Checking on beta, Planetary Alignment has no effect. No other visible changes to the tree. Like Lissanna said, Eclipse works in the Twitter fashion, but the buff strength is still 0%. Notably, Moonkin Form and Typhoon still are missing.

So, yeah, Sleep has been confirmed as a NPC spell. I'll go back to simmering in bitterness as some low level elite druid mobs have an actually useful Hibernate while my 80 druid does not.

On a more serious note, even with the buff being 0%, is the bar movement now implemented functional? Can it be tested whether Starsurge extends the Eclipse duration?

Eclipse works, the thing is you get NO base mastery from spending points in balance, so it is only boosted from mastery rating from gear.

Is there any mastery rating gear available yet? I hadn't seen any, when I was trying to see how it might affect the Eclipse bonus.

Mastery ratings effect has been displayed previously, I went on to check now to answer your question Ara, but earlier it affected spelldmg, spell haste and eclipse-dmg.
As for now, I'd expect it to have the same effect, which could be a little bad in my opinion since we use 1/3rd of our mastery bonus on something that we don't use at all times. I think i'd have been more comfortable had it been dmg/haste and crit for instance.

But we'll see.

It also says on the char-sheet that the mastery-rating stat will give info on what it affects, but that is NYI.

This is a perfect example of why the Mastery system was changed.

Old System - There were three "masteries" for Balance: Spell Damage, Spell Haste, and Eclipse magnitude. All three were affected by placing talents in the Balance tree (originally all three were affected by the first 51 talent points, then it was changed so that the first 17 gave damage, the next 17 gave haste, and the last 17 affected Eclipse). Only the third "mastery", Eclipse magnitude, was affected by the Mastery Rating stat. This led to a large amount of confusion.

New System - Mastery now only refers to Eclipse magnitude (for Balance Druids, anyway. For Resto it's Deep Healing, etc.). You gain the basic version of your Mastery at level 10 when you choose your spec. At around level 75 you train an ability that allows the Mastery Rating stat to affect your Mastery. You gain other things as level 10 as well - Active ability, spec-related bonuses - but these are not referred to as "masteries" anymore. Literally, there's a spell cast on you (invisibly) called Balance Druid that gives you these effects.

Also, Masteries are intended to be unique. No two Masteries are the same, and they're intended to be more interesting than simple bonus ratings. For some specs it's still pretty un-interesting, like extra poison damage. For us, it's Eclipse.

There we go, Planetary Alignment is cut, so they've appeared to accept the arguments presented here.

What really makes me do a happy dance, though, is that Lunar Justice is gone! Now there's Moonglow and Genesis that need to be cut as well, so those should be on a list of talents we should push to be reexamined.

Starsurge is now a baseline spell. Does tha mean baseline upon choosing balance spec, or baseline for the class?

With that said, Tier 2 of the balance tree in its current build looks positively dull.

Neither are going anywhere. They aren't exactly meant for Moonkins to begin with. They exist to give Resto Druids something to spec into besides Resto. No one subspecs into Feral (because Feral talents revolve around Cat/Bear forms).

Well now there is heart of the wild, which both resto and balance will pick up. That is if im reading it correctly.

I find it hard to believe that Heart of the Wild and Furor will remain. The amount to a static 12% increased Int, which is a very hefty amount but it is nice to see a little bit of synergy out of the Feral tree. It'll be interesting to see what they end up doing with our trees.

If the Paladin trees are anything to go off of, we can probably expect massive changes across the board. Most of these talents are likely just filler for now. For example, having only Owlkin Frenzy, Gale Winds, and Solar beam in tier 4 is pretty awkward. Even if you were to compare the Feral and Balance trees, between tiers 2 and 6, Ferals have 4 additional talents amounting to a total of more 6 points to choose between.

Also, I'm seeing (on MMO, which isn't the most credible source these days) that Moonkin form is now a tier 3 talent? Typhoon has also be inserted into tier 3. Improved Moonfire is gone too, which is a welcomed change. I wonder if they'll also remove the Moonfire component from Blessing of the Grove.

Starsurge: It always pushes towards solar unless you are under solar, then it pushes towards lunar
Eclipse: Tested with lunar, seems to have a base bonus of 8% (5516/5107 = 1.080086)