By virtue of posting here and knowing what you're talking about while doing so, you are (I would wager) a pretty good player, easily in the top 5% of the playerbase. For your DPS to swing by 5-10% would indeed be poor design. I'm talking about the genuinely average WoW player, who would find much of these forums to be neigh unintelligible, but would probably be able to function, albeit not beautifully, if given the cliff notes by a guildie. The sort of player who would typically crank out maybe 6-7k DPS given your character. For these people to be able to reach 90-95% of their theoretical maximum also seems like poor design to me; not only does it limit what a skilled player can do with the class, but it also leaves no room for joe six-pack to grow as a player.

Basically, right now on live, (based on my VoA/ToC pug experience, so admittedly not the best data) an average moonkin will typically realize only about 70-80% of their theoretical maximum DPS. A good moonkin might see 90-95%, and a great moonkin will see 96-98%. The gap between average and good is probably a bit too large (a result of our wonky and unintuitive DPS mechanics), but it seems like the beta talent trees will wipe it out almost entirely.

Furthermore, while there are differences between average and top-end arcane mages and elemental shaman, these come mostly from exploiting mechanics in a matter that I can't see in the beta moonkin trees and rotation. For instance, a good arcane mage will manage his cooldowns impeccably (evocate at the very end of icy veins, etc.), and he will have an intimate relationship with his mana bar; able to use every point of it to best effect. A good elemental shaman will keep his lava burst on cooldown as much as humanly possible, and will place his totems such that he can fire nova on the run whenever possible (he will also have other raiders providing the SP and 3% crit buffs, which probably accounts for a lot of the variation seen in elemental shaman parses).

By contrast, the only thing we have that even comes close to those mechanics is starsurge, and for a variety of reasons (longer CD, less DPET difference, etc.) it won't be as technical as lava burst. DoTs can't be clipped, eclipse is easily predictable (and less potent), cooldowns don't need to be synced (except for treants and bloodlust, which is a mimimal overall gain), and moonfire will most likely make your decisions on the move less meaningful. If you can see some mechanics that will allow that kind of differentiation, then please tell me (not trying to be sarcastic, I really do want these trees to be good, because it means I won't have to worry about whether things will end up well in cata). But I simply cannot find anything like that.

Does that mean we get an AoE sleep?

Oo.. it would appear so, I missed the "s" at the end of enemies, thought it was just hibernate for one person humanoid and was beginning to think what the point was if it wasn't instant cast... since we've been asking for better defensive tools that didn't involve timed cast and cyclone going instant cast was considered OP for balance druids for some weird reason even though feral druids don't seem OP'd with predatory strikes buff.

But, seeing that this is an AoE sleep, it's interesting, balance healing is going to be abysmal in Cataclysm, and from a pvp point view I have often wondered what tools will be making up for the things we're losing and the things we never had that we needed.

I loathe people complaining new ability utilities are overkill without either being top notch pvpers or fully testing out the features in an environment that includes every classes new features. It's just silly, as balance druid changes normally come early, and like in wrath they cut a few out, only to heap loads on other classes at a later date that already had a better toolset, and they never revisited the spec with regards to that. Just like the earlier argument in this topic about the supposed Op'd ness of solarbeam + roots, or someone saying much earlier on that the disorientate on a previous build of Solar beam was overkill. I shook my head in disbelief as the comment was coming from a well known pvE player who'd barely touched the spec for pvp, but felt he had to qualify that the meager toolset increase was overkill.. I then off course proceeded to cataclougue the list of utlity features by each caster build, to show that with the initial announcement of new abilities, Moonkin were still with the lowest number of tools and effects, counting compound effects like typhoon that both knocked back and dazed, besides the disorientate was targetted at melee players at least somehow being effected by the beam, desperately increasing much needed instant melee deterence abilities. With that gone, the only instant cast back on the board was typhoon and the much anticapted Fungal Growth talent.

Ao E sleep, if it lasts will be interesting, i like that druids can sleep humanoids now, it was always part of the lore with the emerald dream connection and I was wondering during my early days why the druid mobs like wailing caverns fang druids could sleep humanoids and player druids couldn't, but at the time put it down to game mechanics balancing.

Are you sure about that? I won't be able to check all day, but I thought I had it on pretty good authority that the Twitter Eclipse was going into the next beta build.

And what's the source on the sleep? It's not on WoWtal.

I'm not in the beta, i was referring to a blue post of spell diff in the new build, and mmo haven't posted anything about it. But wowhead says that Solar is now this twitter version.
Thats also in the bluepost, and Wowtal had it in addition to Fungal Growth, but that was removed.

edit: perhaps thats not a blue post but a work of mmo itself

Note that wowtal (wowhead also) does show Feral Swiftness as Tier 1, so that is an updated tree. I have no idea what the deal is with Sleep.

Perhaps there is something in the files that hasn't made it to the tree yet.

It also has Improved Eclipse renamed to Planetary Alignment, and the [NYI] tag is gone, but the tooltips aren't fixed yet.

The rename of Planetary Alignment worries me. It may simple be a hold over, but I was very much hoping that this talent would be disappearing altogether. I'm hoping that since they now have paladins mostly in place and out of the way that they'll move on to druids next.

Sleep is not 30 yard RADIUS, it's a 30 yard range on your selected target.

Think of it like solar beam. 30 yard base range, 16 yard radius upon the enemy you cast it on (who can be as far way as 30 yards).

Basically, it's a ranged Hungering Cold with a cast time. Nice for team utility, but doesn't really address balance's PvP problems as our current problems is that we can't get casts off at all due to not having any instant cast defsenses/peels that give breathing space to cast. Adding one more cast CC won't change that.

Interesting spell definitely, when we see it in tandem with the upcoming druid changes.

In fact, if the paladin notes are to be any indicator of what's their approach to class changes, I'm rather thrilled to see our turn. It really contradicts those people who thought they'd just trim the tree and not do much more to make the trees feel new and different for cataclysm.

The paladin changes are amazing, and that's a good signal for the amount of change they're willing to do for classes. We just need to wait a bit more.


Per blue posts, paladins were the most ahead in the last build, and now in this build they've been majorly revamped. They were in first place for review, and so by that pattern I'd expect the classes that follow paladins in being closer to review completion to be revamped.

Meaning I expect the meat and potatoes for druid changes to still be a few weeks away while they finish with the other classes.

I think they want to get rid of talentnames with "improved", so that could just be polishment. On the other hand, while this is pretty much useless in bossfight, its useful on trash. In the beta video, the energy fades really fast when out of combat, so when fighting trash, gaining energy fast to get an eclipse proc can be useful.

Lets say it takes 30s to proc the eclipse and 30s to get to 0 (without the talent), but the mob is down in 30s, it would be nice to double the energy gain.

The Planetary Alignment rename as been in the data for a while, I wouldn't read too much into it. Like I said, the weird tooltips are still there. I suspect the [NYI] tag may have been forgotten in the rename--I'll see in a bit if it seems to do anything.

I see no evidence that this sleep spell actually exists. I think we should stop worrying about it.