[Balance] 5.4 Changes and Thoughts

[Deleted]

You're somewhat missing the point. You're saying its okay as long as our dps is viable (with or without the 4set) - while other classes dps will be viable, AND THEY GET A USEFUL 4 set; thus making us UNVIABLE.

There's no point sitting it out, receiving the set bonus and then saying 'Hey - how did that go live, now we're stuck with it' we want it changed before it goes live, and the time to make that happen is now. Once it has been implemented they may 'balance' it with a % mod, or a few extra seconds removed from the CD, but largely its the MECHANIC we dislike, not the specific reduction it offers. Unless we can get 2 CA per Incarnation cycle, it doesn't matter if its 3 seconds, 5 seconds or 10. If we can't line it up, it's not all that good.

I'm not missing anything, if we don't get full use of our 4 set but still do in and around the same kind of dps as other classes i won't care and that doesn't make us unviable.

[Deleted]

I'm not missing anything, if we don't get full use of our 4 set but still do in and around the same kind of dps as other classes i won't care and that doesn't make us unviable.

The problem is that you are looking at current dps figures without the new set bonuses. We as of now do not know what the effect of the other classes their set bonuses means in terms of dps, therefor you cannot really compare it as of yet. Boomkins are fine now, yes. How do you think that'll change next patch?

The whole point of the PTR is to give feedback to the developpers, since we cannot yet base ourselves upon numbers (as they've said, they still need to work out the precise numbers), we have to look at the set bonus mechanics and how they would interact with other tools within the boomkin arsenal.
At this point, even if they bump up the CD reduction to something ridiculous like 6 or 7 seconds per eclipse, it'll still be wank. Boomkins want to stack their CDs together (especially CA, since the dps bosot from the spell alone is pretty wank. It doesn't offer a flat damage boost like Incarnation, but rather gives us an instant eclipse, allows 2 eclipses dots and an extra starfall. That is it, the damage bonus from CA is the exact same one as the one from a usual eclipse and thus would scale from mastery.
That's why we want to stack it together with Incarnation so we get the incarnation damage boost applied to the double eclipse dot and extra starfall, thus making it a more potent CD on an overall scale. If you're a troll, you also want to stack Berserking together with CA. If you run with Nature's vigil, you stack that together with CA as well.

The problem is that this set bonus will completely desync all of the above, and thus will discourage players from the Incarnation talent and shoehorns them into using Treants or Soul of the Forest. That is something we want to avoid. Even then, sometimes you want to delay your CA for better suited moments in the fight. Iron Qon Heroic would be a prime example of this, since CA is so potent during that last phase. Therefor, delaying the usage of CA, decreases the effectiveness of the set bonus.
Then you also have the obvious difference in objectives of the set bonus. We swap eclipses the fastest on single target fights, since we wouldn't have to waste GCDs on dotting additional targets. However, CA is a cooldown that is the strongest on multitarget fights. From a balancing point of view, this would neatly balance out the strength of the set bonus on those fights so that the general dps increase is about the same, regardless of what type of encounter it is; IF CA was actually a strong cooldown on single target fights as well, but it isn't.

TL;DR: This set bonus destroys the cooldown stacking and syncronization between CA and talents, has little to no increase on single target fights and effectiveness is diminished if we do not pop CA on CD. Whole point of PTR is to bitch, complain and whine so that terrible ideas such as this do not come onto live realms.

Your attitude is the wrong one sir, you should complain when something is bad when it is still in a phase where it can be changed. If you let this make onto live realms, then it'd be too late.

[Exoblade]

Cata moonkin was so much fun, the op lunar shower 3 stack in solar was the so much fun. I remember just dotting and shroom with sunfire spam for 60k in ZA dungeon. It was broken and got fixed but even after that the play style was still so much fun even though we didn't have cd's and single target was still really lacking.

But at least we were the best multidot and burst aoe, i even was on par with out spriest with legendary and mage on DS heroics. I raided the first tier of MoP but have quit but it seemed like the playstyle was get to back to lunar the fastest and know when to time your cd. Very boring to me.

Doesn't seem like even blizzard knows what direction they want moonkins to go these days, all i know is that in Cata holding off eclipses or hitting the right eclipse at the right time was how you went from average to a great moonkin.

[huth]

You're somewhat missing the point. You're saying its okay as long as our dps is viable (with or without the 4set) - while other classes dps will be viable, AND THEY GET A USEFUL 4 set; thus making us UNVIABLE.

Wrong term. You mean competetive, not viable. If we're viable and get a useless 4p, we're still viable. It would need to actively impede us to make us non-viable.

[Toucanio]

Doesn't seem like even blizzard knows what direction they want moonkins to go these days, all i know is that in Cata holding off eclipses or hitting the right eclipse at the right time was how you went from average to a great moonkin.

This could be said for multiple DPS specs actually. But consider that the direction and design for any DPS spec tends to be iterative and can change each xpac (as we saw during MoP Beta).

Truly, if they just make up their minds, we would be able to provide more focused feedback about the spec. Right now we are in the middle of everything but I think most of the changes we could actually aspire to just don't happen because of the possible homogenization/unbalance it might lead to in the end. The devs tend to be awfully cautious when it comes to do some sort of change to this spec in particular, altough I also feel we are somewhat an afterthought when it comes to wide changes to the whole Druid Class or other Game Mechanics.

Now, to the point of 5.4...
The loss of 15% DR...
I'm starting to think our survival will be balanced around having HoTW active. Hopefully this is not the case. Still we are going to need other compensation to survive bursty raid-wide dmg other than barkskin. Not going to enter into PvP (altough it would be the place where the survival hit feels the most). We still have Symb, but it would be better not to tie a lot of our utility/surv to that spell alone and be able to have more solo-utility.
Possibly the fact that now we have NS baseline + the 2nd row of talents will be enough for them to say that they have "addressed" our survival for this patch. Problem is, healing's contribution to survival is tied to how powerful it is and how much Max HP we have. But DRs contribution to survival increases with how hard the hit is (until the point where the hit could kill you regardless).

About T16 2set...
Not much to say here. Lets wait the number's pass to check it out.

About T16 4set...
I remember seeing the T13, which was our last PvE set in Cata. It would be the 2nd time we get a bonus that wants us to completely skip it. The fix to this 4set wasn't all that great either, as they reduced the CD of SS by 5 secs on it (and SS already refreshed quite constantly back then), and in a later fix added a 10% dmg bonus to SS on the 4set.

I'm starting to believe the devs see CA as a fairly simplistic DMG CD, without understanding fully how does it meshes in the CDs we use or what do we really use it for. The main issue I see (and has been repeated along this post) is how it changes our talent selection. the only talent that gets a benefit from that is SotF, and even then, it's a gimnicky synergy. I leave out the trees because, while they do a fair bit of dmg, it doesn't scale with Eclipse (and hence, our Mastery) at all.
So now, we have to convince the devs that CA is not the kind of DMG CD that just works as a +15% to all dmg. CA is different in it's own way (Both Eclipse effects at the same time) and that's all right since it promoves differentiation from other CD-type abilities, but in terms of raw power it's the faster multidotting and the SS procs that do the work.

Some suggestions for the 4set have been given, but I want to give some too (*incoming long page of ideas*):
IDEA 1: Whenever you leave Lunar Eclipse, your next Starfire becomes an instant cast and deals X% more dmg. Whenever you leave Solar Eclipse, your next Wrath becomes an instant cast and deals Y% more dmg.
- This bonus aims more to help our mobility, faster transitions and improve our dmg outside of Eclipse a bit.

IDEA 2: Whenever you critically hit with Starsurge, the next Starfire casted while out of Lunar Eclipse or Wrath casted while out of Solar Eclipse will deal it's act as if it was affected by Eclipse and Nature's Grace.
- Fairly simple bonus, it will give us more of dmg for Starfire/Wrath whenever Starsurge crits. It also allows for more complex gameplay if you want to use that proc to hold an Eclipse with less dmg loss, even tough it will still be a loss since you may still lose NG uptime.
- The wording is a bit rough, but the idea is when you cast SF or Wrath outside of their respective Eclipses, the cast-time will be calculated as if NG is up and it's dmg as if were affected by Eclipse.

IDEA 3: Critically hitting with Starfire also deals additional dmg equal to X% of the damage your Moonfire will do in all it's duration. Critically hitting with Wrath also deals additional dmg equal to X% of the damage your Sunfire will do in all it's duration. Critically hitting with Starsurge also deals additional dmg equal to X% of the damage either Moonfire or Sunfire will do in all it's duration, whichever is higher.
- It's a kind of bonus that might scale exponentially considering that the DoT snapshotting mechanics are staying. Even then, the idea is to work more SingeTarget synergy and reward well use of procs and all of that.
- This bonus is a dmg proc that doesn't crit and isn't affected by Eclipse (by itself, but will account the buffs snapshotted on the current MF and SunF when calculating the dmg on the proc).
- All the procs produced are Spellstorm dmg. (Minor detail, in my opinion).

IDEA 4: If the Shooting Starts effect is active, whenever your Sunfire or Moonfire DoTs critically hit, you gain a Spiral charge. When you reach 10 Spiral charges, you will gain "Spin On!" and stop gaining more until you consume this effect. "Spin On!" increases the damage of your next Starsurge by X% and after consuming this effect, the damage of your next Starfire or Wrath is increased by Y%.
- This idea builds up from the ideas of 2 or 3 charges of Starsurge and reduce the SS waste we are going to suffer.
- But since getting and storing more than 1 SS charge easily will be huge for PvP, I prefer to improve the dmg of Starsurge and Starfire/Wrath but requiring some buildup from not-used SS procs.
- It can improve our synergy with UVLS a bit. Altough at this point of gearing and all the tons of crit we are going to see, UVLS's value would diminish even more, in my opinion.

To close this long post, I'm sceptical with how are we going to be in 5.4. Even if there is somewhat a buff by getting NS baseline, the DR loss is going to be felt and we are still going to need some fixes on our 4set else that bonus would be only for collectionists.

Sorry for the English slips.

- Toucanio

[Deleted]

I really urge people who want to see change to join in this thread http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7713682410

Look at other classes like hunters, they have loads of people posting on blizz forums, atleast they are getting responses, i see hardly anything from moonkins.

[Dabrix32]

armor is about worthless in pvp. bonus armor to moonkin form is basically nothing.

[Deleted]

I cant really understand why they wont change this with the overwhelming dislike for the set bonus. Really i urge more people to get onto the blizz forums and let them know! I know that blizzard sometimes read threads on mmo champ, but so far nothing has changed. We really cant let this terrible 4 set go live.

[Reyzzz]

I cant really understand why they wont change this with the overwhelming dislike for the set bonus. Really i urge more people to get onto the blizz forums and let them know! I know that blizzard sometimes read threads on mmo champ, but so far nothing has changed. We really cant let this terrible 4 set go live.

True that, if it does go live, it will render incarnation useless, and everyone will take SotF.

[Slippykins]

True that, if it does go live, it will render incarnation useless, and everyone will take SotF.

Or the set bonus will just be ignored while using Incarnation, which is a terrible mechanic if it's ignored.

CA doesn't really provide much benefit for single-target fights, and the set bonus would technically scale with more targets, making CA worth more damage per use. Unfortunately, the more targets you add the more each CA is worth but the longer you'll take to cycle eclipses, meaning the set bonus means less but at the same time means more. It's a little cyclic, but you can see targets add damage but reduce the effect of the bonus by reducing how much the cooldown is reduced. When you add talent choice to the mix, and how Incarnation will scale positively with targets but negatively with using the 4-piece CA, we just get a big heaping lump of complication and dumb damage.

[Miraclous]

@Toucanio. Altough I can see flaws in your ideas like in talent balance ect, I still think they're pretty great ideas that might actually make a change in moonkin playstyle to spice it up instead of the incredibly dull bonusses we've had all expansion. When we got the T14 set bonusses blizz said they were boring because the 'players' still needed time to learn the new class ect, yet after that they've not made any attempt on actually making bonusses interesting and that's what is the worst for me I think.

[Cyous]

Atm, PTR servers are down, but has anyone 'really' tested "SOTF + 4pc" and "Multi-target + 4pc?" I've heard from a credible source that the 4pc is knocking off well over a minute off CA's cooldown in Multi-target (even without SOTF). I would play-test this myself, but I simply have too much going on right now and cannot make the time available.

[dark666105]

As far as the working against itself the 4pc could be fixed in that regard if they changed it to reduce CA cooldown on starsurge and of course lower the amount it lowers it by. Which would pretty much be a direct rip off of the shaman bonus for t15. Though CA is not even close to the cooldown Ascendance is which blizzard doesn't seem to get. It wouldn't fix the decoupling problem with Incarnation unless it would basically halve the cooldown I suppose.

[dark666105]

The change to KJC is hardly gutting the class, it is a QoL change at best. But that is getting off topic. Given how extensive our theorycrafting community is for the balance spec alone I have no idea why they are having such trouble grasping us.

[Deleted]

The change to KJC is hardly gutting the class, it is a QoL change at best. But that is getting off topic. Given how extensive our theorycrafting community is for the balance spec alone I have no idea why they are having such trouble grasping us.

Pretty much. Given the fact the feral 4 piece has been changed, while that was not nowhere near as bad as the balance one, kind of agitates me a little. Perhaps they're coming up with new ideas at this moment nad having trouble working them out themselves.

[Cyous]

Pretty much. Given the fact the feral 4 piece has been changed, while that was not nowhere near as bad as the balance one, kind of agitates me a little. Perhaps they're coming up with new ideas at this moment nad having trouble working them out themselves.

In my personal opinion, I would much rather have something that strengthened our multi-target for the coming tier, but something that wouldn't be tied to Eclipse.

[Aboubacar]

In my personal opinion, I would much rather have something that strengthened our multi-target for the coming tier, but something that wouldn't be tied to Eclipse.

I wish the most iconic moonkin ability (starfall) wasn't so boring and lackluster. Its pretty amazing single target and okay cleave, but the 2 target cap + 20 stars cap, no splash damage meh. Mushrooms so rarely used right now. Just fun spells are neglected.

[dark666105]

I REALLY REALLY miss the starfall splash.

[Broodling67]

Wowhead has datamined some new glyphs for Moonkins:

Glyph of Guided Stars (NYI): Your Starfall only hits targets affected by your Moonfire or Sunfire.

Glyph of the Prolific Mushroom (NYI): You can now have only one Wild Mushroom active at once, but your mushroom deals 0% additional damage.

(source: http://www.wowhead.com/news=215959/5...lyphs-and-more)

I don't get why we have to glyph for a single mushroom but Resto druids are getting it baseline (and they don't even want it in it's current implementation).

Starfall glyph sounds nice for fights like Tortos or Twins where there can be extra adds (Whirling Turtles/Ice Comet) that are immune to damage but still get targeted.

Of course the Glyphs are still listed as NYI (Not yet implemented) so they may never see the light of day or get reworked before going in for testing.

[huth]

Well, there are reasons to want to have 3 shrooms, mostly when you don't care about the damage.

If it gets implemented, i'd say it's fairly likely it will end up somewhere around 200% damage bonus (well, duh).

Though i'd really like if they finally delivered on the tooltip and actually gave us multiple ways of blowing them up with different effects.