hasn't said a whole lot about Moonkins. In fact, two of the things he said cancelled each other out, but there was one nugget that I found very interesting.

Solar and Lunar are not Equal:

Q: Actually, is the design intention to have both Eclipses with the same damage output for single targets and AoE?
A: Actually, no. We’re currently intending for Lunar to be slightly better at single target damage and Solar to be AoE damage. When you have time between phases or situations where you can use Astral Communion to quickly switch sides, you should be able to further optimize performance by tailoring which Eclipse you line up with which boss phases. The difference should not be significant enough, however, that in a Patchwerk-style scenario, you are compelled to only DPS in one eclipse.

This explains a lot. You may remember about a month ago beta build 15726 did some fairly strange things based upon the information we had up to that point. Hurricane and Starfire were buffed while Astral Storm and Wrath were nurfed. A lot of people wondered what the hell Blizzard was doing and I speculated that it was some sort of tool tip or data mining error, but now it makes sense.

My first impression was pretty positive. A lot of players believe that the current MoP moonkin rotation is to simple and therefore boring. I don't agree with them 100%, but I can see their point. As it stands right now, when you enter eclipse you cast your dot and maybe starfall and then just cast nukes until you reach the next eclipse.

This doesn't change the rotation, but having Solar favor AoE and Lunar favor single target adds a little thought and planning back into the rotation. The better players should be able to set themselves apart by being in the right eclipse and that should make them at least a little happy. Additionally under this system mistakes aren't punished as harshly as they currently are since you will still do decent AoE damage in Lunar and decent single target damage in solar.

All that said, after a little more thought I do have a couple of concerns.

Is the Difference Too Big:

My first concern is about the size of the difference. As you may remember, Hurricane and Starfire were buffed by 10% in beta build 15726 while Astral Storm and Wrath were nurfed by 10%. This means that Hurricane and Starfire will be about 22% stronger then their counterparts and that fells a little to large for me. I would prefer to see a difference in the 10% - 15% range.

Timing Eclipse Again:

I have found timing Eclipse in Cataclysm to be extremely problematic, and in my opinion one of the best things about the new MoP rotation (prior to the specialized eclipses) was that timing Eclipse should have been a much smaller issue. While miss timing Eclipse in MoP won't completely destroy your DPS the way it does in Cataclysm, having specialized Eclipse buffs makes it a much more significant issue.

I know a lot of you see this as a good thing because it theoretically allows skilled players differentiate themselves by using the right Eclipse at the right time. Unfortunately this ignores the fact that timing Eclipse isn't entirely within the players control. Of course there are the random elements of the game like Euphoria procs and random movement that can speed up or slow down the rotation, but those are just the obvious aspects of our lack of control. A less obvious issue is how your guild performs as a whole. For example, the better guilds with higher quality players will kill mobs faster and phase a boss faster with the opposite being true for less skilled guilds. Yet, the the time it takes for a player to transition from solar eclipse to solar eclipse is fairly consistent. So, a moonkin can perform at the same level for two different guilds, but get different results because of performance differences in the rest of the guild or with improved gear and buffs.

A good example of this is Heroic Ragnaros. As we all know, being in Solar Eclipse is extremely important for phase two of heroic rag to DPS down the adds quickly. At the end of T12 raiding my Phase one DPS was timed just about perfectly. If I was a little short, when the boss phased I could push Solar Eclipse during the transition and would have it when I needed it. Everything was right with the world. However, as I started doing Heroic rag to farm mounts and get the legendary quest items during T13, my eclipse transitions stopped lining up with the bosses transitions and has reduced my overall DPS on the fight.

Making this complaint and using heroic Rag as an example might not be entirely fair because I am using a level of gear that this fight was not designed for. However, I do see the same thing happening in Dragon Soul with the ever increasing damage buff that Bizzard provides so that everyone can get the kill. Zon'ozz is a good example of this, because I want to be in solar for the black phase to dot up the tentacles, but I've seen my timing change every time the buff is increased.

Making the different Eclipse buffs specialized reintroduces the timing problem into the rotation in a significant way. Messing up the timing in MoP won't be as devastating to moonkin DPS as it is in Cataclysm, but I don't like any situation where my DPS could suffer due to things not entirely in my control.

Another Look at Astral Communion:

After that last section I know some of you are thinking "Hey, What about Astral Communion? Doesn't that fix the control issue?" To that, I say yes and no. Astral Communion is a great tool that helps in a pinch, but it is extremely limited because it is a channelled spell. For Astral Communion to be useful you have to be standing around doing nothing or being in Eclipse for the next phase has to be so important that it's worth the DPS Loss. How many situations fall into one of those two categories? How many times are you standing around in a boss fight with nothing to do? In my experience, there haven't been many of those times. Even during boss transitions there is usually a stack up point or something of that nature that I have to move towards eliminating the possibility of using Astral Communion.

This leads me to the first change I would like to see made regarding Astral Communion. I would like to be able to cast Astral Communion while moving. Not only would this help you out during transitions when you need to get into a new position, but it also acts as an indirect movement DPS option that Moonkin currently don't have.

My second issue is, what do you do when you need to do high single target DPS but you are already half way through the Lunar Eclipse bar? Astral communion isn't a good option because it will take you at least 21 seconds to get back to the top of Lunar Eclipse. Staying where you are at isn't great because you will be leaving Lunar Eclipse soon. There are other options as well, but none of them are all that good, because they require you to DPS in a less then optimal way.

To address this, I think it would be neat to have a way to move the Eclipse bar backwards. I'm not exactly sure what would be a good way to do this. Having a single button that always moved you to the closes Eclipse wouldn't work, because if you were in Solar and wanted to be in Lunar, it would move you in the wrong direction, Having two buttons that moved the bar in one direction only, would work but it feels pretty confusing.

Astral Communion and Wild Mushrooms

2012-05-24T17:39:00.001-05:00

If this wasn't a WoW blog that title might make you think that this post is about a weird new hippie religion, but if you've been paying attention to the Beta and Blue Posts lately you know that these are the two most recent topics of conversation regarding Balance druids.It's nice to have lot of attention being focused on Moonkin again, though it could have happened a slightly better time for me (I'm going on vacation next week and will be AFK). I've already posted about the possible return of Insect Swarm and Ghostcrawlers comments about managing Eclipse. So, in this post I will focus on the new ability Astral Communion and the role of Wild Mushrooms.

Astral Communion:

Astral Communion - Commune with the sun and moon, gaining 20 Lunar or Solar energy every 1 sec for 5 sec. Generates the power type most beneficial to you. 5 sec cast (Channeled).

Those of you that follow me on Twitter know that my gut reaction to Astral Communion was not good. I envisioned that it would dominate the moonkin rotation unless it had some limitation like a cooldown or that it could only be used out of combat. My logic was pretty simple. Why would you cast spells for 15 seconds when you could channel Astral Communion for 5? After thinking about it with a little more perspective I realize that my judgement might have been a little hasty. Now I see some potential in the ability, but there are some pitfalls Blizzard has to be sure to avoid.

Having a way to get close to eclipse (without killing critters) before you start an encounter will be nice. It will require some timing because getting one cast preferable to starting in eclipse, but that shouldn't be two hard to manage. It's also nice that it would provide us with something to do in down time and give us a way to get to Eclipse quickly if critical phase of the fight is a about to start. My guess is that these are the intended types of uses for this ability, but I fear the unintended consequences.

My main concern is that Astral Communion could become a part of the core rotation, and I think that is something everyone (including Blizzard) wants to avoid. To do that, any ability that allows us to manage Eclipse needs to come with a trade-off as i said on Monday. Astral Communion does have a trade-off in that you can't do any damage for the 5 seconds while you are channeling Astral Communion. The question is if it's enough.

After hearing about the new ability I tried to validate my concern with an extremely simple model. It had just one nuke cast every two seconds and generated 20 energy with each cast. The first timeline had a total of 60 casts (30 with eclipse, 30 without). The second timeline had 40 eclipsed casts and 8 AC channels. The first timeline out performed the second timeline even when the Eclipsed casts did double the damage of the normal casts. This "test" was in no way definitive or scientific. It not only didn't use real spells or real numbers, but it also excluded DoTs and Nature's Grace.

My test did allay my concerns somewhat. Using Astral Communion every time you leave Eclipse doesn't appear to be an obvious DPS improvement that I thought it would be at first. That said, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a clever player found a way to turn it into a DPS increase and that has to be avoided. At this point I'm cautiously optimistic, but it needs a lot of testing.

Wild Mushrooms:

Mushrooms don't benefit from Eclipse and really it's targeted more at something you set up before targets arrive. You then use Hurricane once they're there. That's the intent, anyway, and if it's not there yet, then we'll get it there

Lets get one thing straight up front. Blizzard never designed Wild Mushrooms to be used for AoE. If you want to think back to the early days of the Cataclysm Beta, you will remember that Wild Mushroom started with a 15 yard radius and did so much damage that they were better then every other spell we had, especially when they could hit multiple targets. Blizzard reacted by both nerfing the damage and by reducing the radius to just 6 yard. When players complained, Blizzard made their intent clear by stating that they expected players to place mushrooms at spawn points or along their path (if I remember correctly). Wild Mushroom's damage was eventually buffed, but the blast radius has remained 6 yards ever since.

Obviously this wasn't enough because Wild Mushroom has been the primary source of moonkin AoE in Cataclysm along with multi-dotting. However, Blizzard has taken steps to correct this in the MoP beta. The first and most obvious change is the introduction of Astral Storm (an arcane copy of hurricane, think MF/SF). They've also buffed the spell coefficients for Hurricane and nerfed the coefficients for Wild Mushroom. However, as Murmur's pointed out on the forums and as I've said in the past, as long as Wild Mushroom is affected by only Solar Eclipse then Moonkin AoE would still center around the Solar Buff.

With this in mind, Ghostcrawler's comment is really just the final nail in the coffin for Wild Mushrooms utility as AoE, and I support this change. I like many players have not been a fan of the WM/Multi-DoT AoE rotation and will be happy to see it gone for good. Wild Mushroom may need some tweaks to make it viable as the the trap it's intended to be if it is no longer buffed by Eclipse. For example, the damage may need to go up a little bit, and I would love to see the radius increased to provide a higher margin of error. To be honest, I'm surprised it has taken them this long to make this change. Blizzard has known for months that the current form of Wild Mushroom would still cause players to favor Solar Eclipse.

TL-DR:

Astral Communion: Cautiously Optimistic

Uneclipsed Wild Mushroom: A good change.

Insect Swarm and Managing Eclipse

2012-05-21T16:58:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't seen it, Ghostcrawler came back to the forums this weekend with a few more thoughts on the state of Insect Swarm and the moonkin rotation. He did mention Insect Swarm very briefly, but a majority of his comments focused on the potential for managing Eclipse and how that has affected the Moonkin rotation. Once again, there aren't a whole lot of details at this point, but here is my take on these comments.

Insect Swarm Again:

In Ghostcrawlers second comment he was a little wishy washy (at least compared to his first post). Here is what he said exactly:

If we add Insect Swarm back, it would not be just to have another dot to manage, but to give players some way to interact with solar or lunar power more. There are other ways to do that too, so it may not ultimately be Insect Swarm. The rotation is close to where we want it, but it needs just a little more to play with.

Lets start from the back first. I completely agree that the current MoP rotation is pretty solid. Most of the major issues with the Cata Rotation have been corrected. Personally I'm perfectly fine with where the MoP rotation stands, but I can see the point that some people are making that it's a bit boring and repetitive after you trigger Eclipse and get the DoT up. So, I'm not opposed to adding something that makes the rotation a little more dynamic, but I would encourage restraint in adding anything so that things don't swing to far in the other direction.

Adding another spell like Insect Swarm, could be the solution for making the rotation more dynamic. The question is what would the new spell look like. The previous MoP version of Insect Swarm doesn't make any sense in this regard because it wouldn't add any complexity to the rotation. Therefore, I'm going to ignore that possibility for now.

Ghostcrawler's comments also seem to dismiss the possibility of Insect Swarm returning as a DoT, but I wonder if that might be taking the comment a little to literally. One of the big problems with moonkin DoTs in Cata is that Moonfire and Insect Swarm are too similar in that they have the same duration. This means that they are usually cast in tandem and therefore it doesn't make much sense to have them as separate spells. What Ghostcrawler might have been saying is that it doesn't make sense to have another DoT exactly like Moonfire. Insect Swarm could be coming back as a DoT, but something significantly different then Moonfire that would add something new to the rotation.

There is one suggestion for an Insect Swarm DoT that I think has some merit. What if Insect Swarm was added back as a DoT unaffected by Eclipse? The idea behind it is that it would be a button moonkin would hit every 12 seconds or so regardless of where you are in the Eclipse transition, and would give players more to do then spam nukes after Moonfire is up.

While this should make the rotation more dynamic, I do have some concerns about how this would affect balancing. First of all Insect Swarm would have to be stronger then your average nuke (with and without Eclipse) to make it worthwhile in a patchwerk rotation. Second, it would scale differently then our other spells since it would be unaffected by Eclipse and Mastery. This could cause concerns over the course of the expansion and might become too weak to cast by the end as it has in the past. Third, it would weaken Mastery as a stat for moonkin and could make gearing for moonkin difficult because Haste might be the only significantly attractive secondary stat.

However, All that I've said about Insect Swarm in this post could be a waste of breath if Ghostcrawler actually did mean that Insect Swarm was not coming back as a DoT. One thing is very clear to me though. At this point, nothing is set in stone. Don't be surprised if what we end up with in a month or two seems completely different then what has been talked about in the past few days.

The Problem with Managing Eclipse:

The rest of Ghostcrawler's comment about managing Eclipse has me a little concerned. After saying he wanted to "give players some way to interact with solar or lunar power more" in the comment above, he went on to say:

At the 5000 foot view, the point of the Eclipse mechanic to begin with was to cast X spells for a time, then switch to Y spells with the Druid having some control over when or why that occurred. We don't think killing critters to get the bar moving or gaming it so that you stayed at one side of the bar forever really delivered on the vision for Eclipse. However, those tactics did give players some control -- a way to game things so that more clever players could extract a bit more performance out of the mechanic.
We are concerned that we are too far to the other extreme now, where the game UI tells you whether to use your solar buttons or lunar buttons and you really aren't making any strategic decisions. We want to introduce some relatively simple, elegant mechanic to give you more control over how much lunar or solar power you have. Maybe that's Insect Swarm. Maybe it's something else. Try it out over the next few builds, keeping in mind that it may take a bit before we have something we are satisfied with.

I'm not opposed to having a way to manage Eclipse, but I think providing such an ability is a risky option that could quickly get out of control. The problem is that Eclipse is so strong that it dominates how much damage a moonkin deliver. Anything you can do that would increase Eclipse uptime and usage is probably a good idea, and that is how the moonkin rotation got to the strange situation we are in today in Cata.

As GC said in his comment we killed critters to get as close to eclipse as possible at the start of a fight. We came up with interesting strategies like Solar Cleave to stay in one Eclipse and pump out a tone of damage. We did the calculations and simulations to determine when it was a good time to clip the DoTs so that they had a higher uptime while buffed by Eclipse. GC's comments show that they didn't intend the first two to happen, and I seriously doubt they intended us to be clipping DoTs either. This just goes to show that any control we gain could end up dominating our rotation if it has a significant impact on Eclipse uptime and usage.

This actually has me rethinking my position on Celestial Alignment. I like many players thought of Celestial Alignment as an on demand Eclipse at first, but that's not correct. Because it adds to Eclipse uptime, the goal is actually to cast it as close to on cooldown as possible. The only thing holding it's usage back is that it consumes all eclipse energy when used so that you want to use it as close to zero energy as possible. Of course there are times when delaying it's usage will make sense, but the reality is that will be the exception rather then the rule.

This realization lead me to another question. How do you give players a way to manage Eclipse without it increasing Eclipse usage and therefore dominating the rotation. Then I had an epiphany.

Managing Eclipse Needs a Trade-off:

Since players will do everything they can to maximize Eclipse usage, any ability that allows players to manage Eclipse has to come with a trade-off and be close to DPS neutral on a Patchwerk type encounter. Otherwise, it will just become a part of the standard rotation and provide no real control.

In general, I'm not a big fan of Armchair Development from players, because it is very easy for us to fall in love with a suggestion, without fully understanding the realities and technical limitations of the suggestion. That side I'm going to make a couple of suggestions that I think are nice examples of ways to manage Eclipse with a trade-off.

Eclipse Storage - Have Eclipse continue to proc at 100 energy, but allow players to continue to generate energy up to 150 or 200 by casting the "wrong" nuke.

My basic thought is that if you aren't ready to use Eclipse yet or if you need to slow your DPS, Eclipse storage would allow you to cast the "wrong" nuke without reducing your Eclipse usage since every time you cast an uneclipsed Starfire, you would get an eclipsed Wrath later (I know that isn't exactly true, but close enough at this point.)

I like this idea for a couple reasons. First, it's pretty close to being DPS neutral and probably a little DPS negative if used frequently. Your basically gaining an Eclipsed Nuke for each Uneclipsed Nuke you use. Second, it's not advantageous to use this ability excessively because it limits the uptime of Nature's Grace, Starfall, and possibly DoTs. To me, it sounds like an elegant solution to me because it provides a utility without the ability for it to be abused. Third, I also think this idea could work as a standard ability that moonkin always have or as a cooldown that players only used when they needed it.

My main concern with this suggestion is that it could make energy generation too complicated. The current system is nice in that it will only go one direction. Having spells be able to move the eclipse bar backwards all of the time is not necessarily something I want, because casting the wrong spell while eclipse is down would be very punishing.

Eclipse Fast Forward - Allows the player to immediately proc the next Eclipse, but cut Eclipse energy generation outside of Eclipse in half for one minute or until Eclipse is procced again.

The idea is that if you need to be in Eclipse right now you can hit this button and get there immidiately. It wouldn't increase Eclipse uptime, because reaching the next Eclipse will take longer due to generating Eclipse energy outside of eclipse at a much slower rate. As a result this ability should also be DPS neutral on Patchwerk if not a little DPS negative. It could also limit the uptimes of other abilities depending on when it was used.

My primary concern with an ability like this is that it might be too brainy and not very intuitive for newer players to understand. Since it would kind of behave like a cooldown, I'm sure there are quite a few people who would start to use it on cooldown as much as possible. Since there is potential for this ability to negatively impact DPS it could end up being a trap. Therefore, I have a feeling this type of ability isn't all that attractive to Blizzard.

Insect Swarm and the Interesting Rotation

2012-05-18T23:05:00.000-05:00

The early days of a World of Warcraft Beta is a dreamer's paradise. Players have the sense that everything that is wrong with there class can get fixed, and they scream their desires from the highest mountain tops. One of the more consistent and vocal groups are the players saying their rotation is to boring and want something more interesting. The Mists of Pandaria beta has followed this pattern completely. Early on some players were calling for "more interesting" usages of Insect Swarm and for an improved moonkin form that changed our abilities much like Tree of Life and Metamorphosis do.

To be entirely honest, these discussions annoy me. Most of the time they are overly simplified and overly optimistic diatribes about what is possible, but generally lack any creativity or analysis of what the real impact of their idea would be. I had thought about making a post on this a couple of months ago when the beta was newer and some players were in a frenzy about wanting an interesting rotation. Unfortunately, time got way from me and by the time I was ready to write it, the conversation had died down. Then Ghostcrawler brought the conversation roaring back by saying:

We are in fact experimenting with adding Insect Swarm back to the rotation.

Insect Swarm: The Possibilities

Ghostcrawler didn't provide any details on what they are thinking, but a couple of the options are obvious.

The MoP Buff: The newest version of Insect Swarm was a single target spell that did no damage on it's own, but buffed all of the Balance DPS spells. The player reaction to this version was mostly negative, since it significantly diminished moonkin multi-target DPS and created additional ramp up time for target switches. Ultimately this idea was quietly scrapped and never made it into the beta.

The DoT: In Cataclysm, Insect Swarm finally became a strong spell that remained significant for an entire expansion, but that improvement caused new issues. First, since it's currently only buffed by solar eclipse it contributed to the Soul Cleave issues that we have experienced through out Cataclysm. Reintroducing IS as a solar only spell would undermine the effort Blizzard has made to balance the eclipse transition in MoP. The other issue that I've had with IS is that it is too similar to Moonfire. Since the two spells have the same duration they are currently cast in tandem. To make matters worse, if they try to fix the solar cleave issues by buffing IS with lunar they make it even more similar to Moonfire. At some point, they might as well just have to turn them into one spell that you have to hit twice.

All that said, neither of these possibilities are very likely. Blizzard cut these designs for a reason, so it's unlikely that they would bring either of them back without some significant modifications. My guess is that IS will remain a DoT, but it will be interesting to see how they modify it so that Solar Cleave doesn't become an issue but still differentiate it from Moonfire.

Do Moonkin Need an Additional Button?

While the design of Insect Swarm is important, the bigger question in my mind is do moonkin even need another button to push? I know there are a lot of you out there that immediately answer yes, but I'm not convinced. To be fair, I've never been a big fan of complex rotations. I think if you look though my blog history you could find a post from TBC where I defended the MF, SFx4 rotation even though it is clearly very boring by most standards. That said, I do think the critics of the current MoP rotation are being a little harsh.

The standard complaint is that most of the MoP rotation happens around the eclipse transition and then you spam Wrath or Starfire until you get to the next eclipse. There is some truth to that, but I think it over simplifies the situation. First of all, many people seem to forget about Starsurge and Shooting Stars when discussing the MoP rotation. Starsurge is an additional button to push and Shooting Stars makes it unpredictable. The other thing to remember is that some of the nuance of our Cata DoT casting strategy is still there in MoP. While we won't be refreshing MF when we leave eclipse there is a question of if we want to refresh it before we enter a new eclipse. What I'm trying to say is that while the MoP rotation is simplier then the Cata rotation, it's not entirely brainless.

I'm also concerned that many of the critics are basing their dissatisfaction on incomplete information. Testing a rotation against quest mobs, target dummies and even in 5-mans doesn't provide the whole picture since Raids are the primary source of challenging content were a rotation is truly tested. We don't have a complete idea of what the rotation will look like when used in competitive content. For example, if you think back to the Cataclysm beta you might remember that that there were some people saying that the Cataclysm rotation was boring because it would two predictable and formulaic. Little did they know it would be one most complicated and convoluted rotations ever seen in the game.

None of this is to say that the MoP rotation can't be improved. I completely agree that after you trigger eclipse and cast whatever DoTs and cooldowns you need to cast, casting 10 to 15 nukes in a row doesn't sound like an awesome experience. However, I would much prefer a rotation that is a little two simple to something complex and subjective like the current Cataclysm rotation.

Should Rotations be a Source of Fun?

I do find it a little odd that some people treat the rotation as one of their primary sources of fun in this game. I see how having a more interesting rotation could make the game more fun in the short term, but I don't see how it can last. As a raider the rotation is something we we use 3 or 4 nights a week for several hours each night for close to 2 years. We use the rotation so frequently for so long that I don't see how any rotation can stay interesting over the long term.

I'm not suggesting that we should be fine with just any mind numbing, one button rotation, but I do think the critics of the MoP rotation are expecting a little much from a rotation. In my opinion the primary source of enjoyment could come from the raiding content. The fun should come from figuring out how to put out maximum DPS while not dying in a fire or how to modify the rotation to take a particular situation into account.

Tier Six Talent Revamp

2012-05-08T13:22:00.001-05:00

There has not been much Druid news coming out of the beta recently, and I was starting to assume that meant druids were done. That wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing either. On paper I like the over all design of the moonkin play style. However, there are some areas that I thought could use improvement. The most notable example of area needing improvement was tier six talents (lack of moonkin glyphs is a very close second).

While I had given up on the possibility of changing the tier six talents, others had not and Blizzard listened. So the good news is we get kick ass new talents and Lissanna can awake from her depression and stop cutting her self with an icky mage. Here are my more detailed thoughts.

Disentanglement:

Disentanglement — no longer a talent. Shapeshifting for all druids just breaks roots.

I completely agree with Lissanna’s assessment here. Disentanglement was a boring talent in a boring tier. Breaking roots by Shapeshifting has been baseline for druids as long as I’ve played this game and that should never have changed. Losing the heal that Disentanglement provided sucks a tiny bit, but we druids have so many other self healing options that it isn’t a big deal at all.

Dream of Cenarius:

Dream of Cenarius — increases damage spells by 70% (up from 30%)..

From a PvE Moonkin perspective, Dream of Cenarius is probably the new blah talent of the tier, and when we look at the two other options below you will see that it really suffers by comparison. It has two issues.

First, no one is going to take a healing buff over a DPS buff. That is one of the primary reasons for redesigning the talent system again. So we can completely ignore that part of the talent for now. Second, any time I can cast Nourish or Healing Touch, I can cast a nuke. The only exception is when there isn’t a valid target, and that doesn’t happen that often during fights.

Finally, there has been some speculation on EJ that we could use a short heal like Regrowth to buff a long nuke like Starfire, or use a heal to buff a strong spell like FoN, Starsurge, or Starfall. As has already been pointed out on EJ, Regrowth is now a resto only spell so that idea won’t work, but it may be beneficial to use to buff our stronger spells. That said, I don’t have high hopes for that possibility. It would likely be a tiny improvement that required a heavy handed use of mechanics to achieve. The other options are easier and likely stronger. I expect most PvE players will ignore this one, but it could be huge in PvP.

Heart of the Wild:

Heart of the Wild — now also grants 6% passive Agility and Intellect.

While writing this post, I was tweeting about the changes with Lissanna, Hamlet, Murmurs, and others, and I was surprised that several of them were still quite negative on Heart of the Wild after this change, but I can see their point. Adding a 6% passive intellect bonus to HotW is a bit like redoing the kitchen in a house with a bad foundation. Sure, it’s nicer and more useful but none of the fundamental problems have been addressed.

As I and many other people have said before, expecting players to change roles temporarily is going to be problematic for quite a few reasons that I won’t get into again. However, this change is good because if for nothing else it give us a useful talent and it give Blizzard and opportunity to show that their base design of Heart of the Wild is useful.

Nature’s Vigil:

Nature’s Vigil — Increases all damage and healing done by 30% for 30 sec, with a 3 min cooldown. While active, all healing spells also damage a nearby target for 50% of healing done, and all damage spells and abilities also heal a nearby friendly target for 50% of the damage done.

To be honest, this sounds pretty amazing. I don’t have a whole lot of criticism for this new ability. A 30% DPS buff over 30 seconds is pretty strong and the healing it generates sounds great as well. I really have only two minor concerns.

The first concern is that the two aspects of this spell address competing goals. To maximize the DPS potential of this ability you will have to cast it on cooldown and use the healing component at times when it may not be useful. To maximize the utility of the healing component you may not be able to cast it on cooldown and limit its DPS potential. However, this is a reasonable choice and one that makes playing the game interesting.

The second set of concerns, are really just unanswered questions about the healing mechanic that will probably be answered once it gets on the beta server. For example, how does it choose who to heal? Is it a target of target type of situation or is it a smart heal that picks the lowest person in range. Also, what is the range of the heal? If I’m DPSing Goriona on the Blackhorn encounter does no one get healed because no one can get in melee range?

Over All Impression:

Over all these are big improvements to the tier. As several people have pointed out there are still several issues with the talents that we can criticize. However, no one can deny that these changes move the tier from being a boring after thought to providing a more interesting choice with a significant impact.

If all this went live my guess is that Nature’s Vigil would win out as the most common choice. In terms of pure DPS math it likely ties or wins when compared to the straight 6% Int boost provided by HotW. In terms of utility, it also likely wins since Heart of the Wild is a very situational and Nature’s Vigil doesn’t require a moonkin to stop DPSing.

Graylo is Legendary

2012-05-03T00:17:00.000-05:00

I've been working on my legendary for six months with four different guilds, and the day that I get one is finally here. After playing this game for +5 years I doubted that I would get one since I have had so many guild issues this expansion. Needless to say I'm quite excited and can't wait to get into my next DS run.

Of course, there are many people I need to thank for helping me getting it. First and foremost, I need to thank all of my guildies at Resurgence. After having such a tough year guild wise, it's nice to finally find a good home to raid with. I should also thank two of my previous (and now defunct) guilds Equilibrium and Adrenaline for helping me get the some of the embers.

Finally, special thanks are owed to Skunkworks on Balnazzar. They allowed me to go on several of their runs to pick up the cinders. They are a great guild and recruiting a moonkin. If your looking for a guild, give them a shot. If Resurgence wasn't such a great guild I would be applying their myself.

Scumbag Moonkin

2012-04-14T22:30:00.002-05:00

Tier 4 Updates: Beta Build 15589

2012-04-11T11:59:00.000-05:00

According to MMO Champion there is a new beta build on the way, and if MMO Champion's datamining is correct it has a lot of changes for all of the classes. Most of the druid changes were for Feral and Restoration, and there aren't many that significantly affect Balance. Who knows what this means about the status of Moonkin development, but lets take a look at the few bits of new information that we do have.

Incarnation v3:

It should come to no one's surprise that Chosen of Elune (the moonkin portion of Incarnation) has been changed once again. This is a good thing because version two turned out to be pretty bad and only became worse at higher levels of gear. Now we have to decide if this new version is an improvement. Here is what MMO Champion has on the change.

Incarnation: Chosen of Elune - No longer doubles Solar and Lunar power generation. Instead increases all Arcane and Nature damage done while in Eclipse by ?%

There is no official word about the value of "?%", but the number I've heard is 25%. My first impression of this new version is that it's boring, but it's definitely an improvement. The big advantage that it has over the previous versions is that it can work with Celestial Alignment, and it seems that they should work extremely well together.

While my first impression is good, there are still several open questions (beyond the value for "?%") that will ultimately decide the fate of this ability. Is the damage increase additive or multiplicative with the Eclipse bonus? How does it affect DoT damage? Is it dynamic or will DoTs hold the buff for their duration? How will it relate to our other tier 4 options Soul of the Forest and Force of Nature? We won't know the answer to these questions until we can test it on the servers, but I have made some assumptions and built a model to try and calculate some values.

Theoretically, Chosen of Elune should be used in Lunar Eclipse with 100 energy, and Celestial Alignment should be used as soon as you hit 0 energy. This should maximize the buff, and minimize the amount of energy wasted when CA is used. In my model I have assumed that the bonus is 25%, that the buff is multiplicative with Eclipse, and that it affects DoT damage dynamically. I've also run the model with a couple different casting patterns, but I always started at zero energy. When started my rotation going towards Lunar Eclipse, Chosen of Elune provided a 2.61% dps increase at a lower level of gear and a 2.32% increase at a higher gear level.

** Quick Disclaimer: I admit that my simulator is fairly primitive and could contain errors. I don't trust these numbers 100%, but I don't have an obvious reason to doubt them either.

I was surprised by this valuation for a couple of reasons. First, my napkin math suggested that that the DPS increase should be closer to 4% when you combine CoE and CA. This is partially due to me treating the buff as a dynamic buff with regards to the DoTs. However, it's also due to slightly reduced DoT uptime when you don't use CA right away. Second, I expected CoE to scale better with a higher level of gear, but the truth is that it scales very poorly with haste. If you use CoE with CA it is petty much impossible to get to a new eclipse after CA runs out. As a result, increased haste doesn't have much of an impact on how many spells are buffed by Chosen of Elune.

The final question is how does it compare to our other tier 4 options Soul of the Forest and Force of Nature? At this point I would say that it doesn't compare well. At lower levels of gear my simulator is estimating the value of Soul of the Forest at around a 3.3% DPS increase, and it scales well with gear increasing the gain to 4.4% at higher levels of gear. If these versions go live, SotF will be the standard talent choice from the tier 4 talents in most fights. That doesn't mean a cooldown can't be better in the right situation, but that begs the question of how do CoE and Force of Nature relate to each other? As cooldowns, are they so similar to each other that the choice between the two is more of math equation then an actual choice? That will be difficult to tell until we can see the DPS potential of FoN at level 90 and see the fights that might require a cooldown, but I think there is some reason to be concerned.

To sum this all up, this new version of Incarnation is definitely an improvement over the older versions. That said, I still expect SotF to be the primary choice, and the usefulness of the new Incarnation will ultimately be determined by how it relates to Force of Nature.

More Trees:

Speaking of Force of Nature, it was changed as well. According to MMO Champion the duration of the trents is being doubled from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. This could be a straight buff to the ability since I don't see any indication that the Trents damage has changed, but I'm guessing that there is another reason behind this change.

As I indicated above there is a real worry that Incarnation and Force of Nature are too similar to each other as talents and this change may be intended to differentiate them. With a 60 second duration, FoN would become the "sustained cooldown" that I talked about in the past. Assuming that the trents damage is solid this could differentiate the two cooldowns nicely. FoN would be good for single target, extended burn phases like phase 3 on heroic Ragnaros. Chosen of Elune would become the burstier option with just 30 second duration and would also be more useful when you need to buff AoE output. It's too early to say anything definitive, but I like the FoN change at this point.

Glyph Feedback:

This is completely unrelated to the recent beta changes, but I sent some moonkin glyph feedback to Blizzard a week ago and I thought you might be interested in what I had to say.

While writing yesterdays blog post I thought a lot about glyphs and thought you might be interested in a detailed review of the glyphs currently in Beta from a moonkin perspective. The short version is that there isn't a whole lot of choice for PvE moonkin in the terms of glyphs. The top three choices are obvious and will likely be used 99% of the time. The other options are either useless in PvE or extremely situational. There really needs to be some additional options for PvE moonkin to have a choice and I have made a few suggestions at the bottom.

Glyphs I would use 99% of the time:

Glyph of Rebirth - Awesome glyph that is mandatory in PvE. Don't change a thing other then possibly baking it into the spell.

Glyph of the Moonbeast - A nice glyph but is just a convenience and offers no real utility. Shifting to heal in PvE really isn't that big of a deal since casting a spell does it automatically. This glyph is probably a lot more significant in Arena and 5 mans.

Glyph of Stampede - A nice glyph. Again it s a little more of a convenience then a utility, but Stampeding Roar is probably more regularly useful in a raid then self healing.

Very low use Glyphs:

Glyph of Hurricane - An ok glyph, but it is usually pointless even when a slow is useful. The biggest thing hurting Glyph of Hurricane is that it is just a 50% slow. If a group of mobs really needs to be slowed some one will be using the 70% slow which makes GoH irrelevant.

Glyph of Innervate - It's a little hard to judge this one until we know the mana situation at level 90, but I doubt this one will be all that useful. As a moonkin, if I need mana I'm going to save my innervate for myself 99% of the time. If I don't need to save innervate for myself then the 10% mana I would get from casting it on someone else is likely inconsequential.

Glyph of Stampeding Roar - I can see how this glyph would be very useful in the right situation. My only issue with it is that as for moonkin it pretty much requires that Glyph of Stampede be used as well. If used on its own then use of Stampeding Roar would have to be a planned, and even then it would take the moonkin out of DPS for several seconds while shifting, waiting for energy/rage, using the ability, and shifting back.

Glyph of Master Shapeshifter - Why is this a major glyph? It doesn't do anything interesting and conceptually it is much closer to Glyph of the Wild then any other glyph. It should be a minor glyph; also it should be titled Glyph of the Master Shapeshifter. It sounds a little strange with the current title.

Glyph of Entangling Roots - From my PvE perspective reducing the cast time of Entangling Roots by 0.2 seconds is insignificant. I liked this glyph when it made roots instant cast, but I'm assuming that caused issues else where and won't be changed back.

PvP Glyphs:

Glyph of Barkskin - A 25% reduction in the chance to be critically hit is almost entirely useless in PvE. The only possibility I can see is a moonkin might need it if he pops Heart of the Wild to emergency tank and be crit immune, but I view that situation so unlikely that it’s not really worth considering.

Glyph of Cyclone - I've used Cyclone in only one fight in three expansions of raiding and even in that one situation having an extra 4 yards wasn't that helpful.

Glyph of Nature's Grasp - Like Cyclone I've used Nature's Grasp in only one boss fight in 3 expansions. It's not a realistic choice for PvE

Glyph of Solar Beam - In most situations where I've had to use Solar Beam in raid, the silence aspect of the spell doesn't work. If that changes, this glyph could be useful, but I don't expect it to change.

Minor Glyphs:

Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth - This is a mandatory glyph because who wants to take up a bag slot with a reagent or have to remember to repurchase them? The main question I have is, why does Rebirth still have a reagent cost? Why not get rid of it and this glyph as well? (note: this was written before the most recent beta build and this glyph is obviously no longer useful)

Glyph suggestions:

For the record, I want to say that I don't take "armchair developing" all that seriously. I realize there are things that I am not aware of that could make some of these suggestions problematic.

Starsurge Healing - Much like Glyph of Ferocious Bite, why not have a glyph that gives a moonkin ability a small self healing component? My suggestion would be to heal the caster for ~5% when ever Starsurge hits the target. It could be helpful in raids, PvP, and casual play but given how infrequently Starsurge is cast I don't think it would be overpowering in anyway.

One Mushroom - Having to place three mushrooms and detonating them is a clunky mechanic that players have been complaining about since Cata Beta. An obvious glyph would be to place three mushrooms at once. This would also benefit a moonkin's movement DPS.

Larger WM Detonation Area - Increasing WM detonation area would be very helpful in some situations. I realize that WM had a larger detonation in Cata beta and was nerfed, but considering the nerfs to WM damage output I don't think it's likely that WM will remain a primary AoE utility in MoP. Therefore, increasing the detonation area would account more for placement error then be a DPS increase.

Larger Fungal Growth Area - You would likely need to limit Wild Mushroom to just one mushroom, but I see this as a nice option especially when a hunter is not available for the group.

Why Beta isn't a Huge Deal

2012-04-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

The Mists of Pandaria Beta is here, which is awesome for quite a few different reasons. It means that the new expansion isn't to far away (Aug or Sept if history is any indication). It's also a time when Blizzard reveals what plans they have for each class/spec and what they are trying to do to improve them. And most importantly to most people it is the first glimpse we get of all the new content from new races, new classes, new levels, and a lot of other new stuff.

The beta is an exciting time in the WoW life cycle. Everyone wants to be involved, and it sucks to be one of the people not included. I know this from experience. I never got into the WotLK Beta and I got into the Cata Beta quite late. When you’re not in the Beta if feels like there is a really cool party around the corner that you weren't invited too. For those people who are not included it can feel awful.

However, looks can be deceiving. Though the party looks awesome from the outside, you don't see the guy puking in the bathroom or the fight that breaks some furniture. In the Beta, there is a lot of cool stuff going on but it can also be frustrating. It's not all peppermint and ice cream. I'm not going to tell you that Beta sucks, because it doesn't, but I do want to give you a few reasons why you should be patient if your beta invite hasn't come yet.

Beta is Crowded:

Let’s do a little bit of simple math. At WoW peak hit had 12 million accounts. There are 754 active servers listed in WoWWiki for all regions. That means the average server would have around 16,000 accounts on it. The Beta has four servers, and over the past two weeks Blizzard has sent out over 550,000 beta invites. This means that the beta servers have on average 137,000 accounts on them. I'm making a lot of generalizations and assumptions, and I will agree that this math is not completely fair, but I do think it makes my point. Beta is crowded and probably more crowded then anything you have ever experienced in WoW before.

When I got my Beta invite I copied Graylo over as I downloaded the client. When I finally got on the server I tested mechanics for an hour or so before I took a look at any of the new content. When I finally decided to do some quests I as smacked in the face by a ton of blue name plates. There were players everywhere, and trying to quest was like pulling teeth. Mobs were tagged as soon as they spawned and the spawn rate was incredibly slow. To complete one of my quests I ended up having to form a group of 3 or 4 people and basically camp spawn locations. It literally took me an hour to complete this one quest. To be fair the others weren't that hard, but finding quest mobs in this crowded environment is difficult. When I'm questing I'm more frustrated then excited because most of the time I'm running around looking for the spawn I need rather then actually doing something.

The good news is this will slow down. Check back in a few weeks and I bet questing will be a whole lot easier after people spread themselves out a little bit and others loose interest in the beta. In this way, getting into the beta later rather then sooner could be a good thing.

So Many Bugs:

When playing on a live server, the bugs are annoying but infrequent. So, we complain about it for a little bit, find a work around, and continue on with our questing. In the Beta, the bugs can be crippling. The first big bug I experienced was the invisible quest giver. I could see the question mark on my mini map, but the NPC was there. Eventually I figured out that if I stood out side the building and moved my mouse over the area, I could target him (still without seeing him), but as soon as I moved into the room he was untargetable again. Eventually I as able to inch forward enough so that I could click him with out him disappearing but it was a big pain in the butt, and that one is fairly mild.

Here are some of the other bug issues I've experience. The first button in vehicle quests isn't hot keyed to "1", so I have to click to do the quest. There are quite a few lore cut scene quests that can only be done one at a time and have a big line waiting to do them. My personal favorite is the mobs that cause a critical WoW error every time I kill one of them. It makes it really hard to complete a quest when every time you fight a mob you get kicked out of the game.

It's important to remember that the Beta is not a polished product, and can feel choppy when your experience is interrupted by bugs and such. If this is something that frustrates you in live, then you are unlikely to enjoy Beta much since it happens much more frequently.

No Addons:

This is more of a personal pet peeve, but I find it very frustrating that I can't have addons in the beta currently. I completely understand why Blizzard has turned them off, but I've grown so used to them on the live servers that it is difficult to play without them in some cases. I'm mainly missing something that I could use to track DoTs and Starsurge with, and really those aren't huge things while questing, but I miss them. I feel like a bad without them. If you are a big addon user, you might find the Beta frustrating at this point as well.

It's Temporary:

Finally, Beta is temporary. Nothing you do in the Beta Will last. Everything you do will be deleted except for the things you learned in the process. If you are the type of player who is going for a server first level 90 toon, then the Beta experience is invaluable to you. If you are the type of player who has several alts that you will be leveling to level 90, then the Beta is just removing some of the fun you will be having later. In short, being in the Beta is a little like getting to open your Christmas presents early, but having to wrap them back up as soon as you do. You know what’s in there. There are no more surprises, but you still have to go through the motions later.

TL-DR:

The release of the Beta is an exciting time, and if you are one of the people who hasn't been invited yet it can be very frustrating. However, let me assure you that Beta is not all cupcakes and ice cream, and getting in a little later then most is not a horrible thing. Getting in a little later means you will avoid some of the issues that a lot of testers are experiencing now and may have a more enjoyable experience later. It's also important to remember that by playing the beta you are just ruining the experience you will have later. So, not being in the Beta is frustrating, but being patient will result in you having a better experience later.

Skunkworks LF Moonkin:

Just wanted to throw this out there that an old guild of mine is looking for a Moonkin. Skunkworks is an awesome guild and I would be applying for this spot if I hadn't finally found a good raiding home. If you are looking for a new guild and have experience raiding at a high level, I would recommend that you give them a look. You can find their recruitment information here

A View From Beta: The Little Things

2012-04-03T15:45:00.003-05:00

The beta has been open for about two weeks now and I have been in since last Thursday. If you've been following the various forums around the internet, I doubt anything I post today will be new to you. However, I want to give a summary of some of the little things (and some not so little things), that I and others have seen in the beta.

Is Insect Swarm Gone?

One of the curious happenings of the early beta is that Insect Swarm isn't in the moonkin spell books at the moment. There is a history of Insect Swarm being bugged and not showing up in early beta, but given the overall reaction to the IS changes made and other changes seen in beta, some are speculating that Insect Swarm may be gone for good.

In case you've forgotten, the early MoP talent calculators indicated that Insect Swarm was being converted into a debuff that would increase moonkin nuke damage on a single target. Later it was modified slightly to include all damage, but at a lower rate. While I approved of the change, there are a lot of players that didn't like it for a number of reasons. Some just didn't like the idea of loosing a DoT, but others saw the new spell as pointless and uninteresting.

There has been no official word, but it now seems that Blizzard is agreeing with the second view point and is scrapping the spell entirely. Not only that, but the spell co-efficient for the three nuke spells has increased by 26% which is surprisingly close to the bonus that Insect Swarm would have provided.

Personally, I am not sad to see it go. Insect Swarm has had a long and mediocre history in the game and never really found its place. In TBC it was ok at low levels of gear, but couldn't keep up after the first tier of raiding was dropped from the rotation. In WotLK it survived a little longer, but by the time ICC rolled around it fell out of favor unless you are moving and couldn't do anything else. In Cataclysm, IS has remained a strong spell for the entire expansion, but it is so similar to Moonfire that it doesn't really add anything to the rotation other then another button to push.

Small Spell Changes:

Over the past couple of months a lot of attention has been focused larger changes to the spell like how Insect Swarm, but not as much has been focused on the smaller changes that also have a significant impact on Moonkin performance.

First, the amount of energy generated by Wrath and Starsurge has increased. Wrath now generates 15 energy (up from 13.33 in live), and Starsurge generates 20 energy (up from 15 in live). Energy generated by Starsurge is also affected by Euphoria.

Second, Starfire's cast time has been reduced to 2.7 seconds (down from 3.0 after talents on live). I did question if this was a bug when I saw it on the early versions of the talent calculator, but it is 2.7 seconds in the beta and it makes sense when you consider the energy generation changes above.

These changes primarily serve to standardize the nukes and the amount of energy per second they generate. It also causes energy to be generated round numbers and is hopefully less confusing. It's not really a big change but the overall impact is that it will shorten the Eclipse transition so that we have larger uptimes on DoTs and Nature's Grace.

Instant Eclipse Energy:

In beta, Eclipse energy is generated when the spell cast is completed rather then when it hits the target like it does on the live servers. This is a subtle change, and the reactions I've seen are a bit mixed. The detractors have sited that the travel time of Wrath and Starsurge has served as a way for moonkin to extend the Eclipse's effective uptime by casting instants like Moonfire in the small window of time when the nukes are traveling. However, that argument loses its merit when you consider some of the other changes made in beta. Namely, we are no longer going to be manually refreshing DoTs at the end of Eclipse since our nukes well be doing it for us.

I'm in favor of this change since it takes a little of the awkwardness of the rotation. It wasn't that big of a problem at lower gear levels because it was difficult to cast Starfall that was shorter then Wrath's travel time, but as the expansion progressed it became a frequent occurrence especially with temporary haste buffs from weapons, trinkets, and cooldowns. All in all there may be a couple of downsides to energy generation being instant, but I think the positives out weigh the negatives.

The Lack of Glyphs:

This has been commented on by a lot of people but it's worth saying again. There are very few good major glyph options for PvE moonkin at the moment. Glyph of Rebirth is so good that it is a required glyph for every raiding Druid, but after that the options are fairly weak. Glyph of the Moonbeast and Glyph of Stampede are the most frequent choices for the other two slots, but they are really more of a convenience and provides no real utility since I can already switch into the necessary form and use them anyway.

After those three the choices are pretty bleak. Glyph of Hurricane is nice in the right situation, but if you really need something slowed its likely that you will have something with a 70% slow being applied as well. Glyph of Innervate may be helpful, but most of the time if I need the mana I am unlikely to give the innervate away. I an also see a use for Glyph of Stampeding Roar, but probably not frequently. Other then that, the other options either have no use for moonkin or are only useful in PvP.

Creating glyphs for Balance or any DPS spec is going to be some what difficult now that they are trying to get away from the DPS boosting glyphs. However, I do think there are options that have been unexplored. For example, they could add a healing component to one of our existing spell much like they have for Glyph of Ferocious Bite. In my opinion the obvious example would be to have Starsurge heal the moonkin for 5% every time it hits.

I also find it surprising that there is not a single glyph that affects Wild Mushroom or Fungal Growth. I can think of three possibilities around these abilities alone. The most obvious is to have a glyph that allows you to place all three mushrooms at once. Another good one would be to increase the blast radius of the WM detonation. This shouldn't be over powered since WM is getting a pretty heavy nerf and really more of a correction for placement error rather then a DPS gain. Finally, why not have a glyph that extends the radius of Fungal Growth but only allows you to place one mushroom?

Lunar Shower and Movement DPS:

Lunar Shower hasn't really changed at all other then having the energy generation removed, but that lack of change is what I find most interesting. You might remember that back in May Daxxarri said that "Lunar Shower will be working differently in the future" in a post he made on the WoW forums. The interesting thing is that here we are three months later without any significant changes. So the question is did Blizzard scrap the Lunar Shower overhaul or are they still thinking about it?

Wild Mushroom UI:

This is a really small thing but it makes me happy. Now when you place your mushrooms little icons with a timer for the mushrooms appear below the player unit frame in the standard UI. It looks a lot like how totems appear in the standard UI for shaman (if I remember correctly). Hopefully this will make it easier for addon writers to build a WM counter into a standard balance addon like Balance Power Tracker. This isn't a huge issue since there are plenty of ways to track the mushrooms, but I do like it when things are consolidated into few addons.

Edit: This is apperently nothing new, and has been this way on life for some time. I guess I just use so many addons that I never noticed it before.

Thorns is Gone:

I didn't notice this until it was mentioned on the forums, but Thorns is not in the beta or on the MoP talent calculator. I'm not sure how I feel about this. For most of its life Thorns has been a pretty lack luster spell doing so little damage that it wasn't even noticed. In Cata the spell got a new life after its damage was increased at the expense of gaining a cooldown and having a shorter duration.

All things considered, I am a bit surprised to see it gone. There are several fights in Cata where it is useful, and it seems like it would be very useful in PvP. I don't know why Blizzard would want to get rid of it after people finally started using it. That said, from my perspective as a PvE player it isn't that interesting of an ability. When ever I needed it I made a macro that automatically targeted the tank and casted the spell on cooldown, so it didn't really add anything to my rotation.

The Issues with Moonkin Incarnation

2012-03-30T00:31:00.000-05:00

Over the past week a lot of information has been pouring out of the Beta, and in all honesty I've had trouble keeping up with it all. Most of it has been small stuff, that I don't think merits it's own blog post, and there hasn't been enough small stuff yet to do a bigger post. However, there has been one tid bit that I think is big enough to get it's own post and that is the change to the Balance portion of Incarnation and how it relates to the other druid abilities.

The New Incarnation:

Balance: Chosen of Elune - Improved Moonkin Form that doubles Lunar and Solar Power generation. 3min CD

This is kind of a strange cooldown for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one is that how it helps Moonkin DPS isn't immediately obvious. What it does is speed up out Eclipse transitions which in turn increases out DPS in a lot of little ways. For example:

Increase to DoT Uptime Since Moonfire and Sunfire no longer over write each other.
Increased DoT uptime increases Shooting Star procs
Increase Nature's Grace Uptime since we will proc Eclipse more often.
Increase Starfall Uptime since Lunar Eclipse will be procced more often.
Increases the Effective Uptime of Eclipse because of how the energy math works out.

The second strange thing about it is that it is kind of a "sustained DPS" cooldown, because it's not bursty at all. Most of the cooldowns in the game are shorter in duration and provide more direct DPS benefits like Elemental Mastery or Combustion. This one is spread out over 30 seconds and has several very subtle impacts on your DPS. So it's kind of a new model as far as I know.

The Issues of Incarnation:

Now that I've listed five ways in which this version of Incarnation will improve moonkin DPS, I think a lot of people would assume that this is a good ability and one we would like Blizzard to keep. Unfortunately that is not the case. Hear are the big issues.

It's Relatively Weak: When compared to Soul of the Forest it is relatively weak, which will make it a difficult talent to choose. I've built another simulator to try and value some of these talents options and the results are not good for Incarnation. In my simulator Soul of the Forest provided a 3.29% DPS boost at a lower level of tear, while Incarnation was about a percent behind at 2.32%. It's too early to place a definitive valuable on each of these abilities, but my results are similar to the other valuations I've seen. Hamlet put SotF at 3.5% and Incarnation at 2.2%. Dopefish created a simulator that put SotF at 4.47% and Incarnation at 2.45%.

While Incarnation does increase your DPS in five ways, all five are pretty small. Our DoT and Nature's Grace uptimes are already pretty high without Incarnation so there isn't a whole lot of room to improve. Plus, you will be transitioning so fast between Eclipses that the DoTs and NG will be refreshed before they fall off. Plus, the Starfall improve is limited because few of the stars will be buffed by Eclipse.

It Doesn't Play Well with Haste: As I said above, Incarnation relies on transitioning through Eclipse cycles more quickly to increase uptimes and provide a DPS boost. Haste has a similar impact on our DPS. It also helps us to transition through Eclipse cycles more quickly. This means Incarnation will scale well as we progress through the expansion. It may start out as a respectable 2% buff, but as our gear level increases that buff will shrink because Uptimes cannot be improved past 100%. It also means that Incarnation will have a limited impact during temporary haste buffs like Bloodlust.

When I increased the gear level in my simulator, Soul of the Forest increased slightly to 3.58%, but Incarnation fell dramatically to just 0.57%. Hamlet so a similar impact to increased heal in his WrathCalcs numbers.

It Doesn't Play Well with Celestial Alignment: In my opinion the biggest issue with this version of Incarnation is that we already have Celestial Alignment. Incarnation and Celestial Alignment are kind of similar in that the are both long duration cooldowns that fit that "sustained DPS cooldown" model I mentioned earlier, but they buff moonkin DPS in completely opposite ways. CA buffs our DPS by giving us an Eclipse buff and stopping the Eclipse transition. Since Incarnation increases power generation it would have absolutely no impact on DPS if triggered during CA, therefore they can't be used together. This creates a bit of an awkward situation in which we have two long duration cooldowns that can't be used at will due to their various drawbacks. In short, there just isn't room for both Celestial Alignment and Incarnation in the in the moonkin rotation without some negative interactions. As a result, if we need to choose a DPS cooldown from Tier 4, Force of Nature would be preferable since it can be used at any time and it plays well with others.

Conclusions:

At this point, I'm convinced that this version of Incarnation is a bad talent and needs to be redesigned once again. The question is how?

The original version of the talent, that halved Eclipse power generation while in Eclipse and doubled it while Eclilpse was down, had some potential. However, it also had some drawbacks like how it reduced the uptimes of DoTs and Nature's Grace. There's also a lot of support out there for a standard DPS cooldown that increases damage by 20% for 30 seconds.

I would still like to see something in this tier that boosted AoE or Multi-Target DPS. The idea I had was a buff I called Infestation that spread Insect Swarm to all near by targets for say 15 seconds, and increasing our Hurricane or DoT damage on all of those targets by 25%.

TL-DR: This version of Incarnation is bad.

MoP Press Event Reaction

2012-03-20T14:20:00.003-05:00

As most of you know, the march towards a new expansion continued last week with the Mists of Pandaria Press Event, and yesterday we got buried with information from multiple sites and I am only now digging myself out of it.

There are several things that came out in the press event that I like, but my general feeling is disappointment. To be fair, my disappointment probably has something to do with high expectations and in no way am I proclaiming that “WoW is doomed” as some like to do, but I expected more. Overall it felt like a Blizzcon recap and we were fed a lot of rice (no pun intended) without much meat. Though as Lissanna tweeted to me yesterday, that is kind of inevitable until we can get our hands on the Beta.

Anyway, I’m going to break this post into three sections I think of as bit stuff, medium stuff and little stuff. I’ve read everything I could find, and taken some notes on along the way. However, there are a lot of things that are hinted out without much detail backing them up. It is quite possible that I missed something or misunderstood something. Please feel free to comment with different view points or with corrections.

My Big Raiding Questions:

It’s safe to say that my biggest concern after reading all the press event stuff was what wasn’t said about raiding in MoP. In the media presentation it was glossed over very quickly by saying there would be three raids with fourteen bosses and two world bosses, but that was it. When Lore from Tankspot questioned J. Allen Brack about it he said:

Yeah, that’s because we haven’t done a lot of the work yet, and so we’re reluctant to commit to a whole bunch because things may change for us, but we’re working on spawning out the dungeons, we’re working on spawning out the various raids, and building those out. Those take many, many, many months to be built out from an artists’ perspective. Then we’ve got all the itemization, and all the character art that has to happen, from weapons, and armor, and bosses, and trash mobs that we have to make and dress up in order to make that happen.

This has me concerned because I am really hoping for an early Q3 release and don’t want to be killing Deathwing for another nine months. It could be that Brack is underplaying how much work has already been done or just trying to manage expectations, but if the raids are really “many, many, many months” we are in for some rough times.

Brack was also questioned about the overall raiding philosophy for MoP and had this to say:

We actually have not decided what our raiding philosophy, our raiding design will be. We have a lot of different ideas in terms of where we're going to end up, but I really can't say because we basically haven't decided just yet. But we have changed our raiding philosophy very significantly with every single expansion, and I don't expect this expansion to be any different, so we'll have a lot of thought, and a big write-up, and a blog will go out when we've decided how it will all work, and the forums will explode and it'll be amazing! (GamePlanet)

I think we’re gonna look at how the 10/25 person lockout worked as a shared cooldown. Was that the right decision, or do we want to do something different? I don’t really know what the right answer is yet. We haven’t decided.” (Tankspot)

I am happy that they are taking another look at the overall raiding philosophy and aren’t afraid to change it for the fourth time. It needs to change to address the 10vs25 issues, but judging from some of the comments I’ve read it seems like they are committed to the two raid format model. I’ll hold off judgment until they do make a blog post about their ideas, but I am becoming less and less confident that a two format system can work.

Garrosh: The Final Raid Boss

Taken entirely on its own without considering other theoretical “lore vs game play” issues, I love the idea that a faction leader of a playable race can screw up so horribly that BOTH factions think it’s necessary to pull him down. I like a lot of people have never been a Garrosh fan, and despite a few slightly positive moments I think it’s safe to say that his reign as warchief has been a bit of a disaster. I won’t be sad to see him gone, but I do have some concerns about what this will me for the game’s tone and lore as a whole.

I’ve seen the Horde vs Alliance debates for years, and one thing that I think is often forgotten is that game play will always trump story and lore. For this reason, there will never be peace between the Alliance and Horde, because PvP would feel hollow without the overall conflict. There needs to be animosity between the Horde and Alliance, and that is why Garrosh and the irrational Varian were good for the game. They maintained that animosity in a reasonable way.

In MoP that’s clearly going to change. I don’t have a problem with Varian maturing and becoming the “great king” for all of the Alliance that he can be since the Horde had good guy Thrall for so many years. However, I do think a good guy Varian would need to be balanced out by an irrational enemy, and that won’t happen if Thrall is reinstated as Warchief as suggested by J. Allen Brack on GamePlanet.

In short, I like the fact that the Alliance is being presented in a more positive light while the Horde is getting slapped around a little by Garrosh’s the ends justify the means philosophy. However, that will be hard to maintain if Thrall is reinstated. You can only have so many peace talks disrupted by Onyxia or the Twilight Cult. Plus, I think it’s a little strange that Chris Metzen just spent an expansion explaining that Thrall is more of a World character then a Horde character to throw him right back into the leadership of the Horde.

The Medium Stuff

Removing Group Summon: In his Curse interview Tom Chilton said that they plan on removing the Have Group, Will Travel guild perk because it “shrinks the world and allows players to avoid being out in the world” I have to say, this is one of the dumbest things I ever heard a WoW developer say. I agree that it shrinks the world, but it’s absolutely ludicrous to think that by eliminating it players we be out in the world more.

I think of it this way. HG,WT is a travel ability. On my main it primarily gets me to my raid quickly, on my alts I use it to go back to Org to train and such. Without it, I would use a flight path or pop in to flight form fly in the general direction of my objective. Am I really out in the world when I’m on a flight path I can’t get off, or flying myself a +100 yards above the ground?

I would argue not. In fact, removing HG,WT will result in fewer people being out in the world. The HG,WT perk is a quick and easy way to get your friends and guild mates to your location quickly when something worthwhile is going on. Let say for example, the Alliance is attacking Crossroads. If you put out a call for help, the action could be over by the time people get there, but HG,WT will can get people there quickly for some real world PvP.

To get players out into the world more Blizzard needs to create content that make people want to get out in the world. If Blizzard really wants to tackle this problem by eliminating modes of travel there are much bigger fish to fry like Flying Mounts, LFR, LFD, Flight Paths, Portals, and Hearth Stones.

Druid Glyphs and Inscription Changes: In general terms I don’t have a problem with what they are doing to Inscription. Getting rid of Prime Glyphs makes perfect sense since in most cases people use the same three 95% of the time. I also like that they are focusing more on utility and situational options for Major Glyphs while adding a lot of “fun cosmetic” minor glyph options.

That said, I am surprised that the Glyph of Stars made it past the editing room, because its either a half-baked idea or not finished. According to the tool tip (reported by several sites) the Glyph of Stars Transforms your Moonkin Form into Astral Form. This sounds cool at first until you find out that Astral Form is just the “spirit” model that is used when players are dead.

Given that moonkin models have been the same since vanilla WoW, and that the only way to change a moonkin’s appearance currently is to change races, I approve of Blizzards effort to give us a little variety. However, the ideal change would be to update the Moonkin models much like they did for the cat and bear models in WotLK. If that is to much work and a bandade fix like Glyph of Stars is the only change possible, do it better. Please come up with a new graphic rather then a tired old one that makes us look like a Shadow Priest. I think a model like Algalon’s would be cool and would fit the title of Glyph of Stars.

LFR Loot System: There has been a lot of confusion about the changes being made to LFR looting. If you are one of the confused, here is a link to the thread in which Zarhym is trying to explain it.

The basic premise is that for LFR kills loot is done on the individual level rather then for the entire group. If you win an item it will be an item that you can use based upon your class and spec, and it will be unaffected by what other people win.

From what we’ve been told, I really like this idea. For one, it gives us a consistent chance of obtaining loot. We aren’t S.O.L. because the boss only dropped protector tokens and an enhancement shaman can’t role on a caster trinket I want. The other thing it will prevent is the 2minute wait after a fight for loot because someone decided to log off without rolling.

Valor Point Revamp: Blizzard didn’t address this directly in a formal way, but many of the interviews commented on a revamp of the Valor Point system. The most direct comment I could find was on the WoWHead News site which said:

Valor Points are completely reworked. They are no longer a currency for actual items, but something you use to (repeatedly) augment the ilvl of your gear. Details are still being worked out as to how many times players can bump up the ilvl, or what happens when players hold onto an ancient item for the stat combinations.

There were also comments made about using Valor points to buy rep and extra loot rolls in all tiers of raiding. It’s hard to comment too much without getting more information, but what little we’ve heard so far sounds good. Valor points have been a bit of a joke where they are really important for maybe four weeks and then they become completely useless. Tier 13 has highlighted this amazingly well.

WoW Farmville: With the Tillers and Anglers faction players will have the ability to tend there own farm to grow cooking ingredients, herbs, quest turn-ins, and pets. I’m not really interested in a farming for farming’s sake mini game, but I find this addition very interesting.

There are a lot of open questions, but this could have a dramatic impact on the game. The first question is, do you have to be an herbalist to pick the herbs that you grow? How many Herbs can you grow and how often? Can you grow all herbs including low level herbs? Can you choose which herbs you grow?

As you can see there are far more questions then there are answers, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out since it could have a huge impact on the WoW economy.

I also wonder if this is a reaction to the SWTOR professions system. I haven’t played the game, but from what I’m told the crafting system in SWTOR is very hands off, where you tell your crew what to do and they do it while you are off-line or doing something else in game. The Tillers and Anglers faction along with the possibility of Scribes being given a “staff” seems very similary.

The Small Stuff

Female Pandaran Model: I personally think it looks awesome. Much better then the female worgen model. I’m having a hard time understanding why some people seem to hate it.

No Item Squish: I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other on this one, but it does need to happen eventually.

AoE Looting: Why couldn’t this have been available when I was farming Enchanting mats on my rogue.

Buff UI Update: I really like the idea that it will show you if you have 8/8 of the buffs. It should make life slightly easier.

Tier System Revamp: They seem to change how you acquire tier gear every patch so why should MoP be any different?

My Cata Post-Mortem

2012-03-14T11:58:00.001-05:00

Normally I save these review looking, post-mortem type posts until a month or two before a new expansion is being released, but it feels appropriate to do Cata's now. For one, I've almost "beat the game." My guild is currently 7/8 HM DS, and I will be upset if we don't have Heroic Madness down in the next week or two. Second, Blizzard is giving almost every indication that they can that Cataclysm is over. They have already done three "Post-Mortem" blog posts focusing on systems, encounters, and quests, and with the MoP press event happening this week you can bet that all attention will be focused on the next expansion starting Monday the 19th.

So, I would like to take this opportunity and look back at what I think worked or didn't work, before it's completely irrelevant (if it isn't already).

Stats and Customization:

Mastery: Most of my experience is limited to moonkin, but I think most people would agree that the addition of Mastery has been a complete success. There are a lot potential issues with adding a new stat to an existing game. It could be too weak, too strong, or to complicated, and each would create problems. However, after a little tuning, Blizzard integrated it into the game almost seamlessly. In fact, I had read over years worth of old blog posts before I remembered that it was an addition in Cataclysm.

Reforging: As a concept Reforging gets an +A, but the implementation of the Reforging system gets a C. The problem with reforging is that it's hard to walk up to Thaumaturge Zajir and do it on the fly with the assistance of add-ons, third party web sites, or advanced planning.

I think the Reforging UI needs a significant revamp. First, it would be great if there was a "learn" feature like there is on the talent tree, so that you can make changes and see the impact without them being permanent. This would allow players to sandbox configurations without spending a lot of gold to figure it out. Second, I think they could make it clearer which items are reforged and how they have been reforged. If you look at the tool tip of each item it just says "reforged." Why not "reforged crit to hit," or have the reforged stats highlighted in some way on the tool tip?

Talent Overhaul: The fact that Blizzard is once again revamping the Talent system in MoP shows that Cata's overhaul was pretty much a failure. It wasn't all bad, but I think our main criticisms that it wouldn't create more interesting choices or optional talents, has been proven correct and that is why Blizzard is making such a big change in MoP.

Raids, 5-Mans, and Encounters:

General Awards: Traditionally, I have done a list of my favorite and least favorite instances and such. I am going to try and get away from that format a little this time, but I did want to make a few quick comments in this regard.

Favorite Fight: Sinestra - To be honest, I had a hard time choosing fights that I liked, and Sinestra kind of won by default. It was a tough fight and I thought the Cutter mechanic was interesting.

Worst Fight: Spine of Deathwing - This was a hard one as well because in general I didn't like a lot of the fights in Cata. Spine won however, because the idea that DPS only matters for about 10% of the fight seemed really stupid. I also hated breaking the stun as a DPS because it was impossible to tell if you should continue casting or not. Dishonorable mentions: Rhyolith and Beth'tilac.

Looking-For-Raid: In my opinion, LFR is by far the best addition Blizzard has made to the game in a long time. My only complaint is that they didn't add it sooner, which will be fixed for the next expansion.

The reason LFR is so great is that it takes a lot of the headache out of having alts. I have leveled a lot of toons to max level over the years, and it's always a little bitter sweet. Once I get them to 70, 80, or 85 the question always came up. What now? Gearing them up to do any kind of endgame was time consuming and possibly expensive, but now there is a simple way to learn a new class without having to make significant time commitments. LFR is a homerun.

Revamped Instances: Revamping an old instance is a very risky prospect. First, Blizzard always gets called lazy for redoing old content rather then doing something new. Plus there is always the potential that a beloved dungeon is ruined. However, it is also something that players frequently request so that they can revisit some of their favorite instances from the past.

Looking only at the Cataclysm Revamps I think Blizzard has done an amazing job this expansion. The Deadmines was one of my favorite instances leveling up, and the revamp made it 10x better. ZA was another instance that I had a lot of experience with, and while I don't think they improved ZA at all with the revamp, I do think they maintained what made it great as a 10man when they converted it to a 5man. I was less familiar with SFK and ZF prior to the revamp, but I thought both were enjoyable in Cata. As a result, I think Blizzard has figured out how to revamp old content after the blunders in WotLK. I have no concern about the revamps Blizzard has planned for MoP.

Shrunken Raids: One of the more controversial choices made by Blizzard in Cataclysm was to drop the Abyssal Maw raid from Tier 12, and I found the explanation given to be not all that satisfying. To summarize, Blizzard stated that compared to Firelands the Abyssal Maw raid didn't look or feel that good. They also said that they wanted to get away from the 12 - 14 boss tiers and focus their development on 7 or 8 bosses to provide a better player experience.

All in all I think this turned out to be a mixed bag. Generally speaking I would much prefer 7 great fights then 12 mediocre fights, but in the end I think we got 7 mediocre fights in firelands instead of the 7 great fights we were promised. Having unique art does not make an encounter great. Nor does a gimmicky flying mode like on Alys'razor, a gimmicky steering mechanic on Rhyo'lith, or a don't take damage when damage is sometimes unavoidable buff like on Staghelm.

In short, I'm not really against smaller raid tiers because after 5 years of raiding I am interested in shorter raiding tiers, but I don't think blizzard achieved their stated goals for having the smaller tiers.

Other:

Two Equal Raid Formats: I've already discussed this at length and will not go into to much detail in this post, but two equal raid formats was a big feature of Cataclysm that I can't ignore in a post mortem.

On the positive side, Blizzard has done a very good job of balancing the two formats in terms of difficulty. Of course there are examples where 10man is easier then 25man and vice versa, but for the most part they have been reasonably balanced. Unfortunately, that is the only positive in my opinion.

As anyone who reads my blog with any regularity knows I am a 25man raider who prefers the 25man format, and I think it's fair to say that having two equal formats has resulted in the slow decline of the 25man format. I think it's also fair to say that Blizzards solution of more loot and Valor Points has had little or no affect on this decline. While I have proposed solutions to make 25man raiding more attractive in the past, I am quickly coming to Lissanna's point of view that two equal raid formats just won't work. It's bad from an organizational stand point because one format will generally be easier to organize then the other. It's bad from a design stand point, because blizzard has to create an encounter that can work for two different formats in the same general space. And it's bad from a resources stand point because blizzard has to spend resources on an aspect of the game that is shrinking in participation. All in all, two equal raid formats has been a failure in my opinion.

Quest Design and 1-60 Revamp: All in all, I have to say the 1-60 Revamp was a huge success. In my 5 years I've leveled 9 toons past level 60 and I have a pretty good idea of what questing was like before and after the revamp, and it is unquestionably better now then it was in the past. Blizzard has criticized itself for some of the zones being to linier, but I didn't have any problem with that. I love how story driven the new zones have been and how natural the progression within a zone has been. In fact, I only have two minor criticisms.

First, I think Blizzard when a little over the top with the gimmicky quests and themes. From the overall Indiana Jones theme of Uldum, to the Joust quests in Hyjal and the PvZ quests in Hillsbrad to name a few, it just got to be a little to much for me.

Second, this is a bit of a catch 22, but progression through the revamped zones is extremely fast once you combine Heirlooms, guild XP bonuses, rested XP, and experience gained from gathering or instances. Sure you can turn off your XP gain, or not use heirlooms and such, but that presents it's own problems. I'm not sure what blizzard can do about this, but it literally took me 3 different toons to see all of the different 1-60 zone revamps.

Archaeology: The best way to describe Archaeology in Cataclysm is that it's was a good first draft. Despite what its haters say, there are some really cool aspects of archaeology, but it has some very big problems as well. Blizzard has already recognized many most of the problem. It's too grindy. The travel time between dig sites is to long. The dig sites and projects too unpredictable. All in all, it’s just too random.

I would be very surprised if Archaeology didn't get a fairly big revamp in MoP, and it will be interesting to see what changes Blizzard comes up with. Personally, I would like to see some sort of currency being accrued as you complete projects so that you can request or purchase as specific quest after you completed so may artifacts.

Lore:

Lore is generally not something I like to talk about in my blog, but I have been reading a lot of the WoW books recently and the Lore of the game is something I've grown more interested in. These are couple of items that I had originally planned on including in my MoP wishlist, but ended up scrapping because they didn't fit.

Give the Old Gods a Break: If I remember correctly, right after WotLK was released a player asked why there were so few Naga in the new expansion. Blizzard responded that they felt players were a little tired of them after there large presence in TBC. With that in mind I am more tired of the Old Gods then I ever was of the Naga or any other race or faction.

I am tired of the tentacles everywhere, of the faceless ones running around, and of the big gapping mouths spotted around the map. I realize that the Old Gods are arguably the biggest bad in the game, but I'm tired of them after two expansions of heavy old god focus. Please skip them in MoP.

Garrosh Hellscream: As someone who played Alliance for almost 4 years before switching to Horde, I have long felt that Blizzard has been a bit unbalanced in how they've treated the two factions from a lore perspective. The Horde had Good Guy Thrall (there has to be a meme there) in charge for years which excused the idiots he had underneath him in the minds of a lot of players. The Alliance on the other hand was leaderless for a good amount of time and then when Varian Wrynn did step up he behaved like the idiots underneath Thrall. In short, Horde looks good, Alliance looks bad.

Cataclysm has been a step in the right direction in fixing that. I love that Garrosh is still pretty much an idiot who is alienating his allies, but also realizing that his style of leadership also had some negative consequences like they did in the Stonetalon Mountains. I think the tone that Garrosh's development has taken has been perfect, and I can't wait to see how it develops in MoP, when hopefully Varian Wrynn finally leaves his idiocy in the past and the Alliance in general wakes up. The good news is that judging from Chris Metzen twitter quotes I may get my wish.

Sylvanis Windrunner: Like Garrosh, I am happy with what they've done with Sylvanis in Cata, but unlike Garrosh I am unsure of her future. Prior to Cataclysm it was easy to dismiss some of the atrocities that the Forsaken were involved in because they were so focused on the Lich King. However, now that the Lich King is gone, I think the faction needs a big story overhaul if it is to remain relevant. How can Garrosh and the Horde in general continue to ignore Sylvanis' deceit and double dealing. Personally, I would love to see Sylvanis (with some of the forsaken) split off from the horde and become its own bad guy faction, with the playable forsaken being those people that have rejected Sylvanis's extremism.

I'm Annoyed: An SoR Rant

2012-03-07T16:30:00.001-06:00

In case you haven't heard, Blizzard is rebooting the Scroll of Resurrection to induce old players to return to the game with new rewards. The way it works is an active player can send SoR invitations out to former players. If the inactive player accepts the invitation and pays for 30 days of game time, the active player gets a faction based spectral mount. The returning player gets several goodies as well.

A free upgrade to Cataclysm, regardless of the prior expansions purchased.

One character immediately bossed to level 80.

A free server and/or faction transfer to the inviting players server/faction.

7 days of free game time

After seeing all this I got annoyed.

What Is My Issue?

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a grumpy old man rant about how hard I had it back and my day. I think the Scroll of Resurrection is a good idea and that the rewards provided were intelligently chosen. When evaluated entirely on its own, I can't find fault with the SoR.

I'm annoyed because it's hard not to look at these rewards and ask "what about me?"

I started playing this game in December 2006 and I have maintained my subscription without a break for over 5 years. I've paid for the original game along with all three expansions. I've also paid for 14 server transfers, two faction transfers, and a name change. And this doesn't even include the things not tied to my account like the books and WoW branded peripherals I've purchased.

Needless to say, I have been a very loyal customer, yet I have not received one free minute of game time, a single free level, or any free account level services like server transfers. So, it is a little bit of a slap in the face when a player who has quit the game can come back and get rewards I as a loyal player have never had access to. That is why I am annoyed.

What about the Annual Pass?

Some of you may be thinking "what about the Annual Pass? Graylo, don't you think a free mount, a free copy of Diablo 3, and access to the MoP beta are nice rewards for your loyalty?" All of those things a great, and I gladly signed up for the annual pass to get them, but they in no way reward me for my loyalty for a couple of reasons.

You have to sign up for the Annual Pass to get the rewards. Just paying for 12 months worth of a subscription isn't enough.

It was open to everyone who had an active account when it was announced.

In short, the Annual Pass is an agreement between Blizzard and the player, and completely ignores the player’s history with the game and the company. Blizzard is basically one of those TV pitchmen saying "Act now, and we'll throw in a free copy of Diablo." All Blizzard is trying to do with the Annual Pass is sell us the next 12 months.

What Should Blizzard Offer and Why It's a Good Idea?

Loyalty rewards are not a new idea, but most suggestions I've seen center around cosmetic perks like unique mounts and non-combat pets. Pets and Mounts are fun and I know there are tons of players would be happy with cosmetic rewards. However, if Blizzard went with something as simple as pets and mounts I think Blizzard would be missing a golden opportunity to not only reward their loyal customers but also improve their business as well. That is why, I think a Loyalty reward program should be structured more like the SoR and Refer-a-Friend promotions.

My suggestion is that Blizzard should offer a free server and/or faction transfers to players who have maintained an active account for a year. A no-strings-attached transfer would be ideal from a players point of view, but I could understand why it might not be that attractive to Blizzard given the impact it could have on Blizzard's fee based transfer service. However, I think Blizzard could create a system that would not only provide some quality of life improvements for the player, but wouldn't hurt Blizzards existing services much by limiting the free transfers with a few acceptable conditions. Two possible limitations would be:

Only allow the free transfers to be used only on toons level 80 or lower.

Only allow transfers to a server where the player already had a level 80 toon.

My thoughts process is that Blizzard could sell this as an account unification feature, allowing players to get reacquainted with old toons from old servers, but in their new environment.

I don't know about you guys but I have about 18 toons that have been leveled some degree across about 7 servers. In particular I have three level 80 toons and a level 85 on one server that I never play, because I haven't been active on that server in over a year. I would love to play those toons again, but it's hard since they aren't tied to my guild and don't get the perks and sense of community that comes from being in my guild. This could have multiple benefits for blizzard in that it could keep the player engaged in the game and it may encourage the player to transfer other toons using the fee service.

Of course, there are lots of other things Blizzard could offer players as a part of a loyalty program. Offering free level 80 toons could be nice as would free game time like they are offering in the SoR promotion. The point though, is that Blizzard needs to offer something. It just seems wrong that players who abandoned the game are getting offered cool perks, but players who have remained loyal are being left out in the cold.

TL-DR:

I understand the point behind the Scroll of Resurrection, and I'm not against it on its own. However, it seems wrong to reward former players who have quit the game with perks like free level 80 toons and free transfers without offering similar perks to the loyal players. My suggestion is that Blizzard should offer a limited free transfer service that allows long term players to reconnect with some of their old toons and classes.

Help Graylo Get A Legendary!!!

2012-02-22T11:23:00.001-06:00

I've exploited this blog for personal gain before. It has played some part in me getting accepted to 7 different guilds. I got into the Cataclysm beta because someone knew me from the blog. My family views my gaming with a tiny bit more respect because I also write about it. I've even made a tiny bit of cash in the process, and none of this includes all the wonderful people I've gotten to talk to all because I write this blog.

Yes, I have benefited greatly from writing the blog (probably more then my readers have from reading it), but the introduction of Cross-Realm raiding begs a new question. Can I take my blog exploitation to a new low?

Can exploit my readers to help me get a Legendary Staff?

All tongue-in-cheek aside, I don't have high expectations for this, but it's worth a try. Also, I am in no way expecting anyone to go out of their way to create a raid for me. However, if are making runs for Mounts, Achievements, or Alts, and have an opening I would love to come a long if I can pick up the legendary quest items. Here are the more formal details:

Project: Help Graylo Get A Legendary!!!

Current Status: I am currently collecting [Seething Cinders] for the Time Grows Short quest. I need 490 cinders to complete the quest along with all 250 Essences after that and the Rag kill.

What I Offer: I am a Heroic DS geared moonkin (armory link) that has killed every boss in Firelands on heroic mode. I will come prepared to do my absolute best with flasks, food, and potions. Plus, I will pass on all loot and mounts that drop in the raid. Finally, depending on the consistency of the group, I would be willing to continue to run FL to help other people get there staff or mount after I've finished mine.

My Scheduling: I am available on a consistent basis Friday through Monday after 9pm CST. I may also be available before 9pm on Saturdays and Sundays, but I can't comment to those times on a consistent basis.

What I'm Looking For: Ideally I would like to run heroics with a consistent group at the same general time each week. However, I would be willing to run normals or with an inconsistent group. Also, this goes without saying, but I am US-Horde so the group would need to be US-Horde as well.

Contact Information: While I am happy to discuss the possibilities in general terms in the comments below, I would recommend that nobody put their RealID email address there. My blog email address of graymatterwow (at) gmail (dot) com is the best way to discuss the more private details, but you could also send an in-game mail to Graylow (with the W) on the US-Stonemaul server.

MoP Talent Calc: Second Impressions

2012-02-21T13:16:00.000-06:00

I had a lot of fun last week looking over the new MoP talent calculator, discovering changes and tweeting about them with Lissanna, Murmurs and the rest of you. However, one thing became obvious to me really quickly. I had way too many topics to write about to put them all in one post. The problem was there were so many interesting additions and changes that I wanted to comment on, but there where also a lot of comments like "I still don't like the new Insect Swarm" or "No change to Heart of the Wild yet." So, last week I choose to focus on the changes. This week I want to comment on some of the broader thoughts I have about the new design and address some of those comments I read and disagreed with.

IS Change: A Positive View

One of the most common topics of conversation last week was the change of Insect Swarm from a DoT to a debuff. Lissanna made a blog post about the new design on her blog Restokin, and Murmurs made this comment on twitter after the new calculator was released:

"Still do not approve of Insect Swarm. Changing it from nuke damage to all damage just makes it worse, not better. Target switching guys."

After reading these and other comments from around the internet, it struck me that many of us are missing the point of the change. Let me ask a couple of rhetorical questions. What are the good moonkin fights currently, and on which fights are we weak? Those questions are easy to answer with a quick look at the WoL rankings. Any fight with AoE or multiple persistent targets is a good fight for moonkin, but on any single target fight like Ultraxion we are weak. This is one of the biggest problems with Moonkin DPS currently, and I think this Insect Swarm change is trying to address that.

Lissanna said in her blog post that she thought "hampering solar cleave is the primary reason for the change." While I do think limiting solar cleave is part of the reasoning, but I think that analysis ignores the significant issue of Multi-target vs Single Target DPS (yes, this is different the solar cleave). Not to get to sidetracked, but I view solar cleave as an AoE tactic. You get into Solar and hold it while DoTing as many targets as possible while using Mushrooms on CD and Hurricane if needed. In my opinion, with multi-target DPS we still maintain our rotation on a primary target but throw DoTs on a second and possibly third target when we can (the classic example being V&T in BoT). Some form of eclipse cleave will always exist as long as you have AoE and DoTs that are buffed by Eclipse, but this change with the change to Hurricane should limit it's positive and negative impacts. However, Hurricane has no impact on a moonkin's multi-target DPS so we can't expect that change to affect the Multi-Target vs Single Target issue.

What is the Multi-Target vs Single Target issue? What a lot of people forget in the heat of the moment is that none of these changes happen in a vacuum. Improving a moonkin's single target DPS isn't as simple as buffing the spells because that could make those same spells too strong in a multi target situation. If they buff our nukes but nerf our DoTs, that might fix the multi vs single target problem but they would also run the risk of putting us in a situation were we don't want to cast our DoTs like in WotLK and TBC. If they keep our DoTs strong but limit our nukes, then we are in the situation we currently are in.

So, how do they buff our single target DPS without buffing our multi-target DPS and keep our DoTs relevant to our rotation. One solution is to create a buff that affects only one target like the new Insect Swarm buff. This is one of the reasons why I think the Insect Swarm change is a good thing.

This isn't to say that I think the current design of Insect Swarm is perfect. This change doesn't happen in a vacuum either, and I do recognize that this design has some issues with PvP. I also don't want to have to refresh this buff in PvE even at a minute duration. However, I think those concerns are manageable. From a purely PvE perspective, they could add a glyph that causes your Starsurge to refresh the duration of Insect Swarm. Or, maybe your Rogue Symbiosis ability is a redirect type ability that would transfer all of our DoTs and debuffs to a new target. I'm not sure what the coding limitations are, but another option may be to have apply like Earth and Moon and have our DoTs on other targets adjust dynamically when targets gain and lose the debuff.

In short, I recognize that there are issues with the current Insect Swarm design, but I view the general direction as a good thing. Hopefully, Moonkin DPS won't be so lopsided in the future because of it.

Heart of the Wild: In for the Long Haul

One of the most common views expressed last week had more to do with a change that wasn't made then one that was. I saw several comments expressing exacerbation that HotW wasn't changed, fixed or removed. While I am no fan of Heart of the Wild, I would be a bit surprised if we saw any significant change in this ability any time soon. I think a lot of the people who expect this talent to change significantly are forgetting the design goals for druids that Blizzard expressed around Blizzcon. You may remember that Blizzard talked about bring back some of the druids hybrid nature and that some players missed being Shapeshifters. If that remains the design goal, this talent isn't going anywhere until at least the expansion after MoP.

I also wonder if we as moonkin are being a little hard on Heart of the Wild. To use an analogy that shows I watch too much Top Chef, I view DPSers as the traditional chefs of the player base with tanks and healers being the pastry chefs. Whenever you see a pastry chef on one of the cooking shows they seem contractually obligated to say "pastry chefs are the same as traditional chefs, but we can cook everything when they can't do pastry." I don't know if that's true or not in the kitchen, but I definitely think it’s true with regard to the PvE roles in WoW. Tanks and healers have to have some experience DPSing because that’s how you level most of the time, and DPS is the easiest roll in the game. Asking a DPS to heal or tank is riskier because those roles require tools that most DPSers are less familiar with and the basics of the tanking and healing roles aren't quite as obvious as the DPS role.

When I step away from my DPS bias, I notice that HotW has some potential in the right situation. Take the Ultraxion fight for example. It's a DPS race where the healing needs are light early in the fight but much heavier later. This would present an opportunity for managed HotW usage if a guild was struggling with the enrage timer on the fight. Resto Druids could pop their HotW cooldown early when healing is more stable and give the DPS a push to help them get over the enrage hurtle. Or, may be healing is only tight for short periods of time and could benefit from having a moonkin throw bomb heals on a single target for 45 seconds, allowing the raid to run with one less healer.

I'm still not a big fan of Heart of the Wild, but I do think its critics have been a little too hard on it. It's not going to be the exciting level 90 talent that some people want, and I seriously doubt it has any significance as an emergency tool. However, it does have the potential to help a raid group if used in a managed way where the raid's needs are made clear ahead of time.

The Moonkin Tank?

In no way do I think anything in the current MoP Talent calculator suggests that we will see a return of the TBC Panzerkin, but look at all the defensive cooldowns its possible for a druid to have in this calculator?

Barkskin - The old stand by.

Tier 2 - Nature's Swiftness or Renewal will probably be in almost every moonkin's tool belt.

Dream of Cenarius - Would work very well with Nature's Swiftness but could also be helpful on its own.

Might of Ursoc - Requires a little effort but could be very useful in an extreme situation.

Movement & Control Options - Tiers 1, 3, & 5 are full of options that could be used to get a druid out of a sticky situation.

I've spent years, explaining deaths by saying Barkskin was on cooldown or I had already used my healthstone. It looks like we will have a lot more options to keep our selves a live in the next expansion and fewer excuses for early deaths.

Tier 5: The DPS Tier

Whenever I've discussed tier 5 of the new talent trees I've talked about the options in broad terms saying what I like about each talent on its own. Then I always finished the comment with a generic line like "but the best talent will be determined when we get more details and can math it out." This makes the tier sound really boring, and it was boring until the addition of Soul of the Forest and a little tweet from Murmurs. He asked:

@Graylo So ... am I crazy or does Soul of the Forest seem much better than Incarnation?

I did some extremely rough napkin math with a lot of assumptions that may or may not be correct and ended up agreeing with Murmur's assessment. Soul of the Forest does seem better then Incarnation in pure math terms, but I then realized that pure math will never make this tier interesting. If all the options improve DPS by about the same amount then it doesn't really matter which talent you pick, if one of the talents maths out to be clearly the best in most situations the choice obvious, and choice is boring in either situation.

The only thing that can make this tier interesting is design. Let’s take Soul of the Forest and Incarnation as examples. The Dragon Soul raid has shown us that total DPS isn't always the best measurement when judging talents, glyphs, stats or any of the other DPS choices we make. There are a lot of fights like Ultraxion where total Sustained DPS is the most important thing and a talent like Soul of the Forest will likely shine. However, SotF is a horrible option on a fight like Spine of Deathwing where short term burst DPS is extremely important and Incarnation is clearly the better choice. A talent like Incarnation would also likely be a better option in a fight with lots of movement and down time like Morchok. This is a clear example of where design has created a significant choice even when numbers are involved.

To say the least, I am very happy with how Soul of the Forest and Incarnation are shaping up, but it begs the question of how is Force of Nature going to fit into this tier? Our trents are basically burst DPS as is. If the situation calls for burst then the choice of Incarnation vs Force of Nature would be easily mathed out. So, I'm hoping that Blizzard is planning a change.

Personally, I would like to see our third Tier 5 option to be AoE or Multi-target focused. The current versions of Soul of the Forest and Incarnation are both single target focused, so multi-target DPS could be a nice niche for the tier's third option. There are several ways that Blizzard could implement this. If Blizzard wants to keep the FoN structure they could give the trents some sort of cleave or splash damage for when targets are grouped together. I also wouldn't be opposed to scrapping Force of Nature entirely and making it a Tree of Life style buff that allowed us to put Insect Swarm on multiple targets and multi-dot. Another option would be to grant our nukes some splash damage for a short period of time.

Tier Choices: Advanced, Moderate, Dummy

Maybe I'm just being insecure, but several of the tiers and their choices seem to be designed with skill level in mind as well as the talents utility. Take Tier 1 for example:

Feline Swiftness - Increase movement speed by 15%.

Displacer Beast - Teleports druid 20 yards forward and activates cat form and prowl.

Wild Charge - Six different affects based on form.

I realize that all of these options have their own advantages in the right situation, but you could also separate them based on the skill level needed to use them to their fullest potential. Wild Charge could be extremely powerful when used by a highly skilled player. Instead of being just one ability, Wild Charge can be six based upon what form the player is in, and a highly skilled player should be able to manage it in extraordinary ways. Displacer Beast is the moderate option in that it provides a short burst of movement, but its user activated and you have to be careful about where you land. Feline Swiftness on the other had seems like the default option that's nice but doesn't require any skill.

I'm probably being a little irrational, but I'm a little concerned that some of the talent choices will be dictated by a perception of skill. For example, I don't want to feel pressured to take Wild Charge because that is what the "good" moonkin take. I'm not sure how Blizzard could avoid it but there seems to be several choices in the tiers that may be made more based on perception of skill then the utility provided