4.2 Moonkin Comments

As usual, some feedback I wrote up on recent Moonkin changes.

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Now that I've had some chances to play with it in raids, comments on how Moonkin is doing:

1) Lunar Shower.
This was the big 4.2 change. It accomplished the main goal of cutting out infinite Sunfire spam, but left a few awkward issues.
--The idea of just dropping the Lunar Shower talent from raid specs has become pretty popular. It first this seemed like a problem, but thinking about it more, it might be acceptable. It's not really a circumvention of the new energy drawback, as the player doesn't get the best of both worlds, but rather has to choose whether damage/efficiency benefits of the talent are worth the energy cost. Even if the player abandons the talent, it's not a return to the 4.1 situation, since untalented Sunfire spam is generally too weak to use in that way.
--It leaves us in the position where Lunar Shower is a pretty weak talent though. Before 4.2, its powerful uses for effective AoE and for Eclipse delaying obscured the fact that its intended use--providing added DPS while moving--is actually not that great. Ranged DPS work pretty hard to minimize movement in raid encounters, and most of the time, you spend too little time moving for the small DPS benefit from Lunar Shower to be worth the talent points. A big part of this is that it takes 3 GCD's to charge up, so it gives almost no benefit unless you move for 4-5 continuous seconds, which is rare.

There's one significant issue with the talent that makes it a lot less palatable than it would otherwise be. For one-fourth of the Eclipse cycle, specifically the pre-Lunar phase (the time when you're not in Eclipse and arrow is pointing towards Lunar), the Lunar Shower talent provides no energy. This is due to an oversight in the way the energy gain is given: the talent specifies that Moonfire gives Solar energy and Sunfire gives Lunar energy. But for one portion of the cycle, the spell is Moonfire while the relevant energy direction is still Lunar. So the way the talent winds up functioning is biased against the player: in Eclipse, Moonfire/Sunfire repeat casting always drains your energy, but outside Eclipse, it doesn't always provide energy. There's no reason for Lunar Shower to operate inconsistently in this way; the concept of the 4.2 change is for Moonfire spam to move the energy bar, and it should do so regardless of the current Eclipse state.

Summary: The current state is fine if you're okay with Lunar Shower now being a weak PvE talent instead of a strong one. In any case, the aforementioned asymmetry should be changed, to see if the talent becomes more usable once it's working consistently. But in order to be a strong PvE talent again, it would need to provide something more than its current very minor damage increase over the course of most typical encounters.

2) AoE.
The removal of our pre-4.2 "AoE" technique--constant DoT's while staying in Solar indefinitely--has revealed some problems with our AoE toolset. Specially, both of our AoE spells require Solar Eclipse to be effective. Even though remaining in permanent Solar Eclipse incurs much more of a penalty than it used to, players can still feel compelled to do so on encounters with a frequent need to AoE. I think it's pretty clear that, at least as a start, there needs to be some AoE option that benefits from Lunar Eclipse. Exactly how to do it is hard to say though. Right now, Wild Mushroom is a strong AoE spell and Hurricane is a mediocre one. So even if, for example, Hurricane were moved to Lunar Eclipse, it's not clear by how much the situation would improve.

Even a weaker AoE spell like Hurricane being affected by Lunar would be a start though. Right now, the player has to avoid exiting Solar Eclipse if there's an AoE need coming anytime in the next 30-40 seconds (the time needed to get back to the next Solar). Being able to stop in Lunar to AoE reasonably well would generally allow the player to keep using the Eclipse cycle at all times.

Another option would be to increase the base damage of Wild Mushroom and Hurricane and then remove them from Eclipse altogether. This would remove much of the need for Eclipse planning across the duration of an encounter, which you may see as a good or bad thing depending on your current view of the complexity of the class.

Summary: AoE'ing in any state other than Solar Eclipse is heavily suboptimal, and players go to great lengths to avoid it. This conflicts with the idea that the player wants to continuously progress through Eclipse states while DPSing.