Are you running oom in 3 minutes with or without raid buffs? If without, 3 minutes seem to be fine to me. From now on we are supposed to look at our mana bar, aren't we? At the moment it only clutters our display, serving no purpose. We are spoiled kids.

As of moonfire, you can't compare it to DP, as we are not primary "dotters", but rather "nukers", whereas spriests are. Moonfire is something that ups your dps a bit and makes you busy when running. That's it.

Finally, speaking of starfire casting speed, what's the problem with slow casting? If you stand still, it doesn't matter, if you run, you use MF. Spammy does not mean better.

Mana longevity will also scale extremely well as we get more Int.

Without raid buffs (Doesn't matter, as longevity shouldn't take place only in a raid when they have to balance longevity for PvP as well, which does not include heavy raid buff support). Like a poster above said, it i not intended that we are heavily restfricted by mana management; that is dedicated solely for healers and arcane mages.

Says who, that we aren't dotters? We have 2 DoT's. Spriests have 3. Hardly a difference. Just because they have 1 more DoT doesn't mean Moonfire should be so deficient in the face of Insect Swarm (which is like SWP, but better).

The problem is that if Moonfire continues to be such a lackluster spell compared to IS, we're falling again into preferring one eclipse over the other. That's why I suggested Starfire be made an equivalent to Wrath and that Moonfire and IS be brought closer to each other, if not evened out.

We shouldn't see theories cropping up that try to circumvent the intent for eclipse into only proccing one over the other because the nukes for one produce better output than the other.

You're falling into the trap of assuming the PvP scene will be the same in Cataclysm. It will not. Raid buffs are much more prevalent in battlegrounds and the shift away from Arenas will give them a presence in PvP.

Affliction Warlocks and Shadow Priests are DoT-based classes. A large portion of their talents and abilities are devoted to getting the most out of these effects. Fire Mages have Ignite, Pyro, and the Fireball DoT. Does that make them a DoT class? Our DoTs are supplementary in nature; they aren't the driving force behind our mechanics.

Everyone should stop using the word "dotter" unless somewhat explains what possible relevance it has to anything.

To elaborate on what I said above about mana: our base mana is increasing by a factor of more than 5 from level 80 to 85 (therefore, so are our spell costs). You go from having infinite mana at 80 to being completely starved at 85, because the increase in total mana doesn't nearly keep up with the increase in base mana. Getting into decent level 85 gear will help this quickly because the amount of Int is so high.

Int has a superlinear effect on mana longevity--not only does the size of the mana pool scale linearly with Int, but so do the primary methods of regen (Euphoria, and in a raid, Replenishment). Since the mana burden is going to be heavily affected by gear scaling, it's by necessity going to be rough when we start out. Especially since the goal is for mana to be a much more live factor in the game than in WLK.

I've not read anything that gives me the impression this stance includes DPS classes, only healers. Can you provide an example?

I don't believe the design goal is to return to a time where we are running into melee to hit things when we run OOM. That being said, even in WotLK we started off with some mana concerns, but only in the sense that it dictated what talents we chose. By 3.2 though, these concerns were all but eliminated and we ended up dumping any mana regen talents. This is just the way things go with new expansions.

Blues did say that healers cant rely on our innervates any more (or shouldnt be able to) in cata.

Sunfire just makes MF a nature spell, so you dont have to be in lunar when you have to run.

But i really like all of the changes

Except that because Moonfire actually becomes a new spell, it is unlikely to be effected by Lunar Shower in it's current form. However I'm sure that's something that will change. Euphoria's change definitely excites me as it finally gives the random element that we've been missing.

Also, Nature's Grace (soon to be renamed Nature's Torment I'm guessing?) pretty much eliminates the value of a Stretch-cycle. We will want to switch back and forth between Eclipses simply to reset this 1 minute cooldown. This also implies that our target Eclipse cycle will be around the 15 second mark, which I don't think will be a problem especially after the Euphoria change.

Shooting Stars is a nice bonus because it's effect will also scale with Haste.

On a side note though, what did they move from Tier 5 to add Dreamstate and Sunfire? Force of Nature, Euphoria, and Earth and Moon are all in that tier and unless I'm mistaken, the max per tier is 4 different talents. I would guess Earth and Moon is probably the one that was shifted.

All in all, my reaction is pretty much the same as Starfox's... Just wow. Oh, and Overgrowth + Entangling Roots glyph + Solar Beam? That should be fun...

Editted to add:

My only concern is how these changes are going to effect how we spend our talent points. Going by just the patch notes and comparing where our new options are added, there looks to be a bottle neck in tier 4, which are all utility-based PvP abilities (although Solar Beam will likely have a nice place in raids). That forces you to go back down the tree and pick up at least 1 talent point in Moonglow (either that or Owlkin Frenzy/Gale Winds) to move past tier 4. Right now, you actually end up having to spend another point in Moonglow to move past tier 5, but the addition of Sunfire and Dreamstate will correct that problem.

This may be corrected depending on what they do with the now overly full Tier 5 talents. We'll just have to see. The only place to move a talent to is Tier 6 or Tier 3 though, and moving one further down the tree doesn't correct this problem.

Another question is wether or not Sunfire will overwrite Moonfire DOT or if they stay separated. My guess is that Sunfire will overwrite Moonfire and get the Lunar Shower buff to help us while moving. Euphoria sure is nice as it brings some randomness to eclipse without being as random as it´s now.

wowtal is updated as well. Seems like the tree is shaping up nicely. The only thing I might miss is an execute ability but it´s not really needed IMO.

I think what depends most is actually how many mana returning talents we need to not go oom in a longer fight. All in all I´m pretty amazed how much better the balance tree feels with this changes.

Ah, I see... They moved Euphoria down to Tier 3, which wasn't noted in the changes.

I fully expect that Sunfire will react with Lunar Shower, but was merely pointing out that if you only go by the tooltips, that doesn't appear to be the case at the moment. Interestingly, this puts Moonfire more on par with Insect Swarm, but it actually makes Solar Eclipse even stronger than Lunar Eclipse.