Balance Druid Changes - Can someone help me understand?

[Sidonis]

If raid progression > staying in the same guild for you, then as soon as you consistently enter the top 5 on a variety of fights in the guild you're in, it's time to start filling out applications to better guilds.

[Aluana]

If raid progression > staying in the same guild for you, then as soon as you consistently enter the top 5 on a variety of fights in the guild you're in, it's time to start filling out applications to better guilds.

this...

[Pascal]

It was possible to do what WiseEclipse does/did with nothing more than macros, which is default from Blizzard. This is nearly identical to rogues using their swap mod to maximize DPS. It was possible to do with macros, but the addon made it easier.

Yes, I stopped reading replies after the first page.

[Deleted]

No offense, but unless you're talking about hard modes, Anub-25 should have come down a LONG time ago.

He is talking about hard mode.

[HolyshockTalniEU]

its an good thing they fixxed it

about those ppl who claim u need addons far maxi dps that isnt true u only need 2 watch mre across the screen since your debuffs on an boss are bigger (without addons playing) then the rest and u get an najs clockish thingy in it same as CD's but ppl wanna be lazy and just mash some buttons wen they get a flashy screen.

I played an druid dps i could play it addonfree and with addons my dps was the same maybe one was 15 higher.

And iam an healer i saw an comment thats cant play without grid or something like it it isnt that hard just mash some buttons and click the target(if u also wanna go macro free)

[Cyclownd@DS]

6 pages of fail

[Sunfyre]

You are new here, aren't you? Havent been looking around much? I swear, i am so tired of this retarted argument. Here is the link to one of my latest counters: http://www.mmo-champion.com/class-dr...54/#msg1759654

If i was in a shabby little guild, then maybe we could use the argument that "my guild sucks". Unfortunately, we are just looking at Anub and Algalon left, with everything else done. I think that puts us in the better end of guilds.

As of this post, according to Wow Progress, 1,216 guilds worldwide have killed Algalon. 907 guilds have killed 25man heroic Anub'arak. Not to burst your bubble, Qieth, but you're not in a leading edge guild. Trying to market yourself as such and trying to claim that your guild has amazing DPS is unfounded.

[Sunfyre]

its an good thing they fixxed it

about those ppl who claim u need addons far maxi dps that isnt true u only need 2 watch mre across the screen since your debuffs on an boss are bigger (without addons playing) then the rest and u get an najs clockish thingy in it same as CD's but ppl wanna be lazy and just mash some buttons wen they get a flashy screen.

I played an druid dps i could play it addonfree and with addons my dps was the same maybe one was 15 higher.

And iam an healer i saw an comment thats cant play without grid or something like it it isnt that hard just mash some buttons and click the target(if u also wanna go macro free)

a) You're a bad balance dps if what I think you said is true. However, with the absolute lack of punctuation and grammar, I'm not really sure what you said.

b) If you're a healer, stay on the healer threads. Your statements obviously prove you have no clue what you're talking about.

[Surfd]

As of this post, according to Wow Progress, 1,216 guilds worldwide have killed Algalon. 907 guilds have killed 25man heroic Anub'arak. Not to burst your bubble, Qieth, but you're not in a leading edge guild. Trying to market yourself as such and trying to claim that your guild has amazing DPS is unfounded.

Out of curiosity (since i LOVE statistics that are presented only when they can be manipulated to make your arguement sound better) what is the TOTAL number of raiding guilds tracked by WoW Progress, and additionally, the TOTAL number of raiding guilds NOT tracked by WoW Progress? In relation to the combined sum of guilds that raid stuff, what % of guilds have actually killed Algalon and 25 heroic Anub?

If Qieth is in a guild that has cleared everything except those two, and can reasonably expect to clear either of them before Icecrown launches, I would say his claim has pretty good standing.

[Deleted]

You countered by posting the top Balance druid WoLs and saying "these moonkins are beating pures" to which I responded with the list of overall top DPS which had ZERO balance druids for all of ToGC and you said that all of those didn't count, yet somehow your top Balance logs did not fall into the same category.

The reason why i took the moonkin top list, rather than the top list for all, is because we get a wider cut from the moonkin list. We ensure that we are looking for logs with competent moonkins, that are pulling their weight. We can compare them to their raid group (which is even more interesting) and we can see how they do. What was interesting to note was that most of the moonkins on the moonkin top list were seeing the same positions as i am. Are you going to tell me that the guildies to all of these moonkins suck aswell?

This 'Crap Pures vs Awesome Boomkin' debate sure is getting scattered around, perhaps it deserves its own thread? (At least my rantings about DoT uptime were relatively tidy :P)

Anyhow, I think the whole debate revolves around personal opinion. It's very tough to argue with the likes of simcraft - and it's simcraft which tells us that we're not even inside the 'top 10' when it comes to the class DPS rankings - but it also tells us that we're ~5% behind the front runner.

The game is pretty much as balanced as it ever has been in terms of DPS - and that 5% can be made up with minor gear or skill differences, which is what we see on a day to day basis.

I'm currently topping the damage meters consistently in my raids but I'm under no illusion that it's because I'm pushing the boundaries of what my class is capable of - we just may be lacking in other departments.

It's not a case of "Qieth, all your pures suck and do so consistently", it's a case of you're probably one of the better raiders in your guild - and you're making up that 5% by simply playing better and perhaps also optimizing your gear better. When we compare this to the logs of the world firsts, and top world 20 guilds - the results are often different because the gear/skill gaps are much smaller - and class qualities shine slightly more.

I personally will not complain at a 5% "lacking" in exchange for what else we bring to the table, I think it allows us to be competitive without being overpowered - but others may see this 5% buffer as a reason for us not being competitive, as all things being honest and equal - we would not beat an equivalent mage, rogue, whatever.

This i can agree to. I am the caster classmaster in our guild, so i know where our problems lie. And i am a good raider, and that completely has a lot to say. But i also know that there are other people in my guild who are aswell, and when we are on par, it just shows that the actual difference is marginal.

I think 5% difference is absolutely fine. Heck, if Blizzard ever were to be serious about the Pures vs Hybrids, i would be fine with being 10% behind aswell. Funny thing is, though, the latest Simcraft puts us just 2,9% behind the arcane mages, but that log is from the 20th, before the tier 8 nerfs, so i am sure they will put up some new calculations soon.

If raid progression > staying in the same guild for you, then as soon as you consistently enter the top 5 on a variety of fights in the guild you're in, it's time to start filling out applications to better guilds.

I don't see how this has any relevance. I assume it was a comment to wards me defending my guild, but i don't see how this applies.

No; I have been disagreeing with you for the better part of a year... just not all on this account. We all hide behind a veil of anonymity, I like to spread mine around.

Then you lose credibility

There is nothing wrong with being in a guild that has a Boomkin as top-DPS. If you guys love playing together then that is awesome and I'll never take anything away from that. But, using your parses as an argument that Boomkin can or should be equally competitive with pure classes says more about your guild than it does about you.

I didn't just use my parses. I also used logs from other guilds and simcraft's from Elitist Jerks and analytics of the counter-logs to see if there might be an answer to why the DPS turns out as it is.

Around 8-9,000 guilds took down Anub first week with the remaining top 20,000 just now catching up. No offense, but unless you're talking about hard modes, Anub-25 should have come down a LONG time ago.

*facepalm* seriously? You didn't even bother to check my armory or something? You just assumed that we were wiping on Anub normal? We took him down the same day as everybody else - i think we wiped once.

Even if a hybrid class is dishing out DPS equal to pure DPS classes, that is an anomaly which is proactively being rooted out by developers. With that in mind, are you suggesting that Boomkin SHOULD be competitive with pure range DPS?

No. I am absolutely fine with hybrids being behind pures. It makes perfect sense. But until this is actually the case across the board, i can't believe that this is Blizzards aim. How can DK's and Cats (and moonkins ) do so well, and be so competitive, if they are supposed to be behind the pures? It shows that, if anything, Blizzard hasn't managed to achieve their philosophy. At the same time, look at shadow priests and shamans. Poor bastards are in such a bad shape, and are supernerfed in comparason to pures. I sure don't want to be down there, but i would be totally fine with a 5%, or even 10% difference in DPS from hybrid to pure (but i would begin to oppose to more).

6 pages of fail

Whats your take on this? You are the creme de la creme. Are you exceptionally skilled, or does your guild suck?

As of this post, according to Wow Progress, 1,216 guilds worldwide have killed Algalon. 907 guilds have killed 25man heroic Anub'arak. Not to burst your bubble, Qieth, but you're not in a leading edge guild. Trying to market yourself as such and trying to claim that your guild has amazing DPS is unfounded.

I never said i was. Never, ever, ever. I did say, however, that we weren't excactly in the bottom of the list, using GOTUR as a benchmark for our progress. I merely meant to establish, that if we were the ~1000th guild to do GOTUR back then, and there was over 9000 (pun intented) guilds that has access to just as good (and easy) gear as we do, then "skill" is not an issue here. The whole argument i replied to was "Your guild sucks", and i merely went to show that we dont.

Out of curiosity (since i LOVE statistics that are presented only when they can be manipulated to make your arguement sound better) what is the TOTAL number of raiding guilds tracked by WoW Progress, and additionally, the TOTAL number of raiding guilds NOT tracked by WoW Progress? In relation to the combined sum of guilds that raid stuff, what % of guilds have actually killed Algalon and 25 heroic Anub?

If Qieth is in a guild that has cleared everything except those two, and can reasonably expect to clear either of them before Icecrown launches, I would say his claim has pretty good standing.

Its a bit tricky to answer, but your reasoning is the same i used. When is it a raiding guild? When they kill Patchwerk? When they clear the keepers in Ulduar? When they kill normal NrB?

What i did was to search for my own guild, and then go back and look at the achievements. If you scroll down, you can see the latest who has gotten it. For example, my guild was world 1051st to do Yogg +1, and yesterday the guild Anointed on EU-Sylvanas was the 1473rd to do it. There are 19302 guilds that has cleared normal TOTC. This means that there are 19302 people that has access to better-than-Ulduar gear, and thus should have even less problems clearing Ulduar hard modes - and still we only see 1500 guilds that has done it.

Considering that there are 19.000 guilds that has cleared normal TOTC, there is only 3626 that has cleared up to and including Twin Valkyrs heroic. We were #1670 to do that. That puts us at least up in the 25% of the better guilds in the world, and thats not counting all of the guilds that aren't being tracked, or guilds that hasn't cleared TOTC yet.

I don't claim to be in a super hardcore guild. But i do claim to say that we don't suck. (Except on Anub. God, im tired of wiping on that).

Please note:
I wrote a big, big post yesterday, putting all the arguments regarding moonkin DPS into one. I will post it later, when my guildies are done reviewing it. It wont be posted on MMO, though, cause i don't think there is enough room for it in one post.

[DaChicken]

Out of curiosity (since i LOVE statistics that are presented only when they can be manipulated to make your arguement sound better) what is the TOTAL number of raiding guilds tracked by WoW Progress, and additionally, the TOTAL number of raiding guilds NOT tracked by WoW Progress? In relation to the combined sum of guilds that raid stuff, what % of guilds have actually killed Algalon and 25 heroic Anub?

If Qieth is in a guild that has cleared everything except those two, and can reasonably expect to clear either of them before Icecrown launches, I would say his claim has pretty good standing.

www.wowprogress.com

They show you all the percentages you will ever want to see.....and honestly.....if you cant manage Algalon......spending time on Anub is just a waist of gold

[Ni7ro X]

I'm curious why they are completely fine with mages abusing this "double stacking" benefit. They do it with shatter all the time. Even though the frostbolt they launch SHOULD break the frost nova, if you instantly follow it with an ice lance, it too gains the shatter benefit.

actually ice lance hits nova first

[Eilt]

The reason why i took the moonkin top list, rather than the top list for all, is because we get a wider cut from the moonkin list. We ensure that we are looking for logs with competent moonkins, that are pulling their weight. We can compare them to their raid group (which is even more interesting) and we can see how they do. What was interesting to note was that most of the moonkins on the moonkin top list were seeing the same positions as i am. Are you going to tell me that the guildies to all of these moonkins suck aswell?

Yes, you looked at the BEST moonkin DPS parses out there. The stars aligned and these moonkin managed to top the meters in their guild (one time). To be fair we should compare these same numbers to the equal happening for other classes, which is when I pulled the overall top DPS for each fight and there are ZERO moonkins there. Now if you want to go back to your top Moonkin DPS list and see public logs where they are getting those numbers EVERY week and competing for top DPS I would LOVE to see it.

Also no one ever responded to my comment of turning your progress argument around on you. If you can say that your progression is proof enough your DPS is competent I can say that since we are further progressed that our DPS is more competent and thus, your DPS should be doing what our guild is if you want to be better, which means your pures are no where need the DPS level they should be considering I am out DPSing you and our pures beat me.

[Deleted]

Yes, you looked at the BEST moonkin DPS parses out there. The stars aligned and these moonkin managed to top the meters in their guild (one time). To be fair we should compare these same numbers to the equal happening for other classes, which is when I pulled the overall top DPS for each fight and there are ZERO moonkins there. Now if you want to go back to your top Moonkin DPS list and see public logs where they are getting those numbers EVERY week and competing for top DPS I would LOVE to see it.

No, i didn't just do that. I took random swaps from across the list - i have an easy access to the top 200 best moonkins on each and every fight, after all, and they are pretty damn consistant. So its not just looking at a massive list of the best, alltime highest DPS'ers with different classes, its looking across a lot of different logs, from different guilds with different moonkins. 80-90% of the fights listed via NrB heroic WoL moonkin top list shows the moonkin in top five, and the rest wasn't doing too shabby.

You are looking at the DPS you are doing, in your raids, and then you go into the top list and conclude that these guys are doing more DPS than you. But you cannot compare YOUR raid or YOUR fight to other peoples logs, when there are so, so, so many different factors that could change it. You dont know how the top DPS is geared compared to you, you dont know if he recieves any special buffs, you might be looking at raids with fewer or more DPS'ers, which will affect the fight time. Maybe bloodlust is cast at a different point in the fight which favors others more at that specific moment.

You could look through all of this, but until you do, you don't really have any basis for comparasson. Imagine, if you will, how huge a difference would be if Icehowl crashed into the wall to your left - without hitting you - and you could DPS him full time, compared to him crashing into the wall at the other side of the arena. Not only do you not DPS while running to him, you dont do DOUBLE DPS. Think about how easy it is for a DK to pick up DPS after an Icehowl crash - a few diseases and then start on the rotation. A moonkin puts up dots, start spamming a spell, and only when he gets eclipse will he be at his full potential. This is not a problem on a longer parse of casting, because it evens out nicely, but when Icehowl is only stunned for a short time, we fall out a bit. Imagine how easy it is for an arcane mage!

Instead, when i look at the moonkin top list, i know that i am at least looking at logs, and comparing moonkins, to players in presumably equal gear who are raiding under the same circumstances.

Also no one ever responded to my comment of turning your progress argument around on you. If you can say that your progression is proof enough your DPS is competent I can say that since we are further progressed that our DPS is more competent and thus, your DPS should be doing what our guild is if you want to be better, which means your pures are no where need the DPS level they should be considering I am out DPSing you and our pures beat me.

Just like with comparing different logs our of context, you can't just stroll in and compare guilds. Progression can also be affected by many things:

How many days a week do you raid? We raid four days, and we have still spent time in the beginning of TOTC on getting GOTUR done. Thats time spent elsewhere.

How long has the guild been raiding? This guild is about 6 months old, so we even had a late start in Ulduar, which meant we took potential TOTC raid nights to down hard modes.

What about raid composition? We keep our guild relatively tight - we have just four tanks. What if two can't join a raid one day? We might have to change our plans. What if too many healers go away? Though luck, we just have to cancel the raid or do something else.

Server stability? Hellscream has terrible lag whenever Wintergrasp comes up, and Dalaran in the evenings are terrible. It wasn't at all like that on my old server, and it may be better or worse on your server.

Progression only shows who managed to kill a boss, not the factors that allowed them to do it. Unless your server, guild and raid composition is more or less like mine, they aren't comparable. Turning the argument around again, i used to play a hunter in TBC, in the best guild on Doomhammer. When i stopped playing and then came back, i joined a little Karazan guild on my druid. They were good players, but we only raided once a week, on fridays, and we didn't push to get more members and progress into SSC. Does that automaticly make us bad players because we took the game in a different stride?

[Deleted]

Elit does have a point If his guild is further in progression and his pures are pulling more DPS there's only a few reasons for this either ;

A- his guild use 1 less healer increasing his overall raid DPS
B- better guild synergy (doubtfull but still an option)
C- better skilled pure's (if his pures outdps yours consistantly)

As you can see the argument that "I'm so far progressed" can be flipped to counter the same argument even if you look at guilds where moonkins are progressing far.

[Voek]

To me it seems that whether our dps is on par with other dps-classes or behind them is not so relevant for the intended eclipse-change. After all, most of us will agree that this change is not intended to nerf our dps, but rather to avoid that people 'exploit' the lunar to solar transition with an addon, Wise-Eclipse (WE). Most of us will also agree that WE 'feels' a bit different than other dps-addons, i.e. WE cancels a buff rather than that it keeps track of cd's, debuffs, etcetera. From that perspective I can understand that Blizzard and some other players in the community are not that happy with WE.
However, WE is just one way of 'exploiting' the lunar to solar transistion, since there are also other options like macro's and just plain old fashioned timing. The problem is not that moonkins try to 'exploit' the transition, since you can't blame us if we try to increase our dps by timing our spells correctly (if we do not use macro's our WE). The problem is the poorly designed transistion, which is not fixed by the intended eclipse change, since manual timing or future addons that help our timing can still 'exploit' the transistion to some extend.

Personally I feel that we get a dps-nerf which also increases RNG, while it does not fix any problem.

[Deleted]

I've actually never used WE untill very recently ( have only installed it 2 days ago and have not used it in a raid yet) which is quiet funny cause it's getting basically blocked out. I've never found a need for it saying that , my numbers seem to match up with other peoples without a problem and I don't see this as being a nerf to me at all and it wont actually effect my DPS overall . While it might be usefull having an addon like this that buffs DPS a bit I personally believe it's not needed , there are addons like smartDebuff and grid which are helpful at tracking things to make ur life easier but mods that physically do something for you like cancel a buff I have a problem with.

So I see this as a step in the right direction rather then a nerf. Hopefully blizzard will focus on more important issue however then what mods we are using

[Eilt]

No, i didn't just do that. I took random swaps from across the list - i have an easy access to the top 200 best moonkins on each and every fight, after all, and they are pretty damn consistant. So its not just looking at a massive list of the best, alltime highest DPS'ers with different classes, its looking across a lot of different logs, from different guilds with different moonkins. 80-90% of the fights listed via NrB heroic WoL moonkin top list shows the moonkin in top five, and the rest wasn't doing too shabby.

You are looking at the DPS you are doing, in your raids, and then you go into the top list and conclude that these guys are doing more DPS than you. But you cannot compare YOUR raid or YOUR fight to other peoples logs, when there are so, so, so many different factors that could change it. You dont know how the top DPS is geared compared to you, you dont know if he recieves any special buffs, you might be looking at raids with fewer or more DPS'ers, which will affect the fight time. Maybe bloodlust is cast at a different point in the fight which favors others more at that specific moment.

You could look through all of this, but until you do, you don't really have any basis for comparasson. Imagine, if you will, how huge a difference would be if Icehowl crashed into the wall to your left - without hitting you - and you could DPS him full time, compared to him crashing into the wall at the other side of the arena. Not only do you not DPS while running to him, you dont do DOUBLE DPS. Think about how easy it is for a DK to pick up DPS after an Icehowl crash - a few diseases and then start on the rotation. A moonkin puts up dots, start spamming a spell, and only when he gets eclipse will he be at his full potential. This is not a problem on a longer parse of casting, because it evens out nicely, but when Icehowl is only stunned for a short time, we fall out a bit. Imagine how easy it is for an arcane mage!

Instead, when i look at the moonkin top list, i know that i am at least looking at logs, and comparing moonkins, to players in presumably equal gear who are raiding under the same circumstances.

The link you provided is not random swaps, it is the top DPS, although for some reason you put a link to page 5 in. And on Page 5 those moonkin are not competing for the TOP DPS spot, they are barely breaking top 5 (which I am in the same boat on) but I am not arguing that we cannot get in top 5. Look at the difference between us and the usual #1s on that list. That gap is not ‘competing for the top spot’ but I would say it is competitive in terms of overall DPS since the gap in the main core of DPS is a few hundred DPS.
Not to mention everything you said works exactly the same to counter your argument since we can look at the same logs. Sure on the occasional fight maybe Icehowl crashed closer to one DPS instead of another, but looking through the vast quantities that WoL provides is what you would call a large enough sample size to be able to eliminate outliers. And when you do that you see that moonkins are NOT competing for the top spot on the meters on a consistent basis, on the contrary most are just doing enough to be competitive. But saying that somehow when you look at top moonkins from WoL and I look at top DPS from WoL, you PRESUME to think they moonkins are in equal gear raiding under equal circumstance, well why are the logs I look at not allowed to operate under the same presumption?

Just like with comparing different logs our of context, you can't just stroll in and compare guilds. Progression can also be affected by many things:

How many days a week do you raid? We raid four days, and we have still spent time in the beginning of TOTC on getting GOTUR done. Thats time spent elsewhere.

How long has the guild been raiding? This guild is about 6 months old, so we even had a late start in Ulduar, which meant we took potential TOTC raid nights to down hard modes.

What about raid composition? We keep our guild relatively tight - we have just four tanks. What if two can't join a raid one day? We might have to change our plans. What if too many healers go away? Though luck, we just have to cancel the raid or do something else.

Server stability? Hellscream has terrible lag whenever Wintergrasp comes up, and Dalaran in the evenings are terrible. It wasn't at all like that on my old server, and it may be better or worse on your server.

Progression only shows who managed to kill a boss, not the factors that allowed them to do it. Unless your server, guild and raid composition is more or less like mine, they aren't comparable. Turning the argument around again, i used to play a hunter in TBC, in the best guild on Doomhammer. When i stopped playing and then came back, i joined a little Karazan guild on my druid. They were good players, but we only raided once a week, on fridays, and we didn't push to get more members and progress into SSC. Does that automaticly make us bad players because we took the game in a different stride?

We raid 4 nights a week max, and there are 5 bosses in ToGC so we all have free time to spend in Ulduar, we still farm the place attempting to get our third mace completed.
Our guild is older, if you want to hold that against us for progression I will allow it and sit back and laugh at your excuses.
We have 30 on at raid time most nights, we actually only have 3 tanks, and everyone has the same issues with people missing that is not just applicable to your guild.
Pretty sure every server lags when wintergrasp is goiung on, not to mention each World Event ends up with the same lag, we spent quite a few nights not raiding ToGC because it was too laggy and we did not want to waste attempts.
If you want to argue that progression only shows who managed to kill a boss I am fine with that, but you started off using the argument that since you killed a boss it proved something about the competency of your players and that is the only reason I brought it up. If you want to retract that killing bosses proves competency I would not have to argue this point.

[Deleted]

both of you have valid points but what has this to do with understanding recent changes :P ???

on the current discussion that's ongoing at the moment here's my opinion on the matter;

My guild I've always been in the top 5 , the majority of the time I've been in the top 3 without too much hassle , even with the fact that we have no ele shaman or demo lock no FM and not even a WoA totem (i've noticed some of my pures lack in my guild and accepted that but sum are amazing at how they play so it's not valid)... when I pug with sum of the other guilds etc... I've noticed I'm still easily in the top 5 , changed guild recently and noticed I'm struggling to reach the same place on the meters ... now is this because I've suddenly becomes worse ? Or I'm less gear'd then my pears ? (no) Or were the pures in my old guild not as competent as the new guild ? I get the feelings it's the latter ... so...
Now I've accepted the fact that in my old guild not everyone minmaxes but I can't take the excuse that my old guild are shit due to the level of progress again using Qieth's argument , so maybe it's because not everyone in my old guild minmax'd but were still competent players at their class.. This game is now-a-days is designed to allow people to still clear things without being the absolute best.

[Deleted]

Quieth, i'm still waiting for an answer on my post about why i find your methodology of WoL parsing biased. (it's on page6). Summing it up it's about the same than what Eilt says : you recuse top rogue (or whatever) dps because stars could align for them but you take top moonkin dps in account.