To clarify:
Frenzy 5/5
Gives your pet a 100% chance to gain a 30% attack speed increase for 8 seconds after dealing a Critical strike.

Edit: Duplicate post.

Exactly, that is two abilities Ferocious Inspiration and Frenzy in BM tree, and though it is based on Pet crit, surely you don't expect WotLK level 70-80 talent intended to boost an almost shunned and unattractive bordering on not viable build to the level of full viability and equality to other casters to be as limited as a TBC talent for class build that has no problems currently. Bear in mind this is WotLK, where everything has sclaed upwards, TBC powered abilities won't cut it, which is why iMkA is like an upgraded Fenzy but for casters, call it the WF totem for casters.

WotLK talents are suppose to sound a bit overpowered and really nice in a TBC environment even more so on a class build that had so little. Take 5 BM hunters, spread in one in each group (having 5 with frenzy in a raid is the TBC verion of 1 moonkin amongst 4 casters with iMkA in a group in WotLK), now, those 2 talents together are not that much less powerful than iMKa as it stands. iMkA looks impressive a talent, and it's meant to be and finally for a change blizzard didn't just throw in a doggy bone talent (albeit this one is juicy) and leave it at that, they went through the rest of the areas of balance and brought many things up to scratch. iMkA, Nat.Fury, IS, Imp FF, Thorns, MK aura nice viability boost. On the other hand, what you don't notice, is no new great nuking spells, no frostfire bolts, or shadowflame's or haunts or Arcane barrages, spells that will boost their dps a fire bit not to count the talent. It's obvious in a group with a moonkin you will likely be out dpsd by a mage or lock but at least you're boosting the group. Druids do get two new spells, Typhoon an interesting and clever aoe, and Starfall, a powerful one, BOTH on long cooldowns tho. It is to Eclipse talent balance druids must look for their private nuking WotLK boost. They made balance druid's group nuggets but limited their nuke because balance lacked the viablility. Expect Ele shaman to possibly get an extra nuke, a CC based on totems and a new AoE, but no more group buffs.


I think Eclipse is the talent for nuking in PvE, and if you're thinking it's a pvp talent already, then it needs work on. They should simply ditch that cooldown. As said above, we get no new nukes. 3 class abilities revealed..one totally useless to us, the cat stun, but all ferals can use Typhoon, if Typhoon is indeed a spell ability and not a talent. Nourish, which all can use but will mean little to us in PvE, and Revive, a tool we can all use. Unless Typhoon & Nourish are given on the same level as Lock Jaw, which means that each build gets a useable talent, and they can devote the remaining new abilities to more general and nice once.

I'm fine with not getting any new nukes seeing that Eclipse makes the cycle more interesting and we got the much need buffs to group utility along with roots indoors and better aoe. But Eclipse cannot have that cooldown, as it is via description right now, you are only varied for 30secs over 2mins..then it's back to nuking starfire. Given starfire is so mana efficient, maybe it's a good idea not to tempt you to blast too soon.

But clever juggling or having to at least pay attention to maximise the use of your dps especially as you're given no new nukes should be encouraged. The ability would be more fun with a 30sec cooldown. Intensity moving up the restoration tree also.

So the lunar guidance nurf got me thinking. Maybe its not a reevaluating of the int stat on all gear (as guessed earlier somewhere), but simply a reaction to a 41/30/0 build? I mean the 20% and 10% of kings might make int the one and only stat to stack as a moonkin otherwise and even make up for nature's fury and imp shapeshifter or being viable as the 2nd moonkin in a raid. Which both wouldnt be very desirable to implement with 30 points in an otherwise useless tree (not unheard of though, hello AQ/naxx survival hunters).

It may seem so, you do get iMkA, a delicious talent to have, it's a Frenzy/Ferocious inspiration BMs have in TBC scaled up for WotLK. Would you honestly lose the extra spell damage viability to boost a healing off-role that has no current fixed play in the PvE set-up?

Maybe for pvp you might, a good versatile combo build at 41/0/30), give or take. I was thinking a similar thing the other day looking at the talents, and I can get most of my balance abilities and spend some points up to natural shapeshifter, really choosing in WotLK is a lot tougher, you could spend all points in balance and still come out okay... but there is still intensity AND master shapeshifter to get, for raids. Master Shapeshifter is fine where it is, it should make you choose, intensity I think should swap places with Subtelty. Anyway, as it is now, I ask myself what the value of the Master Shapeshifter is compared to some of the other talents. If I spec that far in the current tree set up, I have to drop some dps talents. Bear in mind Master-Shapeshifter is 4% all damage increase, would you take MS over say Eclipse? What would you sacrifice to get MS/Intensity? Do you think MS is to help you compensate for the talents you had to throw away to get to intensity? It can't be though because Feral druids have no use for Intensity and it's just as appealing to my Feral druid, which is why I feel subtlety that no longer is needed by moonkin should swap places with intensity.

Eclipse is what we get instead of getting a new nuke, I love it, but I really wish the cooldown was shorter, and they merged some more talents in balance reduced the counts to 3s instead of 5s on so we free up about 5 points.

If they were the same cost, absolutely. Eclipse is less than a 10% boost to DPS when you have the buffs, and it looks like you won't have the buffs much more than 25% of the time.

The only reason to skip master shapeshifter would be to avoid spending the points in the first two levels of resto. Level 1 is nice, but probably not necessary for a min/max raid, where a ToL will have IMotW. Level 2 resto is just overhead. If you are going for Intensity anyway (who knows if it will be necessary?), you'd pick MS over Eclipse (at least with current descriptions).

A bit more on Imp Moonkin Aura and other balance abilities in action I read from an FAQ in the wikidot FAQ from those who have tried it: I'm not sure whether it is permitted to link my sourcfe, but that's the info copied.

Eclipse
Q: What's the deal with Eclipse? Can the buffs stack? Do they share the internal 2 minute cooldown?
A: Eclipse is an attempt at increasing the complexity of our raid DPS cycle but also an attempt at buffing the usefulness of Wrath and Starfire in situations they may not be considered ideal. For instance, it is generally considered to be a poor idea to use Wrath in raid situations. A balance druid with Eclipse may find it to be ideal to use Wrath for the Starfire proc.

The buffs can not stack, however it is possible to gain one buff less than 2 minutes after you've obtained the other. In actual terms, there is a definitive one-minute period minimum of "dead time" currently with Eclipse.

Q. Also, is eclipse 2 separate buffs? If so, do they share a cooldown, and can you get both going at once?
A. Yes, however you cannot stack both at once. Currently the best use of the effect is in raids, where you would use one nuke for the duration of the 30 second buff and then when the other procs, use the other nuke instead. However there will be at least a minute of "dead time" between each buff. It's not a very good talent at the moment IMO.

Improved Moonkin Aura
"Q: How does Moonkin Aura work? Does it really add 20% haste to all of your spells for 10 seconds? How does the internal cooldown work?
A: Moonkin aura increases the personal haste of the individual in your group that crit by 20%. In WOTLK, a haste cap has not been discovered and haste scales very very slowly, so the 20% haste buff is really very nice.

So far as I can tell, there are actually two very inconsequential internal cooldowns on the aura. The first one is on the individual caster, and due to it the effect cannot occur for them more than once every 10 or 15 seconds. I personally think it's 11 or 12 seconds, but if you ask someone else they might give you a higher number. There aren't enough Moonkins on the alpha that anyone's done the math unfortunately.

The other cooldown is on the Moonkin itself. The effect cannot occur for your group more than once every 3-4 seconds."

Typhoon
Q: How does Typhoon work?
A: Typhoon is an instant-cast AoE knockback that has a 20 second cooldown. Currently it deals Frost damage, though it is unknown if this is a bug. It very likely is a bug.

Q: Is Typhoon the spell interrupt we've always wanted?
A: Typhoon interrupts spells. Whether or not that means it's the spell interrupt we've 'always wanted' is certainly open for debate, however:

* Typhoon does not silence a school.
* Typhoon has a very small range of area (24 yards with Nature's Reach).
* Typhoon also has other uses, such as gaining range from melee opponents. While this sounds nice, understand that it means you will not always have Typhoon when you need to interrupt a spell. After all, you just used it for something else.

Starfall
Q: How does Starfall work? Can I move with it active? Does it cure cancer? Can I go into Travel Form/Bear Form/Ninja Form and have it follow me around?
A: Starfall is basically an offensive aura that follows you around for 10 seconds. Stars fall on targets in a similar fashion to, say Hurricane in that it finds the targets for you, but the actual stars work in a fashion more similar to arcane missiles. As of 8391 they are capable of a critical strike and if you have the Vengeance talent, it will crit for double damage. Celestial Focus also gives each bolt a chance to stun the target.

You can of course move with it active, creating quite a few uses for this ability. You can change forms, but one wonders why you'd want to for tactical reasons (this is largely a PvP ability, believe it or not).

And oh yeah, it is currently dispellable. It also currently gains 200% of your bonus spell damage effects over the duration of the spell, meaning that if you drop 20 stars, each star receives about 10%.

Q: How many Stars will attack the target if Starfall is only used when one person is in the area?
A: At the moment, 20.

Q: Can Starfall be Spellstolen?
A: Yes, however it doesn't steal your talents, so the mage version of Starfall is considerably weaker and does not benefit from Vengeance or Celestial Focus.



It currently costs 645 mana rather than a percentage of base mana, but there is information suggesting this will likely change.

*** ***

The impression I get from my friend, is that iMkA is nice and useful, but nowhere near grossly overpowered as some were thinking it may have been. But it is the big key to our raid viability. MkA, NF & Imp FF are nice, but you also need a big one, and that's iMkA, it's just no where near as overpowered as some of you have thought.

Back to Eclipse, I really hope they do something about that, maybe a 45 sec cooldown or at most a 1 min cooldown. The thing is, when Eclipse is up, you would probably exclude IS from your spell cycle or would you still cast it? I would really like Eclipse to be raid viable. It may very well be, but the thing is when having to choose between different talents, Eclipse may lose out. 2 mins cooldown means a downtime of 1min 30 secs, that means roughly 10% for 30secs out of 2min, which is roughly 10/4 = 2.5% damage increase compared to 4% from Master Shapeshifter.

The way Typhoon appears to work is that you push the key, a cursor to point where it should be cast and you release and it will knock back there, I'll ask to confirm this

Actually that's nothing like the improved moonkin aura, because frenzy is not a party wide buff. It is a 10 second buff to their pet and their pet only.

AH some good news, Typhoon is not a whirlwind that moves around, nor does it use a targeter which would have made it a bit clumsy.

Thankfully it is an instant knock back that has 20sec cooldown, it will knockback everything in 20 yrd radius or 24 if you have Nature's Reach. The interesting thing about it is that it travels out from you to the max range, so those near you will almost certainly be knocked back, those further away may have a chance to escape

Also Cyclone is no longer subject to diminishing returns in PvE, which is good.

Small question - does it *keep* knocking back people for the 20 second duration around you???

It'd be too good to be true if so, but one can hope

If yes, then hallo rogue, enh shammy and warrior invincibility :P stand in one spot, and pelt them with wraths as they try to get to you :P

My bad, I phrased my above comment wrongly, it's on a 20sec cooldown, lol.. if it repeatedly knocked back for 20secs, there would be nerf cries all over, and it would be insanely powerful for pvp, it's a powerful tool like it is, having a good use in PvP and a bit more situational use in PvE.

The fact that Eclipse is actually 2 seperate buffs also makes it more interesting, but the buffs aren't stackable. and by definition it means there is a down time


Balance is looking quite attractive for both pvE and PvP. By the time I stopped playing balance in wow live I couldn't help but have a bitter taste about every aspect of it's spell casting. For nuking it was dead plain, and the only thing there was it was good dps, however at tier 6level that dropped off and they had to introduce the idol to help out.

At AoE I looked at it and also it was depressing, what in lore was a very aoe minded class as nature affects a massive area, and you read malfurion AoEing with everything, it's one AoE whiles individually strong, was rubbish for the average 15-20sec AoE fights.

The only other two aspects of dps casting were off healing and CC, understandbly ybecause of off healing CC wasn't as strong as in mages, but Cyclone (which isn't really a CC as much as it is, "oops I overaggroed...pause let the tank get back to you or "save that over aggroing mage" ability) and roots were un-necessarily gimped, even wth Cyclone on no DR and roots indoors, Mage CC and Warlock CC were twice as numerous and better so I couldn't understand why Cyc /Roots were gimped so for pvE. Finally Off-helaing. Balance druid off-ehaling is nice but like all the other utilities of mages and locks, quite situational, afterall you are dpsing a lot of the time, and you can't really dps and heal simultaenously like shaman and priests.

So you bought good dps but slightly lower than any other caster dps build, you had no utilities to contribute one group buff and 2 mild raid ones.. were rubbish at AoEing (c'mon even Paladins could AoE better and all S.Priests needed to take to trounce your ass in AoEing was Holy Nova), heavily restricted CC, but the card flung in balance druid's faces when they brought this up was."well you can heal", yeah, great. I'm sure we're taken cos of our plus heal.

Now, finally we get an all round upgrade for the first time ever rather than patch works or little teasers like patch 1.8's Moonkin form, or the TBC dps boost and mana regen fix. We get the rest finally looked at:

1. CC as it should have been (still not the greatest, but it's useable and has no restrictions)
2. 2 new buffs, (just 2 you say? well one's really cool, iMkA, the other is nice) but we also get our old buffs fixed to be more useful. Thorns and Imp FF to add to IS debuff.
3. AoE finally repaired, and with some very useful utility: Typhoon knockback, Hurricane attack/cast speed slow, and for dps Starfall which is really convenient at instant cast. Furthermore we at least get to be able to spam an AoE even though it's channelled, I never expected mage/lock level of AoE, but I expected to not be far behind and what I lacked in damage I made up by utility like being able to AoE tank and do some useful things in the AoE fight.
4. Eclipse at least makes the spell cycle more interesting, but many don't seem convinced by it.

What we don't get:
1. We don't get any new nuke (not counting aoe) so our main type of damage remains the same sequence. Also new nukes are a good source of dps increase as they often do more damage and boost older abilities slotting well into spell cycles
2. We don't get any sizeable dps increase. dps contributions from gear have been massively scaled back lunar guidance nerf, removal of the 20% healing conversion into dps. So only the 6% from Nature's Fury, and if you spec it, 4% in the resto tree, Master Shapeshifter. The rest of the buffs are utility orientated for raids, for the AoE niche role and pvp help.

I still think it's very good, if Eclipse is tuned right, it ought to be better than Master Shapeshifter, an early resto talent should not do more for balance than a balance talent deep down.

Let's look at Eclipse under the microscope
As it stands Eclipse is our compensation for no direct nuke since we had development go into our buffs,utilities and better pvp Eclipse proc for Wrath is independent of it's proc for Starfire.

Each of these seperately have a cooldown of 2mins, so a downtime of 1min 30secs, which means the minimum time you will spend without one of these is actually 1min.

So for 1min you will be back to Starfire only spamming at normaly dps, the other min you will have to watch to vary in some wraths. That's 10% more dps up half the time, so just under a 5% net dps increase in regular nuking, plus it makes nuking easier. To make some use of Moonfire in raids, I would add the following:

"When Wrath crits, your Starfire spells have a 10% more crit and your Moonfire spells cost 20% less mana. When Starfire crits, your Wrath and Insect Swarm Spells do 10% more damage or your Wrath does 10% more damage and your Insect Swarm increases the chance your target will miss by 1%.

Anyway like this you could weave Moonfire into your dps cycle when on the Wrath Eclipse. It is a PvE intended talent, a brush up will be nice.

PvP
Here balance was nice again in TBC, but unremarkable. In Arena none of the best set-ups had any kind of druid, the theoretically best set-up didn't have any either, not even when alternatives were considered.

This off course is bad design, so something needed to be done. I notice feral druids get amazing burst damage, an anti-fear and a very very valuable slow/attack speed slow stackable debuff, even though it can be removed.

Balance druids get: 1. The knockback from Typhoon (very nice) that interrupts, Thorns daze and Treants daze. Thorns and Treants become quite a nasty combo to have with brambles talents that is finally useful in both PvE and PvP. So against casters you have: knockback (as it's range is 24yrds with NR) & Treants. Against melee you have Knockback and Thorns. Is it enough though to make the build as good as any in PvE arena? we shall see.

They have given their Fel Armor a 30% mana regen whiles casting, apparently balance druid's are really struggling for mana in the Alpha..which is probably going to make Intensity a must have for all druids. I really hope they move intensity at least one level up, possibly 2 to be one of the entry talents.

Exactly, my feeling is that it should make balance druid's and their allies pretty nasty for coming up against melee, as it's easily dispelled/purged, I assume the only person that will have it refreshed it after a dispel would be the balance druid, which should keep them quite nasty for dual wielding melee. In all likliness, Arena teams will have the casters handle a Moonkin who is still rather vulnerable to them.

I believe the buff is exclusive, whiles one is up the other cannot be up. So when one ends after 30secs, it will only be available after 1min 30secs again, but the other can proc immediately which if it does, that means you have some bonus for about 1 min, but have a tleast 1 min when neither would be up. This does make it better.

Regarding the mana thing, they haven't put in all the new gear yet, but I am assuming a massive hike in intellect, that's probably why the nerf to Lunar Guidance, but then it could have been someone playing around and forgot to undo it. If they were afraid of the resto-kins getting their hand on that, then all they need have done was shove lunar guidance deeper in balance, likely more tweaks would come. We'll see and hope they're all good things.

Well in that case eclipse looks like a straight 5% damage buff to me valid only in PvE... not bad - considering nature's fury is another 6% damage bonus.

But yeah - currently moonkins have their mana on tight leash - it's barely enough to make it though w/o potting with good gear and boss encounters getting shorter.

50% mana increase coupled with NO NEW talents for mana regen (we already have worst mana regen mechanic in the game - just passive mp5 and intensity in resto tree). Simple shaman mana on crit talent ~120 mp5... their water shield is 50 mp5 too... and they get same int > mp5 talent we got.

My guess for druids we'll get a massive hike on spirit on our gear (they are supposed to make it standardized with resto druids I think) so innervate *may* finally restore 100% of the mana bar - like it does to restos... either that or they want us to swing for mana go try doing that on illidian :P

yeah, as it stands, that is 8 points for an 11% increase = OVER BLOATED.

Since you can't really merge Eclipse and Nature's Fury:, They should drop Eclipse to 2 points i.e 30/60% instead 20/40/60% chance and Nature's Should drop to 3, giving you 33/66/100% instead.

Alternatively since many are complaining Nature's Fury is a bit weak, they should make it 5 points make it the debuff increase nature and arcane damage by 1/2/3/4/5%, stacks up to 3 times. That may mean they would no longer make Curse of Elements stack with Nature's FUry, or they still might but cap it at say 25% or 20% even on arcane, who knows, or they may leave it. Depends on how much of a boost it is to arcane mages.

Alternatively they may then change CoS to give 10% increase damage and 5% crit to shadow and arcane spells, which would make it easy to stack with Nature's Fury at 15%, they won't make Nature's Fury have a crit compenent b/c Moonkin AUra already does that.

That solves it for raids. For balance, with that increase to NF, you'd be less pressed to take Master Shapeshifter in Resto IF they swap Subtelty with Intensity. With the 9% increase to NF, it is less pressing to take it and sacrifice vital utility, then you won't do anything more to the balance tree. MS in resto must be weaker than any 2, 3 or 5 point balance damage talent in the tree, which it is anyway, but NF and Eclipse to weak for ppl to max them out, like it is they'd probably drop 2 points in Eclipse and 1 in NF to get MS if push came to shove. However with 2 points of NF already being better than all of MS, you'd have a tough time choosing.

Mana
If they load our gear with spirit, would they chop back on intellect? That'd be bad after the nerf to Lunar Guidance. If not, they may chop back on hit which restos don't need and we would need little off, the only thing that leaves is crit. the Int hike will undoubtedly increase crit, unless they make it some ridiculous number for how much int gives crit. They off course could make druids require less int to make a crit to compensate for the Spirit shove to gear.

But that still makes Intensity a necessity and maybe not even enough, as Innvervate is once every 6 mins. With Intensity and healthy dps cycle, you can burn your mana down in 4-5mins depending on what stage of gear you're at, without intensity it would take longer and you'd have large periods OOM.

Are we finally then going to see Mana on melee made useable at last? If so it would be great if it also required a shift to a feral form because it will finally make balance playstyle feel more complete as a druid (as the feral school is largely (but not entirely) without use to it right now). Off course the mana you get back would have to easily compensate for the cost of shifting, and return enough to you so you don't spend more than 10secs in a feral form.

Also it's not something you want to be using every 2 mins, but more like every 5-10mins, afterall, you are a spell caster, not a meleer and if you look at how Feral druids use casting, they only use their healing spells every 10 odd mins anyway in pvp/solo and in raids a bit random depending on circumstances, but they do have some occasion when it's useful to use almost all caster form balance and resto spells (wrath/starfire are the only ones obsolete-ish), would be nice if balance could have some sort of occasional use for those in-the-cupboard feral stuff.

If you were to fix mana on melee and make it work in feral forms too, my balance druid would be complete, because finally I would have some use for claw/shred/maul/swipe/rake/FB/Rip/Demo Roar/Lacerate/maim/Lock-jaw instead of atm, only pounce/lace/bash/stealth and that, only in Pvp. I expect I'd need a melee mana rush when my Innervate is on cooldown and i'm quite low on mana

It could be an ability that's on a 10 minute cooldown, that rewards triple the normal amount of mana on melee when in a feral form or they could could give it an ability called Avianna's Gift or something like that, that upon using that, it will consume your lacerate stacks or combo points on a target to give a boost to your spell damage or a boost to spell haste. This is off course to make up for the dps loss you had whiles meleeing in a Feral/Form, they could even make it also give some extra mana back per stack of stack of combo points used. How it could work is each combo point you used in a finishing maneouver on a mob or lacerate stack that you've applied on the mob will give 1 charge to Avianan's gift, that will take a maximum of 5, then you can press avianna's gift whenever you want back in moonkin/caster form to use it's bonus to give you mana and damage or mana and haste for a short time.

So you get some mana from mana on melee based on attack power, and the rest will come from Avianna's charge, the amount of damage should be enough to compensate you somewhat for the dps you lost whiles meleeing and you should gain enough mana back if you presumably stayed long enough to apply 5 lacerates or use 5 combo points. Because you have Innervate and mana pots, it may be heavier on giving you more damage back for losing, than more mana, but either way, I would love this.

It would mean that once every 6-10 mins I can spend about 10 secs using a feral form which previously had most of it's trainable abilities redundant for my spec. It would be a lot of fun, both in raids and in solo PvE where it would reduce the need for the higher water consumption drastically. It would also be great in Arenas too, even if the cooldown of Avianna's Gift was on 10mins. The spell can even be calibrated so that it needs no cooldown tweaking the numbers such that it is only valuable to use once every 6-10mins.

It would be SOO cool to final have the feral aspect of the class final with some use to balance druid's at higher level and so help our mana problem in a fun way, even if it's for a few seconds every 6-10mins. I can just imagine in some fights choosing to go either cat or bear to use Avianna's Gift, in bear whiles stacking up lacerate i could demo roar which is a nice debuf, in pvp I would probably go bear if I was under attack also, if I wasn't, I would go cat and do a bit more melee damage (although it'd still be poor), but at least I could use things like maim or lock jaw or FB. I toyed with the idea to make the mana on melee based on damage and not attack power, but decided that wouldn't be good as it would force only the heavy damage moves, if based on attack power, you could use any of your damage moves based on their utility and the circumstance.

If the description in post #108 is correct, Ecilipse becomes useful for PvE, but it isn't quite the 5% people are talking about.

10% increase to SF crit rate is currently worth about 7-8% boost to SF DPS. With IMkA that will go up a little, but will probably stay below 9%.

For a t6 druid, Wrath dps < SF dps (say about 95%). A 10% increase to Wrath is only about a 5% boost to overall DPS. That may change at 80, but in almost all cases, expect the spells to be uneven, meaning part of the increase to one spell is being used for "catch-up".

With the buffs not overlapping, you need to cast a few unbuffed Wraths to get the SF buff. Those 2-4 casts also cost you a bit of DPS.

Overall, Eclipse might end up being a 3-4% boost to DPS. Thats enough that you'll probably want to spec it, but not quite as good as some have been saying.

[EDIT -- there is a more resolved version of the concept presented below, this can be found on page 7, Reply 157, and is the net result of feedback from druids across 3 different forum boards. It is a MUST read, AG presented below was one of the many iterations of the concept, whiles on reply 157, the finished article is presented. The reasons why this is necessary are best articulated in reply 141 on page 6, both these posts will better convey the meaning and intention of what you read below]

So, Balance has a mana issue again right now in Alpha WotLK

1. Fix it by boosting numbers to things like dreamstate, push intensity up etc. Gear will also go a long way.
2. Introduce Avianna's Gift (placeholder name) that makes use of mana on melee.

In fact, Avianna's Gift should be trainable, only balance druid's will have time to spend in melee form anyway, and you can compensate them for the damage loss through the ability, you can't compensate for healing loss as healing is very much needed on time. However it would still make Restos see more use out of feral forms in non-PvE environments, so it should be trainable and Ferals might find it a useful small tool to have also. But realistically only balance would have use for it in raids, sort of like roots indoors, which while nice for the others, again only balance really can afford to use it.

Avianna’s Gift [Trainable for all druid’s ability]
Instant Cast
10 min cooldown on consuming Charges
Once activated in any feral form, every time a bear or cat form special ability or finishing move is used on a target it generates a charge to Avianna's Gift up to a maximum of 5 charges for up to 30mins. The gift may then be consumed to have the following effect in each form: Note that consuming charges has a 10min cooldown, but charges can be accumulated at any time.

[li]Caster form, Moonkin Form, Tree of Life form: Generates 10% of your total mana and boosts your spell power by 8% per charge for the next 30secs. All party members receive a 15% reduction to the mana cost of spells per charge consumed over those next 30sec
[li]Cat form, Bear Form, Dire Bear form:Increases the hit and critical strike chance of all party members by 5% per charge and in addition each member's critical strikes refund 1 rage/energy/runic power per charge consumed for 30secs.[/li]

Also it would be necessary for:
[ul][li]1.Moonkin Form:[31pts balance tree]: Mana on melee and 150%level AP phrase has this section of the talent no longer confined to Moonkin form so it can be used in any form for the balance druid.
[li]2. It would help in everysense if druid aura's were modified slightly so that they continued outside the aura giving form for up to a certain period. About say 10secs. Not just this ability would benefit, but druids in the occassions they need to switch out to do something else.[/ul]

So this is for when you've used your innervate and pots etc, or you could use this first and save your innervate for later or for a friend instead.

Mana on melee is given with moonkin form talent which can then say it applies to moonkin/cat/bear form. So your meleeing whiles in cat/bear will generate even more mana as you are stacking up lacerates or getting ready to use finishing move to generate your Avianna charges. Helping you with your mana problem.

You do lose time shifting, moving into melee range then the time to use special abilities. You don't have to get 5 charges but you might as well, they could lower the amount of damage they compensate you for and raise the mana it returns, as a means of "extra payment" for the ability, but that won't be nice because using the ability requires judgement and timing which I think is price enough so much so that using the gift with the mana on melee from moonkin talent while in cat or bear form should actually result in both net mana and net damage increase overall, afterall it is on a 10 min cooldown.

Finally do you see what this does? Not only does it help with the mana problem in a very fun way, it's actually finally made the feral school have some use for balance druids in particular. No longer would feral druids be the only ones that can make some meaningful use of 98% of druid abilities, now in the balance build you can finally see some use on that cat and bear form hot bar even though it's very occasional. Even bigger is that you have finally created a way you could entice players to do a balance/feral build. Especially with gaining mana on melee (from the moonkin talent), feral boosts attack power which would boost your mana return, also you could introduce or add to one of the feral talents a clause that says boosts the mana return and damage boost of each of your Avianna's Gift charges by 5/10/15/20/25% (or similar) so it actually becomes a powerful alternative to speccing to intensity in restoration. To add in a sweetner in the feral tree to help balance druids, you could do something like make cower and growl useable in all shapeshift form. Say like the 11-point talent be the Faerie Effect instead of Faerie Fire (feral) and will allow Faerie Fire to be used in cat/bear form, whiles allowing cower and growl to be used in Moonkin & ToL form from range.

I can think of several little incentives you can put in the balance tree to entice feral druids to spec there, but you must realise that with balance spells only wrath and starfire aren't really used by feral druids, the rest all have uses in certain circumstances. So maybe the balance tree can make some sort of effect that feral melee can benefit after using a starfire or wrath but you don't want it to be too good so that they feel they have to use those spells again it should be such that you use very occasionally. Another thing would be that balance would have to match what Naturalist and Omen of Clarity give feral druids, to make it interesting. Do note though that now I'm talking about the talent TREES, earlier on, I was attempting to introduce a way of making the Feral SCHOOL (not tree) useable/useful to a balance druid.

Spot on, I make it out to be about 4.25% dps increase at about a 40% crit rate. At T6, it is definitely gear and the CoE debuff that make SF do greater damage. GCD makes SF benefit more from spell haste than wrath sooner than the previous non-haste theortical cap was.

If NF was to be boosted to about 8% or 10% or even 15%, that would once again make wrath the higher dps spell if there wasn't CoE warlock also and without the haste buffs from NG and iMkA. Wrath should be higher damage but lower efficiency, so they need to address that GCD issue with NG. I still think and hope, they will weave Moonfire into the Wrath Eclipse (say let wrath eclipse also give moonfire a 20% mana reduction in addition to the 10% SF crit.), would be nice but not as crucial to have Insect Swarm weaved into the Starfire Eclipse.


EDIT: - Altered Avianna's Gift to a much better format.
dropped the 10sec duration, now you can pick up charges any time you melee if you activate the ability, just use a cat /bear special ability, meaning u don't necessarily have to collect the charges during the boss fight but can do so on trash just before if you want to use it. THe charges ill stay up as a buff for 30mins before you'll have to build them up again, . Once consumed, you can't consume again for 10mins, but you can build up charges

Also added are some nice group buffs for using this ability to encourage a bit of diversity in your raid playstyle. At the end of the day, all risk factors are truly minimum, building up charges should not take more than 12secs at most, and you're given dps to compensate ofr 15secs of no damage, which will add to the small damage oyu do in feral forms. Your aura won't be lost, just pick your moment well. Only risk is that you have to know what to do as a melee i.e. where to stand (behind the boss) etc if you build charges on a boss, the fact that you don't have to should help, and the rewards are great given the risk

That's the essential problem with melee-for-mana. Running in, meleeing, and running back out all takes a long time, while the dps you put out is inconsequential. If Blizzard wants to revamp melee-for-mana for pve, either our swings have to do so much damage that we don't lose much dps while regenning, or our swings have to return a lot more mana so that we lose less time.

that's why I said they'd have to compensate it for the deps you lose whiles you're taking time ot mlelee mana back..it can work extremely well if designed properly.. just because it's shit now in no way means it won't work. And how would meleeing with such low damage cause any threat problems huh? you'd be causing more threat nuking with the new nature's reach than you would be meleeing for mana. and if you're in cat form in raids, you can even cower to help your moonkin threat whiles in cast.

Seriously I see no reason why it can't work very well. With an ability like Avianna's Gift, it's win win win. You finally get some use out of meleeing for mana, you get a mechanism that helps your mana, but in a totally fun way, not only that it also finally makes the feral school (School, not talents) have some worth to a balance druid. It's not something you are suppose to be doing all the time, neither is it your main source of recovering mana. This is why it has a 10 min cooldown. Your main source of mana is efficient casting/intensity and innvervate. However those will not be enough. So why not have something like this? Fun and you get to use bear/cat form every 10 mins.

Seriously, Avianna's Gift, you take about 10secs or less to build up 5 lacerates or to do a finishing move with 5 combo points. The reason it is structured like that is so you actually do spend a little time meleeing. So you can do a few mauls or a demo roar, or if cat some claws/rakes/shreds etc. It only has 5 charges because staying any longer meleeing for mana will not be compensated for by the gift. As soon as you get your charges, shift out, and consume the Gift. The Gift will empower you for each charge so you do damage to make up for the time you spent in feral form, and it will give you mana back. If all druid's get this. then Balance druid's will get an extra advantage because Moonkin talent also rewards mana on melee (if they add while in cat and bear form also for that bit of the talent), which means whiles you're strumping up charges you're also getting some goood mana back because it's mana on melee based on AP. You're only doing this once every 10mins cos it's got a cooldown. The idea is something interesting and fun to help you with your mana and to actually cause you to occasionally use your cat and bear form which ARE part of your class even though your build doesn't boost them.

Even better, give something like Avianna's Gift. Each charge consumed will boost your spell damage by x% over say the next 25secs, it is that boosted damage that will compensate you for the dps you lost. And if you are a moonkin druid, well, every melee hit will give back mana in addition to the mana given for each charge. Alternatively, blizzard good make mana on melee in forms part of the ability useable by all, then simple have Moonkin talent boost the amount of mana returned whiles meleeing and mana returned per charge of the gift. instead of having the mana on melee clause there.


Avianna's Gift
Instant Cast
10 min cooldown
Every time a lacerate stack is applied to a mob, or a combo point is used in a finishing maneouver, each lacerate or combo point generates a charge to Avianna's Gift up to a maximum of 5. When in any caster form, the gift may be consumed to generate x mana per stack instnatly and boost your spell damage (or haste) by z% for the next 10secs.

it's just fun. You don't go meleeing all the time to get mana back. once every 10 mins especially useful if Innervate was on cooldown or had to go to someone else. What you might be mistaking is in thinking mana on melee is a chief means of getting mana back, it should never be because you're a caster. However as a DRUID, melee is a part of your class, a third actually, so it should figure a small role for the balance druid. A small roll is something like using it once in a while, like once every 10 or so mins.

This just in: lacerate is a high static threat move in bear form. Also, moonkin threat is fundamentally high, but at range we have to break 130% to aggro. Run in, melee, and use tanking moves to get mana back? That's an awful idea. I'd rather sit there in moonkin form meleeing for energy.

Also, shapeshifting is still expensive. The amount of mana regen afforded by shifting to cat or bear form would have to be huge to make it not a total waste of time. Additionally, our nukes would need a lot of buffing just to keep our DPS on par, what with all this wasted movement and melee time.

that is easy to compensate for. whiles you're meleeing in a raid, don't use bear form, use cat, you also have cower available, threat problem = Solved, your melee dps is low also, it's not going to be attracting anyone's attention trust me. You easily compensate for the mana you lose while shifting by giving it back through consuming the charges, plus if you have the mana on melee feature, you more than compensate for it. You lose about 10secs worth of dps in the time it takes you to shift, move forward and build up lacerate or combo points+finisher...however long it takes. So, Avianna's Gift needs to give you back about 10-12secs dps right? So it could double your damage output so each charge consumed boosts your damage output by 20% for 10secs, so 5 charges will give you double damage for 10secs. .. or, you could increase your damage by 50% for 20secs.. or increase your damage by 10% for 60secs..

you can do it which ever way..but it's not hard to compensate for. When you think about it logically, for a raid setting you think of what are the drawbacks and you compensate for them. Also bear in mind you are only doing this once every 10 mins, meleeing for 10-12secs.

This is a one easy way to help with mana in a fun way and get balance druids an opportunity to use those feral forms once in a while. It is an addition to innervate and intensity, not a replacement, they could make it really nice by making it give you very good mana back and more than compensate for the damage you lose. Or they could say well you're getting mana back, so we will penalise a little of your damage and not give you quite the 10secs you need to spend but roughly about 8secs worth. [it could be the ability that makes intensity not a must have for a balance druid.]

The point is Avianna's Gift would be a trained ability all druid's can get, - however mana on melee in forms you pick up from Moonkin form, so for balance druid's this ability can work in PvE raids, restos will never have time to melee in raids, nor will ferals need the mana, but then restos aren't the ones with mana problems, neither are resto the ones that will never in not have any use for the majority of the feral SCHOOL (school not talent tree), because restos can still off spec feral and use feral for dps instead of spells (though that needs to be tweaked, but is a different matter). So when you go to feral forms to melee to charge the gift, your mana on melee talent is giving you even more mana in addition to the mana you will get from consuming the charge.

Other things they could do is they could add mana on melee in feral forms to the Avianna's Gift ability, then have Moonkin form talent boost the mana gained on meleeing when in all forms and boost the mana returned per charge, lots of things they could do. Instead they could leave Avianna's Gift seperate from mana on melee which would remain in the moonkin talent, then boost it's prowress in a clever way in the feral tree, enough to tempt a balance/feral off spec since naturally feral increases attack power, so balance druids will get more mana from their melee period if they off spec feral, large enough to compensate for losing intensity, so you have speccing balance/feral actually boost a playstyle that will feature the balance druid using his forms every 10mins, or a playstyle that relies less on the gift. Then tweak it in other ways. Although restos and ferals will never use it in raids, it's trainable because it will help in PvP and solo pvE.

The only issue is everything you're suggesting we can basically do now, but nobody does it since shifting from caster range to melee range is dangerous in such an overwhelming majority of fights.

Meleeing as a caster for mana regen has been, is, and will continue to be an awful idea that'd require extensive redesigning of boss encounters to make even vaguely feasible.

No bloodysorc, you're not getting it sadly, I apologise for writing so much about it in my enthusiasm, instead of putting it in a more compressed form to make it easier to read. I won't de-rail the main discussion any further by pressing on with this, but I will say in parting, that melee on mana is not feasible in it's current form, which is why I described Avianna's Gift. A developer can make any idea work if they develop it so more, you can't really say it's a bad idea that will never work.

In it's current form, it isn't appealing or much help, but I hope my essays gave a glimpse of what it really could be like. Going into mele is not dangerous or overwhelming, you're a druid, you have a melee form. I play a melee class at raid level too, and it really isn't that dangerous at all if you know what to look out for and know how to stay behind a target. Sweeping strikes no longer go 360, so all there is to worry about are the specific encounters tricks so you know precisely when your moment has come, and I'm sure you can find 10-15secs out of 10mins when it's safe to melee out of
an entire 10min fight.

Mana on melee in the druid caster's case only (not other casters, mages/locks/priests do not have a melee school, druids do), can be the thing that finally brings the class into balance because it is thing that can make the Balance build Druids have some use (if very occasional) for almost all their feral abilities rather than only a third of them which is the case now. This will spice up the build as it gives a use or reason to use feral forms once every now and then. This I find if done completes the build's playstyle and helps with it's poor mana regen.

As it stands now, balance druids are having a mana issue again. Intensity going up the resto tree will help, but it's a resto talent and balance should have it's own mechanism. Blizzard will probably tweak the issue by buffing dreamstate, switching restoration's intensity with subtelty, tweaking gear etc, the boring fix.

Will you be taking it intensity and master shapeshifter where it is now? If you do, would drop Eclipse for them? or some other talent.