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

I'm still puzzled by the 10% to Moonkin. Shadowform brings an extra 5% shadow damage over our 10& (15 vs. 10), and it gives a flat 15% damage reduction that applies to magic damage as well.

People tend to overlook that with Perseverance, assuming we can afford it, it's a 6% magic reduction. But we lost the 6% from Balance of Power. So we actually gained ZERO magic damage mitigation, and now have to spend 3 more points for that 6% alone whereas it would come free in BoP to us.

A 120% armor increase is drastically down from the 370% it used to be, in order to accommodate armor changes to leather. But that still means that Moonkin form as a whole lost defensive potency.

Moonkin form thus ends like a weak Shadowform, since it didn't even get to keep the 5% crit. Where will we get magic damage reduction? Mages have Mage Armor and magic absorption. Warlocks have Nether Protection and Soul Link. Shamans would be the only caster on our boat in particular-- if not outright disproportionate-- vulnerability to magic damage.

With the cloth changes, casters are easily sitting at 25-30% base armor. With Soul Link, a Warlock sits in 50% physical mitigation, only 5% less than a Moonkin. A shadowpriest already sits at a good 50% with Inner Fire, who knows where the cloth changes will put them at.

There would be no mitigation difference between a Moonkin and a cloth wearer. Cloth wearers on average would outmitigate a rogue and a cat/resto druid. There will need to be some tuning if indeed they want leatherwearers to not feel inferior mitigation wise to cloth wearers. This doesn't even longer pertain solely to PvP concerns, as the need to conserve mana becomes key, classes that drain more healer mana because they take more damage will factor into their raid appeal.

As for Thorns, somebody should send in some feedback questioning the lack of scaling. A minuscule coefficient will be just a repeat of what it is now, and the "new" implementation seems at odds with their design intent for reflective damage mechanics. They recently changed Shamans' Lightning Shield exactly because it had very little use in PvE (like Thorn even does now), and it lacked appeal as a spell because it was too passive and insignificant.

How they can explain the current Thorns from being any less uninspired than the current live implementation of Lightning Shield is something I want to hear.

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.

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,

Starsurge looks kinda like a mini-frostbolt now, with a bit better texturing. I have a hard time believing it's the final graphic, it's fairly underwhelming. On the other hand, the new Eclipse bar looks pretty nifty. A little more cartoony than I would have expected, but not a bad design. It shows your last Eclipse by lighting up the relevant side of the bar, which may be a little redundant or misleading when you've moved on to charging the next one. PowerAura for Eclipse isn't in yet, but it is for Omen, and makes it very obvious that it's procced (not that it really affects us much).

Mastery lists 12% base plus 1.5% per point for my pre-made character.

[edit] Looks like there's a second component to the SS graphic that I assumed was a bugging-out weapon enchantment. Couple of orbs float around your shoulders from when you start casting to when the spell's graphics fade from your target.

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..

respecced about 10 minutes ago: