That's correct. It does, however, give a very generous 15% Mana boost.

As far as new information goes, there hasn't been much. Furor and Heart of the Wild are switching places, but in the end that's no different for us. I've been keeping my eye out though and will relay anything I see/hear.

HotW got changed a few days ago to +5/10/15% mana, not very useful for balance, but you have to put your excess points somewhere.

It does mean that we can no longer choose to forego the insanely weak blessing of the grove talent for fungal growth or moonglow in balance or perseverance from resto.

It's a fairly raw deal for feral. Really both those talents should just be in feral for levelling cats to pick up.

It would be nice if they'd change off the thinking that we need to be sub-specced into a secondary tree. It works fine for classes with two or three trees that fill basically the same role, but given how dramatically different our 3 specs are it would be fine for spending 41 points in any one of our trees to be a viable option, with the sub-spec in another tree only being used if you want your utility to focus on the strengths of the other tree. The way they're doing it is leading to unnecessarily complicated talent specs.
Say, for example, our early tree is heavy on a mix of spell damage for resto or spell-based control for resto or feral, early feral might have some mobility boosts or just be an undesirable sub for the other two as it is now and early resto would have healing and survivability boosts for balance or feral. But there would be no reason someone who wanted to focus solely on offensive spell casting (both damage and control) couldn't go almost all balance, a feral couldn't choose to spend their utility to be cat and bear or extra mobile by going all feral or a resto couldn't choose to pick up some extra survivability by going full resto.
It would let them clean up these really convoluted talents they're making that are appealing to all specs not because any spec might want the boost from the talent, but because the talents have two or three separate effects, each of which is appealing to just one spec. They might as well just split the talents apart and put each effect into the appropriate tree. Right now it looks like our spec would probably be 32/3/6 not because we slightly improve our feralness and somewhat improve our restoness, but because feral contains 3 points and resto contains 6 points of early spell dps talents.

EDIT: I clearly didn't search well enough before making this post -- I'll let it stand for now as I backtrack and read prior 12 pages. Glad to see this much discussion. I'll edit / remove if what I've asked has already been covered / discussed.

EDIT 2: Backtracked and deleted most of it.


My main concern is with the cancellation of an Eclipse when you reach the middle of bar. Right now, I can fairly well chain Solar to Lunar to Solar to Lunar. Occasionally, due to RNG, there might be some problems where:

a) I can't get the next Eclipse to proc due to unlucky non-crit string OR
b) I just proc'd an Eclipse and now have to move and waste some of that Eclipse.

Situation A is fairly infrequent and, in my mind, a hard to predict yet infrequent break in Eclipse cycles is far better than an easy to predict, inescapable, and very frequent break in Eclipse cycles.

Situation B is fixed by a cycle that can go longer if you aren't spam casting which sounds like a bonus but . . . currently, if I lose out on a portion of an Eclipse cycle due to movement, I can still finish what is left of it and quickly move into the next cycle. In the Cata situation, I get to retain my current Eclipse but there will still be a non-Eclipse break when I reach the middle. Honestly, Lunar Shower seems to help us deal with dps loss due to movement due much more than a potentially long Eclipse cycle that will "wait" for you.

Given what I'm hearing (and again this is without yet playtesting myself) I think this mechanic really needs to move to an opposite side of bar cancel versus a middle of bar cancel. Namely, the Eclipse cycle would last 45 seconds OR until you get to the far opposite side and proc the opposite Eclipse. Lower it to 30 second buff if need be but at least give us a possible chance of chaining Eclipses. Having it go away once you reach the middle means an inescapable, and very frequent break in Eclipse cycles. Also, with Energy move done on a per cast basis and assuming some internal cooldown on Eclipse procs separate from teh bar mechanic, it would seem high haste values make Eclipse cycles even shorter (again assuming spamming the Eclipse-affected spell) and the dead time longer in end game gear (thus not scaling).

I think if we could go past middle and maintain an Eclipse proc that would go a long way into maintaining Eclipse uptime and keeping predictably high dps. I understand we can do some gymnastics to make an Eclipse last the full 45 seconds but doing so will cause us to cast spells that don't benefit from that Eclipse a good portion of it's duration. I don't care so much about "Eclipse uptime" (how long the Eclipse is up) as "useful Eclipse uptime" (how much of that uptime I can use to cast spells that benefit from it). I clearly need to play test it or see more video of it but middle of bar cancel has me greatly concerned.

Disclaimer: I'm also not on Beta. In the following, I'm going to assume we want to maintain 100% DoT uptime, and both DoTs have a 12s duration.

Energy bar is 100<->0<->100

On live, you can get roughly 70% of your Nukes to benefit from Eclipse, but being stunned, or having to move will really mess that up.

In Cata, that number should be around 64%, and go up slightly if you spend time on things on other than nukes

1) 11% of time spent casting SS -> Benefits from Eclipse
2) 11% of time spent using the energy that SS gave us -> Benefits from Eclipse
3) 24% of time spent not casting nukes (maintaining 2 short duration DoTs, using other cooldowns, some latency)
4) 27% of time spent casting a nuke to increase energy (no benefit from Eclipse)
5) 27% of time spent using that energy (benefits from Eclipse).

76% of the time we're casting a nuke, and 49% of the time we're casting a nuke that benefits from Eclipse. 49/76 = 64% of our nukes get Eclipse. If we get stunned or have to move, items (1) and (2) don't change very much, (3) increases, and both (4) and (5) shrink. This all assumes you manage Eclipse so that it is always up when SS comes off of CD. With an effective 17s CD on SS (2s cast + 15s cooldown) that should not be too difficult.

Full-speed, wall-to-wall Eclipse means Eclipse is up 50% of the time, so each DoT would only benefit from Eclipse 25% of the time. If you maintain each Eclipse for 40s (you can use Wrath to extend Lunar, and SF to extend Solar), total Eclipse uptime climbs to 80% (10s to proc, 40s active) and each DoT benefits from Eclipse 40% of the time. The difference in total DPS is not that large though (probably one or two%).

Note that longer Eclipse means less frequent Euphoria procs. There is a tradeoff between DPS and mana. I don't know if mana will matter.

It may be (somewhat doubtful), that they will allow you to stick to one Eclipse (exit Solar Eclipse after 45s at 85 solar energy, cast a single SF and proc Solar Eclipse again). If they allow that, one DoT and one Nuke get 100% Eclipse uptime. Last DPS numbers I saw (Hamlet's 7/31 spreadsheet) showed
IS > MF
Wr > SF
and also showed that Wrath consumes energy a bit more slowly than either SF or SS generates it. Put all that together, and you'd want to go for 100% solar uptime. Our stronger DoT would see 100% Eclipse. Nukes would see >65% Eclipse, and it would always be the stronger nukes (Wrath and SS) seeing Eclipse.

Relevart posted: saying that tooltips indicated 37% bonus from Eclipse at starter gear levels.

On current beta you can do this just fine, always staying on one side of the eclipse bar
Also, DoT durations are IS: 14s, MF: 15s, they just gave splendor to everyone for free :o

Thorns is interesting. The question is: Will it be worth to keep it up on the tank?
Moonkin, well. Hello fun talents.
The remains is adaption to 3 point talent and to the loss of this range-talent whatever name it had.

I'm still missing the 200% from crits

100% haste will be the new cap. With 30% BL and 15% NG, that makes 55% solo and 50% in raid. 50% on lvl 80 means 1640 hasterating. I don't think we will reach this.

It looks as though it's finally our turn in the development cycle. I'm glad Moonkin Form got a buff (it needed one). All of the range changes go in to replace the loss of Nature's Reach. I believe there's a bug in that if you had Nature's Reach at the time it was removed from the talent tree then it's still active, which would explain the 48 yard range.

About the Haste cap... Unless I'm remembering incorrectly (or something has changed) Haste buffs stack multiplicatively, not additively, so the cap is actually a little bit lower than you're projecting. 1.30*1.15*1.05 during Bloodlust means we need ~43% Haste during Bloodlust to be haste capped. Still, that's a rather tall order and Wrath will still be impossible to Haste cap, or at the very least impractical.

Also, I'm a little surprised they haven't lowered the casting time on Starfire yet. Similar long cast times have been drastically reduced, but Starfire seems to be the only one that hasn't. We should be seeing our round of changes in the next few patches though. It's still early yet.

Did the coefficient for Thorns also get increased? If not, they just doubled its damage and massively reduced its duration. If it was increased enough, keeping thorns on the tank might actually become a part of our rotation.

Could someone check our DoT durations on a premade character? Resto's are reporting 9s lifebloom for transfers, and 7s for premades.

I'm happy with a 3s talented Starfire. It provides a chance to relax and look around. Having a big hitting nuke, off cooldown, is nice in lots of situations. It suffers more from things that cancel a cast (movement), but less from most delays (pushbacks, latency). It is a nice "opener" for starting small-scale combat, or greeting someone leaving Cyclone.

Natures splendor is still active on my copied druid having 15s mf, 14s is, 9s lb. My premade druid has 12/12/7
New thorns seem to have an astonishing spellpower coefficient of... 0 :o

there seems to be a problem where some old (removed) talents still seem to benefit some characters, but not others. It makes testing really hard when what your buff says is different than the person standing next to you. I have 3 different druid copies just for double checking things. The one I was playing with today had a 12 second duration for both moonfire & insect swarm. Beta is generally buggy enough that it's hard to figure out exactly what is or isn't intended some days.

I don't think thorns is going to be worth casting on the tanks, as the damage isn't high enough for it to be meaningful, and you'd do more damage just casting a wrath or starfire most of the time anyway. At this point, I'm deeming the current thorns to really be a PvP spell for balance & resto, as it has limited use outside of that (it even shifts bears out of bear form when you cast it at the moment).

MMO has changes from a new build that has appeared, but has not been deployed. It looks like they are starting to tweak numbers. For Balance, damaging spells (other than roots) and solar beam all have the 40 yard range (be even more careful with starfall).

HotW is back to 2/4/6% Int, instead of 5/10/15% mana, and Furor is now more mana, not more Int.

Hurricane and similar AoE's (Mages Blizzard) base damage increased by 33%. If they did the same thing to the coefficients, it will put them at levels similar to TBC (about 2/3 of LK levels).

Lunar Guidance no longer increases the radius of Solar Beam, and Roots is now a 2s cast. Rooting someone in Solar Beam will be trickier.

Nature's Majesty affects all spells.

Lunar Shower

Lunar Shower DD increase has gone from 2/4/8% to 15/30/45%. If that still stacks to 3 and I plug it (along with Nature's Majesty) into Hamlet's 7/31 calculator, that would put MF spam while moving at about 85% of SF spam.

That LS number is high enough that the following two energy-neutral "fillers" have very similar DPS during a 40% bonus Lunar Eclipse:
- 100% MF-spam
- 50% (cast-time) each Wrath and SF.
with the MF "filler" scaling better with increased mastery.

I can't imagine that they'd want MF-spam to be a viable piece of a stationary PvE fight. I expect the numbers will change (or have already changed, and I just haven't seem them yet).

Edit: Choice

The Furor/HotW change puts us in a much better spot in regards to interesting choices. Previously you'd get all the "good" talents with 31/3/0+7, but any raider would almost certainly take MSS, meaning he had to go with 31/3/6+1, leaving very little to choice. With the change, the core build is going to be 31/0/6+4 with potentially useful choices for DPS, reduced incoming damage, mana, or CC.

Nihilum . EU has further changes to eclipse:

# Force of Nature - Range increased to 40 yd from 30 yd.
# Moonglow - Reduces the Mana cost of your damage and healing spells by 3/6/9%.
# Wrath - [With][Without]Starsurge[Generates 13 Lunar Energy.][]
# Starfire - [With][Without]Starsurge[Generates 20 Solar Energy.][]

Does anyone know if this is an increase or if its standard? Weren't these the old values of eclipse?

Wild Mushroom is now available for testing. Now when its damage was first given I assume it was given with respect to the overall AoE spell damage nerf. They recently decided to buff up all the AoEs by 33% roughly, but the initial values of Wild Mushroom did not change, so I'm wondering if it was overlooked as it wasn't implemented yet, and we should really be seeing about 33% more damage from it.

Ranges are an increase.

Moonglow now applies to all damage and healing spells. Previously it was just selected spells.

13 Energy for Wrath and 20 Energy for SF are old numbers for non-crit hits.

We'll have a better idea of how Mushrooms are doing once people actually test it.

I'd hope that three mushrooms (4 GCD's to place and detonate) do about the same damage as six ticks of Blizzard (also 4 GCD's). We should soon know if Blizzard Entertainment agrees.

Wrath/SF always gave eclipse energy, perhaps they changed it back so only balance druids gain eclipse?
For me precopied druid the eclipse bonus was:
(25 + mastery * 1.5)%, so even in resto spec I got eclipse with a 25% bonus
But transfered chars were still so bugged with old talents still active etc. :/

Edit: Servers begin to get up again.
New glyph UI is in, minors seem to not work.
E&M: the tooltip indicates the debuff is +13% again

I hear the graphic on Starsurge has changed - and it apparently looks quite nice, is it different during the lunar phase (silver) and on the solar phase (green) ?

I really wished they would change the wrath/starsurge green to more a sun gold with a green outer rim, i think it willbe more thematic.

Apparently the eclipse UI too has changed... do check on Thorns, Barkskin, FF to see if any changes...oh and does Entangling roots apply it's 27 sec damage over 10 secs in pvp? - They should just make roots give its damage in 10 secs instead, but the duration last 27 secs on mobs,

There's one thing I thought I would bring up for discussion and that the change to the casting times of our CCs.

GC said that this was being done because of haste scaling and how it is really not feasible to expect someone to interrupt a 1.1 second CC. My curious question to that is this then: is that not the reason why so many interrupts were taken off the GCD? The whole reason everyone who has an interrupt can use it whenever they feel is almost designed so they can be used at a moments notice. Now, however, they can be used at a moments notice and have a much larger window of opportunity.

It's just a head scratcher for me that leaves me wondering if this stance on interrupts is going to be reversed eventually. It's further complicated by the fact that just about every meleer has this ability now.

GC on glyphs:
Anyway... awful talents in the tree so far:

Spec: Dreamstate's removal is alarming, this was the most exciting passive imo especially for pvp. I still can't see why Moonfury doesn't give 200% crits to ALL offensive spells, seriously, why cut some out? It's so confusing.

Lunar Guidance
Owlkin Frenzy
Genesis
Fungal Growth for FoN

[resto] Blessing of the Grove
[resto] Natural shapeshifter

with no mechanic changes in glyphs and talents so far only modifying Moonfire and WM, and providing no extra interactions & synergies with other spells, this spec is fast appearing pretty flat once the excitement of the new toys wears off. And it is looking damn easy. Gain a new spell, just cast it... little more to learn about it or master, or capitalize to reward the more skilled.

Balance druids get Eclipse, Lunar Shower and Fungal growth to modify starfire, wrath, moonfire and WM for them. Still they cast Thorns/FF/cyclone/Entangling Roots no different and arguably worse than the other two specs if you count pred strikes and ToL changes...Hurricane, IS are only different from damage, so these two need some mechanic change in the tree.

Suggestion: Let going to moonkin form change mechanics of defensive spells Thorns/cyclone/roots/FF so they cast better in this form because this form can't heal.
e.g.:
In moonkin form: cyclone is 40 yrds range and you get a free instant cast each time Owlkin frenzy procs,
in Moonkin form: casting roots in the form has much higher chance resisting being broken by dispels etc [maybe sneak in a cast time reduction]
In Moonkin form: thorns gives a damage reduction equal to or at a percentage of the damage reflected. Works of magic attacks too, or maybe on magic attcks, when thorns is active, rather than it damaging the cster you get some damage boost to your spells from the damage it would have done
In Moonkin form: Barkskin lasts longer.

Throw in some interesting talents that let IS do some interesting things and Hurricane too. Would be nice if uner hurricane your enemies had their visibility reduced, like their screens go gray with the cloud.

So I spend 85 levels levelling as balance with no more difficulty save i get new spells that are incredibly simple - that is the current state of affairs and its not good. Btw.. why can't they just raise the spell co-efficient of moonfire and lower the damage buff of lunar shower? Bear in mind that Moonfire needs to be competitive without Lunar shower, so it should be doing Insect Swarm like damage - okay it doesn't have to if you're changing it to be an on the nuke spam instead of a spell as part of our rotation, but i would think the spec is best served if Moonfire was a part of our rotation and doubled up as the on-the -move cast when you had to move. It gives the impression that the tweaking seems so half-arsed atm, probably cos they're overswamped, so not too overly worried about numbers.. I'd start panicking if i start seeing lots of number changes with the mechanics still needing some fleshing out.

As many have said, the tree definitely needs another pass. And as usual forum people excited about balance druid tree, completely miss the issues with the non-ability talents because they're excited about shiny new toys. Fungal growth for WM is good, but not for FoN if applied on death, it should apply when they're active.

You get Celestial Focus, Moonfury and Dreamstate when you pick the balance tree.

Can you double check this? according to latest reports, 12857 doesn't have Dreamstate as a specialization, it has been removed. Now this could be a bug of course, or the information erroneous, so have a look in game and see what happens, try respeccing or unlearning talents and respec and see if it disappears, also check if it has become a hidden or ghost talent like some of the old talents.

The 70% pushback resistance is gone off Moonfury also, need to check if it is the same with the other casters, in which case it's probably a conscious decision by the designers and not a bug, no blue comments yet on the matter though..

Quick scan of Wowhead's talent calc (now updated to 12857) does indeed show Balance with only Moonfury (+25% Arcane/Nature and the extra crit damage). The second Starfire under the crit damage has changed to Starfall now and still no mention of Starsurge in there. So it's saying we've lost the pushback resistance and regen.

Seems everyone else with pure pushback resistance has also lost it. It's missing from Hunters, Shadow Priest, Resto Druid and Locks at least. More interesting ones like the Shaman versions (with cast time reductions built in) are still there. Perhaps everyone is getting more bundled with their pushback resistance?

And yeah, now that they're ruled out rotation changes with glyphs, our tree is very much lacking interaction. Here's hoping for improvements.

respecced about 10 minutes ago: