1. I am not sure what the question is.

2. Your gear is currently your feral gear, so we cannot tell the gear at the moment. However, the rotation is fine, except you have to consider whether you cast IFF, and then I would use IS before MF due to the SF glyph. Occasionally, you get bad luck with wrath procs, and MF gets off. This gets you an extra second.

You can reapply IS after the eclipse ends, and then again before the ICD is done, as well as MF. Starting a fresh new eclipse rotation with both DoTs at max uptime helps a lot.

3. Again, your gear isn't showing. But, 400 haste is the threshold for eclipses. < 400, you go with a Solar Eclipse (SF until eclipse, Wrath spam), > 400, with the other. There's a lot of talk in this thread about the exact mechanics of exterior haste (Bloodlust) which you may want to follow.

4. http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...0&version=9868

This is the basic talent spec I recommend. You have 7 points to distribute around, I choose Starfall, Typhoon, Force of nature, and for the last four, you can either get Owlkin Frenzy, Gale Winds, Imp. IS, or Intensity. A lot depends on your style and what fights you have trouble with.

5. You have the MF/SF glyphs, which are correct. The last is usually IS glyph, although I prefer Starfall, especially in Ulduar.

when doing 2-4 mobs trash pulls, i find myself falling behind a lot of classes (mages DK's rogues). I normally do my normal rotation, IS-MF-wrath untill eclipse.

how do a lot of you that stay on the top of the charts handle small trash pulls without aoeing?

i was wondering if spamming starfire waiting for a solar proc would yield more dps (or overall damage) because of the faster cast time and easier to swap targets (starfire is a pretty long cast time when mobs only have 2-300k hp remaining)

I had two questions, and I was hoping to draw on the experience of others.

1. Eclipse rotations seem to be extremes, haste stacked (lunar) or crit stacked (solar) - meaning that in the process of switching gear from one to the other, dps seems to drop. Thus the question is what crit rating are people stacking to before switching?
I recently tried moving from a lunar rotation to a solar one, dropped a few pieces of haste to pick up more crit. It really felt like a dps loss, although at time my dps would really spike during good crits under solar rotation. It felt like solar would be amazing, but my crit just wasn't high enough. I'm switching back to lunar until I can pick up a few more solid crit pieces. I think I just got excited over solar eclipse and my gear didn't support it. Rawr and theorycrafting show it's definitly feasible, but those tests seem to be done with everyones BiS gear which nobody has all of that yet. Has anyone experimented and found a good level for crit rating to be before switching?

2. 4 piece T7 VS 2 piece T8 under Lunar eclipse, the impact to being able to proc Lunar with losing 5% bonus from t8.
Nothing worse than spamming 10 wraths straight and not getting a Lunar eclipse. And losing the 5% bonus from t8 seems to compound the problem, dropping wrath crits by 5%. RNG will always be, and we'll always see a string of non crits or crits that don't proc, but what's the balance. We know that 2 piece t8 is a dps boost, but do those simulations use perfect rotations, where it procs Eclipse as soon as it's up every time? I guess what I'm getting at is with the overall crit nerfs and then dropping 5% to pick up 2 piece t8, in a non perfect eclipse rotation, where you have to spam 5 or 6 or more wraths to get eclipse to proc, how much of an upgrade is it still? Similar to #1, is it better to wait for multiple upgrades, including some crit increase before switching to the 2 piece t8 when using Lunar?

I feel as though the bigger impact is having under 400 haste makes Solar slightly better except in bloodlust/similiar buffs or mana intensive fights. I think it has a lot less to do with crit, crit is just more beneficial after you hit that soft haste cap on wrath spam. I personally use Lunar unless I know for sure there won't be a hero, or I won't have time to idol swap before hero.

This also depends on rotation, it seems like the solar eclipse benefits more the moment you get your 2pc, but without any math or anything, just personal experience, the Lunar seemed to suffer at first, then balance out more with more crit from gear.


Also h3llraiser: I feel like dots should only be applied if you think the mob will be up the full duration. I usually wrath spam to proc lunar eclipse on trash. Sometimes I don't purely out of boredom.

I also still have the habit of moonfiring as a killing blow, despite it being glyphed since the great Sunwell nerf. Hard to break a habit that's 4 years old I suppose.


Finally, on Hodir, doing hard mode tonight we found making sure our tank got a charge from 1 or 2 of the crit buffs going out. 1 is absolutely nessicary for threat as far as I can tell, 2 maybe.

It's comparable with weapon changes for innervate. When you use a solar rotation and have to switch to a lunar one or just plain sf spam because of bloodlust or other haste buffs, you can change your idol to maximize damage.
This can best be done while running and having no instants to cast or with a macro that swaps the idol right after an instant, during the gcd.

Yep, I only swap idol's while moving from fight mechanics and all my instants are spent/applied.

Even then to be perfectly honest, i've chilled out a lot on it during hard mode attempts. There's more to pay attention to than tweaking another 10-20dps. (Not sure on the numbers, just the idea behind it.)

While it remains a foggy issue as to solar or lunar being better, or most likely gear dependant, im going to stick to my lunar rotation since i enjoy it better playstyle wise, and i find it difficult to not have too much haste to cut in a lunar one. So my question for some of you math calc people is: obviously the lunar rotation excels with increasing levels of haste, while at the same time us boomkins have always seeked high sp. So for gemming my new ulduar gear and such, do I want SP or do I want haste? Is there a cossover point where you want to gem for one over the other?

I too, am planning to stick with Lunar. The difference between the two is really within the precision of current theorycraft*.

For now and the foreseeable future, spellpower is significantly stronger than all other stats. And actually, don't always assume haste is better than crit. If you look at my current setup, WrathCalcs has crit slightly edging out haste for marginal DPS value.


*Although this reminds me, it might be worth an examination into whether Solar looks like it has a chance of scaling strongly once more crit gear is available. On the other hand, higher tier gear will only many it harder to stay under the haste cap for Solar. So people building around Solar and high-crit gear might be working into a bit of a dead end.

One thing that makes me wonder. We have those 2 approaches at the moment, meaning:
- stacking haste for lunar based rotation
- stacking crit for solar based rotation
(I am aware it's a bit of generalization but it isn't the point here)
While the solar one seems a bit less dps (yet supposingly still comparable) it's unfortunatly the only reliable approach. The problem with lunar approach and haste stacking is horribly low crit which leads to very hard time proccing the eclipse ... and we all know how much dps is lost if we spam wrath for a long long time without a proc.

This leads me to thinking that with current gear and current mechanic of a balance druid we somehow should find something in between those 2 approaches. That is why I am wondering what would be a decent level of crit that we should keep for lunar rotation to work well. I don't have any maths to support it but it seems that anything below 40% raid buffed is bad for lunar rotation. The thing is however that without T7 bonus this is somehow challanging and at the same time keeping T7 lower our capabilities of haste and spellpower increasing not to mention the 2xT8 bonus.

In the end, I don't know if I understood GC's last posts correctly but I do find them some light in the darkness. I mean eclipse mechanic doesn't really work well with current available gear so if they don't want to change the gear maybe they will take a closer look at the mechanic.

Oh I dont think in any way should we completely ingore crit. But I think looking at my intended BiS list, many of the items come with crit (ex: robes of the umbral brute, shoulderpads of dormant energies, handwraps of the vigilant, T8.5 Legs) so while we concentrate on SP and Haste for our lunar rotation, the crit should come along on its own just fine.

tier 8, right now sense the 4 piece set bonus is bugged, it isnt really worth bothering with right? some one posted it was only a 30-40 dps increase?

my question is if you are going for the 2 piece t8 set bonus what are the two BEST pieces to take?

What is some of your opinions on the best two pieces to use currently?