It took a good day of waiting since my post yesterday, but the much anticipated druid changes are finally here! But what to make of them?

Surely, these seem like rather interesting and creative changes. We can only muse about how they will play out once Cataclysm goes live, so in the meantime, lets take an in depth look at the changes.

Please refer to my previous post for a list of all changes.

Eclipse

This is a very interesting change. Right off the bat, it means that we will not suffer nearly as much from moving as we do currently. This mechanic is very similar to the stacking suggestion I made somewhere: When you cast a nature spell, you gain a stack of lunar eclipse and vice versa.

The easiest way to look at this is to consider Starfire and Wrath a 100% damage spell. If you cast a starfire, the next will do, say, 90% damage, the next 80%, 70% and so on. At some point you decide that you do not want to cast starfire anymore – probably when your moonfire runs out – and you switch to wrath. Your first wrath will be buffed to do, say, 150% more damage. The next will do 145% damage, then 140% and so on. I am going to assume that it takes roughly two wraths to move the meter the same distance as one starfire does.

If you are just spamming these abilities, the net damage will be the same over any length of fight – much like an mage that does nothing but spam Arcane Missiles. Thats fine, because the spells will probably be normalized, where we right now need eclipse to be up to do comparable damage, but now we will do it right off the bat. Where this system can really shine is when you are able to plan ahead. How can we use this to our benefit?

You know that bloodlust is coming in 10 seconds. You spam a lot of wraths, making your starfires really powerful. When bloodlust comes, you can throw some very fast, very big starfires. I am not sure how this will effect the meter – it would obviously deplete the meter faster, but I would think that Blizzard has a way around this. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that our spells cannot go below 100% damage – so once your meter is at the middle, your starfires will still do 100%, but the wrath buff will stack up. This allows you to still take full advantage of bloodlust, with a big burst at the beginning, and then spamming normal damage starfire for the remaining duration. This also means that we end each bloodlust with a very powerful wrath, which we then switch over to afterwards. If Blizzard DOES allow our starfire/wrath to go below 100%, then they will need to find a way to compensate for this.

When you have to move, you can spam instant cast spells to stack up whatever eclipse type you prefer. It will give you a lot of control when you get to know a fight. This change actually makes movement much less of a trouble than before, because we are compensated for the movement by getting more powerful spells when we stand still.

Eclipse Mastery

How Eclipse Mastery will play out is very hard to tell. The simplest way to implement this is to simply make the additional bonus stronger. It might make the eclipse meter longer, so we are able to stack it further to one side if we wish, although that would make us switch spells less. It might stack up the buff faster, but that would probably mean that our current buff depletes faster. I am probably going to have to go with the first suggestion made, and assume that spells can be buffed, say, 50% in either direction, and the more mastery we have, the higher will this scale go. If it takes 10 starfires to buff wrath to 150% damage, then more mastery could make 10 starfires buff wrath to 175% damage.

Nature’s Torrent

I am not sure what to think of this. It will probably be a big hitting spell, although I am not sure if it is instant or not. It will do a different type of damage depending on how your eclipse meter is looking, and it is probably something we will want to use everytime it is off cooldown. If it didn’t do very much damage, it would have to be instant, so we could quickly move the meter, but my money is on a big hitter that we use once we are done casting one type of spell, do a large amount of damage, and then switch to the other nuke.

From this, our rotation would probably look something like this:
Moonfire, Starfire until full solar eclipse, Nature’s Torrent, Insect Swarm, wrath until full lunar eclipse, Nature’s Torrent, Moonfire, repeat.

Wild Mushroom

This is a very currious ability. I am not sure what to make of it. It seems like Blizzard wants to give us more options to do AOE damage. But for some reason, Blizzard thinks that it is fine to do on a single target fight as well, probably when it is buffed by eclipse. I think of it somewhat like warlock’s Seed of Corruption, although it doesn’t require damage to explode.

We can probably only have one mushroom up at the same time. Casting it again will probably simply detonate it ahead of time, which is the only reason I can come up with to why we have the ability to explode it at will. If we simply plant it in a pack of mobs, or near the boss, it probably wont explode before it turns invisible, but if we detonate before it turns invisible, it might blow up right away. But if we can simply detonate it right when we spawn it, the damage would have to be comparable to starfire and wrath, because otherwise we wouldn’t use it on a single target unless we are moving around. It is probably nature damage, and would affect our eclipse meter as well.

I must be honest, this ability confuses me a little bit, but once we get more information on it, and are able to brood over the posibilities more, a way of using this will probably arise. In any case, it sounds like a fun little “proximity mine”, and I am sure that PvP’ers will love to set up traps in BG’s and arenas.

What about DOTs?

Unfortately, it doesn’t appear from the preview that our DOTs will be affected by crit and haste, is other classes are. HOTs are surely affected, but it may be that Blizzard hasn’t decided on it yet. I still think that DOTs will be part of our rotation, and we will probably cast them with a fully charged eclipse meter to get the most out of them. The way they scale with spell power will just have to be corrected a bit.

Stampeding Roar

I sort of feel like I should mention this ability. There is nothing stopping us from switching into bear or cat form to cast this on our raid members, or we could even use it if we have to move a long distance, like if you are far away from the spore meeting point on Festergut, or if Sindragosa pulls you in for a Blistering Cold just before you wanted to reset your stack. As always, I am sure that we will find a way to use this ability, at least in some fights.

Unanswered Questions

There are a lot of “What about”‘s and “What If”‘s hanging in the air, but we must keep in mind that this is probably not every change that is coming with Cataclysm. Preview is preview, one might say, and there are still months before we will actually see Cataclysm. Some of the things I wonder about are:

• Starfall – Will each star hitting the target count as one cast, or will the stars have a set damage depending on the eclipse meter when they were cast? They are obviously arcane, so they would favor a full lunar eclipse meter.
• Treants – Are they nature? Will their damage depend on the state of the eclipse meter?
• Typhoon – Assuming that this is a nature spell, is this just going to be a weak version of Nature’s Torrent that we use when we move about?
• Hurricane – Much like Starfall, will this count as one movement on the eclipse meter, or will each hit change it? That could make AOE look something like Hurricane > Mushroom > Hurricane > Mushroom. Although, Hurricane is nature as well, isn’t it?
• Eclipse – A guildie of mine mentioned that the change to Eclipse sounds a bit like a meter that Goblin Shamans have in Warhammer Online. But in this version, you can supposively stack the meter up to five, and the next cast resets the meter completely. I wouldn’t like this idea very much. I would much rather have it that spells could not go below 100% damage, and that the Eclipse meter works as a scale that moves in one direction or the other.
• Will there be a change to Nature’s Grace or Wrath, to allow Wrath to scale better with haste? Obviously, we will need more haste, because we will get less haste per haste rating, but we seem to get a lot of haste just by spending talents in the balance tree.

Lots of information, lots of answers, lots of things to theorycraft about. It is currently 4:30 AM. I have pneumonia, I am very tired, and my head is buzzing with ideas. Give it some time to settle in, and lets see what the future brings.

What do you think about the changes?

- QQ