Folks never understand the folks they hate.

Important Update at the Bottom!

Blizzcon has come and gone.  It’s amazing that Blizzard continues to host such an amazing event.  I’m not sure any other development company could pull off something of this magnitude.  I went on a nerd-gasm based roller coaster ride as information was released and rejoiced as some of my game friends got to meet each other in person and further develop relationships.  I wish I could say I wasn’t green with envy that I was at home for this one.

Unfortunately, the convention this year ended with such a sour note that the only thing worse has been the Community Managers reaction to the situation. Those who follow my twitter account know well my thoughts on this. As I was writing the first draft of this post, I was given a link to the following blog article:

http://piercing-shots.blogspot.com/2011/10/i-would-rather-not-be-making-this-post.html

I started not to publish this at all, but I do believe in Burke’s idea that “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one.”  As a community, we must stand up and be counted in opposition to such a horrible presentation.

I understand where the CM staff is coming from, but that doesn’t make it right or even palatable. I suppose it’s hard to hold them accountable while senior members of the company propagate such hate. However, Community Managers should be well versed in how to contain an unfortunate situation and cool tempers before they flare. Instead, they chose to add fuel to the fire.

This situation has everything to do with homophobia and hate being openly supported by one of the most successful companies in the entertainment industry. Had the slurs been racially directed, I can’t imagine you would have aired it as part of the ceremony.

In the Online Petition to Blizzard, user N T states the following:

This has nothing at all to do with Horde vs. Alliance. This has everything to do with homophobia being publically supported by one of the most successful companies in the world. Had the slurs been racially directed, this would never have aired. Hate speech is hate speech, period, no matter who it’s aimed at, and Blizzard is acting hypocritically at best by condoning any form of it, most especially by thinking it perfectly fine for this to be shown in front of millions of viewers, present and virtual. Saying things like, “It was bleeped out,” is just another way of saying, “Censoring it made it okay to say,” and brushing off concerns with phrases such as, “It’s just a joke, can’t you take a joke?” is the same thing as saying, “As long as it’s not directed at me or anyone I identify with, it’s cool.” At this rate, Blizzard might as well be openly supporting those who bully LGBTQ youths into committing suicide.

It’s disturbing enough to see how widespread the use of homophobic slurs as synonyms for “bad” is; it’s heartbreaking to see one of my favorite companies actively parading its support for it, then defending its employees’ use of it on the one hand while punishing customers’ use of it on the other.

I couldn’t say it better myself.

The topic and potential ramifications stretch far beyond the virtual world. Please don’t write this off as a bunch of nerds upset that someone dissed their in-game faction.

[I welcome mature discussion on this topic, but I maintain the right to delete those who I feel are posting simply to further sling insults.]

Update:

A couple hours after posting this, Mike Morhaime had the following letter published.  It is very difficult to admit when one is wrong.  It’s even harder to make the apology public.  Thank you, Mike. This one feels heartfelt.

Dear members of the Blizzard community,

I have read your feedback and comments about this year’s BlizzCon, and I have also read the feedback to the apology from Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain. I’d like to respond to some of your feedback here.

As president of Blizzard, I take full responsibility for everything that occurs at BlizzCon.

It was shortsighted and insensitive to use the video at all, even in censored form. The language used in the original version, including the slurs and use of sexual orientation as an insult, is not acceptable, period. We realize now that having even an edited version at the show was counter to the standards we try to maintain in our forums and in our games. Doing so was an error in judgment, and we regret it.

The bottom line is we deeply apologize for our mistakes and for hurting or offending anyone. We want you to have fun at our events, and we want everyone to feel welcome. We’re proud to be part of a huge and diverse community, and I am proud that so many aspects of the community are represented within Blizzard itself.

As a leader of Blizzard, and a member of the band, I truly hope you will accept my humblest apology.

– Mike Morhaime
President, Blizzard Entertainment

 
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10 Common Raiding Mistakes

I would like to present several issues which seem common to many raiding guilds.  This list comes from mistakes I’ve made myself, common complaints I’ve heard from fellow leaders in the game, threads from various forums, and articles I’ve read in the past.   Back when I was a young student of leadership and management, we were taught to “know yourself and seek self improvement.”  I hope this post helps you along your own path.

1 – Not allowing a trial member’s alts into the guild
2 – Just Wipe More
3 – Raid Leads need to yell
4 – It’s ‘JUST’ trash
5 – Teaching the whole fight at once
6 – The Raid Leader is a Genius
7 – There’s only one way
8 – You have to take the jerks to get good players
9 – Choosing officers by the meters
10- Meters are all that matter

 

1 – Not allowing a trial member’s alts into the guild

It’s important your current and prospective members get to know each other.  It’s hard to figure out how well a member fits in and if he has any symptoms of a drama llama if he’s not part of the guild and not part of your daily activities. Having their alts in guild chat, running 5 mans, leveling, and chatting with the other active members of the guild will tell you far more about how they will fit in eventually than having them in a separate guild and just seeing the new guy in raid. For a lot of raiding guilds, time spent playing out raid is helpful to build relationships and share in those fun times that hold you together when you need to spend time on a really nasty raid boss.

 

2 – Just Wipe More

Time spent actively working a boss is definitely very important: it allows folks to practice the encounter (some people learn by trial and error). People need to work toward muscle memory to react to particular triggers. However, it’s necessary to give your mind time to absorb what you’ve been practicing. Sometimes taking a break or heading into the logs will provide more benefit that pulling again immediately. You can’t do that while running back.

Tons of strategy work happens offline — often your best strategy work.  It’s really tough to make massive strat changes mid fight.  There’s a lot of things being actively managed by the raid leadership.  Serious strat changes take time and trying to do that while 9 or 24 other people are sitting there is painful.  It’s important to spend time with your team outside of the instance planning out what you are going to do.  These planning sessions don’t have to include everyone and they don’t have to be super structured, but they need to happen.

 

3 – Great Raid Leads yell a lot

The Super Guilds progress faster than most. To do that, the raiders must be near flawless.  So the leadership yells a lot, right?

There’s no doubt some do but that’s definitely not true across the board.  The best leaders know when to bark, when to stay quiet, when to correct publicly, and when to handle things after the raid.

Years ago I had the privilege to serve in a rather select group and there were two of us that really got at each other and all sorts of words were slung back and forth.  When the dust settled, our commander told us that we were in risk of being removed because of the outburst.  We were supposed to be professionals and if things had gotten to the point we had to yell at each other, one or both of us had no business being there.  Mature and skilled people simply don’t need to resort to those methods of conflict resolution.

 

4 – It’s ‘JUST’ trash

Most of the time spent in a successful raid is spent either working through trash or running back from a wipe.  I want to address the first of these two.  Players have a tendency to go afk or just go through the motions when doing trash.  Trash provides the raid a great opportunity to get settled and get their muscles and brain into “raid mode.”

Trash can also be the catalyst for a terrible raid night.  If people start skipping out, it takes longer, there’s unnecessary wipes, and people start getting pissy.  Raiders thinking they are too good for trash sow the seeds of “Us vs Them” fights in the guild and rarely does anything positive come from that.

As a raid leader, officer, or just guy that people listen to; keep the raid focused on trash.  You wouldn’t let your players check out on a boss, don’t let it happen on trash, either.

 

5 – Teaching the whole fight at once

My favorite fights include Archimonde, RoS, Firefighter, Heroic Lich King, and Heroic Ragnaros.  Four of the five share one major thing in common: there’s a hell of a lot going on spread through several phases.  If you try to explain any of these fights, with the detail needed for a progression fight, from start to finish you’ll put even the hardened raider to sleep.  I love these fights, and I’d leave to go get another drink before you are half way through.

I much prefer to discuss and work a fight phase by phase.  We’ll talk about phase one, then work that until we hit P2 a couple of times.  At that point, we talk about P2 then work those two phases (while keeping mostly quiet about P1) until we hit P3. You see where I’m going with this?  Spending 20 minutes explaining the entire fight is like asking your raiders to drink from a firehose, swallow it all, and then be able to tell you exactly how much they just drank.  It’s just too much info to process.  This is another case where you need to let the brain soak things up in smaller bits.

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Druid Feedback

We’re looking for feedback on your class as we work on changes and adjustments for a future game update. While we may be making some specific class changes in 4.3, what we’re looking for in this thread is overall feeling on the class as a whole for more long term changes in the future.

 

Well, that’s not what I was expecting to see on the forums this week.  It’s generally a good thing to see game developers asking the players what they think about their class and how it functions in the game world.  Even though this thread is full of the the same suggestions the playerbase has been making for the last months/year it’s nice to see them in one place and hopefully we’ll get some much needed attention.

Let’s get started, shall we?
What type of content do you focus on? Everything I do related to PvE Raiding content.  I understand there are styles of play, but I think this is the pinnacle.

What are your biggest quality-of-life issues? I think Moonkin are in a really good place as far as everyday play. AoE balance between the eclipses would make things flow a lot more smoothly and not force me to sit in Solar for extreme amounts of time waiting on a burst phase in a fight.  I would like to see Moonkin form get a graphical update similar to the cat/bar, but do NOT remove Moonkin form!

What makes playing your class more fun? I love the idea of shapeshifting! Obviously, the class has to be competative in terms of damage and utility and I think that we are there right now.  I’ve played moonkin when we were just brught a long as a +hit/decurse bot. I really appreciate being able to both do damage and control fights.

What makes playing your class less fun? Still being penalized for being a “hybrid.” This is a really archaic descriptor as it relates to damage potential.  Unless my healing in that spec is something significant, my damage shouldn’t be reduced in any way to compensate.

How do you feel about your “rotation”?I normally enjoy a rotation that is easy to learn but really rewards those who master it.  I think the current Moonkin rotation is almost there.  The knowledge of how to manage dots as they relate to Nature’s Grace and Eclipse is nice and much more engaging that the current Arcane Mage style.  I also enjoy planning my burst (whether AoE or single target) around an eclipse. I don’t have a problem with needing to delay an eclipse just before a burst phase.  I think this rewards the experienced and those willing to think through the fight.

Having said that though, the two eclipses need to be balanced for AoE.  Currently Solar is the AoE eclipse and having to delay for an extensive period of time of loses the fun that this style originally brought. Thankfully, there is a really easy fix to the problem. Simply buffing Hurricane and allowing it to benefit from Lunar Eclipse instead of Solar would result in evening out the AoE imbalances and give the player more options and make the class feel less punished by having to sit in the “mushroom eclipse” for far too long.

What’s on your wish list for your class? An Arcane based AoE which would balance out AE potential between the two eclipses. I’m still hopeful for a graphical update for Moonkin form. Finally protection from the Moonkin form NOT becoming some kind of cooldown.  I really enjoy shifting for combat and can look at my gear in town or when questing if I like.

What spells do you use the least? Hurricane isn’t even on my bar anymore. I use my CC and Soothe less and less every week.  At the start of the xpac they were indefensible and I enjoyed having to play the control role and felt proud when it was the moonkin that saved the pull by rooting, hibernating, and even cycloning a wayward add if things went bad during a fight.

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Departing the R&GL Forum

Written around mid June, this is the first in a series of Draft Posts that I’ve finally decided to clean up and publish.  This topic made the cut as I actually posted on the R&GL forum this morning to address an admin kinda thing that I was very involved in at one point. 

 

As some of you have noticed I posted up in the R&GL Forum that I would be leaving the forum and no longer maintaining the index and general info thread.  I had originally decided to delete the old guides, but thankfully a calmer attitude prevailed and I simply asked that the sticky be removed from the main thread. Below is the post in case you missed it.  I may post if a certain topic really grabs me, but I’ll no longer spend much time there.

Howdy folks.  I have decided to leave most of the official wow forums for the foreseeable future and will no longer be maintaining the Guide List and General Info sticky.  Additionally, I don’t expect to maintain any of the guides I ported over when this forum was created.  If you would like the information I suggest you copy it soon.

I will continue to maintain the archive at acheron-guild.com.  I’ll be writing about Raid and Guild topics on my WoW blog at owlbearmoose.com and will begin posting some of my previous writing shortly.  Feel free to stop by.

I wish all the new guild and raid leaders the best of luck and I thank you for facilitating the best parts of the game!

Yup, that was the nice version of the good-bye post.  Stripping by the social politeness, I left because I was tired of the digs, the insults, the underhand moves at “control” of a forum designed to help each other.  It had gotten to the point that I dreaded browsing that forum.  Add to that the same couple topics repeated ad nauseam and it just wasn’t all that enjoyable.

Additionally, at about the same time I had found myself on the deleted post side of a few issues and after chats with a couple members of the Community Team I decided the WoW forums were not where I should spent much time posting. I must admit that the discussion I had with both these gentlemen left an impression on me. While I disagree with them hiding the double standards on the forum (there’s nothing wrong with them, just be up front about it) and the dumbing down of the WoW discussions, I will have nothing but respect for the way in which they engaged me.

Ok, on to the R&GL specifics:

There have been players over the years who were gifted with three abilities which made them amazing assets to the community. First, they ran very successful guilds.  While some of them were certainly OMG face-melting, super progression guilds, others were more laid back, and there were even some RP guilds represented. Secondly they possessed the assessment skills to know ‘why’ their guilds were successful and how they had developed over the years. Finally, they were gifted writers and had the ability to share their views, experiences, and lessons learned in a way that could be easily understood via the static nature of the forums.

Following that group came the skilled administrators and over the years a series of them took to the task of managing the information so that it remained properly formatted as Blizzard changed to different forums (this happened twice), was properly indexed so that it could be found easily, and spent time directing new forum users to these great guides.  Additionally, another group did a good job of keeping up with the discussion threads and helping folks find what they needed. Continue reading

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No Player Left Behind

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk about Valor Points, Justice Points, and how one acquires them.  I’ve made my share of snarky twitter and forum comments, but with the latest changes I felt like I needed a little more space to get my thoughts out of my head.

 

The Backstory:

When Cata launched, Blizzard moved from the multiple Badge currency system of Wrath (you remember that mess, a different currency for each tier) to a very simple two tier currency system.  Basically there is Justice Points for easier, older content which is designed to buy older, lower quality gear and Valor Points from the current tier of difficulty which allows the player to buy the more powerful rewards (generally equal to drops from the current raid bosses). This system mirror the Honor/Conquest system and seems like it should be pretty simple.

The problems come when Blizzard allows multiple sources of “top tier currency.” Back in Wrath, Blizz offered the players a reward of top tier Badges for completing their daily 5-man random dungeon.  This system was put in place to entice and reward players for using the shiny new Looking for Dungeon tool. Initially, it just allowed players to get a couple more badges for the week. Basically, more effort yielded more rewards.

Back then there were no artificial caps in currency collection.  Going back to BC, a player simply earned Badges for completing content. The more content you cleared, the more Badges you earned.  This wide open style led to some situations that Blizz didn’t want their players to contend with (like the feeling you had to run all versions of current and previous tier content to get the new gear as fast as possible). Blizz made a lot of changes in lockouts based on that situation, but that’s not the focus today.

Blizzard made a very significant change in Cata in that they introduced an arbitrary weekly cap  to the total amount of Valor Points (top tier) that a player may earn in a week.  Reaching that number is usually called “capping” and is Blizzard’s way of controlling how fast players purchase gear and in some ways, how much people play (their mains).

 

The need to cap:

This bit isn’t all that hard.  Players who want to upgrade their gear as quickly as possible will want to gather as many Valor Points as they can in a week so that they may buy rewards more quickly. Where once vendor gear was a supplement to allow choice or the ability to cover a slot you had a hard time getting from a boss drop, the developers have made buying gear a requirement now.

The raid bosses don’t have the loot tables to support the variety of classes and specs anymore.  While this can be nice in the idea that a player doesn’t have to play the random drop game and potentially never see a drop (damn you Halfus and Chimaeron!!!), the result is that vendor gear is a necessity if you want to best outfit your toon.

Sometimes gear is a necessity. There are times when you simply have to have enough of X to survive an encounter.  We used to call them “gear checks.” Think back to Naj’entus.  If you didn’t have 8,501 health you simply could not survive the encounter.  Other times gear improvements are a buffer for players to help offset skill (own skill and the skill of others), latency, distractions, etc.  And of course, some people just want the newest and most powerful gear.

Whatever drives the desire if you want the new purples quickly, you have to cap your point weekly.

 

The challenges to reaching the cap:

Currently players aren’t completing enough boss kills in Firelands to reach the cap. In the 10-man style, it isn’t even possibly to reach the point cap with a full clear of the zone on normal difficulty.  So if you want to cap, you need to do things other than raid the Firelands.

When Cata launched the only things that gave VP were Raid Boss kills and completing the LFD random (the first 7 times a week).  Doing a few LFD runs could offset your raids inability to clear content early on. The 5mans didn’t give much VP but it could help if you were just shy of the cap. It’s important to note that you could not reach the cap by only doing 5-mans.  Dungeons were a supplement. You had to raid to reach the cap.

When the Zandalari 5-mans joined the party, things shook up a bit.  The troll dungeons were harder than the original instances.  Appropriately, the rewards were better.  The Zandalari gave us our first epic quality loot from a 5-man this xpac and utilizing the LFD tool gave you a very nice bonus of VP. Going through your 7x troll dungeons gave you 980 VP, a huge step toward the weekly cap.  You still couldn’t cap, though. Dungeons were still a supplement.  You had to raid to reach the cap.

 

The issue with Trolls:

When Blizzard released the Firelands in patch 4.2, they also reduced the arbitrary Valor Point cap to 980.  I’m tried not to mention specific VP numbers too often, but that point total is VERY important to the discussion. If you’ll remember from the previous paragraph, completing the 7x troll dungeons award a total of 980 VP. All of a sudden, a player can cap Valor Points without having to raid.

There is a defense for Blizzard though.  It’s not the troll 5-mans themselves offering the Valor Points. Flying up and running in the front gate of ZA will not net you any rewards.  The VP comes from a successful completion of the Looking for Dungeon tool.  I think for many people the problem isn’t that you can get a few VP from the trolls, but that you can get ALL your VP from the trolls.  Their value wasn’t adjusted to keep the percentage available the same as the previous tier.  Previous a player could only get about 78% of their points from 5mans.  If that relationship continued this patch the Zandalari LFD should only reward about 760 (okay 764, but that’s a strange number for Blizz).

 

Tier 11 Raids:

When Blizz first announced the two tier currency system, the explanation was JP for older content and older rewards and VP for new content and new rewards.  If you followed Blizz’s statement you would expect that once the T12 raids went live, the T11 would be relegated to JP status and the old valor gear would move to the JP vendor. That’s exactly what happened, mostly.  T11 normals received a 20% nerf across the board and Blizz stated they wanted the content to be pug friendly. No stress here.

Heroic mode content was untouched and as such the rewards were left at Valor Points, although the amount per boss were reduced.

This made sense.  It was in line with Blizzards plan and all were happy.  Well, everyone but the players who aren’t very good at the game.  This subset of players went to the forums demanding that old content continue to reward the top tier currency.  Blizz caved and reverted the old, nerfed content to VP status…at the same rate as the heroic level.  25-man still offers slightly more than 10-man.  The result is that 25-man normal anything, offers more currency than 10-man heroic anything (including Sinestra).  I’m not sure why that little bit of trivia even bothers me.  The much bigger issue is why is old content offering any VP to begin with?

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A Legendary, New Quests, and a lot of things on Fire

Unless you checked out of the game a while back, you know that we’ve just finished the first week after patch 4.2 Rage of the Firelands made it to the live servers.  With the servers down for maintenance, it’s as good a time as any to share my thoughts on the recent game changes and maybe give a couple predictions of what is coming.

 

Legendary Drama
Just before the patch went live, our raid group decided the first recipient of the new legendary staff.  I had hoped to have an open discussion about the staff, but now I see that was a bit naive, even for Zosima’s Utopia I like to live in.  Instead I open a private section of the forums that only our raid group could see and put it up for a simple vote.

You can’t really argue that a legendary doesn’t come with OMG face melting DPS potential.  However, legendaries are much more than that.  They are status symbols for individuals and raids, they usually have some amazing flavor addition (I’ll talk about this one in another post), and they are much a way for a raid group to reward someone who has done more than just show up.

In Wrath we awarded Shadowmourne to one of our founding members who sacrificed his love of DPS to tank to keep progression moving, he was always looking out for the raiders to make sure folks were getting what they wanted out of the game, and was just generally a good guy.  Back then it was really an obvious choice.  No one else really spoke up wanting it initially as pretty much everyone knew he deserved it.

I was hoping for the same this time.  Since it didn’t happen to work out that way, I hoped the voting would simplify things.  Private votes, with a public tally should make everyone happy.  What I failed to prepare for was some people counting votes and trying to figure out who voted for whom.  In the end the second place raider didn’t get all the votes he felt he was promised and all hell broke loose.  There were shouting matches in whispers, /ignore being thrown around, and people just disappearing from the game unless it was raid time.

Holy shit!  I really thought we were above that.  I really hate being wrong.  There was talk about the raid group splitting up over it, or maybe 1-2 people should be removed, etc etc.  I will admit I thought long and hard about doing just that.  Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and I decided to wait and watch.  The drama has settled for now, and if things return to normal, great.  Tempering steel makes it stronger.  So too does a little heat in a raid group.  Just like metals, too much heat will make a raid group brittle.  Now is when the leadership gets tested to see if we can strike the balance and end up with both a strong group and one that is still flexible.

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The Frostscythe of the Drama Llama

Ok,  going to be curt, candid, and everything that isn’t tactful. Just letting you know up front.

Seems more than a couple players are QQing (there are more here, and then there’s this guy) over the stats of this year’s version of the Frostscythe of Lord Ahune.

If you need this weapon to up your DPS, you are doing it wrong.  Like the Diamond Tipped Cane, this is merely a “Pimp Set” weapon.  The stats really don’t matter when you are rocking this bad-ass blade in Stormwind.  I’ve been playing the game for a while now, and this has always been a crappy weapon for stats.  For fun, here are some screen-caps of the stats.  A big thanks to MMO-Champ and WoW-head for these images (hey, at least I’m not hotlinking them).

The complaints drew a response from Bashiok fairly quickly.

Making it ideal (stat-wise) now and it would stomp all over ZA/ZG weapons. It’s fairly trivial to obtain so we’re just not really willing to do that.

The solution we’re considering would be to make it a 346 blue, but there are some designer-y issues and side effects of what a change like that would cause. Either way I don’t think we would be keeping it purple and giving it Int or otherwise making the stats more ideal.

But anyway, those cloaks are pretty sweet, huh?

 

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Ask the Devs: Tanking

Last week “Ask the Dev #9: Tanking” was released and the community got a chance to see what the developers of the game think about the tanking role and the class/specs that tank.  There was a bit of hubbub about the time between closing the question thread and posting the answers.  Blizz told us not to worry as the Dev’s needed time to get good answers for us. Hmmm…

I’m willing to concede that maybe I read the wrong answer thread. The replies were of such low quality one has to think the interns or even the janitorial staff wrote them.  Well, that’s only if the janitors don’t actually play wow.  Let’s take a look at a couple of answers and see what we’ve learned. Continue reading

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If April Showers bring May Flowers, what do Lunar Showers bring?

At the end of my Eclipse post, I posted a little about Blizz trying to fix the “solar cleave” style of play.  I wanted to take a minute to talk about how they are trying to change the way we play (btw I think solar cleave should be fixed).

The 4.2 patch notes were updated to state that:

Lunar Shower has been redesigned. When casting Moonfire, the druid gains Lunar Shower. Lunar Shower increases the direct damage done by Moonfire by 15/30/45%, and reduces the mana cost by 10/20/30%. This effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 3 seconds. While under the effects of Lunar Shower, Moonfire generates 8 Solar Energy, and Sunfire generates 8 Lunar Energy.

 

When you cast moonfire, you get solar energy and the eclipse bar moves toward the solar eclipse (to the right).  When you cast sunfire, you get lunar energy and the bar moves to the left.  The intent is keep Moonkin from spamming MF/SF when in an eclipse (thus hitting a lot harder).

The initial problem with this is it’s asymmetric. There are four phases to the eclipse cycle and three of them allow you to cast Moonfire while only one them allows Sunfire.  The Eclipse movement should be equal.  Hopefully Blizz will fix this soon.

While this seems like a decent way to fix the solar cleave problem there are a few issues. First, this is still just fixing the runny nose.  It would be much better to offer us a real alternative to needing to use solar cleave.

Second, there’s another much larger issue at using this change to fix the problem.  If you like Solar Cleaving it’s very easy to keep that mechanic…simply don’t spec into Lunar Shadow.  Sure, you lose out on 45% initial dmg from MF/SF, but you get to stay in Solar as long as you like.  If the changes went live today, I would spec out of Lunar Shower for fights like Maloriak, Halfus, and Cho’gall.

I have a hard time embracing a fix for a broken design that allows the player base to opt out and return to the broken mechanic.  I really expected to see another change to the talent before the patch went live, but there’s only a week to go on that one.  Hopefully it won’t be another case of Blizz hotfixing it just after patch and the tooltip no longer correctly describes what is going on.

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It really is safe to look at an Eclipse

Several days ago, there was a brief discussion via twitter discussing the problems with Eclipse and its impact on Moonkin.  I thought I would take a crack at this one as my first Moonkin related post.

Since Cata, the Moonkin theorycrafters (and anyone with recount) figured out that there is a massive difference between AoE damage in Solar Eclipse and anyone other phase in our dps cycle.  Because of that, Balance druids started stacking the damage around Multi-dotting (Sunfire spamming) and using Mushrooms during Solar Eclipses.

On the surface this seems great.  At one time I even made the comment in guild that “Moonkin are in a great place right now.  Normal players do decent damage just by the standard rotation, but really putting in extra effort yields amazing results.”  At that precise moment I think I was right.

Before long Blizz heaped a couple of nerfs on the class through various hotfixes.  Some were reversed after they realized their own bad math (remember this thread?).  The result is a much more noticable difference between eclipse and non-eclipse damage.  On top of that, solar is simply a much stronger eclipse because of the number of abilities that it affects.

It’s hard to get a good read on Moonkin damage potential right now. The folks putting out big numbers are doing so in gimmick fights or encounters which give a couple adds to multi-dot. In order to maximize the output in light of the encounter and class design, players are getting to solar and just staying there. Slipping out of Solar early or not getting there in time has dire consequences.

Sure, I’ve done it. You probably have too. Continue reading

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