[Moonkin] A bunch of ideas and tweaks.

[Azalar]

Hi!

I'd like to share with you all "a bunch of ideas and tweaks" for moonkin. I’ve used some ideas from Cyous@Malfurion_US and his post in the US forums, but tweaked some to give them my own flavor.

It's best to see this on my blog, since it's all colored and better to read than here, plus it'd be a bit too long for here.

http://wewant4specsnow.wordpress.com...or-the-future/

I tried to cover all I thought that felt odd or not fun, especially the AoE issue. But I think it could be better done with your help.

What are your thoughts?

[Deleted]

Awesome.. mind = blown.. The changes in your blog were fucking awesome. I would love to see these ingame, making moonkins the funniest spec out there. Single target could be made more interesting and changed alot from its current model imo, those aoe changes are awesome.

[Alzu]

I love the new ideas for many of the spells but a few things catch my eye I don't like:

1) Too many new spells. The ability bloat would be insane with 4 new skills. We would have to get rid of some other skills then, and I wouldn't bee too comfortable getting rid of more than 2 current spells (Faerie Fire and Nature's Grasp for me personally.) To add 4 and to get rid of 2 isn't good enough though, in my opinion.

2) I feel like while Moonkins can be quite squishy, they don't need a new defensive cooldown. The defensive capabilities should be fixed in some other ways but a heavy cooldown isn't the way to do it. Just not adding that would help getting rid of excess abilities. Also I personally don't even like the wind component of the CD.

3) Everything transforming to deal damage according to your eclipse. There is a reason there are two different eclipse states. You can't just mindlessly spam SF while in solar eclipse. Keeping Starfall only as a lunar skill and let e.g. Insect Swarm be only nature damage would add small and fine complexity in our AoE which would be nice. When reading the blog post I was fine with the idea still at fireflies but after getting to the last part and having Starfall change to Sunstorm and Faerie Gale change Twister's damage is too much in my opinion.

4) While it sounds so good, spreading our dots with an AoE skill would be too strong in every single case. Just leave that idea be and have dots interact with AoE in other ways (like your idea of Constellation and Sunburn. More of them later.)

5) The Sunfire and Moonfire fae differences are quite silly. It just makes Sunfire that much effective as it might proc Shooting Stars more often. Just let them both be like Moonfire's.

Everything else sounds good when refined a bit more though. I feel like Insect Swarm's idea is nice but could be refined a bit like this:

[Insect Swarm]: Surrounds an enemy target with insects, causing X physical damage for X sec. The swarm has 30% chance of spreading to another nearby enemy when it deals damage. Twister deals triple damage to targets affected by Insect Swarm. Casting Insect Swarm on a target which is already affected by it spreads the effect to all nearby enemies within 10 yards. 2 minute cooldown. 2 charges. Fae: Now has a X% fae chance of refreshing itself anytime it deals damage.

The damage from IS could be small but when spreading it to all nearby targets, Twister would become very powerful. Also with the cooldown and charge change you could every now and then force it to spread itself but still have 100% uptime on it due to Fae in a single target scenario.

Constellation and Sunburn are brilliant. The idea that you can do good AoE to spread out targets while in lunar and stacked targets in Solar is very nice. Their cooldowns shouldn't get reduced though. We have other ways to deal damage even when they would be on cooldown. Maybe add increased damage from Mushrooms for 3 seconds after a target is hit by Sunburn to make Mushrooms worth using again.

Now you can only hope that most of these changes come true, looks very nice!

[Broodling67]

It's an interesting take on some of Cyous' ideas. I like how you call it a "mini" rework when it's a rather large change (if all those changes were made at once).

My favourite things I would cherry pick out of there is the new mastery and how it interacts differently with each ability. I also like cleaving Wrath, it always annoyed me that during cd's like Astral Communion and Incarnation I had zero reasons to push that button. I like the sound of a choice between doing superior single target damage with Starfire or cleaving with Wrath depending on the situation I am in when I want to pop my cd's. Cleaving Starsurge is nice too but I was already pumping that into enemies when I could so extra hits is just icing on the cake.

I don't like "random path" on Twister, it sounds like it's suppose to shoot out of the Druid like Typhoon but then it wanders off on it's own? Why would I go through the trouble of positioning my self for this only to have the Twisters decide to side step what I was trying to hit? Considering all the other AoE/cleave/DoT spreading you proposed I think this could be left on the cutting room floor.

I do think there is way too much AoE/cleave/dot spreading in there, apart from Starfire, Sunfire and Moonfire (Sunfire and Moonfire do interact with their own AoE spells though) everything in there is going to hit multiple targets, seems like overkill even though we are lacking AoE options at the moment.

Overall, I'm not a fan of all those changes but I think some things could be picked out and used. Only thing that sucks about threads like this is as much fun as it is imagining what could be, it feels like there is very little chance of it getting in game.

[Deleted]

I like the new mastery idea and i hate the twister idea.
i love the idea of the fireflyes, it would be nice to make a bunch of mobs shine with different colors xD.
Insect swarm spread fireflyes from a target affected by moonfire/sunfire to nearby targets and have a x% chance to refresh itself.
(make the fireflyes colored differently as moonfire/sunfire is randomly chosen to light them up when spreading)
It should deal damage only if 3 or more targets are affected to avoid a nerf by Blizz to our other abilities because this spell does not add another single target rotation dot and it does not make our rotation more difficult / punishing if switching target.

It's not an OP mechanic to spread our dots to all the targets because DKs can do that...
Having a dot dealing damage and spreading by itself would back up our damage while we keep multi dotting the adds, just like a placed hurricane/astral storm, the difference is it's more eye catching, does not cover ground sight, brings back a spell that many moonkins liked.

Edit: You have just modified your blog.
What's not working in my opinion:

Wrath cast time reduced by 0.5 while under CA is useless because does not make it instant cast, we are already at the gcd cap for wrath with meta proc and -0.5 wouldn't make a difference.

" [Twister]: release 3 tornadoes that slowly sweep gliding forward"
I don't like a spell that "slowly" moves forward, It would require us to go in melee range to benefit from it before the pack is already dead.

"[Insect swarm]: The swarm has 30% chance of spreading to another nearby enemy"
but "Casting Insect Swarm on a target which is already affected by it spreads the effect to all nearby enemies within 10 yd"
Why the hell it should spread to nearby targets at a slow 30% rate if i can just cast it two times on the same target? Is it to make you choose to use both charges or keep one? In that case then why we should be effed up for 2 minutes if more adds come just because we wanted to deal a decent amount of AoE?

I prefer my shiny fireflyes idea, because it's faster at dealing damage, because we need to start doing AoE faster to be competitive, because it's one button in place of hurricane reducing ability bloat and of course because it's my own idea and I favours it :P

[Azalar]

Thanks for posting, I've been kinda busy re-reworking the blog post based on Alzu's and Broodling67 feedback.

I'm sorry I caught you reading the blog while updating it >_<

Although I personally love fireflies (and the colors :P), there has to be some way to put it so as not to create mechanic conflicts with Celestial Alignment. The 2 minutes CD after using both charges of IS was because of its self-refreshing mechanic, but could be tricky since that self-refreshing works with a percentage. I'd love to bring back fireflies in some way.

I like the idea of Twister too, but there has to be some other way to put it on paper.

I agree with Wrath change on CA and meta proc, which I didn't take into account.

I'm quite happy with how Fae mastery is working, and it's fun to see that you like it too :P

Things I thought:

1. IS and/or fireflies being the counterpart of Starfall during Solar Eclipse.
2. Twister transformed into a Rain of Fire like AoE.
3. Keeping IS as is would mean having to refresh 3 dots if IS does not refresh by itself, thus more complicated rotation.