Winter's Chill and Improved Scorch more likely. Focused Magic is going to be really hard to theorycraft accurately with the current number of charges it has.

Winter's Chill really helps Starfire's DPS and DPM.

With the newly added arcane damage to scorch and nature damage to CoS, has someone actually came up with the difference in Wrath vs Starfire? Starfire, as far as I know, still has 0 resistance to push back. If the difference in damage isn't significant, I'm sure the investment in 2/3 Celestial Focus + 50% pushback protection glyph be worth having and casting Wrath over Starfire spam. Most DPS calculators ignore spell pushback and are based on chain casting starfires for a long period of time. There are little to no boss fights at all where movement and pushback on starfire doesn't exist(Note that wrath benefits from being lower cast time in movement fights). If we take pushback vulnerable Starfire into account VS pushback immune Wrathing, it's plausible that Wrath would be the way to go. Especially now that Nature's Grace can grant 50% GCD reduction on crits (The benefits deteriorate with haste, but I don't see druids gemming haste at all if it's just wrath spam).

Frost mages will give 10% crit to starfire but not wrath which brings starfire back in line too.

I'm not sure the investment in getting wrath uninterruptable is worth it. Their are three 'better' glyphs in my opinion, starfire lengthening moonfire duration, moonfire dot damage increase and the insect swarm damage increase making it worth casting.
So you lose one of those options of the bat if you go for the 50% pushback protection.

Now factor the changes to spell pushback, 0.5s per hit to 1s max pushback and pushback protections power is lessened somewhat. Not useless by any means but I think 2 talent points and a glyph is too much.

Vodrin, I must have missed that part of the TCing, but did you say that glyphed Insect Swarm will be a worthwhile use of our casting time? That would certainly be appreciated.

Edit: Erragal, I must have missed some theorycrafting about the mana as well. I'm guessing the change happened when the Moonkin proc changed to something actually useful. :p When you say our current mana situation is looking really good, does that imply with all of the mana regen talents (including Intensity and OoC in Resto) or just Dreamstate and the Moonkin aura? This is something I'm very interested in.

I would contend the innervate glyph could end up better as well (Assuming it's one of your three major glyphs). Depending on our mana situation (Which looks REALLY good right now, but that could change) the extra mana could be significant. Or it would be enough with our other mana regeneration options to give our innervate someone else in the raid.

From the previous examinations, IS became worthwhile with the glyph but that was before Winter's Chill existed.


To follow up on the pushback changes: Concentration aura will be raid wide 35% reduction in those times as well, with that the max your starfire could get pushed back is already only .75s. The new pushback system is much more favorable to longer cast time spells since you cannot be affected more than twice on a given cast.

A lot will depend on the exact availability of those glyphs.

Wrath advantages will be
- Higher base damage
- More frequent moonkin-haste procs
- Higher uptime for earth and moon
- Easier to get pushback resistance.
- Slightly better Eclipse buff.
- Short cast advantage in high-movement fights.

SF advantages
- Better DPS scaling with both haste and crit.
- Extra arcane-only buffs from mages (scorch and winter's chill)
- Much better DPM
- Extremely nice synergee between Starfire glyph and MF glyph (assuming Starfire glyph actually applies to Starfire).

Note that if you don't have any pushback resistance, Starfire may actually end up being a better spell in a very high-pushback environment (adding 1s to SF is less of a DPS penalty than adding 1s to Wrath).

They changed the glyph system to be 3 major and 3 minor. So we should certainly be able to use all three glyphs.

A lot of the mage TC is showing that it's very plausible to have a frost mage with both Improved Scorch and Winter's Chill keeping up both debuffs. Particularly with the Improved Scorch glyph making it about the same DPS loss that IFF is for us.

Can't wait to see some of the additional set bonuses and particularly Idols. Hopefully they put a bit more effort into those, this time around.

Is it really that much better DPM?

Wrath - 11% Mana - 1.5s = 7.3%/s
Starfire - 16% Mana - 3.0s = 5.3%/s

However, critical strikes giving 2% of total mana favors wrath (even with 10% Winter's Chill on starfire) due to the higher amount of casts.

Judgement of Wisdom has a 4s cooldown with 100% proc. JoW procs are huge.
This favours wrath as you are going to cast a wrath sooner after it comes off cooldown than a starfire.

So somewhat better DPM but I don't expect it to be massive?

Also Balance Druids seem to be the only spec I've seen so far with 4 powerful pve glyphs making the inscription bonus useful for Balance in PvE. Of course we have not have seen all the glyphs for the other classes yet and more will be added as the game progresses.

Assume mana = 5 * base mana (at 70 that would mean 10450).
Assume 33% crits.

11%/5 - 2%/3 = 1.53% mana
16%/5 - 2%/3 = 2.53% mana

Ignoring base damage and just looking at mana scaling

67%/1.53% = 44% damage/%mana for Wrath
120%/2.53% = 47% damage/%mana for SF

Those numbers are before the assorted buffs (other than WoC). The mage buffs favor SF by 10 or 21? %.

If you have both the SF and MF glyphs, most SF casts also get a free 175% MF dot, effectively pushing the SF scale factor from 120% to about 140%. If you are chain-casting Wrath, you have to explicitely cast MF, and that will lower your rotation's efficiency.

I don't know what the numbers are for seal of wisdom in LK.

From US beta forums
Koraa:
Currently working on a polish pass of the Balance tree. Get ready for more bloat!

Could change a lot.

Hope he's not too serious?

Last thing we need is more bloat. Hopefully this Balance pass will also effect the bottom of resto too...

Here's to hoping :P

I doubt too much will change. It's just that a lot of talents need to be 0/1-/0/3 instead of 0/5 to make the tree work as-is.

Blue post
2) We are moving almost every buff to affect the entire raid. There are only a few exceptions, and these tend to be short-term, bursty abilities. Most buffs from Battle Shout to Leader of the Pack will affect the raid.

Hmm LotP isn't currently raid wide in the talents trees i've seen (http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?druid). I wonder if MK and\or iMK will go raid wide as well? I hope the next pass gets us some much needed buffs and talent fixes

Blue post regarding Improved Moonkin Form:

Wow. I suspect Totem of Wrath will become a straight +5% crit totem if our Aura is going raidwide.

I just hope that Totem of Wrath stacks with Moonkin aura because of the synergy between Earth and Moon and elemental shamans. From the shaman perspective it would be irritating to sacrifice a central utility talent in order to get a buff that is specifically directed at shamans, arcane mages, and balance druids.

I really doubt it will, after reading the Raid Stacking blue post: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Raid stacking in Wrath of the Lich King. They're trying to give most of the powerful raid buffs redundancy, so you have more flexibility in who you bring to a raid.

Talent bloat saddens me, since it means I have to lose out on nice things, but I can live with it as long as I can get everything I need for a certain task. Right now I think there's too much bloat to even get just the talents you need for PvE or just for PvP (well, maybe not the latter.)

Does anyone have any word on Starfall hits proccing the new Moonkin regen?

I heard it was like this in the beta, but it seems like this is something that would get nerfed, otherwise Starfall could conceivably become a ridiculous regen tool.

They've indicated the Balance tree is up for polish soon, and that they are aware of the bloat issue with it.

It is on a cooldown, and during boss fights (only time regen matters) you usually wont be able to hit as many targets to get procs. I don't think it would even affect much if it was allowed to proc on hurricane (which can now crit), considering the high mana cost.

Speaking of crits, it would be nice if all our new abilities that can crit would be included in Vengeance (and hopefully some of the other damage talents), specifically Hurricane and Typhoon. It might bea good idea in general to change some of te talents to "Balance Spells", instead of listing each one out.

On another forum i, in passing, suggested that the current gear consolidation is flawed at best and easily fixable. The more i think on it the more i like it.

Looking at caster\healer leather\cloth on MMO-champ all the blues have Int, Stam, Spellpower Plus one of Spirit, Crit and Haste. If Moonkin regen from iMK etc is as good as the devs have suggested (i recall a dev suggest that our regen might be too good currently) we won't need\want intensity so spirit is near worthless. Hot don't crit so trees don't want it. We don't want spirit and they don't want crit, SO how are they reducing gear bloat? All they did is move the rift form heal vs spell damage to spirit vs crit. The easy, obvious solution is to make a high tier talent that gives moonkin crit from spirit, kinda like all our Int to Mp5\Spellpower talents. Trees already get more +healing from spirit (via tree aura). Then everyone would be happy, especially the mages and locks as we'll be less likely to roll on cloth. Seems like a similar fix would work for priest\mage\locks too

Without some kind of change (or them putting that many more items back into the game) i'm seeing myself stuck in spirit heavy leather armor or going back to being a clothkin, once i start replaying my T6.

They didn't reduce gear bloat so that resto and balance druids would have the same best-in-slot items. They reduced the gear being thrown-away by making healing items nice for casters and the opposite.
I look at some of the sta/int/spi/spellpower items and think that they'll be a nice upgrade. I know that they won't be the best-in-slot at that gear level because i will be looking for gear with hit/crit/haste, but in the meantime i'll still have had an upgrade for my dps instead of just getting some offspec healing gear.