I have to say, I'm really happy to finally see the Balance spell pushback resistance.

Having Celestial focus reduce spell pushback for just Starfire/Hibernate/Hurricane, but not for Wrath/Entangling roots(Nature's focus) just felt so weird and out of place, especially when Hibernate and Hurricane are nature spells.

Note that Moonkin Form is now in the MMO trained (baseline) skill list (120% armor, 5% spell crit aura).

There is nothing particularly wrong with that. Letting a feral train MkF is no more weird/OP than letting a Balance Druid train Lacerate. We'll just need a bigger dance floor.

Other interesting trained abilities: Feral Charge, Omen of Clarity, Improved Barkskin (learned 48 levels before Barkskin).

Starsurge still being listed as a talent is strange. It is probably best to consider it a placeholder for now.

Edit: Feral Charge is also is also still in the feral tree. Obviously things are still incomplete.
Edit2: Typhoon is also trained. Parachutes strongly recommended at Lumber Mill.

Ghostcrawler has already posted about this (see the official forum). They are still deciding between Moonkin Form and Starsurge as our starting ability at level 10, the other one will be a 11-point talent. I do hope Moonkin Form will win this race, it *is* our iconic shapeshift since introduced.

I for one do not. Moonkin form is no more an active ability than a Paladin Aura is. Starsurge makes perfect sense to be the lvl 10 ability if they actually utilize it in the rotation to become our most meaningful spell (instead of a wrath on cooldown).

The problem is that our fluff talents are neither dynamic nor interesting. They do nothing to enhance or change the way our spells work with the sole exception of Fungal Growth. Why Planetary Alignment is still in the tree is completely beyond me. Something like this should be baseline. There's no need for talents to prop up a mastery and yet we have 8 talents devoted to that. Euphoria I can tolerate, but if Wrath and Starfire don't require talents to give energy then neither should Starsurge.

Choice is great. But with these talents it's like choosing between Minor Glyphs.

I agree, but somehow my faith in Blizzard is waning a little these days I suppose. The only talent I expect will be dropped is Gale Winds. Somehow I just don't think it's probable that talents like Lunar Guidance and Improved Eclipse will be going anywhere. There's something of an underlying problem here. They are trying to make Eclipse the be all end all mechanic for Balance Druids and that's just not a role it's capable of filling. There are no other talents or passives that actually have an effect on our rotation.

Why is this? <rhetorical question>

Editted to add:

Actually I take one thing back. I'd give it a 50% chance that Starlight Wrath is on the chopping block too. It doesn't look like they actually got to the Druid changes and I believe that we will see a similar passive as the Eye of the Storm Shaman Passive which reduces the cast time and provides pushback resistance for Elemental Shamans. Also, I think it's pretty obvious that the Vengeance will be added to our list of passives. If they did prune the tree a little more, they would naturally have to add more talents, but until they decide to make a change regarding the state of Eclipse and it's end all, be all status, I'm skeptical of how meaningful any talent will be.

Actually, it could also be the case that both abilities will be our lv10 start, if you think about it. Each spec get's an active ability, a passive ability (sometimes even two) and the specialisation bonus. Balance druids are right now one of the few specs which only fields two entries, the specialisation (Balance Druid, i.e. pushback reduction) and Starsurge.

I do view Moonkin Form also more like an Aura, but a little bit more starter friendly compared to shadowform, which was dropped as possible starter for offering nothing at lv 10 (GC wrote something like: "What should i do? SW:P my enemies to death?" as explanation). Improved armor, crit and regen (if this will be kept, which wasn't in earlier beta builds). This *could* be enough to justify adding it as passive lv 10 ability (beside it being just so defining of our class).

As active ability Starsurge is not the worst possible choice. But i do not like it, to be honest. It was newly introduced in Cataclysm and shall already be one of our core specialisation abilities? I always compare this spell to Entangeling Roots, a early druid spell which attributed a lot to my starting experience. It does have a CC element too (root instead of knockdown), fits the druid theme very nicely, and a casttime, so that i have to think a little bit, when to use it. Starsurge has more of a finisher feeling, yes, but i think it will confuse new druids a little bit about the druidic way of damage.

If i could decide (which i can't), i would choose Treants as active lv10 ability. Very druidic, very unloved right now. Making an lv 10 ability out of it would mean that i have a believable reason for tinkering with this spell, which would be neccesary of course.

Two core abilities (one more or less passive, one active) that do speak for themselves - 'We are balance druids, one with nature (able to conjure up tree elementals to join our cause) and bearing the blessing of Elune (able to shape into the change of the owlkin, the protector of the godess)'. From a roleplaying point of view that would be very fitting. To make a fit from a playing point of view - well, that's why Blizzard has designer.

1) You can use that exact same argument for Moonkins. They only have 2 spells at lvl 10: Wrath and Moonfire. What good would Moonkin Form do?

2) It's the only ability that blends both Nature and Arcane spells. The level 10 ability is supposed to be both iconic of that spec and integral to it. Moonkin Form might be iconic, but it's certainly not integral. In fact, it's pretty much useless these days. I'm not following your Entangling Roots comparison at all, so I won't comment on that. For that matter, I don't understand how it will confuse anyone about "druidic" way of damage. What exactly does that even mean anyway?

3) It's never a good idea to suggest Blizzard make a change so that they can make more changes. That being said though, Force of Nature needs a lot of work. The treants don't scale with any of our stats. Even Spellpower, they have a stupidly low coefficient. But Treants aren't exactly iconic. It's not the same as Water Elementals for Frost Mages who get much more use out of their summon. The problem is that Druids didn't have an iconic ability at all. Their spells were largely just improved versions of spells that any druid can use. We don't have an ability like Conflagrate or Unstable Affliction or Arcane Barrage or Pyroblast that screams Balance druid. That's why they created Starsurge in the first place. It filled a rather large gap in our spell book.

3) Only Night Elves worship Elune. Taurens worship the Earthmother. How those two interact together is something of a lore debate. Furthermore, Trolls worship the Loas and I believe their Druidic powers come from that. With Worgens it's really anyone's guess. Either way as interesting as Lore is (the depth of it never ceases to amaze me), it's hardly a reason to define a class.

Also, the chances they're going to give us 2 active abilities, even if one of them were Moonkin Form, are about 0.

Regarding Moonkin Form early: Yes, it wouldn't offer much at the beginnig, but isn't that part of scaling through leveling? A little bit more survivability. Fewer needs to rest and recover. An ever so small increase in the speed of killing something. Party Synergy, something Blizzard want to teach people as early as possible. Level 10 is so very early in the game. From 10 to 20 it takes how long? A few hours, even less. From a designers point of view an incentive is a nice reward. To differentiate oneselves from other players, through the use of a shapeshift, can be such an incentive. We are looking at the game often to much from the eyes of powergamers, of numbercrunchers. But there are other views as well, even though RPG-Server are an unliked stepchild for Blizzard.

Of course do Balance druids have an iconic ability (besides the shapeshift). It just is not an active ability, it is Eclipse. The problem there being, with eclipse defining our style of play, there is little need for anything other than the slider pushing spells. Not being in a ecplise proc means loss of damage. Designing a spell that does more damage per time than an ecplised spell means i have to cooldown it, otherwise the player won't aim to proc mainly eclipse. Cooldowning it means even more frustration for the already static balance druid cast sequence, and wouldn't also solve the other druid main problem, namely movement. Starsurge is (only speaking for my own viewpoint of course) an answer for a question nobody asked. I do like new spells, who doesn't, but it is just another cast-time DD spell with an added effect (knockdown being the new gimmick of Cataclysm), usable mostly in soloplay and PvP. But i do see the problems within the balance design, they just created a style of play that dominates the player, not otherwise around. To solve this problem, a large eclipse redesign would be necessary. Which Blizz is (of course) neither willing to do nor do other people necessarily share my point of view in this case.

Actually, Tauren too do honor Elune. Either way, i don't see a problem there. Blizz has already proven that lore is as easily rewritten as some spaceship will crash just on a small little island, creating a suitable city for survivors. The entity Earthmother and the godess Elune could be fit so easily together, there wouldn't even be much left to explain.

I've been leveling on the beta server, and I'd prefer to have starsurge at level 10 than moonkin form. I'd rather have a button I can actually push at that level, before I have starfire. Starsurge will help more at those early levels. The focus on Cataclysm is about leveling - making leveling at the earliest (1 to 60) levels more fun. They are investing a huge amount into making the game more fun, and something like starsurge at level 10 would be a huge improvement for early balance druid leveling, the way that having cat form at 10 instead of 20 makes druid feral leveling more fun.

Balance for me right now on the Beta server is totally unplayable for any druid spec at level 82 because of all the bugs. Moonkin form should be a talent if we get starsurge as the level 10 ability, according to comments by Ghostcrawler on the forums. At this point, I don't have moonkin form, Eclipse, typhoon, etc. I can't do much of anything in terms of testing. With that in mind, I really do think they have a lot of work left to do to make druids playable, because they really pushed through this build with druids not ready at all to even be tested.

We can talk about this until we're blue in the face really.

Eclipse only interacts with 3 of our spells: Wrath, Starfire, and Starsurge. There is no rotation with a mechanic like this unless the goal is to continue nuke spam which honestly is neither fun nor dynamic. Until they introduce additional mechanics, this is how things will remain. Starsurge feels flat because it behaves no differently than Wrath or Starfire.

They must add something else to make each rotation feel unique. That will cause Eclipse to feel more dynamic because there will be a difference between Arcane and Nature rotations. Until then, we will keep spamming Wrath or Starfire.

I wasn't thinking of Moonkin being the missing piece of the puzzle. All Moonkin form needs to be successful is some sort of personal buff that makes it worthwhile. Even Mage armors have this much at least. Crit aura and armor bonuses don't really count. I doubt we'll see Moonkin form have an effect on our rotation at all.

The key lies in somehow making our dots, our nukes, Starsurge and Eclipse all play nicely together but the more I think about it the harder it seems to make work. About the only thing I can come up with is a talent that causes our nukes to generate some stacking buff/debuff in the presence of our DoTs that causes Starsurge to behave differently.