Dec 09
2
I got a wonderful little suprise when I first logged on to MMO-champion today. A single line, but one that is sure to make a lot of people very happy.
Since tier 8 was nerfed last week, and WiseEclipse was dumbed down to nothing more than a waste of space, the forums have been hot with discussions. All we got was a slight bump to our 4pt10 set, and people haven’t been happy about it. The biggest discussion was the “When you did this to rogues, you buffed their abilities!”, and I have been following that discussion – and the responses Ghostcrawler has made to it – with great intrest. And now, it seems, we have got what we wanted:
Patch 3.3: Eclipse now increases damage done by Wrath by 40% (up from 30%) and the critical chance of Starfire by 40% (up from 30%)
This is a very interesting buff. While it certainly has some positive implications for us, it might still lead us into some problems in Icecrown Citadel.
Lets start off at the bad end. I’m not going to bitch and moan too much, but a little bit is in order. The prospect of dropping 2pt8 was very nice to all of us, because any well geared moonkin is getting dangerously close to being crit capped in raids, if they aren’t already.
Losing the extra 15% chance to crit during lunar eclipse gave us a bit more air before crit becomes just like haste, but now it seems like we will be pushing caps once we get into Icecrown. I made a small comment on Elitist Jerks about this, and I will be no more than a few percentages off 100% crit chance when 3.3 hits – and that is without 2pt8. This is obviously just to fix us after the recent nerfs, and it does just that – and then some, I believe – but it is not a long term solution to our problems with stat caps.
The buff, however, is a buff, but what does it mean? We lose the 15% from 2pt8, but we get 10% of it baked into our Eclipse talent. At the same time, we are able to get rid of 2pt8 and gain the bonus from 4pt9. When I tested 2pt8 against 4pt9, I found that 4pt9 was only 50-150 DPS behind tier 8 on a target dummy. If we are able to retain 10% of our 2pt8 bonus, and put on four pieces of tier 9, this is an amazing buff. This not only makes up for the fact that we lose the most overpowered set bonus before, it should also cover the loss of WiseEclipse.
But it doesn’t stop there. Yesterday it looked like we would drop a bit of damage when 3.3 went live, and now it seems we will have a nice, little increase. The extra will also affect our tier 10 set bonuses. While tier 10 was sort of weak, it was modelled around not having the 2pt8 bonus, so by letting us keep 10% of the 15% from the set bonus, we carry along a buff to tier 10 aswell.
The more damage we have, the more we gain from our 2pt10 bonus, that’s a given. But the biggest effect will be to the 4-piece bonus on tier 10. The added crit – to a point where I am still statistically sure to crit with most, if not all, of my eclipsed starfires – will ensure a lot of nice Languish dots, and the extra 10% damage on wraths will ensure bigger Languish dots than what we had in store before this change.
We will get a buff to our damage, which in turn also will be a buff to our tier 10 bonus, bringing it closer in line to the bonusses other classes have, and we will be in a good position to continue to rain down star-glittering terror on our foes. Now, if they would only fix Nature’s Grace and allow us to stack a bit more haste, I would be a happy turkey, but even so this buff is dearly welcomed.
This is indeed a very welcomed buff. I wouldn’t worry about the crit soft cap so much. We’ll already be over the haste soft cap by quite a bit in ICC gear, so being over the crit soft cap can’t hurt too much. Remember, that extra crit still helps us proc Eclipse faster.
Amazing! Not clear for me, how offen you updating your qieths-quips.com.
SuperSonic
Well, in the past month, ive done 15 blogs, but i can’t promise i will do a blog every second day
Being over the soft-crit cap isnt so much of a dps loss as being too far over the soft-haste cap.
i dont know if there’s a blog about this from you already, but what’s your take on dropping NG alltogether if they don’t look like fixing it?
i’m sure with the levels of haste on the new ICC gear we should be able to easily hit the 1s cast time on wrath again.
let me know if there is another place where this has been discussed already, haven’t seen anything on EJ, Mmo-champ or alsewhere
That would be absolutely pointless. One word diffuses the whole idea: Starfire.
Longer version is that NG also benefits our starfire, even moreso than wrath because when we are in lunar eclipse, ALL of our starfires will be hasted, guaranteed. Removing NG would remove it from starfire, and while we can “get that haste” it still wont put STARFIRE down to 1 sec.
NG needs to be changed so that it gives another buff than haste, but equal to what we have now (so to not lose DPS, but allow us to scale with haste). I did talk a bit about Nature’s Grace – use the Tag Cloud of Awesomeness to find it – or look at one of my earliest blogs
Ok, I know that the soft haste cap is 401, but I am finding it hard to stay in that range, I am currently over 600 haste. I normally do 5-6k dps with spike way over 7k and am wondering how much better I could get if I could find a way to dump 180 haste. Do you think dropping a point or two in Celestial Focus would improve my dps substantially.
Here is my armory page, this toon is still a work in progress as I just got back to playing again from a 2-3 month break, any info/criticism is welcome.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Windrunner&n=Se%C3%B1orsantos
Yes, your crit is quite low, and that extra haste does absolutely nothing for you, unless you get it to 712+. And since your crit is low, you can benefit from that on both starfire and wrath (and moonfire crits, for that matter).
To boil it down: At 401 haste, your haste will only benefit starfire, but its only at 700+ haste that you can actually get another starfire out during a lunar eclipse. Crit, however, is not meeting a soft cap until you have 42% raidbuffed.
Get as close to 400 haste as you can, and then pump up that crit, baby!
Ive had to close comments on this post. For some reason, the spambots usually go for this, and im tired of deleting them