According to the PTR patch notes (and the MMO-champ talent calculator), Balance of Power now provides 6% spell hit with 2 points. Quite an interesting change, although reduces the pool of 'viable' gear further due to the prevalence of hit in Ulduar. Still quite nice.

MMO champion as the T9 bonuses and they seem abysmal to me compared to T8 2pc certainly, and 4pc probably.


# Druid T9 Balance 2P Bonus (Moonfire) (Class: Druid) -- Your Moonfire ability now has a chance for its periodic damage to be critical strikes.
# Druid T9 Balance 4P Bonus (Starfire) (Class: Druid) -- Increases the critical strike chance of your Starfire spell by 5%.


Also the new 3.2 idol - I'm no theorycrafter, but that doesn't seem that great to me unless the chance is pretty good.

Druid T9 Balance Relic (Moonfire) (Class: Druid) -- Each time your Moonfire spell deals periodic damage, you have a chance to gain 200 critical strike rating for 12 sec.

The relic could be pretty good if it has a near 100% uptime, since its effect would help you both when casting wrath and starfire.

T9 4pc is garbage as it stands of course, when you have to give up the T8 2pc bonus for it. I don't see us giving up the T8 2pc any time soon unless they alter it.

The T9 4-piece bonus is worse than the T7 4-piece.

GG.

One can hope.

I modified WrathCalcs (WrathCalcs Hamlet 090519.xls version) for General Vezax hard mode to account for the +100% magic damage, +100% increased casting speed, -75% mana costs, and lack of mana regen to try to see what the best rotation for that fight might be. The changes I made aren't very clean, but I think they work.

The changes I made are as follows (that I can remember, anyway):
Character Sheet:
- Reduced Replenishment uptime to 0%
- Reduced JoW uptime to 0%
- Innervate changed to None
- Potion changed to None
Rotation and DPS:
- Added new column: Damage Before OOM (to see what rotation would do the most damage over the course of the fight)
Basic Calcs:
- Damage Multiplier: multiplied by an additional 2X
- Total haste: multiplied by an additional 2X
- Moonkin Form Proc: reduced to 0%
Starfire Calcs, Moonfire Calcs, Wrath Calcs, Insect Swarm Calcs, and Cooldown Calcs:
- Multiplied mana cost by 0.25 and rounded upward to reflect the 75% decreased mana costs

----------------------------------
WrathCalcs General Vezax.xls
----------------------------------

Provided that my modifications work correctly, a few observations can be made (at least with my gear): Lunar Eclipse deals the most damage for the amount of mana available compared to Solar, but Solar Eclipse will make the mana last longer. Even though Starfire has better DPM, Wrath clips the GCD so, despite the higher DPM, it just can't be cast any faster (thus the lower damage of Solar vs Lunar). Additionally, even though Moonfire isn't very efficient, including it in the rotation rather than leaving it out results in about 1-2% more damage.

so with the change to the 4pc t8, is it a must now?

im trying to figure out what pieces to use so im just wondering

i thought just from looking at it that going (tier pieces) hat, shoulders, gloves legs would be my best bet, leaving the chest open for the umbral brute, but after doing some sifting i think my best bet is going to be (tier) legs gloves chest shoulders, wyrm hat (off razorscale)

may be wrong but thats what i thought the biggest pickup was if i had to use 4 t8

so 4 piece t8 a must now?

Sorry, I just noticed that I failed to mention that I modified it for General Vezax hard mode not normal mode, where there are no Saronite clouds to replenish mana (I have since edited my post to clarify). Since on hard mode, the best spec and rotation is not the one that deals the most dps but, rather, the one that does the most damage after exhausting all mana. Previously in the thread, there have been suggestions to use a Solar rotation for hard mode Vezax and to drop Moonfire out of the rotation due to it being much less mana efficient than other spells; since Shadow Crash increases cast times by 100%, I was skeptical about Solar Eclipse being better than Lunar, so I set out to find out if those suggestions were correct in terms of damage done. I also wanted to find out how sustainable each rotation is without mana regen but with the -75% mana costs, and the time to OOM.

I chose the 090519 version because I thought it was the version previous to 090621 which seemed like the only changes were to model Idol swapping, and I didn't really want to make things more complicated for myself. Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of the 090619 version at the time, so I'll try to modify one of the two (or both) and see if my results change.

I know it's a bit soon to say, but Im a bit disappointed in the t9 4pc set bonus as described on mmo-champion.com. Im pretty sure t8 4pc is better. I'm sure it will change however.

Looking over the stats on the new tier though, it looks like Blizz finally knows how to itemize a Boomkin. Also, I like how they're making plans to make our dots crit. It's about time IMO.

Well we are actually still getting the short end of the stick. If you start by looking at the elemental shaman set its of course perfectly itemized for us like usual with no pieces with spirit on them. Now here is where the changes start coming into effect. Next we have the mage and shadow priest sets each with only 2 pieces with spirit on them. Now you would expect us to match the rest of the dps casters as spirit was pushed to be more useful to all of us other than elemental shamans. Alas this is not the case as along with warlocks we have the most spirit pieces in our tier at 3 pieces with spirit on them. So while we have one less spirit piece than we do in T8 we are still on the bottom of the totem pole, only difference is warlocks are joining us.

Maybe if we express our distaste earlier in the PTR cycle this time we might get a favorable reaction, but this is very optimistic thinking.

But this is only true for phase 1 right? The point must be to find a rotation that will produce the most damage in p1 while leaving you with enough mana to be able to burn the entire p2. Doing more damage over the entire course of the fight is surely less important than finishing p2 as fast as possible?