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. Ignoring half of our rotation is a crap-tastic way to play. I’ve never liked hanging out in one eclipse indefinitely. It’s just lame. It seems that Blizzard has the same viewpoint. Unfortunately instead of fixing the mechanic, they have chosen to fix the way players have adapted to the problem.
Think of it this way: you have a persistent runny nose and are constantly blowing your nose. The pile of used snotty tissues is kind of gross…ok, it’s really gross. Now, instead of going to the doctor and finding out out why you have a runny nose, you simply remove all the tissues from your house. What’s the problem? The nasty pile of tissues won’t happen again, right?
The current proposed changes to Moonkin in 4.2 will make Lunar Shower stack with subsequent Moonfire applications. When Lunar Shower is active, casting Moonfire (Sunfire) will push push you out of eclipse and toward the other one (like wrath/starfire).
Moonfire Spamming sucks…they fixed moonfire spamming. Everyone is happy, right? No.
Just like with the example earlier, the tissues are gone but we still have a nasty runny nose and the only thing left to us is our shirt sleeves.
Unless Blizzard addresses the root cause, the player base will continue to develop our own workarounds and I dear they get less and less sophisticated. As we’ve seen in the past, this isn’t something that Blizzard likes and more work will be focused on breaking the players’ fix instead of the actual problems.
So what are the actual problems? I see two.
1. AoE is stacked on one side of the Eclipse.
2. There’s too big of a difference between damage potential while in Eclipse vs out of Eclipse.
The first problem is easy to understand and easy to fix. First off, we have two obvious and two not so obvious AoE abilites. The apparent are Wild Mushrooms and Hurricane. That’s right, I said Hurricane. That spell we used to use back in BC and Wrath but now we only use to chase other DPS around in Vortex Pinnacle (if you haven’t done this, you really need to!!) Our ability to multi-dot must be taken into account as potential for AoE. This means we have four AE type abilies which benefit from Solar and only one that benefits from Lunar. I am not counting Starfall as that’s not really an AoE ability since the splash damage was removed.
Blizzard is already addressing the dot spamming piece of the puzzle by making our dots push us out of Eclipse so DoTs will move back toward direct damage where they belong. So what about the other? Wild Mushroom and Hurricane are both Nature spells so are only buffed by Solar Eclipse. Simply making Hurricane do Spellstorm damage (like Starsurge) will allow a choice in Solar and provide a “Lunar AE” ability. This would also solve the current issue of our AoE being little more than spamming direct damaage abilities on multiple mobs.
If we get the Hurricane fix to imbalance AoE, Hurricane itself will need to be fixed. Currently it’s so gorram (yes, I like Firefly) expensive and has been neutered more than John Bobbit that it’s silly to cast it (outside of VP…you really should go do that, by the way).
Bringing Hurricane in-line with WM damage and shifting the spell type will go a long way in fixing the class and make up for the effectual damage nerf that the upcoming dot fix will have.
The second problem is much more problematic and significantly harder to fix without a redesign of the class. Even though the current version of Eclipse is better than it’s ever been (sooo much better than the random procs of old), there is a huge delta between the damage between Elipse and non-Elcipse. Lissanna over at restokin.com explains this wonderfully with a simple pic. This is all her doing, I could never think to say something so concisely.
I’ve seen two prevailing suggestions to address this issue. As if it wasn’t all complicated enough, these fixes must be tuned very carefully or they will cause new problems of their own. First off, Blizzard could simply balance the damage between the two states. If Eclipse was more like a dps bump than and orbiting ion canon players wouldn’t need to game the system to stack Solar Eclipse time.
The inherent problem is that if there’s not enough difference between the two states Eclipse feels like a really complicated pile of nothing.
Another potential fix is reducing the amount of time Moonkin are out of Eclipse. The problem here is that if we get a larger amount of up time, instead of Eclipse being a buff to damage, non-Eclispe becomes a regularly occurring nerf in the rotation. That just doesn’t feel fun.
I would like to see the base damage of a Moonkin increased and the base buff to Eclipse brought down a bit. Eclipse should continue to scale from our mastery (I hate seeing scaling tinkered with every patch…because then it isn’t ‘scaling’ anymore).
The planned 4.2 change to DoTs should help stop Moonfire spamming and allow us to more realistically have to choose between single target and AE abilities. We need clear delineation between direct damage and AoE. I see nothing wrong with double dotting, but rolling dots on 6+ mobs is lame. Rejuv spamming was a bad healing design and Sunfire spamming isn’t much better.
If you’ve stayed with me this long, I’m impressed. I would hope to see blizzard actually make the spec healthy again instead of just taking away our tissues. After all, all guys know there are other uses for tissues…
…like wiping up mage tears.
