Obviously numbers may change (or spreadsheet might have a number or two wrong), but the spreadsheet seems to show Starsurge as almost pointless for PvE.

Same cast time as talented Wrath, but does less damage than Wrath (@3000 SP), has a lower crit rate, and generates less Lunar Energy. It also doesn't scale as well as Wrath. It has somewhat better mana efficiency, but we aren't supposed to care about that.

If trying to proc Solar, it has lower DPS than SF, and also lower Solar Energy/sec. One thing it can be used for is as a "finisher" to proc Solar Eclipse. If you only need a little energy, Starsurge is a faster cast than SF. You'll often be able to reduce the Eclipse cycle by about 0.7s, and that should be worth something.

It also has a lower crit rate than the other nukes.


Other minor observations:
With 2s talented Wrath, it doesn't seem like NG needs big changes.
MF spam while moving costs 6 mana per cast?

Edit: First post says spell coefficients aren't necessarily correct. Give Starsurge a coefficient of 1.4 (its base damage is about 1.4 times SF base damage), and Starsurge has appropriate DPS for a 15s cooldown.

Time to proc Eclipse
 

I think the time to proc Eclipse is not too short (I loved proccing Eclipse back to back).
These are the times I obtained for obtaining 200 energy either with WR spam and with SF spam only:
Assuming Improved Eclipse after Euphoria & no Nature's Grace.

WR spam:


SF spam:


Notice the huge amount of haste/crit needed to bring "proc time" under 15s (assuming casting DoTs doesn't generate energy & Cataclysm ratings).
The formula I used is: ProcTime=(INT(200/((EnergyPoints+(ExtraEuphoria*%Crit))*1.3))+1)*(BaseCastTime-0.5)/(1+%Haste)

Similar to things I thought while working on it. SS, being unaffected by Starlight Wrath and a few other talents, is almost strictly weaker than Wrath, unless it has huge base damage or an unusual coefficient. Probably best for PvE purposes would be to have it generate more energy--15 is far too little to matter (but then you still have the problem of the cycle being too short).

Moonfire--yeah, well if Moonglow and WoC stack :P . The base DD of Moonfire is very low though. I suspect it will be bumped a lot at some point, or all the Moonfire DD talents will be kind of pointless. WoC making it free is nice, but MF still has to do a worthwhile amount of damage in normal use.

Main difference I think is that I was using 36% for max rank Improved Eclipse; you were using 30%. We don't really know how it will work at the moment since it's NYI and the tooltips for all 3 ranks are inconsistent (we also don't know if it will affect energy gained from Euphoria). At 30%, it does take a good bit more haste/crit to hit 15s. Also, any DoT refreshing during Eclipse will give a bit of leeway.

I guess the rotation becomes a lot more cumbersome in my mind if the end of one Eclipse crashes into the beginning of the next one. For one, you want a little gap there to refresh DoT's and then cast Starsurge. Proper scaling of haste/crit is also affected if uptime hits 100% and can't increase any further (do we really want more haste/crit caps this expansion?). Also, there's randomness in the proc time due to crits. So if the rotation's very tight, sometimes you'll be lucky with crits and the next Eclipse will start before the current one ends.

Not to mention the problem with lost Eclipse uptime is even worse when you're used to 100% uptime. An interruption during Eclipse will also cause you to have to spend X seconds uneclipsed proccing the next one. It will be a pretty substantial effect proportionally if the cycle is tuned for ordinary DPS at near-100% uptime.


Off the top of my head, a good solution to both make Eclipse somewhat smoother and make Starsurge have more defined role in PvE is to slightly reduce the energy gain from Starfire and Wrath and substantially increase the energy gain from Starsurge. Then Starsurge begins to really feel like a spell you can use to control your Eclipse procs. That's more interesting to play with, and I think one of the design goals of the new Eclipse was to make it feel more controllable (which the current proposal doesn't do very well).

Haste Spikes
 

Download the spreadsheet, change the MF strategy to "Always Refresh", and the displayed marginal value of Haste jumps to >30. Move Haste from 300 to 299 (or to 301) and the marginal value is <2.

In cataclysm, there will be lots of places where the marginal value of Haste changes fairly significantly:

1) One more (or one fewer) DoT tick (this is what happened above, SF-glpyhed MF went from nine to ten ticks).
2) If NG remains unchanged, the point at which NG-Wrath cast time (including latency) drops below 1.5s (significantly boosts NG uptime).
3) Point at which GCD reaches 1s.
4) If NG goes away, Haste has a fairly high value at the point it allows another cast during Eclipse (although I don't think the spreadsheet reflects that, and you don't really know where that point is unless you have very high confidence in your latency number).

I see the spikiness as a potential problem. Sometimes you want to see the spikes and know exactly where they are. Other times you'd prefer a "smoother" behavior. Perhaps the spreadsheet could have a "smooth haste" option that does something like evaluating 1/20*(change in dps when haste changes by 20).


Edit: Eclipse proc rate

We'll be spending 7 talent points, and all of our +Mastery gear boosting Eclipse. To me, that means Eclipse needs to account for a big hunk of our DPS. I'd really prefer a "level" eclipse strategy where we see something like a 30% dps boost, almost 100% of the time, to a "spike" strategy, that is a 60% dps boost, 50% of the time.

Also note that a "level" strategy is much friendlier to movement and DoTs. Lost (or wasted) Eclipse uptime becomes less significant. With the level strategy, Haste still has linear scaling. With the burst strategy Haste has quadratic scaling (it reduces Eclipse downtime and increases casts/second).

Level strategy means 15s (or less) to move the energy bar 200.

Yeah, I think I will have to do something like that. I'm hoping they won't design Nature's Grace in a way that bakes in a reachable haste cap again, but there will always be the issue with DoT's. At some level, DoT's can be handled without changing much. We'll all know the breakpoints (I'll probably add a box to the sheet for computing them based on current talents/buff, just as now).

Squeezing in an extra nuke during Eclipse is an interesting point. In the past, I was never convinced that it was worthwhile to discretize nuke cast times for that purpose. With predictable Eclipse starts and (potentially) no Nature's Graces to randomize cast times, it might become more accurate to do it. I'm not looking forward to figuring out the breakpoints with latency though :/ .

Hmm, so you actually want overlapping Eclipses and 100% uptime? I don't know--for one, you not only need to generate the energy for the next Eclipse every 15s, but also refresh DoT's. Energy generation would have to bump up considerably to do that reliably. And the Eclipse mechanic starts to feel a bit degenerate to me at that point. It's just a bonus for continuous casting.

Well, it's at least nudging you to rotate back and forth between SF and Wrath. And if they overlap significantly it could drastically lower the cost of movement. Tune it to give you, say, four seconds (or heck, even just 2) leeway after you've refreshed your dots and maybe popped Surge. You get a little buffer to either be allowed some movement, or lower the required bandwidth on when to swap main nukes. Maybe allow ticks of DoTs to generate energy, so that it takes a little setting up to reach that comfort zone. It's not as interesting or intricate as, say, basing your bonus on the amount of energy you have, but it's at least fairly stable, and requires a modicum of setting up.

Moonkin damage tooltips from spell bar (not actual damage from casting)
Using insect swarm, starfall, & focus glyphs...

level 82 moonkin #'s (150 spell power without gear, no talents):
Moonfire: Burns the enemy for 230 arcane damage then an additional 342 arcane damage over 12 sec
Wrath: (2.5 sec cast) causes 732 to 813 nature damage
starfire: (3.5 second cast): causes 1179 arcane damage
Insect swarm: causes 2208 nature damage over 12 sec.

Level 82 moonkin #'s (3319 spell power geared, no talents):
moonfire: 820 instant, then 2058 over 12 sec
wrath: 3002 to 3083 nature damage
starfire: 4358 arcane damage
Insect swarm: 7170 nature damage over 12 sec

Outstanding, thanks. Just check the note I put on your blog while you were posting this--you can get the talented spells too as long as you note what talents you have. The only things that should matter are: spell damage mastery, Earth and Moon, Gale Winds (for Typhoon), Master Shapeshifter (if you're in form, which you probably shouldn't be) .


Tooltips are great, actually. When dealing with talented spells it's a bit trickier since we have no way of knowing what talents they take into account. But based on the info from my unnamed Alpha testing helper, the tooltip did increase when points were added to Earth and Moon and to the Balance mastery. As long as those are true, we don't really need target dummy shooting except as a confirmation.

The following talented testing with 60/0/13 talent spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Using insect swarm, focus, & starfall glyphs.

Level 82, out of moonkin form, tooltip damage #'s, 140 spell power no gear:
Moonfire: 300 arcane damage, 390 over 15 sec.
wrath: 839 to 931 damage
starfire: 1350 damage
insect swarm: 2954 damage over 14 sec
starsurge: 1610 to 2131 damage
starfall: each star does 355 to 409 damage
typhoon: bugged & says 400 damage. Actually does 1831 damage

level 82, out of moonkin form, tooltip damage #'s, 3319 spell power with gear:
Moonfire: 955 damage with 2355 over 15 sec
wrath: 3437 to 3530 damage
starfire: 4990 damage
starsurge: 7197 to 7718 damage
starfall: 1029 to 1083 damage per star
typhoon: bugged & still says 400 damage... actually does 2290 damage

Without E&M on the target, out of moonkin form, the starfire damage on target dummy is same as what is on the tooltip, so the tooltip #'s look accurate this build outside of moonkin form.

Processing Lissanna's numbers for coefficients:

Starfire: 1.00 (unchanged from live)
Wrath: 5/7 (changed only to reflect cast time increase)
Insect Swarm: 0.260 per tick (up from 0.2--sure you didn't have a Glyph of IS slotted?)
Moonfire DD: 0.186 (up from 0.150)
Moonfire DoT: 0.135 per tick (up from 0.130)

e: doing the ones from second post now.

Had to remove glyphs to repeat insect swarm & starfall testing.

Testing with talents, no gear 140 spell power:
Insect swarm: 2338 damage over 14 sec.
Starfall: 326 to 375 damage per star

testing with talents, with 3319 spell power from gear:
Insect swarm: 8960 damage over 14 sec
starfall: 999 to 1048 damage per star

No talents, no gear 140 spell power:
insect swarm: 1752 over 12 seconds

No talents, with 3319 spell power from gear:
Insect swarm = 6708 damage over 12 sec

This shows the damage and haste masteries to be 9.42%, which is what they would be if masteries didn't cap out at 51 points. Can you confirm the mastery bonus in-game is still 8.01%?

Mastery gives: 8.01% damage, and 8.01% haste.