Uh, you're aware that all of your above cases are functionally identical, right? I mean, you're comparing Granny Smiths to McIntoshes. Different color, different flavor, but they're both apples.

Blizzard controls the rate of energy gain, which is just an arbitrary Energy/cast. As long as your position along the bar only matters when you hit the endpoints, whether you have both Solar and Lunar energy at the same time is irrelevant, as is the absolute value of either type of energy. The only thing that would matter is the % of maximum energy you have, and the % energy gained per cast. Take your first two cases (you've admitted that your third case is functionally identical to your first already). If Blizzard doubles energy gain in case two, or halves it in case one, they're the same system. You cast X spells, and then gain buff Y for Z period.

The only point at which these numbers matter is when someone's writing a mod to keep track of Eclipse gains and do prediction based on it. I'd be surprised if the base UI ever exposes your current energy levels or the amount of energy you gained with a cast.

Euphoria will also apply to Starsurge, which still makes Starsurge provide the most eclipse power.

Iamrelevart - we aren't certain the bar will move during an eclipse. It makes sense for it to, but then it not moving might be a way to slow down the proc rate of eclipse. The danger there though is that the concept of making the decision to return to proc the second of the same eclipse will vanish. I'll be very surprised if the bar doesn't move. The question then becomes whether the damage of the main nuke is affected by the bar during a full eclipse.

As far as I know currently, the bar position influences the amount of damage you do. The further along the lunar slider, the more arcane damage your spells do, and the converse for the solar slider and nature damage.

Based on what? There's nothing that implies that. I think it is odd if Starsurge doesn't get bonus energy from crits, but that is not what the talent says.

It is very unlikely that Eclipse provides both a scaling buff based on your position along the bar and a time-based buff that is triggered by reaching the endpoint. Though that does have some interesting implications, as deliberately delaying a proc wouldn't be a complete loss.

There's no reason to believe right now that damage will scale based on position on the meter. I know the initial preview description implied that, but it was clear at the time that they didn't have a final idea. The timed buff triggering at the end of the bar is the current way of implementing the basic Eclipse concept.

I've been assuming that the length of the bar is 200, but that SF and W give more than 8/4 base. Euphoria doubling energy gain would be far too strong, comparing it to Improved Eclipse and remembering that Euphoria gives a enormous mana benefit. Beyond that though, there isn't too much point speculating about exactly how the numbers work out. I'd expect a high Eclipse uptime though.

Starsurge will need to have a very strong base damage range to be at all useful. At the moment it doesn't benefit from any of the talents that scale all our other spells--and the 15 Energy it generates is going to be barely more than what a Wrath generates in the same amount of time anyway. It either has to be powerful enough to represent a serious damage spike (probably not what's intended), or else the energy gain from Lunar Guidance has to be increased, or else it's going to hard to make Starsurge even usable in a PvE rotation.

Random thing I totally forgot to specifically mention above is that Starfall lost its splash.

It's bit hard to see how Improved Moonfire and Blessing of the Grove are going to be at all compelling. Moonfire would have to do an enormous amount of direct damage for a 10% or 6% increase to be meaningful (or even the 24% increase from WoC). Now, WoC is good anyway, because of the 90% mana reduction (will it stack with Moonglow to reduce Moonfire to 1% cost?). So while free Moonfire DD spam will a nice thing to do while moving around, adding 16% to it will still be a piddling DPS increase.

That's precisely what it does at the moment, and that's what makes the delaying tactic less of a sting. It also makes decisions to return to the more recently procced eclipse more interesting. It also makes your arcane/nature interplay far more interesting. On your way to wards a lunar eclipse you're casting wrath to add lunar power, the further along the slider you go the more damage your arcane spells do, you'd have great pleasure casting Moonfire, Starfall as they'll be doing increasingly more damage and those spells don't move the bar at all so no need to worry they'll gain you solar enery.

The big one though is starsurge, going further along the lunar slider, casting starsurge will do ARCANE damage because arcane damage gets higher the further along the lunar slider you go and conversely nature in the solar half which increases the as you approach the full eclipse... but unlike starfire or wrath, Starsurge will add eclipse power to whatever you have more. In the lunar half it is lunar power. Starsurge works the eclipse bar differently. You must realize that if the eclipse bar did not influence your nature/arcane damage, Starsurge wouldn't be able to tell whether to do arcane damage or nature damage. As I stated in my long post earlier, atm, Starsurge damage is not affected by the full eclipse, so it is very important on the way to an eclipse. However since its damage is so high and depends on the bar position, you may find it beneficial to still cast it during a full eclipse in addition to your wraths/starfire. Starsurge has the same cast time as wrath after the starlight wrath talent is taken.

They have not made up their minds whether they will impose the condition of you having to proc the opposite eclipse first before you can proc the same one again. However it is something they want to be possible. This is what I was referring too in my long post early on. The pros and cons of prohibiting you from sometimes going back for the same eclipse instead of the opposite.

They must have envisioned scenarios where you procced eclipse but interruptions in PvE or pvp, meant you lost so much casting time at the end of it you were quite far away from the solar end of the bar, therefore you'd re-trigger a lunar eclipse. This is why they want to avoid putting cooldowns on eclipse and why the bar has to move during an eclipse, because if it doesn't they'd have to slap a cooldown on eclipse. There are obviously issues with all these approaches.

Perhaps if they don't force us to proc the opposite eclipse we might keep fixing eclipse to favor the end we feel does more damage, but this depends on how far the bar will swing ultimately during both eclipses. If it doesn't swing far enough if you can get off a full set of casts, you might always go back for the same eclipse, especially if you view that one type is more dps than the other.

I'm confident that the best approach is the original vision, if you fail to cast a lot eclipse wise it's better to go back for the same eclipse, if you do manage to get off all you r casts during a full eclipse, then you're much better off at the other end of the slider proccing the next eclipse.

Without breaking any legal rules Hamlet, the bar does determine how much arcane or nature damage those spells do, and it scales with the position on the bar, this is how Starsurge determines what type of damage it does, and how much above base. This is also what makes Starsurge that much more useful and enhances the arcane/nature interplay as well as lending weight to strategic eclipse delays. It's not that hard anyway, you can think of it as a spell power buff to either the arcane based spell s or nature based spells the further along the slider you move.

I'm hoping that Starfall splash is just one of those things that gets left out by mistake and added in later as they polish off. Also bear in mind, that the kick of values and possibly effects of these spells gain additional features as you level up.

Now in cataclysm we don't get new ranks of spells, they grow with level, but there are several abilities scattered around the classes that sometimes gain new features with new ranks. I'm hoping starfall like them will gain its splash with later ranks if indeed it is not either some sort of internal error or decision they're toying with whether to remove or not. Doesn't make any sense to remove the splash damage now. Which is why I'm willing to wager it's either a tooltip error or will arrive later.

My mind is not made up about the new Moonfire yet, numbers are still changing far too much from build to build, and well its effect in pvp too is a long way from being finalized. I know the mind is saying it's not enough, but I have a sneaky feeling it will play out a lot better than it reads. What I'm hoping does return is the improved insect swarm talent, that was more than just a simple increase x damage and y, it made the arcane nature interplay more interesting. As I mentioned in my first long post, demo/destro lock shadow/fire interplay is very sleek, and makes our nature /arcane play look a bit like childsplay even with the new eclipse. I would have hoped for a greater distinction between casting in the lunar half of the bar and casting in the solar half than just a spell school change.

Here's to hoping they increase the interaction between wrath, insect swarm, starfire and moonfire. No idea what the glyphs will be now, but I'd love wrath to do something interesting like knock insects to an additional target and extend time onto insect swarm and/or maybe increase the damage of each tick too, something to distinguish it further from being a 1 sec shorter cast Starfire. If wrath going 2.5s is the answer to Nature's Grace issue, then you need to adjust your eclipse energy gains, it's no longer twice as much for starfire/wrath, because the cast time is changing. And yes i think it will be boring if wrath doesn't do anything else. Maybe they could add the T10 4 set bonus to the wrath spell at higher ranks.

What talents? There's no Moonfury any more, Wrath of Cenarius is a Moonfire talent, and all other damage buffs are to general spell damage (E&M, Master Shapeshifter). The only major talent I can see that doesn't affect Starsurge is Vengeance, and that may just be an oversight at this point. If you check the wowtal.com talent calculator (the MMOC one) it has a Blizzard icon at the bottom right stating that the first pass is 95% complete for Balance, so there may still be tweaks to be made (and this is only the first pass anyway).

edit: This is working under the assumption that further ranks of Wrath of Cenarius are just further buffs to the Moonfire movement system, and not what's shown on the talent calculators (which would be a first for a talent, providing a completely different effect from the 2nd and 3rd points).

This is based on all nature and arcane spells moving the energy slider:

From the Druid preview:
"Whenever they cast an Arcane spell, it will move the UI closer to the sun, and buff their Nature damage. Whenever they cast a Nature spell, it will move the UI closer to the moon, and buff their Arcane damage. The gameplay intention is to alternate Arcane and Nature spells (largely Starfire and Wrath) to maintain the balance."

and

"Wild Mushroom ...its damage component will remain very effective against single targets. ....No cooldown. 40-yard range. Instant cast. "

It seems to me that with the new Moonfire talents and Wild Mushroom, we can still move the energy bar in both directions while moving. (albeit at a slower pace?)
This could be their answer to low eclipse uptime due to moving.

And on that note, if all nature and arcane spells do more the eclipse bar, casting insect swarm and moonfire would not be a casting interruption (stopping energy generation because you're not casting wrath/starfire), but an interesting mechanic for us to play with:

While working your way up to proc Solar Eclipse, you should only cast moonfire and vice versa for Lunar Eclipse.
And with the removal of Improved Insect Swarm this is entirely possible, because we would only want to cast arcane spells to reach Solar Eclipse, and when we get there, we only want to cast Wrath because of the damage increase. No room for Insect Swarm in there, unless Solar Eclipse ends and we're aiming for Lunar Eclipse.

With our current playstyle of casting 1 dot for upcoming eclipse and leaving the other ready to be cast while moving (and vice versa for other eclipse), that won't be possible in Cataclysm because it would move the slider back. But they solved that problem by giving us Wild Mushroom, so that we can cast both arcane and nature spells (that do decent instant damage) while moving.

I was referring to Starlight Wrath and Vengeance. It means that SS would need to have quite a bit higher base damage/coefficient than Wrath in order to keep up. Obviously it might be changed, but just saying (my guess is that they'll add it to Vengeance but not SW). Either way, it would probably be more in line with their desired PvE use of the spell to increase the amount of energy it generates.

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I for one am rather happy about the loss of IIS. That alone knocked about 1/3 or more off of the size of the spreadsheet :P . Now just waiting for NG to be officially replaced with something else . . .

I was currently assuming that DoT's don't move the meter. If they do, that's an interesting theorycraft problem--you might not want to leave them out anyway since they'll do so much damage in Cataclysm.

In this case, there might be a point where you'd want to cancel one DoT: you're trying to proc Solar by doing Arcane Damage with Starfire, and the Insect Swarm is dealing Nature damage which counters it (although not by a high coeficient).

If this is the case then it will be very interesting to find out how much time we have between the end of the Lunar Eclipse and the proccing of the Solar, to time IS so that it ends before it starts working against us.

Well, I meant in contrast to the WLK situation where the DPET of DoT's started to fall below that of nukes. DoT's should remain strong enough that they're worth keeping up for DPS reasons at all times. Also, the number of Moonfire-related talents seems to imply that it will be quite a strong spell (or else there's no reason at all to take them).