Spirit is not a good stat for us.

It gives 30% "value" in itembudget points.

meaning 30 spellpower from spirit costs the same as 90 spellpower from spellpower.

This is no way/shape/form makes spirit a good stat.

That said, spirit got better (with the 15->30% buff) and spirit isn't worthless for us, but compared to _not_ spirit (in the shape of spellpower, haste, hit or crit), it is crap.

A few things about the set bonuses:

I'm guessing 2T9 is of the form "your DoTs can now crit", meaning the chance for the moonfire tick to crit is the caster's critical strike chance. With moonfire being 10% of your DPS and 50% crit chance (WARNING: NAPKIN) we're talking about 5% boost to DPS, which is pretty nice. We'll do actual math on this when more information comes out, but it will probably be competitive with 4T8 as a bonus.

Most DPSers have 4T9 bonuses which say "your main nuke now has 5% more crit". For moonkins Starfire is listed, but of course it should be Starfire and Wrath, which is exactly the 4T7 bonus. I'm guessing Blizzard doesn't want to just recycle the set bonus, and they're probably also not going to release a set bonus which is directly inferior to a similar one two tiers down (set bonuses don't actually need to get stronger, but weakening an old bonus is weird). This is likely a placeholder that will be changed.

Another thing to remember is that T9 has massively higher ilevel than T8. The 25-player non-heroic version is ilevel 245 and the heroic version is ilevel 258. T8 is ilevel 226. The higher stats alone will make T9 very attractive. 2T8 might still be competitive with the double eclipse cycle, but I'm fairly certain 4T8 is going to be a thing of the past.

After being out of commission for a while, i just barely got my 4pc bonus for T8.5. Seems to me like the 7% crit I just lost is definitely NOT worth the 40 sp, 15% extra eclipse damage, and very low-proc insta-Starfires I've gained. i mean it sounds all dandy, but out of 8 IS I only got 3 procs. I don't know how the 15% eclipse stuff will work out, but I don't know if it can compensate for 7% crit. That's huge. Any thoughts?

I've read through the forum some, couldn't exactly find a straight answer. Just curious for your thoughts on t8.5.

Atleast there are two pieces of T9 without Spirit so it makes it an easy choice for gearing up, especially as one of those pieces isn't the legs which will give us access to 3 tier pieces that are itemised well. I can't really see anyone dropping 2xT8, unless they nerf it somehow, with the incoming changes to Eclipse.

At the moment, the better set up seems to be an MF/IS/SF glyphs, with the new MF Idol and a 2t8 + 2t9, keeping MF as close too 100% uptime as possible. I'm not sure if IS will be refreshed constantly or just pre-Solar, I'm not good at calc's and stuff. I also wonder if the MF crits will proc NG, which will further increase the uptime.

Has anyone had a chance to test whether this is just a tooltip error? I can't believe that blizzard would have just gifted us another 2% hit and it must be either a bug or a tooltip that was hastily changed without thinking.

Make sure you're thinking through what you're doing before you spend a lot of time tinkering with the spreadsheet. I'd assumed you were talking about Vezax hardmode if you were going to all the trouble to think about this fight. If, as you say, you're trying maximize the total damage out of your mana bar, then all that matters is DPM. Cast time, clipping, and any other timing issues are irrelevant. It doesn't matter that Solar "lasts longer"; you can make anything last longer by standing around doing nothing for a bit. It's completely obvious, for example, that you wouldn't cast Moonfire (except on Clearcasts), you don't need to model the rotation to find this out.

The only nontrivial issue is Solar vs. Lunar. Eclipsed Starfires give significantly better DPM than Eclipsed Wraths, but uneclipsed Starfires also have better DPM than uneclipsed Wraths. But the issue is the frequent interruption to dodge crashes making the very swingy Lunar rotation impractical. Interruptions due to movement can detract from Eclipse time but not from pre-Eclipse time (this is an irritation with our class on every fight, actually), so frequent movement works heavily against a rotation that requires you to invest in a full Eclipse to get a minor overall benefit.

During Animus, where you might want to trade a bit of efficiency for DPS, I'm not sure anything changes--Solar is more consistent that Lunar in terms of both DPS and DPM. Also, your guild will certainly have Bloodlust up, during which you'd want to just spam Starfire.

If the 4T9 is not placeholder, than yes, it's terrible and can't replace 2T8 even if it comes with a significant stat bump.

The bigger issue is that even if this 4T9 is a placeholder, whatever they put in still probably won't be strong enough to replace the 2T8. The 2T8 is quite overpowered for a set bonus once the new 3.2 Eclipse rotation is active. The honest game-balancer part of me would say it needs to be nerfed. But the problem there is that the DPS increase we're all looking forward to in 3.2 relies so much on the 2T8--it's about half as large without it.

The set stats look pretty good. Only issue is the huge amount of hit lumped onto only 2 pieces; might make the initial upgrade path pretty awkward. Remember that crit will be equal to or slightly better than haste now, so the shoulders aren't that bad. The most important thing will still be stacking spellpower.

Saving comments on the new MF Idol for when we see the proc rate. But it need in the ballpark of 50% uptime to beat out the Starfire one.

I don't know why you'd expect to stop casting IS. It scales every well (1.4 coefficient in a GCD before debuffs).

MF ticks proccing NG is a good point; that will be pretty nice. Pain to model though.

Do we know whether it would be affected by Vengeance? How has this worked with other classes' DoTs?

Echoing, someone confirm this.

I was able to log on PTR and test Balance of Power. It is still 4%. Had 8.49% hit from gear, 3% from iFF and 2/2 BoP and got a miss after a few casts. If it were 6%, that wouldn't be possible.

Edit: Also, Eclipse isn't buffed on the current PTR. It is functioning as it does on live.

Edit2: Lightweave Embroidery now 295 SP proc.

oooh, totally forgot about the profession buffs - how much more sp are your dragons eyes giving, or has that not yet been changed? (i ask as i wait to be able to log onto the ptr myself - womp womp)

39 SP per Dragon's Eye but no longer prismatic.

I'm going to guess it's significantly better anyway. If Vengeance affects 2T9, you're looking a 5% DPS increase on a napkin (more if it procs Nature's Grace). Nobody (afaik) has attached an exact number to the 4T8, probably because its main attraction is the added multi-target/movement convenience and not the on-paper single-target benefit, but expecting 5% from it is pretty steep.