Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Waking up today was like christmas evening, with a ton of goodies spilling out of MMO-champion. Just to clarify, danes get presents on christmas evening, not chistmas morning on the 25th.
There is a lot of stuff out there, ripped from the Cataclysm alpha client. I am not excactly sure how Blizzard feel about people stealing info from the client, but since nobody in the alpha really said anything, I suppose it might be alright.
Before we go on, I MUST stress the point that this is really early alpha changes. The talent tree below is not finished, it will be changed, and nothing of this is guaranteed. Got it? Let me repeat it again: The talent tree below is not finished, it will be changed, and nothing of this is guaranteed.
If you don’t like spoilers, you probably shouldn’t read this post. What am I saying? Ofcourse you should read my blog!
Even though the talent trees are going to change a lot over the next few months, the moonkin talent tree has been changed with a few very interesting talents which gives us a clue as to what Blizzard has in store for us. Check out the talen tree here.
Celestial Focus
CF has been moved from tier 4 to tier 3, and no longer offers spell haste. This means we will probably not care much for this in a PvE setting, and even though we “lose” 3% spell haste, its probably not a huge deal. To be honest, I am glad that we are getting rid of all that random haste here and a spot of haste there, because it goes a long way to help increase our soft haste cap on wrath – as long as we get balanced around it, everything should be fine.
Solar Beam
Blizzard hinted at this ability in the recent Twitter Developer Chat, and with the first draft for this ability, it looks pretty cool. Solar Beam will cast on your enemy target disorienting all enemytargets under the beam for 3 seconds, and then silencing anybody under the beam while it is active. This sounds really powerful; A ranged disorient with great stopping power, and then a silence!
Lunar Justice
Whenever you kill someone, they get bathed in moonlight. If you or an ally stand on this moonlight, they get 2% of your base mana back. This seems like another PvP talent, to help keep us going in PvP. Cute.
Starsurge
Following up on Solar Beam, I am not sure if Starsurge will be beneficial in PvE. That really depends on what kind of damage it does and how it scales. In any case, it still offers another ability to use, and helps with a bit of crowd control. It does have a cast time though, so the damage might just be a placeholder, and turn out to be worth getting for PvE as well.
Lunar Guidance
Your solar beam becomes bigger, and starsurge returns up to 15 luanr or solar energy – for the new eclipse system – depending on which is greater. This means that Starsurge will push the meter around more if we have this talent, than if we didn’t.
Balance of Power
Still increases our hit by 4%, but now also converts 1 spirit into 1 hit rating, simple as that. So if we need 500 hit rating to be hit capped in Cataclysm, we really just need 500 spirit.
Moonkin form and Improved Moonkin Form
Moonkin form, currently, does not show any bonuses other than 370% armor and polymorph/root immunity. They removed the usual stuff on it, and we will probably see either some changes to the bonus we get, or make it into a… dare I say it? A cooldown to use, much like the new Tree of Life. On one side, I am probably alright with this, as long as we are balanced around it, but I would feel sad about not being a giant chicken. Realisticly though, I don’t think they are going to pull that stunt with two druid specs. What will the next thing be, that you can only be in bear form for a limited time? Hah!
Improved moonkin form was also changed to give us up to 6% extra crit chance to us and all party or raid members nearby. This is a fair damage increase, and one that makes sense. Current moonkin form gives us spell damage from spirit, but in Cataclysm we will only have enough spirit to be “converted” into hit. Maybe at 500 spirit, we wouldn’t want any more, so removing the spirit component from Imp. Moonkin form makes sense.
Don’t worry, they will put something shiny on our moonkin form, surely.
Eclipse
Hasn’t been changed yet, though it has been disabled in the Cataclysm alpha.
Fungal Growth
Our shrooms have limped into the talent tree, as a sidenote to our treants. When our treants die or when our Wild Mushrooms are triggered Fungal Growth will pop around in an 8 yard range, slowing enemies by 70% for 10 seconds. So anyone will be wanting to get far away from our treants, and they will curse themselves when they trigger a Trapshroom. This is probably a bit focused for PvP, but it could be very nicely for add control as well.
Blessing of the Grove (restoration)
Goodbye Improved Mark of the Wild. I’ll miss you. No, not really; Blessing of the Grove will increase the direct damage of our moonfire by 6%. Since we will probably see new glyphs in Cataclysm, we are most likely not going to be using Glyph of Moonfire, so the extra damage on a good old moonfire spam will do nicely.
Perseverance (restoration)
A little treat for PvP’ers as well, reducing all spell damage by 10%.
Insect Swarm
It seems that Blizzard misplaced Insect Swarm and Improved Insect Swarm. Not a big suprise really, because Insect Swarm will probably be a baseline skill, and Imp. IS will be lost and balanced out somewhere else.
Conclusion
We already know a little bit about Blizzards plans for PvE moonkins, and I have previously stated my enthusiasm for the eclipse changes, and I am in good faith that however the talents and the new eclipse system turn out, they will turn out alright. It’s all about tweaking the numbers, really, and since we don’t have the numbers, I’ll give Blizzard the benefit of doubt before I go all RAWRRAWRRAWR on them.
For PvP, it looks like moonkins are getting a whole lot of new crowd control; An invisible trap, a ranged disorient and mass silence, a 2 second cast damage ability that knocks people down and an AOE slow whenever shrooms or treants die. Add that to entangling roots, cyclone and lolhibernate, we have a pretty wide range of crowd control abilities.
Sidenote: Talent builds
As it is right now, you can reach our 51 point talent with 51 points, and grab everything critical on the way down. Spending the classic 13 points in restoration as well, we are left with 12 talent points at level 85. This could be used on stuff like Genesis, Owlkin Frenzy, Gale Winds, Brambles or even mana regen talents, should we need them. We could also go over into restoration and grab Nature’s Swiftness, although I don’t know if we will get any long cast nature spells. In any case, it seems to go fairly well with Blizzards plans to make us able to take everything we want, and then a few more talents for funsies.
While the talents might change their function, I am not sure they will change position or how many points they will require. The structure of the talent tree might probably be as we see here, but hey, nothing is set in stone yet. And we still have archeology to worry about.
I’ve made a draft talent tree of what the basic cookie cutter build might look like, if these changes were to be out now. You know, just to play around with it for a bit. Check it out here!
As I read the talents, I had the impression that Starsurge is a substitute for Nature’s Torrent, since that spell doesn’t show up anywhere in the talents and hadn’t been anounced a base spell, only with cast time (pity).
It also struck me that we will seemingly want to cast Moonfire for its direct damage component, since
1. Improved Moonfire now only increases the direct damage of Moonfire by 10%
2. Blessing of the Grove, as you mentioned, only affects the direct damage of MF
3. Wrath of Cenarius (if you only put one point into it) says the following: “While moving, the direct damage of your Moonfire spell is increased by 5% and it’s mana cost is reduced by 10% for 3 sec. This effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 3 sec., but is refreshed as long as you are in movement.” This is only the one-point-spent variant, mind you.
It kinda feels weird to me that Moonkins might want to move around before casting Moonfire (with as much Arcane Eclipse points as possible) or running around spamming it a couple of times…
Well, we’ll see…
Also, something on Celestial Focus: I think they removed the haste component of the talent because our second mastery bonus is planned to be “Spell Haste”. I don’t know if you took that into account and just decided not to mention it or not.
However, that changes nothing about Blizzard needing to balance us around our haste stuff.
And Germans get their presents on Christmas Eve (24th) as well.
Oh, and did I mention that I want to have Deathwing as a flying mount *cackles*
If sprit hit conversion is 1:1, and sprit will also provide mana regen, they could get in a situation that we’ve seen time and again:
1. We’ve reached our hit cap via spirit
2. We don’t have any mana problems at 500 spirit
3. All our gear has sprit, wasted stat :\
Even If 1. turns out to be correct, but 2. does not, then the additional spirit gained will have absolutely no effect on our dps (except for the “dps is zero when you’re OOM” part).
I’m going to guess that they intend for a resto druid to want about as much spirit for mana regen as we’ll want for hit rating.
I wonder if they have considered a “chill-of-the-throne” solution for hit caps — dungeons after the first tier have a -X% to your chance to hit debuff. That way as they pile on more and more spirit onto leather caster gear for resto druids, they’ll still be helping us reach an ever increasing hit cap.
Ugh, should probably proofread.. when I said ‘situation we’ve all seen before,’ I only meant that the third point is what we’ve seen before. Instead of too much hit, haste, or crit (which is often the case now), it’d be too much spirit.
Same ol’ itemization gives us WAY too much of one stat at the expense of others we need problem.
Bartol:
Starsurge may or may not be Nature’s Torrent. To be honest, I didn’t even make that connection (I had just woken up, seen the messages, and wrote the blog before my first coffee). I think its fine that Starsurge has a cast time. I don’t really want anymore instants. Id rather want stronger spells, that scale with haste, and especially those that are 2 seconds. Thats going to be fine if our haste situation in Cataclysm is anything as it is now.
As I wrote above, I doub we will be using level 80 glyphs at 85. They might still be viable, but we will probably have Glyph of Eclipse, Starsurge, Mushroom, Solar Beam or whatnot to play with instead. So unglyphed moonfire will be a nice enough spam ability as we move around. I didn’t notice the change to WoC myself, but it may just be something to compensate for us moving for an extended period. Its kinda humerous, actually, we will probably be moonfire spamming when we run around, but we probably wont be running around constantly anyways.
With the changes to moonkins – which fixes all our problems if they came out *right now* – and the talents and such, I really think we are going to be in a good place once we get to Cataclysm.
Duskstorm:
I doub we will have any problems with too much spirit, at all. One word: Reforging. When you start getting more spirit than you need to be hit capped, you simply reforge the spirit on some of your gear into haste or crit. Problem solved! You will probably find yourself Spihit capped at heroic dungeon levels, and after that you just reduce spirit you get and hover around your Spihit cap from there until the last raid in Cataclysm.
This also means that we probably wont rely on spirit to regen – the trend is probably that Blizzard is wanting DPS classes to rely on class abilities like innervate, moonkin aura, totems and potions to keep their mana up. Ours wont be very high. I mean, I have 419 spirit right now, which is hardly any regen at all.
Also, we have currently “lost” a lot of haste from our talent trees, putting our haste cap higher. We also completely lose any notion of a crit cap, because Lunar eclipse will probably be a +damage increase instead of +crit. We also get more spells (Starsurge, for example) that benefit from haste, not to mention dots scaling with haste and crit as well.
Really, I think haste is going to be an awesome stat for us, and I doub we will reach the haste cap anytime soon. After all, haste is still our strongest spell after caps as it is now, and with a higher haste cap, it just becomes even stronger
Looks like Starfall is changing too. It’s listed as NYI and doesn’t say anything about big or small stars or splash damage, just a paltry 111-129 damage for 10 seconds.
All the buffs to moonfire’s direct damage is very strange. I really don’t understand Wrath of Cenarius,
We’ll just have to wait impatiently for new builds.
I don’t really mind all these changes. Starfall right now is *very* powerful, and was admittedly a bandaid. I think its fine if they rebalance it along with everything else.
Also, there is a possible misplaced moonkin talent in the resto tree – or it could be something for resto PvP:
Fury of Stormrage 3/3 – You have a 6% chance when you cast Nourish to cause your next Wrath to be instant cast and cost no mana, and when you moonfire a target that is at or under 25% health, you have a 60% chance to cause your next starfire to be instant cast.
Could be moved to the balance tree, or it could be an option for resto’s to do a little bit of damage.
Perseverance really tickles my fancy. Even though I have almost 1200resil those nasty locks and priests still make life miserable for my druid. A 10% cut in that damage will be a nice little bonus for sure.
@ neyuna: looks like starfall is being changed to be a much better single target spell. splash damage might be gone (looking at the tooltip it does look that way, unless its just missing) but the base damage of each star now looks to be about doubled at 303-348. which will make it much better for single target damage…and it’s pretty good now with the damage buff it’s been given as of 3.3.3 . wrath of cenarius appears to be a way to increase our damage while on the move. unglyphed i’d guess you will just spam moonfire while moving. although it remains to be seen what our new glyphs will be and how that all will work……
@ qieth: i originally looked at fury of stormrage and said….well that doesn’t make any damn sense. but them i remembered that tree of life is going to be a cooldown based talent that buffs and/or changes heals while active and that alot of druid healing will be done in NE/Worgen/Tauren form and that they will be capable of doing damage while healing….so in that respect it’s placement in the resto tree makes perfect sense.