Blue Post: Druid Q&A

For the last couple weeks Blizzard has been publishing some Q&A's regarding each of the classes and Druid Q&A was just released. For the most part there doesn't seem to be any big revelations. I am not an expert on the other trees, but most of the answers given seem to be fairly standard or restatements of prior blue posts. That said there is one comment in the Q&A that may cause a lot of trouble for raiding Moonkin:

Q: Have we considered providing more tanking leather and to prevent extra loot clutter possibly finding ways for Balance and Restoration druids to use solely cloth item since they often use them already?

Ghostcrawler: No. Druids are a leather-using class. We are just going to have to make three types of leather (melee, ranged and healing). You have to understand that even though we have pushed bears and cats farther apart, we still consider them to be part of the same spec. We can’t get into the business of itemizing for niches within a particular spec or we’re just going to have too many items per tier. I can see the argument for having tanking and dps leather and making the casters use cloth. That’s just a different design and we currently like for certain classes to be associated with certain types of armor. We like that druids look different from say priests or mages (even ignoring the forms thing). We like that we can kit druid tier piece armor to look a certain way.

Also note that if we buffed bear mitigation through more tanking-oriented leather that we’d just have to nerf them in other ways. In my experience, most bears end up with “tanking leather” anyway because they want to gem and enchant their bear gear differently. Having one set of gear that you wear as cat or bear isn’t really feasible in Ulduar.

This comment doesn't address the Cloth vs Leather debate directly, but expect a lot of clothies and raid leaders to use this comment to exclude druids from rolling/bidding on cloth.

However, lets focus on what Ghostcrawler actually said. He said "Druids are a leather-using class." He did not say that druids should only use leather, or that druids should not wear cloth. He is saying druids are designed to use leather and I think we all know that. If there was quality Leather gear similar to the cloth equivalents then I would freely pass. However, a majority of Cloth gear is better itemized for Caster DPS then the Leather equivalents. On top of that the quantity of cloth gear is significantly higher especially at the high item levels.

In the end GC's comment probably won't change much in how guilds are ran. I am fairly sure that if GC came out and said moonkin are designed to wear cloth, then clothies would still say they should have first dibs. This is one of those debates where the sides are fairly well entrenched and I don't think anything could move them.

Other Comments:
There are the other Moonkin relevant comments from the Q&A:

Community Team: Let’s take a look at the Balance talent tree. Eclipse is a crucial talent for players who are looking to perform a damage dealing role and invest in the Balance tree. There has been a lot of discussion though regarding the gameplay it provides as there is a lot of randomness involved. The buffs to a solar rotation were very well received, but the lunar rotation still has to wait for a critical strike to happen as well as an additional random proc to occur which can lead to some long gaps of nothing happening. Then when these finally fall into place players have complained about threat issues which force them to slow down or having to move to avoid something which ruins the procs they have and significantly hurts their overall damage.

Q: What are our thoughts on how Eclipse is functioning and do we have any plans to change how this talent works?

Ghostcrawler: The goal of the Eclipse talent in the first place was to give moonkin a more dynamic rotation that involved the player paying attention and responding to the environment rather than falling into a monotonous rotation. The Eclipse in 3.2 should less strongly favor one half of the Eclipse over the other since the cooldowns are independent. Ultimately however the problem we are trying to solve is that Wrath and Starfire are just too similar. In PvP you get a little bit of interest out of the fact that they are in different schools, but in PvE by the time talents are factored in, the two spells just become fairly quick (but not instant) nukes and it’s easy to math out which one to use and which one to ignore. Long-term to fix this problem we need to add another spell, separate out Starfire and Wrath from each other a little more, or make one of the other spells, like Moonfire or Insect Swarm, more dynamic. I’ll give a couple of example of caster rotations that “work” in our opinion: Destruction warlocks want to Immolate before they Conflagrate, Frost mages can proc a Brain Freeze and throw out a fast Fireball.

Community Team: Another aspect of Balance talent tree that has seen a number of discussions lately is the survivability of Moonkins while in a Player vs. Player setting. Many players agree that they have a very low survivability rate and that a spell like Typhoon doesn’t provide enough help to prevent classes like Death Knights and Rogues from doing some serious damage to them.

Q: How do we feel Moonkins are doing in PvP and do we have plans to improve their survivability?

Ghostcrawler: We don’t think Moonkins are quite there yet, though
we’ll see how they look after 3.2 ships. Some of their problems are not
limitations with the spec so much as they are ramifications in other parts of the PvP environment, such as some classes being able to burst them down too quickly. Of the casters, and as of this writing, only Frost mages really seem to be a potent PvP force, but it requires multiple forms of CC and escape mechanisms to get there. We really don’t want to go down the road of every caster needing that many unique tools – it homogenizes the classes and makes the mage tools less compelling. We understand some players are desperate to play Balance in PvP, but our priority is on getting underperforming classes viable before we worry about the second or third spec of classes that already have a strong PvP presence. We’ll get there.

Community Team: Players have also been discussing how they feel the overall playstyle of a Moonkin is just not very exciting. The best damage dealing rotation for them requires very few spells and a deep Balance spell like Starfall doesn’t help them very much.

Q: Are there plans to make any changes to the general spell rotation for deep Balance/Moonkin Druids?

Ghostcrawler: As I mentioned above, we do want to improve the spell rotation of Balance. We think the spells are interesting when considered alone (expect for perhaps Starfire and Wrath) but they don’t necessarily play together in interesting ways. You don’t try to save up a Starfall for example for great synergy with another spell. We have no problems with Starfall itself -- it is an AE with smart targeting that doesn’t require channeling. It is basically just bonus damage. Often players with a gripe about Starfall are wishing that it still proc’ed stuns with Celestial Focus or was a stealth remover. But those uses meant players saved Starfall for only those specific situations instead of using it when they needed extra damage, which was the original intent.

There is nothing huge here. Most of these comments have already been made before, and anyone that follows moonkin closely has already heard them. That said, there are some interesting comments made regarding the moonkin rotation.

He reiterated that the problem with Moonkin rotation is that it involves too few spells and that those spells are too similar. What is interesting about his comment are the possible solutions he suggested.

Long-term to fix this problem we need to add another spell, separate out Starfire and Wrath from each other a little more, or make one of the other spells, like Moonfire or Insect Swarm, more dynamic.

First off, please note this is a list of possibilities, not a definite plan of action. If the next expansion comes without a new DPS spell don't go and say "GC lied to us."

That said, I like the idea of a new spell. I had always thought about it as giving us a direct damage spell that doesn't interfere with Eclipse, but adding something to be a more significant part of our rotation would be interesting also. The big question is can they create a spell that is desirable but doesn't trump any of our existing spells?

I also thought it was very interesting that he suggested that they might "separate out Starfire and Wrath from each other a little more." I would love to know what options they are considering, since these spells are critical for Eclipse to work. Since Eclipse is such a big part of Moonkin DPS changing either of these spells significantly would have a huge impact on Moonkin DPS. I'm not saying it would be a bad impact, but it could fundamentally change the way the spec is played.

The comment about making the DoTs more dynamic seems to have been in practice for a little while already. It started with the addition of Improved Insect Swarm. Now they seem to be expanding the concept with the new set bonuses. In fact 4T8 and 2T9 could be a trial runs for a new talents that might come later.

While all of these comments provoke some thought don't expect any changes anytime soon. They are definitely not coming in 3.2 and I would be extremely surprised if we saw any hit of them in 3.3. My guess is that these comments are an outline of what Blizzard is thinking about for the next expansion that is likely to be named at Blizzcon.

Mailbag: A Twisted Explination

I have raided a moonkin for a little over 2 years. I know some of you raided as a moonkin back in the dark ages, I mean during vanilla WoW, but I think 2 years is probably a lot longer than the average. I think that experience is one of the things that makes my blog successful. On the other hand it is sometimes very easy to forget that what seems clear to me my not make immediate sense to some one that is newer to the spec.

So when I got an email from Sydera from World of Matticus, I realized I may have made a mistake. Lets take a look at her email.

Hi Graylo,

As always I love your blog, and as our guild has lost our moonkin to summer school woes, I'm going to be changing over from resto. I have used your site to figure out what I need to do currently, but my question is about 3.2. You are suggesting a "Twisting" rotation. I'd like more exact details on that. If you get on the PTR (or once it goes live) can you sticky a little guide with EXACTLY what to do (moonkin for dummies, if you will). I haven't played moonkin long enough to intuit what the changes to my rotation will be, or even what I'll be looking for on Squawk and Awe now.

I'm not quite sure I understand how both Eclipse procs and both cooldowns will function.

Best,
Syd

Great question. First, lets take another look at what the change to Eclipse is doing.

With the old (3.1) Eclipse, you have two buffs on the same cooldown. The best example that I can think of to describe it is the old Potion mechanics used in TBC. You could have multiple pots in your bag for Health, Mana, or DPS, but once you used a one, all of your pots were on cooldown for 2 minutes. So you had to choose which was most advantageous to use.

With the new (3.2) Eclipse. you will have two buffs on two connected cooldowns. The perfect example of how this should work are "On Use" trinkets. Back in TBC I had two "On Use" trinkets, and both trinkets had a 2 minute cooldown. If I used trinket A it went on cooldown for 2 minutes. Trinket B would also go on cooldown, but only about 15 seconds. This prevented me from using both trinkets at the same time, but could effectively use both trinkets in a fight without losing any of the benefits.

Basically, we are currently choosing which Eclipse we uses. After 3.2 we will use both Eclipse buffs.

Twisting???:
So when I call our future rotation a "Twisting" rotation I mean that it switching or changing rotation, where we will "twist" or switch which of the Eclipse buffs we use with each proc.

I took the name from the old Shaman practice of Totem Twisting. Because of how the Windfury totem worked it was possible to have the Windfury buff and that of another Air totem for most of the fight. The practice is dead and gone, but when I was looking for something to call the new rotation Twisting seemed to fit.

So, how exactly will the new rotation work?

Actually, it is fairly simple. You will start your rotation the same way you do now. FF, IS, MF, Wrath until Eclipse, Starfire. The change comes when your Eclipse buff drops off. At this point you continue to cast Starfire until Eclipse, and then switch to Wrath.

What about DoTs:
The big question that no one really has a great answer for is when do you refresh DoTs. Obviously, you don't want to refresh DoTs before the old DoT drops off. You will always want to refresh your DoTs when neither buff is up, but there is some debate on what to do while you have an Eclipse buff.

Some people say, that you should never refresh DoTs during Eclipse, but that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion. I presented the most common opinion back in February with this post. The basic theory is that you refresh DoTs early in the Eclipse buff, but wait if they don't drop off right at the start of the buff. I don't think this is bad advice, but I'm no longer convinced that it will result in the absolute best DPS.

When I looked at this question before, I looked at it as if I was losing a Nuke GCD when I cast the DoT. However, I now think it is more of a trade. I'm casting a DoT now instead of in 8 seconds from now, and I will be casting a nuke 8 seconds from now instead of right now. So the cost of casting the DoT now is not the entire cost of the GCD, but only the change in DPS between a Nuke now and a Nuke later.

I will have to sit down and do the math some time, but this idea has changed the way I reapply DoTs. I will now reapply Dots very late into an Eclipse buff. As long as I have about 5 seconds on the buff I will reapply the DoT. I don't have any solid evidence to support my opinion yet, but I think the logic is sound.

Addons???:
Addons like Squawk and Awe (SnA) are going to be much less important with the new Eclipse. The most important piece of information that SnA provides is when the Eclipse cooldown is up. After the new Eclipse that won't matter.

This doesn't mean that SnA won't still be useful. If your using it as a DoT timer then that benefit will still be there. It will also be good for reminding you which Eclipse is up since the Blizzard animation fades fairly quickly. There also may be a couple of times when it is good to know when a buff is off cooldown.

I plan on keeping Squawk and Awe for the foreseeable future, but you could get the same benifit from a more global addon like Power Aura's or Scrolling Combat Text.

WoW.Com Response: The BiS Trump Card

As I was browsing through WoW.com (formerly WoWInsider) today, I came across a familiar topic. Should players be able to bid on gear below there max armor type even if it is BiS. Link to the post in question: (Link)

As many of you know I have covered this topic before, but I would like to inject counter points to those presented by Scott Andrews. I can't argue debate from the Plate vs Mail stand point since I have very little experience with either armor set or the classes that use them. So, I will look at this argument from my traditional Leather vs Cloth point of view.

Just so you know, Scott did say Balance leather is one of 3 sets where Blizzard has had difficulty producing well itemized gear, I highly recommend that you read his post before you go on.

WoW.com: Classes limited by armor type would be at a severe disadvantage

Counter Point: By limiting classes to their max armor type you maybe putting them at a severe disadvantage. Here is a link to all of the gear with a 239 ilevel currently in game. There are 21 pieces total, 10 of them are unaffected by armor type, 7 of them are Cloth, and 4 are leather. If you limited Moonkin to just leather drops then the most they could wear is 2 so that they could maintain the set bonus. A cloth wearer could use 3 and still maintain a 4 piece set bonus. I know its not the cloth wearers fault that there are limited options, but it's not the Moonkin's either.

WoW.com: Higher armor drops would go to waste.

Counter Point: This assumes that the Higher armor type has drops that are similarly desirable. Lets compare [Footsteps of Malygos] to the [Boots of Haste Revival]. The FoM are ilevel 213 and the BoHR are iLevel 226, yet both are rated about the same in terms of DPS. Yet, I would be denied cloth upgrades even though my other option was not an upgrade. Granted in this case there is some crafted gear that would be better then most of the options but that is not always the case. From a moonkin point of view the spell leather available is almost always inferior to the Spell cloth available. So, just because there is a leather options, that does not mean it is a good option.

WoW.com: For some classes and specs, the BIS list changes frequently.

Counter Point: Doesn't this argument cut both ways? It is definitely possible that the BiS list of any class could change, but why should the player with the higher armor type be punished while the player with the lower armor type not be. It is just as easy for a moonkin's needs to change from one patch to the next as it is for any clothy.

Obviously if the changes are already known, then those changes should be taken into consideration. However, you shouldn't punish some classes because of an irrelevant uncertainty.

WoW.com: Finally, the loot system would put a massive burden on the officers to know which items are BIS for every slot, for every spec in the game.

Counter Point: I agree with this statement but not the conclusion drawn. Of course we can't expect raid leaders to understand the gear needs for every class and spec in raid, but how does limiting Moonkin to leather limit this problem.

You already have 3 classes wearing cloth. The needs of a holy priest are different then those of a shadow priest, who's needs are different then a Mages and so on. Since we've already said we don't expect the Raid Leaders to know the gear needs of every class and spec, so the problem already exists. If the problem already exists, how do we currently manage it?

The answer is unsettling to some, but really quite simple. We trust the players to know what gear they need and to bid/roll responsibly. Many high-end guilds take this a step further and request that their members fill out a gear plan on the guild forums. This way the leaders know what the raiders are thinking, and the raiders can know what other players need.

Most importantly though it openes the door to communication. You don't know how many loot arguments I've heard that could have been prevented with a little upfront communication. Most players are not loot whores, and most raiders will pass on a piece of gear if it is better for the raid. However, they have to know the situation if they are going to make that choice.

On top of that all players need to be considerate of their fellow players when bidding/rolling on gear. A few weeks ago the [Boots of Fiery Resolution] dropped off of FL hard mode. They are my BiS boot, and I had the most DKP of the casters in guild but I passed. I did so because I had won the [Staff of Endless Winter] the week before. It would have been easy to argue that I had put in the effort to earn those boots, but after a little thought I didn't think it was fair that I had two pieces of hard mode gear while a vast majority of our guild had none.

Conclusion:
Limiting Druids to leather or Paladins to plate are very popular rules for loot distribution systems. However, most of the arguments used to support the limitation can easily be reversed, and cause dissatisfaction with in a guild. Rules are not enough to make a loot system run smoothly, because there will always be a difference of opinion some where.

The way to make your guilds loot system run smoothly is to encourage communication between the members. When someone one seems to be getting out of line or tries to game the system, talk to them first. Most likely they will back off.

General Update: 7/10/2009

Ok, I've been a bit of a slacker lately and haven't posted much. My life has been very hectic with holidays, work stuff, Raiding, and even some trips to the hospital (don't worry everything is fine). So, I will try and give a general update of what is going on in my WoW life.

The Gear Guide:
I've updated my raiding gear guides to include every item in Ulduar. So, it should now be complete until 3.2 comes out. I want to point out that this list is still based upon a pre-3.2 Lunar Rotation. I probably one updated it for 3.2 until right before the patch is released.

Regarding the guide don't expect any serious changes. It is very similar to previous lists, and most of the changes were due to the addition of Algalon gear. Basically, its not important to study the new list. If you already have a good gear plan it is still probably good.

Raiding:
I must admit that Raiding has been quite draining lately. My 25man schedule is the usual 3 nights a week for 3 hours, but my 10man group now raids for another 2 or 3 hours after that. To some of you 15 - 18 hours of raiding a week may not seem like much, but it is tough when you combine the late nights with my family responsibilities. Hopefully it won't go on for to much longer.

The 25 man group is doing well. We have 4 hard modes down and are working on a couple of others. Despite our success I am starting to feel a sense of urgancy. Time is running out on the Meta Achievement and I want an Ironbound Drake before they are removed. The four hard modes that we have could probably be considered 4 of the easier ones leaving most of the heavy hitters to still be downed.

The good news is that our 10man groups are going very well. My group is only missing the Vezex and Yogg hardmodes. The guilds other 10man is just missing Yogg +1 and they got the Ulduar Undying achievement. So, we are in a very good spot to complete the meta on 10mans, and the additional experience we are getting on 10mans should help us meet our goals for the 25man raid.

The other positive sign is that both 10man groups are working on Algalon. My group has worked on him for 2 weeks now, and he is hard, but maybe not as hard as he seems.

Algalon feels like a break through fight. There is a lot of stuff that gets thrown at you very early in the fight and when you wipe after just a few minutes it sometimes feels like your not making much progress. However, that feeling can be misleading. There is so much to adapt to from the very beginning of this fight that it is hard to pick up quickly. Healers have to deal with the huge raid damage when a Star dies. Cosmic Smash is much more difficult to avoid then your standard void zone. The freaking constellations running around beating on people. Figuring out how to survive big bang and at the same time dealing with the massive damage that the tanks are taking.

That is a lot of stuff that all of that happens in the first minute or so. So, as you try to hone your strategy it may feel like your not making progress because most of your attempts don't' last more then a couple of minutes still. However, when we make a break through the fight will be come much easier. Our attempts will go from lasting 2 minutes to testing the 6 minute enrage timer very quickly once we figure out how to deal with everything. So I am happy with our Algalon progress. Hopefully he will be down soon.

My Inner Goblin:
I've been reading the Greedy Goblin for quite a while and I have often wondered how much gold I could make on the AH if I really put some effort into it. I don't really need the gold because I made plenty while leveling 3 toons to 80, but I'm interested in the challenge.

I started my experiments in the Flask market. Specifically the [Flask of the Frost Wyrm] market. I am kind of risk adverse when it comes to this sort of thing. I didn't want to get really far out on a limb with a lot of stuff and lose a bunch of gold, so I selected this market for my first attempts. The average cost to produce a flask seemed to be less then the average flask prices on the AH. Plus, I am an Elixirs master Alchemist so the procs mean added profit, and if my effort completely failed I could always use the flasks for my raid consumables.

The next two businesses I picked up for dual purposes. I hate not having my professions leveled up all the way to 450. It looks sloppy and I hate finding out that I can't do that enchant because my skill level isn't high enough. So I got into the Meta Gem business with my warlock and into the bag business with my priest. The results were mind blowing.

The Meta Gem business is easy. [Skyflare Diamond] were selling for 25g - 30g on my server and [Chaotic Skyflare Diamond] were selling for 50g - 75g on average. You do the math. I've decided though that this is a weekend market. The cut gem prices seemed to go down quite a bit on raid days. It seems to me that the real money to be made is on the weekend players.

The bag business is a little more difficult because you have to look at several different mats to figure out if it is profitable at this time, but for some odd reason it also seems to be a less developed market on my server. There never seems to be a lot of bags on the AH. For that reason undercutters don't seem to matter. I seem to be able to put my bags on the AH at my prices and they will sell even if there are undercutters with posted for a 25% discount.

Not all of my efforts have been successful. I've tried buying Eternals and selling Crystallized pieces and that hasn't been that successful. People on my server seem to be a little more savy in that regard. I also bought a ton of Shoveltusk flank before patch 3.1 was released for personal use and as an investment but Fish Feasts seemed to have killed that market. I have been focusing on the raid nights so far. I'm going to be switching to the weekends here and hope I have better luck.

All in all, I've made several thousand gold over a week or so with just a couple of hours work. Not bad, but I'm not going to be hitting the gold cap anytime soon at this pace.

Other Toon News:
Outside of raids, Graylo has been working on the Ardent Tournament stuff and getting his rep up with the different alliance factions. All in an effort to be able to access my bank once every 8 hours and help my alts to level up a little big quicker. Indicated above Graypal and Grayfel have been forced into business. I would love to raid both of them if I had the time but, given my already busy raid schedule its just not possible.

Grayvik has also suffered some due to my renewed interest in the Ardent Tournament. He is up to 53 right now, but he would easily be a couple of levels above that If I wasn't spending so much time on Graylo doing the Tournament stuff. On top of that, leveling has become more difficult for him. I am now about 2 and a half levels ahead of my guide. All of my quests are green and on occasion I have to fight grey mobs. He is in searing Gorge at the moment but I am going to look at jumping ahead again once I get out of the zone. I guess the good news is that 58 is just around the corner and then I can jump to the easy Outland leveling. That will be a great day.

Patch 3.2: Updated 4T9 Set Bonus

As several of you have noted there was a change to the 4T9 Balance set bonus in the most recent PTR build. For those of you that haven't seen it:

4 piece: Increases the damage done by your Starfire and Wrath spells by 4%.

At first glance I am happy. Its a new set bonus that is not an inferior copy of a previous set bonus. Plus, this set bonus is a buff when compared to the 3% increase to crit chance. However, there are a few important things to remember.

While the change above is nice, the best news from this PTR build is that 2T8 hasn't been nerfed yet. As Hamlet, and several other posters have pointed out, the 4T9 set bonus really doesn't matter while 2T8 remains in its current form. The 2T8 set bonus is so good with the New Eclipse, that Blizzard would have a very hard time creating a 4T9 set bonus would compare without escalating our expectations for future set bonuses. So, Blizzard has to break the cycle. Hopefully they will do that by not considering 2T8 when they create future set bonuses, but leave it as is, but the other option is to nerf it. I think I speak for almost all moonkin when I say I hope that doesn't happen.

Another important thing to remember is that currently we don't know if this is an additive buff or a Multiplicative buff. If it fits the normal pattern then this is an additive buff because it affects specific spells. Therefore a 4% buff is not really a 4% buff. In reality it will be a little less for a couple of reasons. The obvious reason is that we cast more spells than Wrath and Starfire, and those other spells are unaffected by the buff. Also, since we already have other additive buffs like Moonfury and Solar Eclipse then the impact of 4T9 will be reduced when they are combined.

The Math:
As you might have guessed, I ran these changes through my model a couple of different ways to compare 2T8 and 4T9. I ran my model without either buff first to come up with a good baseline. Then I ran it once with 2T8, once with 4T9, and then once with 4T9 and some added stats from the gear up grade. Here are the results.

Adding the 2T8 set bonus increased my model DPS by 6.1%. That is huge if you didn't know and it is obvious right off the bat that 4T9 cannot compete with it buy itself. Adding the 4T9 set bonuses into the model showed that increased my model DPS by 2.5%. However, 4T9 does not come by itself.

Moving to 4T9 will upgrade your stats as well as change you set bonus. Since the difference between 2T8 and 4T9 is so great, I jumped right to T9.258 when adding the additional stats to the model. I also assumed that the two pieces of T8 we would keep are the Legs and the Shoulders. I chose these two items because the T9 Helm and Chest seem to be the best, and I wanted to limit the amount of Hit rating I got from the T8 set pieces. When I compared the legs and shoulders between the two sets I saw that T9.258 had the equivalent of 132 additional Spell Power, the equivalent of 29 additional Crit Rating, and 43 additional Hit rating. To be conservative I increased the Spell Power amount on my model 153 assuming that half of the additional hit rating would be converted into SP some where, and increased my crit chance by 0.64%. The additional stats combined with the 4T9 set bonus this increased my model DPS by 6.9%

Some of you may be surprised by this result. A lot of the rhetoric I've seen passed around on the internet seemed to assume that 2T8 was unbeatable. Well, it is not, and we all new that some level of gear would make it irrelevant. I just don't think anyone expected that T9 would be that gear level.

However, lets try and look at the bright side. This is a great argument for Blizzard to not nerf 2T8.

TL:DR
So let me try and summarize these results.

The new 4T9 is an improvement over the previous versions, but 2T8 is so good that Blizzard would have a hard time come up with a reasonable set bonus to compete with it. When you compare 2T8 to 4T9 directly, the 2T8 set bonus is clearly better by a wide margin.

However, if you upgrade to 4T9 your picking up more then a new set bonus. The additional stats you will pick up along with 4T9 will close the gap, and according to my model eliminate the gap if your using the highest iLevel of T9.

It is important to note how close the two numbers are. This shows that there is very little difference between using 2T8.226 and 4T9.258. It also indicates that you probably shouldn't upgrade to 4T9 until you have a full set of the 258 iLevel tier set.

Side Note on the New Eclipse: PTR testers on the EJ forums are reporting that the new Eclipse has been fixed on the PTR and is working as described in the patch notes.

What is Blizzard Smoking?

In my last post I talked a little about the new set bonuses. This was my reaction to the first 4T9 set bonus of 5% Crit chance to Starfire.

I'm sure my first reaction was the same as most of yours when I saw the 4T9 set bonus. "That sucks." It's obviously worse then 4T7, and there is no way it can compete with 2T8 with the change to Eclipse. If this goes live no moonkin is going to wear 4 pieces of T9 gear.

My second reaction was "This has to be a place holder." Its not uncommon for Blizzard to put old information in tooltips in early versions of the patches. You may remember that early versions
of the Idol of the Crying Wind had the same tooltip as as our current SF idol. Since the 4T8 set bonus is so obviously underpowered and an exact copy of the 4T6 set bonus, the 4T9 set bonus has to be a place holder.

Well, as you probably already know, the speculation that the original 4T9 was a place holder was correct. However, the new set bonus is equally lame.

Balance
4 piece - Increases the critical strike chance of your Starfire and Wrath spells by 3%.

What the heck is Blizzard smoking?

Seriously! Who thought this set bonus was a good idea?

This is just wrong in so many ways, I'm having a really hard time knowing where to begin.

I don't assume that creating set bonuses is easy. It's got to be difficult to continually come up with new ideas, that have a significant impact, but that is similar in strength to other tier bonuses. However, this set bonus is just lazy and stupid. Lets look at the T7 set bonus for comparison.

4T7 - Your Wrath and Starfire spells gain an additional 5% critical strike chance.

I don't really have a problem with Blizzard recycling an old set bonus. We all loved 4T7, but what sense does it make to put a nerfed 4T7 set bonus on a higher level of gear?

Also, I've never used a lore argument before, but what sense does this make from a lore perspective. Are you telling me that the Ardent Crusade can't equal the craftsmanship of the Kirin Tor, let alone improve on it? If this goes through it will make the Ardent Crusade look like a bunch of wimps that want to play with sticks by a cliff.

My guess is that Blizzard thinks that T7 as a whole was too good for the ilevel, and that with T8 and T9 they have been trying to scale it back. I will also say that blizzard is somewhat shackled by the quality of 2T8. Assuming that it is not nerfed, that is a hard set bonus to beat with the changes to Eclipse.

I think I understand the difficulties of the situation, but I also think they are making more mistakes in the ways they are trying to deal with these issues. If you make an early set bonus two powerful, the best way to handle it is to hold line or maybe slight nerfs. In this case 3% crit to Wrath and Starfire is a HUGE nerf. I haven't done the math yet, but I doubt you will people wearing 4T9. If they do it will only be with the highest iLevel gear, because that is the only level at which the stats have an opportunity to over come the set bonus nerf.

One other suggestion before I move on to another topic. If our going to copy a set bonus, take another look at 4T5. Every one loved that set bonus. If you expanded it to have a relationship with IS and Wrath also, I think everyone would be happy.

Please Give Feedback:
Convenently Ghostcrawler has given us a place to comment on the set bonuses. I strongly encourgage everyone to go to this thread and express your feelings on the new set bonuses. I assume that most (if not all of you) will be saying something negative about the 4T9 set bonus. That is great and I agree with you. However, I want to remind everyone to be polite, constructive, and possibly say something nice about the 2T9 set bonus.

Tier 9 Costs:
It looks like they are changing the way you build your tier set. Currently tokens drop off of specific bosses for a specific armor slot. (ie Yogg 25 drops the shoulder token). Well, it looks like they are changing this in a couple of ways. The first change is that the first two levels of Tier 9 gear will be completely purchasable using Emblems of Triumph, and there doesn't appear to be another way to pick up this gear. The top level of tier gear will still use the token system, but the tokens won't be tied to a specific armor slot. It looks like they will still be tied to a set of classes.

I have a couple of reactions to this. On the positive side the token change is a good idea. It will make the tokens more useful, and few of them will go to off specs or shards soon after the patch.

On the flip side, I have a big problem with the lower to levels of tier sets being purchase able with emblems. First of all whats the incentive to buy the 232 iLevel tier set when the 245 ilevel tier set costs just 50% more? When you get enough Emblems to buy the first level of gear you will have a choice. To I spend all the badges now and wait 3 weeks to upgrade, or do I wait a week and get even better gear?

Obviously we don't complete know how the system will work, but there are a lot of potential problems. If the Tier tokens are to easy to get, the emblem tiers will be almost completely ignored. If the tier tokes are to hard to get then it will take a really long time to build a set. Finally as I said above there is no real incentive to go for the 232 iLevel set.

I think they need to scale it back to a little more like the current system. Have the top level tokes drop off of 25 man raids. Have a lower level token drop off of 10 man raids, and I think it would be a great idea to have the lowest level tier be purchasable with emblems. That way all three levels have some level of desirability.

Other Changes:

• You may have seen this quite from Neth:
  

  We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance.

  This is very interesting in a lot of ways, and I think it will cause a lot of headaches for who ever is in charge of designing it. For instance, what do you do about quests? If you level to 80 as Alliance, do you have all the horde specific quests still available? Also what about reputations? If I'm exalted with all of the Alliance reputations do I be come exalted with all of the Horde reputations? What if I'm only exalted with half of them?
  
  See, it poses a lot of questions but it will also give Blizzard some new tools. I think the real reason Blizzard is doing it is to try and balance the factions on some servers. Take my server for instance. We are very Alliance dominated. I think once this service becomes available Blizzard will open up free faction transfers to try and get some of the guilds to switch over. This may be particularly useful on a sever like EU-Magtherdon that is completely Horde dominated.
  
  
• Expendable Raid Lockouts: Blizzard hasn't announced this yet but it is popping up on the PTR. With this new feature you will be able to extend your raid lock out for another weeks. Some of you may be wondering why anyone would want to do this, but I think it is a big boost for guilds with lighter raid schedules.
  
  Let me use my own guild as an example as to why this as big bonus. My 10man group is currently working on Mimiron Hard mode and will focus on General and Yogg after that. Last night we had several sub 5 percent wipes, and are very close to killing him. The problem is that because the instance resets tonight we have to fight through 4 bosses just to attempt him again. If we get him down quickly then we have to kill another 3 bosses to work on General. The gear isn't a big concern for us, so we probably wouldn't mind extending last weeks raid ID. What we would lose in gear we would be more than made up for in time.
  
  This obviously won't matter to the guilds with really high activity, but for guilds like my that can't play that much this will help.

Patch 3.2: Tier Sets, Idols and Set Bonuses

Since the patch is now on the PTR more information is starting to come out regarding gear and such. You can find all of the items at World of Raids, and probably MMO-Champion. Here is my reaction.

Idols:
I feel a little psychic. In yesterday's post I said I wouldn't be surprised if there was a new idol and it turns out there is.

[Idol of Lunar Fury] - Each time your Moonfire spell deals periodic damage you have a chance to gain 200 Critical Strike Rating for 12 seconds.

My first impression is a positive one. It will be nice to have an idol that affects 90% of our rotation. Of course it all depends on the proc rate.

I've plugged the idol into my model with a couple different proc rates. For reference, here is how the current idols increased the hypothetical DPS: SF Idol = 1.07%, Wrath Idol = 0.46%, & IS Idol = 1.38%.

With a 10% proc rate the new MF idol increased the Model DPS by 1.18%. When I increased the proc rate to 20%, the idol increased my Model DPS by 1.99%.

Now lets remember a couple of things about my model. First, it does not factor in movement and movement will decreased the effective uptime of the idol. Second, my model assumes DoTs are refreshed when they expire, even during Eclipse. Therefore in reality that 1.99% number is a bit high. Therefore, it is my estimation at this point that the proc rate on the Idol of Lunar Fury has to be at least 20% to be usable, but my guess is that it should probably be 25% for it to be a buff over our current idols. I will have to do more math on it in the future to confirm.

Tier Gear:
I've had a couple of worries about the T9 itemization. Would we be stuck having 4 items with Spirit? Would we be flooded with Spell Hit even more? Would the T9 set favor Haste or Crit? After a quick look at the new tier sets one thing is very clear. The T9 stat itemization is far superior to that of T8.

Only 3 of the 5 pieces have Spirit on them, only 2 of the pieces have hit on them, and Crit rating is favored over Haste rating. On top of that our gem sockets and socket bonuses are better then then T8. I haven't had a chance to look at the sets of the other casters but realistically this is about the best we could hope for.

Set Bonuses:
I'm sure my first reaction was the same as most of yours when I saw the 4T9 set bonus. "That sucks." It's obviously worse then 4T7, and there is no way it can compete with 2T8 with the change to Eclipse. If this goes live no moonkin is going to wear 4 pieces of T9 gear.

My second reaction was "This has to be a place holder." Its not uncommon for Blizzard to put old information in tooltips in early versions of the patches. You may remember that early versions of the Idol of the Crying Wind had the same tooltip as as our current SF idol. Since the 4T8 set bonus is so obviously underpowered and an exact copy of the 4T6 set bonus, the 4T9 set bonus has to be a place holder.

The 2T9 set bonus is something that some moonkin have been asking for for a while. I've adapted my model for the set bonus and it says it increases our DPS by 4.07%. For the purposes of comparison, my model says that the 4T8 set bonus is a 2.48% DPS increase. Obviously, 2T9 is an upgrade over 4T8 and is worth the upgrade.

On top of that, this set bonus raises an interesting question. Does this make Improved Moonfire a viable talent again? Currently Improved Moonfire has very little benifit for a raiding Moonkin. The Glyph of Moonfire makes it a marginal talent because your Crit damage is so small and the 10% increase to damage is over powered by the 75% increase you get from the Glyph.

But what if the DoTs can crit? Suddenly that 10% chance to crit seems a lot more interesting. You may have already guessed this but I've plugged this possibility into my model.

Without the 2T9 set bonus, two points invested Improved Moonfire increased my model DPS by about 0.50%. You can see why so many moonkin skip this talent since it provides such a small damage increase for a 2 point investment. If you include 2T9 into the equation the DPS increase goes up to 1.76%. As a general rule of thumb, some people assume that each talent point should be worth about a 1% DPS increase. (I'm not saying this a blizzard rule. Its just one I've seen several places mentioned by other people). So if we hold to that rule then the talent still falls a little behind, but Improved Moonfire will be a more significant talent when combined with 2T9. My guess is that you will see this talent become more popular in the next teir of content.

Side Note:
Several people have said that Balance of Power increases your chance to hit with spells by 6% on the PTR talent trees (up from 4%).

Well, PTR testers are saying that this is a typo, and I'm not surprised. I had a hard time believing it, because I see no other reason for this change other then a general boost to Moonkin DPS. On top of that there was no mention of it in the pre-release patch notes. While it would have been nice, there is no real need for a change of this type.