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Quick Quip: 3.3.3 druid changes

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Just thought I would cover some of the initial druid changes on the PTR. I say “initial”, because I really hope this  isn’t the last we will see. Ghostcrawler said they wanted to give us a burst ability for PvP (which might spill over into PvE), and acknowleged that moonkins was too dependant on eclipse, while at the same time passing on two quite solid suggestions in the druid forums.

So it is a bit disheartening to see the following:

  • Nature’s Grasp: Now has 3 charges, up from 1.

Great for PvP I suppose. Definately not bursty, but anything helps the dueling moonkins, I suppose.

  • Starfall: Te damage done by this spell has been significantly increased.

Great. In reality, it increases the initial hit by an average of 140 damage, and the splash damage by 23 damage. This gives it another 2.800 damage on a single target, or 3.260 for two targets. Not a massive buff, but a buff none the less, though it can hardly be considered a burst to do 2,8k more damage over 10 seconds.

  • Typhoon: Mana cost reduced to 25%, down from 32%.

Allow me to take a moment to jump up and down. We now save 245 mana on each Typhoon. Joy.

I really hope that this is not the last thing we have seen to moonkin buffs this patch. A lot of other classes are getting some really nice buffs, and I do think we should get some love as well. Never the less, it’s not like the patch is out yet, so we might see more stuff coming soon.

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Quick Quip: Speculations

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

In the past few days, Ghostcrawler has made two comments in Moonkin threads across the official WoW forums.

The first comment was to a suggestion to make Owlkin Frenzy be an on-use ability, such as Beastial Wrath or the like. Ghostcrawler didn’t seem to like that idea, stating that “I also don’t think it’s a great place to buff them for PvE. There are fights without a lot of predictable raid damage, and void zone diving shouldn’t be critical in keeping your dps up.”.

Thats all fine and dandy, Ghostcrawler. I understand if you don’t want to give us a burst ability, or if it’s too big a change to make at this point in the expansion. It would be rather easy to balance though, and would give us that little edge.

The second comment was aimed at a suggestion about changing Glyph of Wrath into something that increased its cast time by 0,5 seconds, and its damage by x%, to account for the longer cast time. This is a brilliant idea, because it would give us better scaling with haste, and it would remove a rather useless glyph. Ghostcrawler, however, stated that “I understand the intent and it’s clever in a way, but we would be hesitant to introduce a glyph that would actually be a bad glyph for players who weren’t capable of benefiting from a bunch of haste.”.

This makes no sense to me. We already have Glyph of Healing Touch, which is the excact opposite of what is proposed for Glyph of Wrath and that doesn’t seem to worry the developers. Even if new players did use the “new” Glyph of Wrath, it would probably not be a very big deal for them. Never the less, this is how the developers feel, and I suppose they know what they are doing.

However, the PTR forums are getting clearned up, which usually means that the PTR is coming soon. I find this curious, to say the least, because we usually don’t get many comments in moonkin threads.

This is pure speculation, but maybe – MAYBE – Ghostcrawler is passing on these two ideas, and being so “active” in moonkin threads, because they have something else in store for us?

- QQ

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Quick quip: Earth and Moon buff

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Just thought I would cover Zarhym’s post the other day. It appears that they are planning to give a little buff to Earth and Moon:

Keep in mind that we tend to make much smaller adjustments during a minor patch cycle due to the limited amount of testing time we’re allotted before applying such patches. For this reason you’re not likely to see any major Balance druid changes coming in the next minor patch.

With that being said, one small change we have in the pipeline will double the passive effectiveness of Earth and Moon so that it provides a flat 2/4/6% spell damage increase, up from 1/2/3%. As an obligatory warning, this is subject to change prior to the next minor patch going live.

The most awesome part of that thread is the immediate comment after the blue post: “6% more spell damaeg.”

Obviously, this is not a 6% buff. It’s not even a 3% buff, but more like a 2,82% damage increase. But hey, we probably don’t need to go into heavy theorycrafting here, right?

While it’s not a massive buff, it still means a few hundred more DPS, and it’s always nice to see Blizzard tweaking the numbers once in a while. It makes us feel special. There is a chance that they will have a change of heart before this hits the live servers, but there is probably only a small chance of that happening.

A buff is always nice, but I do feel that we are overall at a very fine place on the meters. I worry that a lot of people are looking at Icecrown fights, seeing casters generally lower than melee, and thinking that the whole world hates them. In reality, there is a lot of movement in ICC, and that generally hurts all casters a lot. Then again, I’m not about to pass up on free buffs, and we need a much bigger buff before we are anywhere near overpowered.

- QQ

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Glyphs ‘R Us

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

I often get questions regarding which glyphs to pick for your all-round moonkin spec, and while some of them are pretty obvious, there are a few that always cause much debate.

So lets take a look at the current moonkin glyphs, and talk about which benefit us the most, and when to pick one over the other. This is, ofcourse, purely from a PvE perspective. Things are a whole lot different when it comes to battlegrounds or arena, and I will not cover them from fear of giving out some seriously bad advice.

There are 11 glyphs that we could possibly ever consider to use. These are Glyph of Barkskin, Entangling Roots, Focus, Hurricane, Innervate, Insect Swarm, Monsoon, Moonfire, Starfall, Starfire and Wrath. The list is actually quite long, but most of them have no real place in a PvE setting.

Lets look at them in order of usefulness.

(more…)

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3.3 live this week

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Just thought i would make a small update, because I know you will be visiting my blog before you go to MMO-champion. According to Boubouille, patch 3.3 will be online this week. Yay!

I don’t know how he got this information, cause it’s not official yet, but I’ll take his word for it. Here is a summary of the changes specific to moonkins:

  • Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
  • Talents
    • Balance
      • Eclipse: This effect will not activate again within 15 seconds of either type of Eclipse effect firing, in addition to the existing 30-second cooldown for each type of Eclipse.
      • Force of Nature: Health on the treants has been increased.
  • Pets
    • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
  • Bug fixes
    • Glyph of Hurricane: Now modifies the spell tooltip on Hurricane to indicate the spell also applies a movement slowing effect.
    • Hurricane: When cast from Bear Form, Cat Form, or Dire Bear Form, this spell will now channel properly instead of stopping the channel as soon as the shapeshift is cancelled.

Also. while it is not covered in the official patch notes, tier 8 2-piece set bonus should be nerfed to 7%, while the percentage gained on Eclipse in general is increased by 10%.

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