@ 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.

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.

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.

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

Same ol’ itemization gives us WAY too much of one stat at the expense of others we need problem.

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.

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*