When you spell out your thoughts, remember to use the spell queuing mechanic which causes your casts under 1 second to no longer queue. When that happens, what was once [cast]-[0.3 spell queue] becomes [GCD] + [reaction time] + [latency] since your input is no longer taken until the 1 second GCD is done. That is why hastes becomes so devalued, because it increases your cast rather than reducing it. Only gets worse if you have poor reaction skills or large latency :/

Always wondered - How do you select your [reaction time] when you're most likely spam clicking (or as some, using key repeat helpers)? Do you use it for every cast or just eclipse switching/4p T8 proc usage? Also, back in TBC it was argued (in discussions about haste and lifebloom stacking) that the magnitude of ones latency wasn't as big of a problem as a highly fluctuating latency, so that with a somewhat constant latency coupled with the (then) new pre-casting you wouldn't really be affected even with a fairly high latency - did that argument stand the tests of time, and and if so, does it apply at all for these haste/crit calculations above and below gcd? Maybe that's all covered since way back and I just missed it, but would like to know the current state of things.

Resposting a comment I made on a blog about 4T9. I see a lot of people making a huge fuss about it on the official forums and other places. I don't think there's any point to this.

1) The fact that it's weaker than the 4T7 isn't significant. Set bonuses aren't stats; they don't have to scale coherently from tier to tier. The only real issue is that the upgrade paths work (i.e. why they buffed 2T8 on the 3.1 PTR to be stronger than 4T7). Which brings us to:

2) Being weaker than 2T8. But here's the thing. 2T8 was a nice strong set bonus before the 3.2 Eclipse change. Now it's an extremely strong set bonus (~350 DPS typically). Nothing they intentionally design into the 4T9 slot is going to outpace that anyway, so 4T9 is irrelevant. The only way to make 4T9 beat 2T8+2T9 is to nerf 2T8. Which brings us to:

3) The DPS bump we're all looking forward to in 3.2 relies heavily on 2T8. The 6-8% we've all been estimating will take a huge cut (more than half) if 2T8 isn't around. A 4T9 buff and corresponding 2T8 nerf in order to make 4T9 wearable will result in a worse DPS position for us during the 3.2 cycle.

Now, I'm generally in favor of clean design, and it seems the correct approach here would be to:
--Give us a nicely balanced 4T9 bonus.
--Nerf 2T8 to compensate for the much higher Eclipse uptime in 3.2.
--Give Moonkin some other DPS buff to compensate for the fact that the Eclipse buff is no longer backed up by 2T8, making it comparatively minor.

But the third is highly unlikely to occur this patch. So it seems the easiest path forward is to happily use 2T8/2T9 for now, rather than constantly petitioning Blizz for what's going to be a net DPS loss.

I'm wondering if anyone has put any thought into trinkets like Embrace of the Spider and Elemental Focus Stone which with their haste procs in 3.2. Right now with a lunar rotation they work well since the only clipping they cause is in the pre-eclipse phase. Once we start alternating back and forth between lunar and solar, I'm wondering if the dps loss to clipping during a solar eclipse will outweigh any dps gains during a lunar eclipse.

Obviously there are better trinkets out there that don't include a haste proc, but I'm trying to figure out how fit trinkets into my DKP spending plans pre 3.2. Currently I have a lot of other gear that needs upgrading and trinkets were pretty much at the bottom of my list of priorities. Does that change with with the changes to eclipse?

I would think haste proc trinkets would be a bad investment when it comes to 3.2. The 45 second iCD would line it up to proc every other eclipse (well optimally, however it would probably line up with pre-eclipse moreso than anything). But using the logic that we'll be using Wrath so much more in our rotation than currently, I just see spell power procs or the passive bonus trinkets to just be a larger gain.

Something i'm curious about, with the increased value of Crit, how does the Razorscale10 trinket add up VS others now?

After 3.2, I'd rather have a /use than a proc on a haste trinket. That way I can macro it with my Starfire and make sure it gets synced to the correct part of my Eclipse rotation. Even if it means slightly less uptime, it seems like control will become more important. You'd need 2x the uptime from a proc trinket in order to get the same benefit from the RNG.

Unfortunately unless 3.2 introduces more trinkets of this type, [Scale of Fates] is the only recent trinket that fits that profile.


EDIT: Nevermind, simulation does not bear this out.

Using napkin math with an assumption of 5 sec between Eclipse procs, it fit quite neatly with the 2 min cooldown of the trinket. But once the RNG is properly considered it falls apart. If Lunar Eclipse procs but the trinket still has 15 sec on CD, you lose significant uptime as you wait for the Lunar part of your cycle to come around again.

Rather than 5 procs in 10 min, I'm seeing more like 3-4.

This makes me agree with Poromu... haste trinkets just aren't a good investment anymore.

You should always take these in context of the fight. IDS is always going to be worse in a burn fight (see xt if you're having trouble killing the heart, or similar fights where you want to line things up with bloodlust or other burn parts which require burst damage) because it's a flat benefit instead of activatable burst. Scale of the Fates is awesome if you're looking for a trinket that will let you line up procs with specific portions of the fight which require burst. IDS and Broodmother also have the issue of dropping off on any fight which you may end up not attacking for long enough for stacks to drop (something like Vezax is a good example depending on what tactic you use and how lucky you are with shadow crashes). You should never take results like this as a definitive list of what is the best, take it in context of what you are doing and what you need.

You might also be heavily underestimating the benefit of snycing the Scale use with Lunar Eclipse. WC doesn't have a way of modeling trinkets, but since you can see easy how much of the DPS is allocated to various parts of the cycle, it shouldn't be hard to come up with an estimate for things like this.

Assuming you're going to be running 2t8 and 3t9 (the 245 ilevel), which t8 pieces would be the best to hold onto?

Shoulders seems like a shoe in, but the lower stat budget gloves turns a blue slot to a red one, and the pants gains spirit which would leans me to t8= shoulder/legs, t9=hat/bp/gloves

I don't think I'd give up the t9 bp/hat though. thoughts? math?

T8 shoulders are awful, but the gloves are worse. My thoughts are T9 chest/hat, T8 pants/shoulders. Pending more offset gear being released obviously.

Assuming the hit's valuable (as a general matter, thinking of hit as roughly as valuable as spellpower when you don't know the gear context is a decent rule of thumb). T8 legs are best--all the others are roughly equal. T9 hat/chest are the best.

Has anyone checked with the new build if the talent changes like the new eclipse are working now, and if they are have they been able to confirm if balance of power is actually 6% hit now or if its just an oversight?

Can we let Balance of Power die? Just because I don't like saying things that I can't back up, I logged into the PTR just now and got 11% hit from gear and Balance of Power 2/2. If BoP were buffed that would be 11% + 6% = 17% and I wouldn't be able to miss. I missed, so it's still 4%. There's no reason for them to buff it to 6%. Not only would it make gearing awkward, it would not be in line with any other caster's hit talent. It's just a miswording because they changed the second part of the tooltip text without realizing how that affected the way the first part was worded.

Old text: Increases your chance to hit with all spells and reduces the chance you'll be hit by spells by 4%.

New text: Increases your chance to hit with all spells and reduces the damage taken by all spells by 6%.

Some absent minded developer thought "we are just changing the second part, so that's all I'll change on the tooltip", not realizing that the number at the end of the first tooltip applied to hit as well.

It still seems pretty lackluster, however none of the set bonuses stand out as much as T8 or T2/3 did as far as originality. I agree though, the DPS loss from the set bonus I can see being overtaken by just raw stats. 4% nuke damage ALL the time is pretty nice all things considered, I get pretty frustrated at the RNG dependancy we have sometimes. Going from 7k on Decon hard to 5.8k just because I didn't get my Eclipse procs.


That actually strikes an interesting question, if you fail to proc Eclipse during the 15 second window to do so to get as much Eclipse uptime as possible, would you want to switch to your optimal Eclipse, say Starfire wins out and you just finish your Lunar Eclipse, you reapply your dots or whatever, start spamming SF to proc Solar Eclipse, but fail to do so in the 15seconds til Lunar Eclipse is off cooldown, would you want to switch to Wrath spamming again?

How will this affect the theory of spell-twisting that was so popular at the start of WotLK?

4% extra damage on starfire and wrath is a very decent set bonus, and is comparable to 4T7. If 2T8 is still so good that it's worth wearing over 4T9 (and remember, those come in ilevel 258) just use it and be happy.

Assuming you're gearing for both the two eclipses are pretty close under "lab conditions", so I don't think this will be much of an issue in a standing fight. Fight conditions will certainly change this, but we asses those on a fight-by-fight basis anyway.

Yea, that makes sense, I would just assume with spell queueing/latency issues it'd seem logical to switch to Wrath to proc the Lunar. Of course that's an individual basis as well.

In the newest PTR patch (yesterday) new eclipse is working fine. They have also fixed that notorious "proccing" bug, making PTR test-worthy.

2T9/new eclipse;
So I would start with a moonfire, starfires, solar eclipse;spam wraths, lunar eclipse;spam starfires, after eclipse refresh dots and start making that moonfire 3 ticks longer, note that the time window to your next solar eclipse will be small or not existant compared to then when we only had 1 eclipse.

With Rng/movement eclipse cooldowns will be back at different times every rotation. The way that extreme rng or a lot of movement on an encounter influences the rotation is something i'll experience with later.

But in this order I like it most because it will require a lot less wrath spam, and the only wraths you will be casting will be empowered by solar eclipse(if you didn't have to move or had bad rng). Also I think this results in possibly longer eclilpses uptime because when you do the opposite there is a high chance to crit with your first lunar eclipsed starfire, hence immidiatly proceding into solar eclipse, so you would end up spamming wraths allmost the whole rotation. Which would also influence moonfire uptime.

edit: with this rotation IS glyph looses a lot of value to me as I won't be using it much, but maybe its still worth it when dotting while moving. Wrath glyph is maybe not that good as you won't be casting much wraths at all. Then there is only starfall left. I guess the third glyph will be mostly influenced by the mechanics of the encounter.

For the record, I've been skeptical of this conclusion since day one. Is there actually evidence of a discontinuity in the effective cast time of Wrath when it switches from being cast-limited to being GCD-limited? Even though you can't "queue" it while it's under the GCD, you can still press the next cast as soon as the client-side GCD ends, producing largely the same effect if your timing is good.

Lunar procs very slightly faster. 3s Starfire vs. 1.5sWrath/60% = 2.5s --> it procs 6/5 faster. It's never been a significant term in the DPS comparison between the two cycles. Though based on the number of people that constantly mention it, it seems to be quite a source of psychological bias; some people really like the "guaranteed" proc of Solar.

What does that third paragraph mean? I don't know of anything unclear or mysterious about the workings of the new Eclipse that we have to test out on the PTR (besides the basic, "is it working correctly?").

@Druidark: can't make much sense of your post, but I think you're imagining that the two Eclipses can be active simultaneously, which the tooltip says they can't.

Activating lunar eclipse does not end solar eclipse or vice versa? If I understand you right you need to let one eclipse fully run out to proc the next? hmmm

I'm not convinced that there is any kind of jump-discontinuity (in cast time) when the GCD drops below one second. However we repeatedly see "spam" average timings get farther from theoretical as the GCD approaches one second.

Skjaven's results show latency increasing from about 80ms to about 110ms as the "ideal" cast time dropped from about 1200ms to 1000ms.

His net benefit was only 170/200 = 85% of what it would have been under ideal conditions.

Even the spam-theory says that dropping the cast time even further won't help. In practice, there probably is some benefit (avoided interrupts, seeing NG proc that much earlier, possibly better interaction with variable network timings).

I think all of our latency models are poor enough that we don't know the real magnitude of these effects. We just wave our hands and say something like

cast time = max (theory + .08, 1.11)

which does not have a jump discontinuity in the cast time, but does have a jump discontinuity in the value of haste.

No shared cd, and the buffs itself are exclusive. If Solar is up, you can't get Lunar and vice versa