If it's true that there is a modifier based on where the slider is, then its possible that Moonfire could hit like a truck (especially on the move). Also, given that the Moonfire related talents deal directly with the DD portion of the spell, we're not going to be glyphing it anymore (I just opened wrathcalcs and saw that still selected as a glyph, haven't checked calculations yet).

Again, assuming that the report that there is both a proc and a sliding damage modifier is true, it seems likely that we will want to cast the buffed DoT near the end of the Eclipse meter (due to their snapshot application) and then use Starsurge to push us into Eclipse for the proc and spell switch (since Starsurge will hit its hardest right at the end of the meter).

EDIT: I forgot to mention that even if the benefits to Moonfire damage are minor, we'll still pick those points up for lack of better options. I'm not really feeling the whole "optional talent" thing here. It looks pretty close to "fill your tree and then spill over"

It seems slightly counter-intuitive that we would decrease the only part of moonfire that our talents would be buffing. Especially when we should be able to select IS and Focus as the other two glyphs (hoping that IS will be a much stronger DoT now that it will scale with both haste and crit).

Counterintuitive, but may be perfectly sensible if the bonuses are additive.

e: Probably shouldn't go too far off on Glyphs though--I don't think we know anything about them.

I liked how IIS made you use the DoTs to ramp the nukes in different ways. True it may have been soley to boost their importance and now that they scale with haste and crit that is no longer necessary. However it made the interplay between the two schools more interesting, and that was good - I really don't want the nature half to be a mirror of the arcane bit, I am hoping they do something more.

Wrath is currently been changed to 2.5secs cast at base, before talents. IF this is the case, is there any point in changing nature's grace now I ask? Also I desperately hope wrath gains an additional feature with this increased cast time, if it stays, just to distinguish it from starfire in more than just 1 sec time cast in nature magic instead.


And DoT's, AoE, in fact all other damage spells do not move the meter currently, the reason they don't is that doing so will likely force you to stop casting certain spells when in one half of the bar. This is not the intention, you already have very few spells to begin with, eclipse was introduced to make juggling between wrath and starfire interesting, other spells apart from the 3 nukes moving the slider will work against this. Imagine spamming wraths to get your slider to a full lunar eclipse, but your moonfire ticks keep sending it the opposite direction. You may just decide not to cast moonfire at all. If it doesn't slow your swing predictably, you'd be annoyed, and even if it did, you wouldn't like the small dps you lose from it.

What they did was let the higher your lunar power is, the higher your arcane spell damages deal, so as you're spamming wrath to push closer to a full eclipse, casting moonfires, starfall will be doing more damage, and so will Starsurge which will do arcane damage along the lunar half because that does more damage, and will push your eclipse bar further up

A few things changed from the announcement, once the details were worked out, they didn't like other spells moving the slider, so it became only wrath/starfire/starsurge, however other spells are affected in damage by the position you are on the slider. More damage scaling for arcane further up the lunar side, and more damage for nature scaling as you gain more solar power.

As far as I know, it is both, not an either/or. You gain a buff when you hit the end of the slider to your main nuke only. However the slider position affects the damage of all spells in the nature or arcane schools. The bar position scales the damage. This is how starsurge decides whether to cause nature or arcane damage.

For e.g. at 75 lunar power your arcane spells will do more damage than they did at 60 lunar power. That's all your arcane spells, starfire, moonfire, starfall. If you cast starsurge here it will do arcane damage, and will do more damage at 75 Lunar power than at 60 lunar power. Starfire moves slider with solar power. Moonfire/starfall won't move the slider though they'll do more damage. Only wrath will gain you more lunar power, and Starsurge too after picking up Lunar Guidance, which will do arcane damage unlike wrath therefore fully benefitting you from the bar position and instead will add lunar power. When you get 100 lunar power, you gain the eclipse buff, gaining additional damage to your Starfire nukes only at this point. Increasing your mastery from taking balance spells, equipping leather and getting set pieces with mastery bonuses will scale how much damage that will be under the eclipse buff.

Imo mastery should also scale the damage increase to your arcane spells as you move up slider, it may do though already, I am not able to test that currently. The main reason I hope it does is that it makes sense too and if it didn't then balance druid mastery only benefits you for the eclipse up time, rather than all the time like other mastery stats do.


The details haven't been finalized, but this is how it currently works, but things may change as it is fine tuned.

i think balancemoon is referring to the druid preview, but i don't think the position of the slider will scales the dmg anymore, as Arawethion pointed out, its pretty useless. unless you have something as a proc like eclipse.

but do we know anything about the eclipse? they said they want to reduce the rng, but with the old eclipse its just the same. perhaps eclipse becomes a buff ala "your next 10 wraths will do 30% more dmg, last 30 sec" and 5 SF on the other end. so moving doesn't make you lose much of the buff.

Ok, I was looking at the talents and I am greatly concerned about the spirit -> hit talent in a raid setting. For comparative sake, my base spirit with Improved Mark is 162. Mark gives another 52, toss in spirit and kings and thats probably another 100. Id be sitting at 310 spirit naked.

That would put us way over raid hit cap with literally no gear on. Has Blizzard addressed the fact that if spirit is going to so heavily convert into hit rating on gear that we will literally have to have crit/haste on every single piece of loot we obtain in cataclysm?

It is an interesting point though that we do have an initial amount of Spirit, therefore we require less spirit through gear due to the 100% conversion. I mean, if the hit cap is 500, and we have 250 base Spirit, we'd only need 250 hit instead of 500 hit like other classes. It's definitely a bonus for us: we get free hit from our base stats.

The real question is whether Spirit is considered a "Primary Stat" in Cataclysm anymore... I know it's a healer-only sort of stat, but that doesn't really say anything.

As a side note though, the only slots we would have to really worry about Spirit being on are Wrists and Belts. Everything else will have a DPS-comparable item, none of which will require Spirit (rings, neck, etc). I doubt they'll put spirit on our Tier pieces... but I wouldn't put it past them either.

Spirit as a secondary stat was confirmed today. And we probably could have inferred anyway from its being omitted from MotW.

I thougth about that also, and was a little surprised that BoP still had a full 4% when the trees came out. However I don't think it is that big of an issue.

First, having the 225-250 base spirit would give us a lower hit cap relative to other classes, but it wouldn't be all that different then were we are currently. At level 60 a full 17% hit cap was 136 hit rating, at 70 it was 215, and at 80 it is 446. As you can see the way that the hit cap is increasing is not linier. At minimum the 85 17% hit cap will probalby be close to 1000. When you consider the amount of gear inflation we had in WotLK, I would expect it to be betwee 1300 and 1400. So lets assume that it is 1350. If that is the 17% cap then you need 79.41 Hit rating to get a 1% hit chance. With BoP our cap is reduced to 1033. If I assume that base spirit at level 85 is 250 then moonkin will need 783 hit rating to cap. That is roughly 9.86% hit chance we need to get from gear and is pretty much the situation we are in right now.

The second thing to remember is that Blizzard has said that the hit cap will scale with the content in Cataclysm. So, it will be more difficult to hit cap.

If this goes live, I would probably complain if I was a Mage or a Warlock, but I don't think it throws moonkin way out of balance.

With the current released talent build it is possible to get Heart of the Wild in the feral tree for a 20% boost to Int. I'm not sure if it is an entirely viable talent build but it is a large boost. If it is not changed in someway before release we might see some pretty badly wasted talent points in the feral tree to gain this talent. Taken along side Furor that would be a 32% boost to Int.