Moonkin - Eclipse

#0 - March 25, 2010, 11:41 p.m.

I'm going to talk here a moment as someone who knows next to nothing about boomkin and plays one purely as a scrubby alt.

But after doing my first couple dungeons/heroics on my boomkin, I'm curious about the design of eclipse and what the intent is behind it's design the way it is.

Clearly it provides too much of your DPS. When it pops, and you get randomly stunned/boss shifting stages in the encounter where you can't DPS, you just lost a huge chunk of DPS. That's fairly irritating even as someone who just picked up the moonkin spec.

But here's the thing. It doesn proc on the first spell that can proc it. It gets a little annoying when you know eclipse can proc and your'e nuking away for 4-10 wraths before the RNG gods smile upon you and it finally procs (yes I am using the right spell to proc the right type of eclipse -_-).

Would it be OP if it got the Taste for Blood treatment and anytime Lunar or Solar eclipse CAN proc from Starfire/Wrath it WILL proc? Maybe I'm not even fully understanding moonkin but I would think that might remove a little of the RNG. Like I said, I don't know moonkins very well at all, but this one little thing seemed like it would be quite irritating to fulltime moonkins :o

Ghostcrawler

#14 - March 26, 2010, 5:29 p.m.

The purpose behind Eclipse was to encourage Balance druids to cast something besides their hardest hitting spell over and over again. From this thread it appears at least some of you were content with a "rotation" like that, but you'll have to believe me that it was a very common complaint we heard from druids as to what they disliked or why they didn't play Balance.

Now it's possible to base a rotation around a single spells. Mages are designed to do just that. However, they also have a lot of procs, cooldowns, secondary effects and other situational events that mean that even though you're getting most of your damage from one button, you're managing a lot.

We could have gone that way with Balance druids. We didn't largely because part of the kit of Balance is balance, and we thought that manifested itself nicely in switching between Arcane and Nature spells, or Starfire and Wrath, or Lunar and Solar.

The problem with Eclipse (as I've stated many times, so I find the comments that we won't address the issue to be a trifle unfair) is that it now accounts for so much of Balance's damage that the random element can be punishing. Having to shift positions right when you get a proc should be a little bit of a bummer on the level of missing a few crits in a row, and not a devastating blow to your dps.

We're keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element. :)