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Starfall is Garbage
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Post by
Graydust
51 point talents should be much more useful and interesting than an AoE on a cooldown.
If they wanted to help balance out with AoE they could improve hurricane.
I've been considering returning to WoW for WotLK but the new balance tree is not tempting me.
Eclipse is also a bad talent. Should be removed all together. Balance druids are not going to cast wrath in PvE, with nature's grace up it's a 1 second cast, so it gets very little benefit from haste. I don't even care about PvE and I can see this.
Anyone feel the same way? Anyone disagree?
Post by
Zalambar
I have to disagree and I think you haven't considered the potential use of the skills you seem so unhappy with.
51 point talents should be much more useful and interesting than an AoE on a cooldown.
If they wanted to help balance out with AoE they could improve hurricane.
It is a mistake to think of Starfall as only an AoE spell. Yes it can be used to deal AoE damage but it is also a powerful tool for single target damage dealing. At level 70 against a single target you can land 10 stars for 2500 to 2900 base damage (before considering any other talents, crit chance, or spell power). That's around 4.5 times the base damage of starfire for about the cost of 2 starfires and using only a single global cooldown. With a 30 yard range you should be able to hit two targets even if they need to be tanked separately, doubling the damage dealt, and in an AoE situation you split up the direct damage but get to take advantage of the splash damage.
Starfall is not just another AoE spell, it's an instant cast arcane damage burst.
Eclipse is also a bad talent. Should be removed all together. Balance druids are not going to cast wrath in PvE, with nature's grace up it's a 1 second cast, so it gets very little benefit from haste.
I'm not sure about this one but I think it has potential. Wrath is already handy for dealing a burst of damage if your mana pool can support it and this will just make that burst larger. I need to consider the actual numbers involved but a 10% boost to wrath's damage may be enough to make it preferable to starfire for the 15s the buff lasts. Too bad this is not a controllable talent but it should offer druids a chance to deal a burst of nature damage.
Post by
Graydust
Starfall is damage over time, so it's not really burst damage, although it's instant cast is nice and it's damage would help with burst. It's dispellable though, which for CD DoT can be an issue in PvP. And, from what I've heard, it's coefficient is not too great.
Regardless though, balance needs more
utility
for both PvP and PvE, not more DPS. Earth and Moon + Moonkin form buff will give us some synergy with casters, but I can't see it being enough to make moonkin worth a spot in a serious 3s or 5s team. Typhoon is nice but not that nice.
Wrath with eclipse
might
be preferable for those 15 seconds if you're not stacking much haste, and you have the mana for it, but consider that it costs three talents to make it so, and likely if you're geared starfire is scaling much better with haste, and wrath gets worse and worse if you stack due to it's cast time, haste, and the GCD.
To be completely honest, I'm hoping for something as cool as thunderstorm or deep freeze, both of which I am extremely jealous of. And shamans have instant ghost wolf and hex now...which is making my moonkin feel even more inferior.
Post by
Gnostik
Balance not worth a spot on 3s or 5s? Ridiculous. Balance Druids are in the best position to toss out Cyclones and Roots at will. Yes, Resto is also adept at this but they have to focus on the team's health bars at the same time, making offensive CC a bit more difficult for them.
Then there's Typhoon. This spell should be a boon in the arena.
Then there's Earth and Moon. The latest version is absolutely awesome. It will make Moonkins highly valuable to a raid if nothing else.
I agree that Eclipse is pretty bad, but so what? All the talents surrounding it are good, so there wouldn't be enough points to put into Eclipse anyway. Maybe it could be removed. So what? That's not a reason to down the whole tree. It's certainly not in the completely useless category like, say, the current Master Conjuror.
As for Starfall, it looks quirky, but I think it's worth a point. Personally I'm of the school of thought that the capstone talents
shouldn't
be so good that they discourage hybrid builds. Perhaps some people will still be playing a Restokin after the expansion, who knows. For a full Balance Druid I don't see how you can complain about it for 1 point. It's instant and it deals a lot of damage, just like Typhoon. So we gained two new instant sources of damage.
Also note that the cooldown on Hurricane is being removed. Along with making Roots castable indoors, Blizzard has successfully addressed our two biggest issues in PvE - lack of CC and lack of AoE.
All in all, with the exception of Eclipse, I think they've made some great changes to Balance. It's is going to be better than ever in both PvP and PvE. But I guess someone will always complain.
Post by
Lightrain
I'm thinking his main issue is that his twig and berries seem a bit too small compared to others. I say just wait for live, you'll find a nice nitche where you will be accepted for what you are. =) (I think my weekend is messing with my mind!.... (>.<)
IMO, having now, 3 instant cast spells is major for boomkins. On top of the starfall doing so much damage. The main boomkin issue is pushback, and having that much more choice for damage and getting them away for a quick cast is uber. I'm hoping typhoon will give us a chance to root em quick before they get into range. It would be even better if you jumped while casting, it pushed you back too.
Post by
Biglove
Haste and Eclipse?
Eclipse 3/3
. I'm fairly certain there's not a word about haste in it...
Balance druids ARE going to cast Wrath, bcuz, srsly, a 10% crit chance for Starfire? Yes @#$%ing please.
Starfall is just another instant cast for boomkins, it's always welcome and the ability is great.
Balance druids HAVE utility. Earth and Moon. Cyclone. Roots (work indoors now). Buffs. Offhealing. DAMAGE.
I do not see any problem with balance druids atm. Not counting the bloated talent tree, ofcourse.
Post by
182501
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
109094
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Celdhyrean
although i can understand certain cogitations on beta talents- but perhaps its best if you wait for the game to come out, test the abilities out, let your opinion swirl around your brain, and
then
make your decision.
lets face it- the real proficiency of an ability comes from using it, not from crunching the numbers. and if you are crunching the numbers, maybe you've been playing a little too long.Getting numbers from playing only introduces a statistical bias that can only be removed by whacking for an hour or more at something. Also, it's very difficult to put yourself in ideal testing conditions in the real game and keep the same circumstances and buffs throughout several real fights.
Theorycrafting and numbers allow you to bypass this easily and rapidly.
Theorycrafting must be confronted to reality of course to make sure everything works as modelled, but that's only experimental verification.
As for why to do it, it's to be able to give feedback. Waiting till the expansion goes live to do that results in delayed fixes/changes, ie is bad. It has to be taken in context naturally (ie moving talents and skills, boss mechanics, other classes also not being finalized, ...) but IS usefull.
That and having a good understanding of those abilities and the different rotations before the expansion goes live helps to test them faster and reach an optimal situation when it goes live instead of just starting to think about it when it's live.
Post by
Erlinn
Eclipse is also a bad talent. Should be removed all together. Balance druids are not going to cast wrath in PvE, with nature's grace up it's a 1 second cast, so it gets very little benefit from haste. I don't even care about PvE and I can see this.
I have to disagree with you here. What Blizzard is trying to do it make it to where Moonkins are just sitting there spamming Starfire the whole fight. They are just trying to let us have the option of mixing up our spell rotations, as limited as that can be.
Post by
Kaitain
I been playing with moonkin specs on PTR. It's really good I think (apart from the fact that Typhoon is current completely bust. it does nothing when you click it). I have only been using my t6 resto gear, so healthy spell power but almost no crit (15% or so). The following info in anecdotal ofc so take it for what it is. It's also looking from a PvE perspective.
Starfall on a single target does about 4k damage for me. For 1 GCD i don't see how anyone could complain about this.
Eclipse is indeed good for a couple of reasons:
Firstly the buffs are actually a nice boost to DPS. With the startfire buff a properly geared moonkin will see a lot of crits. As we all know crits increase a moonkin's DPS more than just the damage alone (Nature's Grace procs), so any crit % increase, even if temporary, will fuel your DPS more than other classes. The wrath buff also does great damage. It seems like when the wrath buff is up it is best to spam it until it's over, but I don't really have numbers to support it. Nature's grace and wrath is fixed now so if you have healthy crit% wrath spamming is really machine gun like.
Secondly, as Erlinn says, it makes a Moonkin's DPS rotation have a reactionary element. You can't spam the same rotation all night, you need to always keep Eclipse buffs in mind and react accordingly to achieve maximum DPS. Players with limited ability will not like this. Players with skill will really excel at this.
I can do 1400 DPS on Dr.Boom with resto gear on, and I really wasn't critting very much. Plus I'm totally new to this build so I may well be doing it wrong. I imagine a fully geared Moonkin would do really high DPS.
And as has been said above, Moonkins now have impressive raid utility. Roots, emergency Cyclones, Earth and Moon, Innervates, Battle Res, ooc res, Improved Aura, self-healing, off healing. In fact few caster classes will be as useful to your WotLK raid as a moonkin.
Post by
Celdhyrean
While i aknowledge what Blizzard is trying to do with Eclipse and find it interresting, there are several problems with it currently.
- it requires Wrath and SF to be mostly equal in dps to be interresting. Either you are going to proc the buff through your top rotation and there's no point to swap to the opposite rotation if the difference is too big, or you are going to try to proc it through the not optimal rotation to boost your top rotation and the buff then has to compensate for the time spent using the not optimal rotation.
Either way, you lose a good chunk of the dps boost through this mecanic (in compensating the time spent doing lower dps because of the time to proc Eclipse or compensating the intrinsically lower dps of the other rotation).
- On a "buff the optimal rotation" strategy, you run the risk of proccing Eclipse on the wrong spell if you don't take precautions (precasting before the CD is gone) which goes even more in the lowering the dps side, as well as causing some more headache in watching timers
- Whatever rotation you use, the first spell after the proc will be the wrong one (when chaincasting you can't change your spell depending on the result of the previous cast), losing you 1s or 2.5s of the 15s buff.
All those constraints and problems make Eclipse's dps boost lower than you would normally anticipate and quite of a bother to use optimally, ie it's quite unattractive at the moment.
Post by
Kaitain
Fair enough.
Correct what is wrong here (i'm sure something is as I don't play PvE moonkin much), because this is how i was picturing it:
With less good gear and less crit % on your gear, the best rotations favour wrath spamming over starfire spamming, right? Therefore with starter gear the talent is good because you wrath spam anyways, and the buff gives you enough starfire crit % to make Starfire the best spell to spam for the duration of the buff.
With great gear with fat crit %, starfire spamming does the most damage because of the crit scaling. But for this talent to be worth it wrath spamming would have to provide within 10% of the damage of Starfire spamming.
Is that right, or am i talking
poo
? :-D
Post by
Celdhyrean
To be honest, i haven't looked at wrath vs SF scaling yet.
(though i remember seeing a post about that yesterday in the EJ wotlk moonkin talent discussion thread, by Erdluf or Adorielle. But i can't link it since i don't have access to EJ from work).
The problem with Wrath is that it won't get all the scaling from haste + crit since the GCD can't be lowered under 1s (ie 40% crit and 15% haste means ~6% less wrath dps than theoretically planned). And those values shouldn't be hard to reach since talents + mage + whatever non-enhance shaman already give 22% crit and 11% haste.
Regarding Eclipse, it's true that proccing the 2nd best rotation is more optimal in terms of dps loss (you don't need to switch to get the proc and you don't run the risk of proccing the bad buff). In a perfect situation I'm not sure wether it's the biggest dps increase though, that would require number crunching.
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