• Adoriele

My guess is that they're worried about our regen more than our starting mana. With Aura, DS, Intensity, and Innervate, coupled with Moonglow, it's possible that they put us in a place where is was impossible to spend mana faster than we regenerated it in raids, even if grabbing all of those wasn't the usual case for a Moonkin. On the other hand, 10% int is (for me, fully-buffed) about 1k mana. Spread that over a 6-min fight, and it's equivalent to 10 mp5, hardly something to really worry about. It does, however, boost our spell damage by a decent enough amount for a 1st-tier talent.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

You get more mana out of it than that. More intellect means more regenerating from your existing spirit, more mana from critting in moonkin form (as well as slightly more crits), and more mana from shadow priests/ret pallies/survival hunters under the new replenishment effect.

It's still not gigantic by any means.

 

• Adoriele

True enough. It's 61 int for me, so that means 6 MP5 from Dreamstate, which is almost as good as the plain old mana gain, better over longer fights. It's 15 spell damage (7.3 in Wrath), and about .75% spell crit. With my spirit levels, it's about 20 MP5 OOC, or another 6 MP5 assuming chain-casting and Intensity. It's 25MP5 when under the effects of replenishment (assuming replenishment doesn't stack). It gives (assuming chain-SF, no haste, perfect latency, 25% crit with SF, 100% proc rate on the mana regen [Does anyone know what the actual proc rate is?]) 8.3 MP5 from moonkin form regen. In all, it's about 30 passive MP5, with an extra 25 when under replenishment.

Compare it to Dreamstate which gives 62MP5, or Intensity which gives 121, both of which are also 3 points, and I don't think we'll be taking it for the regen aspect, more simply because it's a good place to put points on the way to MS/Intensity.

 

Kaug

MotW\GotW appear as its own category, like Kings, so i'd expect all the stats to stack with everything. Or is there some post i missed suggesting it won't stack with other stat buffs.

 

• Adoriele

MotW is a single buff to all stats at once. There currently is no buff which acts similarly, so there's nothing it could stack/not stack with (more responding to your quote than to you).

 

mydhrin

OMG! Look at this new tree!

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Druid -> Talent Calculator

 

Alerian

Wow, that's quite a lot of new things, but there is still way too many talent points in that tree. You'd have to be level 88 to get everything if you spent every talent in Balance.

Notable changes:
• Removed Nature's Grasp
• Removed Control of Nature
• New Talent: Genesis - Increases the damage and healing done by your periodic spells by 1/2/3/4/5%.
• New Talent: Nature's Splendor - Increases the duration of your Moonfire, Insect Swarm, Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Lifebloom, and Flourish spells by 10/20/30%
• Insect Swarm moved to 21 points
• New Talent: Improved Insect Swarm - Increases damage done by your Wrath spell to targets affected by your Insect Swarm by 1/2/3% and increases the critical strike chance of your Starfire spell by 1/2/3% on targets affected by your Moonfire spell.
• Moonglow moved to Control of Nature's old position

The rest of the tree seems mostly the same. No changes to Dreamstate, iMK Aura, iFF, etc.

EDIT: Celestial Focus - Gives your Starfire and Starfall a 5/10/15% chance to stun the target for 3 sec and increases your total spell haste by 1/2/3%.

 

• Adoriele

Right. This still isn't the final version of the tree (And boy, when they said they might be adding bloat, they weren't kidding), because it's not listing things we knew yesterday regarding buff changes. It does, however, make things a little more interesting.

 

Tyjet

Some incredible changes in the balance tree, really took me by surprise.
Control of nature removed makes me cry. (((((

Control of nature+nature's grasp removed means 1 of 2 things:
- They're trying to nerf our CC in PVP.
or
- They're planning to release these abilities as glyphs. (A proc for nature's grasp, and spell interrupt resist for cyclone/roots)

 

Spiry

Celestial Focus changed. Wrath bonus removed, passive haste added.

 

Arazan

What are the more experienced balance druids thinking about a 55/0/16 build? Balance has always intrigued me but I could never manage to level a druid because I really dislike feral... but now balance is looking so damn nice that if I play WoLK I might resubscribe and do the RAF thing just to powerlevel the druid.

Anyway, just tinkering with the officially unofficial talent calculator what I'm looking at is:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Druid -> Talent Calculator

I like the points in resto because I think Intensity is going to be a requirement, so getting omen of clarity and master shapeshifter just seems natural. I didn't go for Genesis or Nature's Splendor... do you guys think that's a mistake? How much of your total dps is from moonfire's dot and IS, anyway?

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Genesis seems largely made for resto druids. It seems pretty minor for actual damage for balance druids.

Nature's splendor I'm not really sure. It seems decent especially if it makes insect swarm worth using.

 

Spiry

We have to remember that none of the raid buff changes are in these talent changes, namely iFF and E&M, which is making me wary about getting giddy and playing around with the new toys.

 

Axanor

They just went and made the bloat problem even worse. Great.

I really don't understand a lot of the changes they just made, given that the biggest problem with the tree was that we didn't have enough points to go around with the crazy number of new talents.

 

• Playered

Resto having some second tree to throw some points in was somewhat needed after the other two specs could do it in Resto though - so I wouldn't say all those changes were made for Moonkin only (you also got 10% extra int from furor).

I would keep in mind it seems only the early tiers have been reviewed so far and there should be multiple changes to the upper tiers in future patches - an easy sign of this is the remaining inferiority of Dreamstate which really should be addressed at some point.

Don't get despondent so soon

 

PsyBomb

Found another change. Furor adds 2% to your total intellect per rank while in Moonkin Form, maximum is 10%. We now have SOLID points in Resto leading to our more critical talents there. Does anyone think Genesis is worth taking, though? I think it might be decent when paired up with the IS, MF, and SF glyphs, but 5% to periodic only seems a bit meh.

Edit: beaten to it by a split second, but %boosts to Int do up the effectiveness of Dreamstate, if only slightly.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

Septus

In a way, I already "gained" 8 points or so already from not taking earth and moon or imp. FF. This new build doesn't really seem to make the tree less workable, and I'd say getting what I want now, is much easier than it was a month ago.

 

Axanor

Earth and Moon no longer makes sense as a 0/5 talent given that it's been changed to be a clone of CoE. It would make much more sense as a 1 point talent on the 3rd, 5th or 7th tier.

Any idea what's going on with entangling roots? Is it removed completely?

 

Kathbrian

It looks like they just took everything and flopped it on its head. Hopefully they'll do some pruning and reducing, and reformatting...right now the tree just looks like total chaos in the first tiers.

It's nice to see that restos will have some reason to spend points elsewhere.

 

Kaug

There are more changes to come just to line up with listed RAID BUFF STACKING POST.

On the bloat, I'm cool with it so long as the abilities are all good. If there is 'good' bloat then it will allow Moonkin to specialize some instead of us all being the same cookie cutter Moonkin. You could take the 'core talents' and then choose if you want imp dots or imp AOE or imp debuffs etc. Almost like having multiple trees within balance! How it will pan out depends on what additional changes they make in the higher tiers which was mostly untouched and doesn't fit already announced changes like E&M going from 6% Nature\Arcane to 13% all schools but not stacking with COE

Edit Add in some of the Inscription and you can see even more specialization possibilities

 

rpnguyen

Control of Nature, Wrath interrupt part of Celestial Focus merged with Nature's Focus in Tier 1 Resto.
Nature's Grasp is baseline, 100% chance.

 

novasphere

It will be interesting to see just how many ticks it adds to Insect Swarm. 30% of 12 is 3.6, and IS ticks every two seconds. If it rounds up and adds two ticks, pretty cool. If just one, myeh. It does allow for an extra Starfire in IS/MF/SFx3 +1 rotations, which is nice--it also adds some nice effects on the side for off-healing, since it adds two extra ticks to Regrowth and Lifebloom, and an extra tick to Rejuv.


edit:

It'll be really interesting to see Glyphed Moonfire, Starfire, and Insect Swarm all working together with Splendor and maybe even Genesis (although 5 points for a 5% boost to a pair of dots seems pretty marginal).

 

Boswell

This was the only logical talent build I can put together based on insect swarm+wrath spam. Why did I choose insect swarm and wrath? Insect swarm isn't completely worthless anymore with having the Insect Swarm part of Improved Insect Swarm being better then the Moonfire, ontop of the 30% more damage Insect Swarm glyph. Wrath just seems like an overall better spell - Less cast time is always better. There aren't many boss fights where you can just stand there for 6 mins and chain cast, and I don't expect that there will be any in WotLK either. Plus it has pushback protection which is huge for fights where you always take constant damage(I qq with 5s Starfire casts on Kil'jaden).

I agree with this analysis:
Moonkin WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion

My talent build:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...05013025010221

I'll explain my choices that can be questionable, (keep in mind that DPS talents should almost always come first before mana regen talents):

- 3/3 Celestial Focus for the passive 3% haste
- For now, Omen of Clarity/Intensity/Dreamstate shouldn't be mandatory to sustain enough mana for a boss fight using Insect Swarm + Wrath rotation.
- 0/3 Balance of Power. This really depends on what kind of itemization is seen in WotLK. Even though you would lose 4% hit, you also should gain 3% spell hit from Misery(Shadow Priests). It should be safe to assume that at least a shadow priest are going to be in raids, which leads to the next point...
- 0/3 Improved Faerie Fire. See previous point for why no spell hit. As for the armor debuff, a feral druid/Curse Recklessness/Hunter Pet should cover it.
- I tried to work 3/3 Owlkin Frenzy but I'm not sure if it's worth the investment, it does depend from encounter to encounter. The immune to pushback part of it should mostly cater to Starfire, but regardless, a source of DPS increase is a source of DPS increase. And there shouldn't be many boss fights where 0 points of damage is taken at all.
- 0/3 Eclipse. I'm still not sold on the investment of points in this talent to be worth it. Someone can try to convince me but from what I see It's still not worth it.
- 2/5 Earth and Moon - Speaks for itself, 40% is plenty to have almost always 100% uptime, especially if it's with a fast spell like Wrath. People might ask why Earth and Moon when Warlocks can curse? Earth and Moon has Malediction built into it, granting 13% while Curse of Elements is 10%. (Not likely warlocks will be deep affliction). Could also move the points into finishing 3/3 Owlkin Frenzy and Omen of Clarity if a Death Knight would be doing the debuff.
- 0/2 Improved Mark of the Wild - Let the resto druids do that >_>.
- 3/3 Nature's Focus - Obviously for Push back protection on Wraths.

I would like to get some opinions of what people think of my build and reasoning and see if we can unanimously agree on a talent build.

 

Panoramixe

In its current form I'd skip Lunar Guidance, doesn't seem worth the points in its nerfed state. You also didn't take a single mana regen talent, this is very unlikely to work.
My suggestion would be to take the 3 points out of Lunar guidance and one out of moonkin frenzy.
Then depending on the amount of int/spirit you can either go with intensity or dreamstate + get OoC.
You can certainly take points out of genesis for a balance raiding build, our dots might be strong but not strong enough to waste 5 points there and Typhoon is questionable for a balance raiding build.

new one:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...35213015001221

the points that are debatable in there are:
Dreamstate vs intensity
Lunar guidance vs brambles FoN combo

 

Tyjet

You'd rather have points in celestial focus than lunar guidance?
Celestial focus gives 3% haste, which is only about 60haste rating at lvl70 i think?
Lunar guidance gives nearly 150magic dmg? (nerfed version is 70dmg or so... hmm)

My numbers are wrong but I think lunar guidance might end up being more DPS.