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:
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.
