It's incidental for the amount of mana it provides, but innervate does use a spell GCD as well in case that's not being modeled at the moment.

The latest build available for download (r464) uses a 71pt Balance build by default.... Mana doesn't seem to be a problem.... but we do eat a GCD for Innervate.

Heh.... The report filters out the ridiculously high one DPETs that occur on auto-refreshing DoTs.

That's actually really good to know. I've been writing 66/0/5 specs terrified that I'm losing out on the 4% damage bonus in T3 Resto and Intensity. Looks like I can stop worrying so much.

My biggest issue is how this will play into boss encounters. Lets say you have a boss like Illidan where you have to stop dps to let the demon tank get agro. Would you have to stop castig starfire so far out cause your moonfire is X long and cast wrath to make sure it runs out? If that is so eclipse might be even more worthwhile to minimize the reduced dps from having to stop starfire. Thoughts?

It might be possible to cast MF again, overwriting your 45s existing DoT with a new, 12s or 15s dot. Anyone know?

I was looking through some of the new trinkets posted on mmo-champion and this particular one really jumped out.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...dyingcurse.jpg


I imagine it has a very long GCD, but I wonder how controllable the proc rate is. That's an enormous amount of spell damage to be maintained on moonfire for the duration of a fight. I'm genuinely surprised how much they're pushing the trinkets in general, they all seem very powerful even though they mostly lack clickable effects.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...maticpower.jpg

The new timbal's also looks very fun, though lacking the raw power of huge spell power procs.

Well, realistically even 765 spellpower will only add a total of ~250 damage per tick, which you *HAVE* to use the starfire glyph to maintain and moonfire glyph to make useful. It's not anywhere near as abusable as trinketbomb'ed lifebloom maintenance, or trinketbombed earth shields were... plus, in general abusable dps mechanics are given more leighweigh than abusable tanking or healing mechanics...

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the mechanics of the starfire glyph or moonfire dot were changed to not really interact with trinketbombing, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were left in game, either.

I might be regreting I asked this, but here it goes. Has anyone looked into brambles as a dps increasing talent? As in buff to thorns damage(on tank). I've got them to reflect 210 damage with ~1600 spellpower. So getting 100 damage out of brambles should be attainable even at 70. Thats 50 dps minimum, assuming boss autoattack at 2 sec.
I can only imagine how high it can go at 80.
Haven't been able to check if they stack with ret aura though.

I'd rather have a tree doing thorns of course, but would be nice to be able to see how useful it actually is.

Well as of the most recent tests brambles is still scaling with the targets spellpower, not the casters. But Erdluf did do a rough DPS analysis of brambles a few pages back just based on the base level 80 damage. For pvp purposes, it's going to be an enormously powerful talent for resto and balance druids.


Well the liklihood of rolling moonfire staying as a mechanic is directly related to how abusable it is. There's zero value for pvp purposes, so it will not have any impact there. It has the biggest impact on very long boss fights. My thoughts is that it'll get nerfed if it allows balance druids to easily blow through the DPS scaling range they want all the DPS classes to be within. As long as we're not blowing away all of the other DPS classes solely due to this mechanic, I can see it being allowed as a gameplay option.


It's also relevant to note that the Starfire glyph is mechanically different than the dot refresh talents, which is why it has this functionality and they do not.

The reports I've seen are that

1) Thorns scale with the target's spellpower, not yours.

2) Brambles boosts the base thorns damage, but does not boost the scaling damage.

If those are both still true, then Brambles at 70 does very little for your thorns (maybe 10 dps for a tank that is hit every 2s). That does scale with the number of mobs being tanked.

If your treants do 12k without Brambles, then Brambles gives you another 1800 every three minutes (another 10 dps).

As a DPS talent at 70, it seems pretty weak. I suppose the daze can be situationally useful in PvE. If you are burning down adds, having them dazed by either your Barkskin or your treants could make things a little easier.

At 80, the base damage of Thorns is quite a bit higher. In an AoE-tanking situation, an extra 60 TPS on every mob makes the talent a bit more valuable.

A note on Thorns/Brambles
Actually, Brambles does boost the scaling damage. I tested this myself, watching how much damage was reflected as I took each additional point in brambles.

It multiplied it AFTER the damage from my spell power was taken into account. This is a huge relief, what it means is that the damage hike from 25 to 73 in Wotlk base damage actually has the smallest impact when considering the 3 factors of base damage, spell power and Brambles boost.

I use to have a problem with Thorns damage as well as it's limited implementation, but now I think the damage is fine as brambles does take into account spell power. Your thorns though uses the targets spell power, this makes it a weak buff compared to Ret aura, but seeing that the effect will stack with ret aura, and that on you it is more powerful damage wise in your spell power gear is not a bad thing.

So: Lightning shield > Reflective Shield (from PwS disc priest) > Thorns (in spell power gear with brambles) > Ret Aura
in terms of damage.

However where Thorns loses out, is that all these other three, i.e. Ret Aura, Reflective Shield and Lightning Shield ALL do other things in addition to giving a target damage when they hit you. This is what I hate. As a balance druid we have limited enough abilities not to make more use of ones such as thorns.

Whiles it is cool to be able to buff the tank, I'm surprised it does nothing for the balance druid in PvE, and only returns damage when hit when all the others do more. Personally, I would add 2 additional features or at least request 2 additional features for thorns.

1. To help the balance druid/DD dealers: I will add this to the base ability. "... and every time you crit, your thorns damage is dealt to the attacker.
2. A tertiary feature could either be the return of the Thorns daze to brambles, which is intersting, and remember everyone that gets buffed with thorns gets this, OR Thorns damage reflected also gives you a damage reduction equal to 75% (or some figure) of the damage reflected.

STARFALL

Bug? or Combat Error? or Not Working as Intended?
I have an issue with this talent I have tried raising on the EU boards. I have noticed it is not working correctly, and someone needs to have this reported on forums, in-game, whatever method you choose as long as it gets out there.

1. Starfall is only using 10 stars not the stated 20 stars as in the description tooltip and talent tree. This is according to the combat log.
   
2. Visually you can only count 12 stars drop every time, but the combat log reports only 10, and there should be 20.
   
3. This occurs whether it's one target only around or several
   
4. When two or more targets are around, the stars only fall on two targets, even with 3 or more around, I notice the same two only get hit, I haven't thoroughly investigated this last bit yet, but will do some more.

Interesting little facts you may or may not know about starfall

• Each star crit returns 2% of your mana.
• Splash damage and star damage can crit and each do so independent of each other
• Everyone including the person the star lands on can receive splash damage, and does so once for each star
• Both star damage and splash damage are boosted by your spell power

They should keep the above aspects of starfall

My Personal Opinion on Starfall
I have mixed feelings, I love the fact we have this ability, I also like how it works.

1. It can double up as a single target spell when only one target is about as all the stars fall on that target
2. It can play as an AoE, since only one star will fall on one target only, 2 targets in theory will have 10 stars each if the bug wasn't making it 5 stars each atm. So it is the splash damage that causes the AoE.
3. I like that it's instant cast and it moves around with you.
4. Like the fact that many damage boosting and crit talents affect it

Hate:
1. It's very wide range limits how often it can be used.
2. It's damage is too low, for such a cooldown. Even if you counted 20 stars, and the splash from each, for 3 min cooldown ability whether on 1 target or on many, the damage is ridiculously low
3. It is far too easily dispellable or spell stolen.

This is ruining the ability, for me, I think with this damage the cooldown needs to drop to 30secs, or the splash damage and number of stars need to double (this is after fixing the bug)

For a 3 min cooldown, it's too long, 30secs cooldown is what I feel is fitting to pay for being instant cast and able to move around.

Has someone done the math after the new base damage on spells to show at what levels of spellpower you want hit, crit, and haste?

I imagine those have become a bit more powerful in comparison.

Not yet. I imagine once I get the sheet running to a point I'm satisfied with I'll run the math on it. I don't know how likely it is that I'll do the same sort of thing I did with my last sheet, as once the values are known it's not as useful to work with. I'd need something like Rawr to be able to keep track of everything but the basics.

Casting MF does not lower its durations (tested on PTR).

Hm, I just stumbled across this blue post, which was in reply to rogues:
I bolded the relevant part. I wonder if they were referring to druids in general there. It would be interesting if they assumed OoC to be a mandatory talent for balance as well - the latest simcraft results appear to show that it isn't really that relevant to us.

Considering it's addressed to rogues and also mentions warriors I would be willing to guess that this is referring to feral cat druids who are and have always been very reliant on OoC because of how powerful energy-free attacks are for them.

Some question to guys that joined Beta/PTR raids:

Does anyone know if it will be possible to avoid getting killed during wipe situation in a boss encounter by using the new NE racial ability: Shadowmeld?

In practice, can I go shadowmeld as Boomkin wait till encounter is reset and decloak without bing killed subsequently?
If yes, this would avoid a lot of running.

seems like a limited feign death.

What I wonder is the fact that we regain threat once we leave the shadow meld, does that mean we'll reaggro a reset boss?

I think the bolded part implies that if the boss really resets, we won't reaggro.

You can't get out of combat with the new shadowmeld, it's like the very short lived Fall of humanity ability which was confirmed to not drop combat. It actually works like a slightly stronger fade ability, with some de-targeting utility for gib boss abilities and PVP counterspelling. Actually very strong for balance druids in PVE because we do not have any type of even temporary de-aggro, for encounters like bloodboil or aggro-wiping phase changes.
EDIT: I see what you say about the wording, but I was understanding that fall of humanity wasn't going to prevent wipes because you can't actually exit combat with a boss mob. It'd be really powerful for wipe recovery if night elf priests and druids could survive every wipe to rez the team, however.



Axanor: I just don't agree with you that those abilities are mandatory. I understand you don't like that you can't get all of the single target DPS talents in one build, but Celestial Focus and Gale Winds just don't qualify as mandatory. Talents like Nature's Grace, Vengeance, Moonfury, Moonkin Form are mandatory talents that could only be avoided in what he was referring to as 'experimental' builds. A build that ignored vengeance for genesis in a four main target fight that just focused on keeping high DPCT dots up and occasionally launched a wrath: it's not very good for most encounters but on that particular fight it would blow a traditional nuke build away. But it's certainly not going to be considered a good build.

A talent like moonglow that used to be considered mandatory, is now actually very weak and being almost forced on us due to talent placement. I feel the majority of our talent 'bloat' comes down to decisions between more mana or more throughput, and more throughput or more utility. I don't find that to be a bad problem to have, it makes our individual talent tree have more dynamic decisions than some pure DPS classes have with three talent trees. I'd rather have our well-designed problem than the current situation with elemental shaman. Shadow priests still feel very static with the few choices they get to make being strictly PVP vs. PVE now that dispersion was changed.

Even our best PVP talents (Brambles and Owlkin Frenzy) actually have situational and powerful usage in PVE encounters. Owlkin frenzy alone allows us to fulfill utility as an aoe tank with the right gear in 5-man/10-mans. I'm extremely happy with the state of our talent trees outside of concerns with the power level of Eclipse and Starfall (Still believe the cooldown should be much closer to 1 minute due to lowish DPS and just having something available more than every 3 minutes for once), and perhaps Genesis getting a bit of a bump to be more comparable to other talent point expenditures.

The problem with genesis is mostly it's tree placement:
as it is now, it's VERY powerful for resto druids (+5% heal pretty much) and limited for balance druid (+5% dmg to moonfire assuming we use the "continuous moonfire" model of spsing).

If you want to leave it's tree placement, it should probably be +1% heal to HoTs +2% dmg to DoTs.

Or move it up in the tree (not that I really want more things higher in our tree), and make it a 2 pointer: +2%/5% to Damge/Heals over Time spells.

Even giving it the most generous setup (IS, SFxN, MF rider), Genesis gives us about 26 DPS with full Naxx gear, which is less than 1% of our total DPS at that level. Compare that to Improved Insect Swarm, which gives us ~85 DPS for only 3 points. To achieve any sort of parity, Genesis would need to be closer to 5% DoT damage per point, and I don't realistically see them doing that, as it would be a significant difference between the perceived utility for Restos and Balance.