Pardon me, I want to go back to talking about Eclipse:

I'm not quite sold on the "minor issue". The way I see the Twitter eclipse, is that it forces us to be in a 50/50 state when it comes to eclipse. Half the time you'll have it, half the time you wont. This means that if the eclipse buff is 20%, then the average damage increase will be a static 10% overall, no matter what gear you are wearing.

Current eclipse (live) allows us to have less downtime. You must agree that it generally took longer to proc eclipse back in Ulduar (after the eclipse change) than it does now, because with added crit and more haste, we get faster procs. We spend maybe 30% less time outside of Eclipse now than we did with lower tiers of gear, and this allowed eclipse to scale with haste and crit. When eclipse does not scale with haste and crit, it leaves us with the 50/50 model, which makes eclipse rather redundant.

I agree that, if SS could be used to lengthen an eclipse, it would allow the system to be more useful. But it would have to generate a large quantity of power, and not push us towards the "next" eclipse (as it seems to do now), but rather the "closest" eclipse - in order to extend the time it takes to reach the middle.

Using the non-eclipsed spell to go back towards the eclipse we have just procced doesnt seem viable, though. It still makes you spend the equal amounts of time casting spells that are not buffed with eclipse compared to casting spells that are buffed with eclipse. Let me explain:

Lets say it takes 5 SF casts or 10 wraths to reach the middle. During a normal rotation, we cast 5 starfires (eclipsed) and 5 uneclipsed. Half of our casts have been without eclipse, effectively halving the eclipse bonus. Say we cast 4 starfires (eclipsed, one starfire remaining until we reach the middle) and two wraths to go back the other way, we can now do two starfires and reach the middle. The two uneclipsed wraths would cancel out the benefit of getting one more eclipsed starfire. We are still at a 50/50 state.

I think this is more than a minor issue, because it does not scale with our gear. While we will obviously be casting more spells per minute, at higher damage, because of haste and crit, the eclipse buff remains a constant, whereas if it was a 15 second buff that did not cancel in the middle, we would be past the middle when the buff wore out at higher levels of haste and crit. If eclipse is only up half the time, the bonus might as well just be a 10% buff in the passives.

Starsurge does allow us to reach the other end faster, but does this really compare to more than a few casts of a spell? Lets say it generates 15 energy towards the next eclipse, but does so after a 2 second cast time. That could have been two wraths or a starfire instead, so it would have been no more than those two seconds generating double eclipse power.

I really did prefer the previous beta eclipse. While we are still suffering from movement, and may lose the buff, it does not worry me as much as it would on the live servers. Many times we are able to predict movement, and as such, we can often move before we have to, before we proc eclipse. The old beta eclipse allowed us to make eclipse scale with haste and crit, where as the Twitter Eclipse does nothing but to turn eclipse into a x10% damage buff on average. And despite an increase in gear, it will stay at that point at the beginning of Cataclysm, all the way to the end.

I do not have beta access. All my comments are from how i interpret your messages and those on other forums.

Why do you think we won't? Its damage output is fine. At the moment it looks quite strong, actually. The main issue is making the DD stronger to support the Wrath of Cenarius mechanic.


As far as DoT's and energy. I get the idea of having Moonfire support the Arcane side of the cycle, etc (but note that, if Moonfire generates Solar energy as you'd expect, then you want to cast it only the Wrath side of the current cycle, so that's kind of odd). But energy gain per tick could be messy--it could result in a rotation that it very difficult to solve/execute.

If the answer winds up being that it's always worth casting the DoT's, now you've added nothing except for some constant jitter on Eclipse. So you either want the possibility of energy loss if you cast them at the wrong time (e.g. Moonfire during Solar), which will happen naturally if each DoT only generates one kind of energy, and/or have the DoT's inherently weak enough that you don't cast them if you're not getting the energy benefit. But then we have the awkward situation where you want to cast DoT near the end of an Eclipse, so the energy is good at the beginning, but bad at the end.

And I think this question, of when exactly you refresh a DoT so that the damage gain outweighs the partial energy loss in the latter part of its duration, is going to be very annoying. I mean, maybe it won't matter--we'll just compute how far across the bar you want to stop using each DoT and then pass that information around. But now you've not really added anything interesting. I doubt good players will have much an ability to really manipulate this effect in varying situations for any particular benefit. It will basically be rote gameplay, with some guesswork whenever you can't use the stationary DPS cycle.

Yeah, but that damage output would be when moving, yes? If you have the option of an unbuffed MF versus a pure nuke, how does MF compare on beta?

You are probably right. I was so wrapped up in seeing MF more as a DD ability because we wont be using the glyph (presumably), i didn't really think much of the dot part. While it's low, it would still be enhanced by haste and crit.