Haste mutlipliers (heroism/icy veins) do not work this way. If you had 40% from gear you would have 68% haste while the effect is up. Of course having this much haste is not going to be optimal because 1.5 second casts and instants will be below the global at that point. I doubt it would even be possible to get more than 25%ish passive spell haste. Yes I pretty much agree that I foresee this becoming problematic moonkin in every single caster group becoming mandatory. Even if the ability had a 13 second cooldown like someone suggested uptime would still be over 50% I believe.

Coming back to something that Balancemoon wrote earlier:
One thing to keep in mind here is that unless Barkskin's cooldown is removed as well (which it won't be, for obvious reasons), you can only do one uninterrupted Hurricane. You'd run in, cast Starfire, Typhoon, Barkskin+Hurricane... and after that you might have the mobs beating on you, but you couldn't do much to actually keep them. Any Hurricane you would cast would immediately be interrupted. Unless Owlkin Frenzy protects not only against pushback, but also against the interruption of channeled spells. Which would make it very interesting all of a sudden for select PvE applications (namely AoE tanking).

Which, yeah, are the exact same thing. OF would protect your Hurricane just fine. Still not a reason to grab it for PvE.

I wasn't sure if it's exactly the same, thanks for clearing that up, Adoriele. It won't be worth it in general, I agree, but you might want to respec to it when your local prot pally is not available and you're suddenly the best choice for <insert AoE tanking encounter here>.

Erdluf and Miststorm I wouldn't be too hasty to judge the impact of the new abilities, as "being murder against a rogue" or so overpowered, "you could be in greens and still justify your spot", because it is not calibrated for level 70, but for level 80, all abilities coming in the WotLK. Thorns are meant to hurt, but bear in mind at level 80 we will have a lot more health, and thorns has been useless for so long. To be honest I wouldn't cry too much that rogues have a hard time for a change against balance druid's who have brambles as it's a lot easier for a rogue to take down a balance druid than the other way round. The reason I say don't conclude is because you don't know how everything will scale.

All I do know is that Thorns was previously useless and needed to be fixed, now it looks like it will hurt, but then again it's an effect 4 classes can remove and no anti dispel talent, we agree that the Thorns buff is good for PvE when taken with Brambles at that 141 reflection damage. How it works out in pvP is too hard to determine yet. All warriors can dispel now because Shield Slam is trainable, and there is more coming for Rogues. So, we'll see.

That's the idea in general, channelling is susceptible to pushback disruption and interrupt, and interrupt will stop Hurricane channelling, whiles a pushback effect would only reduce the duration channelled. So Owlkin frenzy will definitely allow you to pop up Hurricane unaffected by being hit by mob, unless the mob has an interrupt ability like a slam/gouge or stun, the ability works very well for AoE tanking, and is some consolation for not getting the arcane explosion like AoE. But I'm happy with what the balance druid gets in the WotLK, it finally got what it needed in the different caster departments, at least as far as dps casting is involved.

20% haste and 5% crit as a group buff, especially if the haste stacks as flamingcloud assumes based on the experience from Heroism/Bloodlust, is seriously overpowered, independent of gear levels.

We can safely assume that caster will stay below 50% crit rate in lvl80 endgame, so the 5% crit will be at least a 3% dps buff. Combine that with a 20% dps buff from haste, and a moonkin will boost 4 party members by at least 23% each, or 92% total. Include the raid wide dps buff from improved Faerie Fire, which will amount to a raid dps buff of more than 8% of the average dps of a raid member, and the raid buffs alone are so strong that the moonkin would need to do nothing more than refresh faerie fire to have a above average dps contribution.

This is completely independent of gear levels, it does not matter whether the average raid dps is 400, 2000 or 5000. Therefore we can assume that the improved moonkin aura will provide an average haste improvement of 5% or less, because anything more will give us so much utility that our dps would need to be cut back to keep the balance, and that cannot be desired.

I readily agree that Thorns can turn out to be finely balanced. If 3K dps will be seen as normal at T8 levels of gear, then 300 dps reflected damage is painful, but definitely not overpowered. And I still hope that Thorns will finally get some scaling from gear. Something between 2% to 5% scaling based on spell damage would ensure that Thorns will improve with gear levels to continue to be a painful deterrent to melee classes.

As for Owlkin Frenzy, I only hope the effect will not be dispellable, because with the loss of dispel resistance it will be close to useless otherwise, at least in 5v5.

The point being made is that while it's gear dependent for the mages or warlocks in the moonkin's group (both for crit rating and longevity) it could still bring so much raid DPS that the moonkin could almost go afk, just refreshing iFF, and still hold his spot against bringing another "pure" DPS class instead.

By comparison, a Shadow Priest needs to applying SW:P (or VT or Mind Flay) to whichever mobs the raid is targeting (this part being similar to how iFF is used) to achieve +5% spell damage and a further +10% shadow damage, but to actually get the main benefits of bringing a Shadow Priest they actually need to be *doing* something and doing it well. i.e. VE and VT being linked to DPS.

20% haste on next spell after a crit.... NG springs to my mind... 0.5 sec off 3 sec on next SF after a crit is 20%.

so this would simply be a group-wide NG generalized for all spells.

the way I see Moonkin aura is as a slightly less powerful NG at 20% extra speed, that you can use for 10secs, but not again for afew seconds after one has just ended. say a few seconds is 10secs.

So if it procs, you get for 10secs, but you can't get it again for another 10secs after that. If your crit chance on your nuke is about 40% (for e.g.), that makes a proc on your 3sec nuke once every 10 secs, with a 20sec cooldown, you have the effect up about 3 times in a minute.

It is looking a lot more likely that is a next spell effect, in which case 20% haste is not very remarkable, and dammit, I would like it to be quite a powering buff. Since most of your nukes are 3secs long, a 10 sec duration makes sense.

TBh, decent thorns, roots indoors, imp FF, no cooldown hurricane, nature's fury -- are all buffs that should have come in TBC, it's good that they are given them now, but they should have come a while ago. Typhoon, Starfall and Improved Moonkin Aura are the WotLK improvements. I view iMkA as the 5 pointer apetiser for balance the way Infected wounds is for Feral. So it should really be overpowering, but not ridiculously so

which would make it somewhat un-remarkable and very much in line with all the small buffs druid's a use to, need it to be an "OOMPH" like ability, not a "nice" or "quaint" little addition like MK aura was.

Well, if it is just a NG aura kind of deal (which I think it is, or ultimately will end up being), then that "every few seconds" ICD really could be a 3 second cooldown, leading to a 20% haste buff with an uptime very close to your crit %.

you do have a point. I'm quite excited about the new moonkin stuff. I quit playing a balance druid last year because I felt it to basic. I was quite annoyed that it was the only spec/build that the higher you got, the less abilities it used. I still wish they would find a meaningful reason to melee in feral forms as a balance druid, one that actually helped casting, like if you got alot more mana back meleeing in cat/bear form than moonkin so that in a sense, balance durids would use feral forms as often feral druids for e.g. used caster form to heal.

However the deciding factor for me was that every other caster spec had more to offer both to groups and raid, still had most of their abilities in other spell schools relevant to them, and 1 on 1 were all a better choice for a raid in almost every department. Balance druids I viewed needed a few more new things like about 2 or 3, all their current utilities and buffs made reasonable, and to have some sort of caster niche role, the easiest to think of was something that made use of their armor, like in AoE tanking & utility.

not just I, but most of the druid's on the boards. All agreed thorns needed to be made more useful, roots indoors also, and Hurricane at least to lose it's cooldown, all also agree and many wanted an additional AoE. Then many suggestions for the extra buffs were an improved moonkin aura, some wanted mana, some wanted extra dps based on crit which follows the theme of the balance druid and one or two extra things. The game also need someone to boost nature damage, and a little bit more to arcane damage, balance druids were perfect candidates seeing as theya re the most specialised nature users in warcraft and the night elves being inextricably bound to the well and the arcane, and seeing that druids for all their supposed proficiency had no ability that amplified the power of nature magic nor any resistance, not that they'd want you to resist it. So Nature's fury is very very welcome nice bonus touch.

That's what we got. The caster niche was AoE tanking/utility - with Owlkin frenzy giving you immunity to push back, if you were the target you could at least pull it off. Starfall great aoe, nasty burst damage, only a DK or Prot Pala could take those mobs off you, or prevent you from getting aggro with Nature's reach specced, and the boost to hurricane utility and Typhoon, may not make the balance druid the heaviest AoEer over 20secs, but a darn sight useful one to have. So it gets it's niche but more importantly one that plays into it's strength, that armor was so going to waste until just now.

With this addition it feels worthy of a spot in a raid, and as an equal not as the one you add once you've got all the useful ones.

I suppose there is not much to filter out except admiration for finally blizz sorting balance out, at least on paper. True they could nerf everything back to pre-WotLK by the time WotLK does launch, but it looks like the balance druid's darker days are finally numbered and the balance druid is finally looking like the caster it should have been from the start.

Now with this, any new player wanting to roll a caster class would at least now could seriously consider the balance druid as a choice.

I agree that it's worth waiting for more information before drawing any conclusions about the overall strength of imp MK aura.

One thing to consider going forward, however, is that, depending on the cooldown, rapid group swaps of a moonkin (example: every 10 seconds) and, for example, a shadow priest could increase the benefit of the aura significantly.

Allowing macro'd group swaps in the xpac would of course make this much easier to execute. Who knows! It's probably not worth a thread derail right now, just something to keep in mind once we get some real info.

But as things stand right now (at least I) feel extremely gimped when I'm not in the shadow priest group, since our mana efficiency is significantly worse than that of... pretty much every other caster DPS.

First, I'm going to hope to hell that you're in your PvP spec/gear right now, because if you're not, you're doing it wrong.

That said, we're nowhere near the least mana-efficient caster. That award goes to the Arcane mage spamming AB and AM. Second is probably the Destro lock, who gets to mitigate the effect with Life Tap, which is nowhere near a great compromise. We're actually fairly decent post-2.4. I almost never get a spriest, and barring the longest of encounters I never need to do more than chain-pot and sometimes pop my innervate.

Not that i would like to actually see that in action, but there are addons for group swaps already.

In regards to Eclipse, I really like the idea of this talent, especially when it comes to the possibility of twisting your spells depending on what buff you have going at the moment (10% wrath dmg or 10% SF crit), however it clearly doesn't encourage that in its current incarnation. It really would be a cool talent if it lasted for long enough until you got the opposite buff of what you currently have, at which point you would switch until you got the other buff. At the moment it just feels like you would cast wrath or SF until you got the desired buff, then switch for 2 minutes. Rinse repeat. Doesn't feel interesting to me.

Within 10 seconds after switching, it seems like you'll get the other buf. That means that means that in any two minute period, you'll have 20+ seconds with both buffs, and 80+ seconds with neither. If the behavior was you couldn't get the Wrath buf when you have the SF buf (and vice versa), but they were otherwise on separate cooldowns, that would make it a better raiding talent. That might weaken it as a PvP talent, where you might want both buffs at once.

I see, I was under the impression they shared the same cool down. I don't like eclipse generally for PvP, as waiting for a Starfire crit to proc the wrath component makes me sick merely thinking about it.

yeah.. so would I..but people who say that 20% haste for 10secs to the group is stupidly overpowered have got it wrong. So let's say it was 30% haste after crit for 8secs, no cooldown..like say a beast master hunter gets yes? now say you had 5 beast master hunters in a raid, which has happened many a time before, now they all have about 30% crit roughly, no one will say that's overpowered at all, so why is iMkA that is 20% for 10secs unlike BM hunters which is 30% for 8 secs both after a crit all of a sudden ridiculously overpowered? I tell you why because some people hate the idea of of a druid having a good buff, or any class other than their's having a great buff. Unlike the hunter buff, the druid one has an icd. I love it.. and I think 20% spell haste on crit to all group members is simply delightful, not ridiculously overpowered.

I'm glad that for once, it will be as exciting to play a balance druid as it was in TBC to play a Warlock or Feral druid or Enhancement Shaman. Kudos to blizzard a stellar effort . Finally some long awaited justice.

Beastmaster hunters have a talent that gives their pet melee haste on a pet crit. That is quite different from giving a party of casters spell haste on a crit.

Ferocious Inspiration
Rank 3/3
When your pet scores a critical hit, all party members have all damage increased by 3% for 10 sec.