A few days ago, MMO-champion datamined information on all masteries from the alpha client. I don’t know how they did that – I am not at all that technical – and I don’t really think it matters much to anyone. But it gave us a bit more information about our moonkin masteries. Our moosteries, if you will (Seriously, Qieth? Seriously?)
Now, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Elune knows I’ve been posting “Alpha, alpha, alpha” more times than I care to remember in the last week, and there are a lot of things that can change. But at the same time, I think Blizzard probably have a pretty good idea about what they want to do with the masteries – they are pretty central for Cataclysm after all. And because of that, I think it is fairly safe to start thinking about what kind of impact they might have on our gameplay.
I am a bit apprehensive, though. Blizzard has asked MMO-champion to remove alpha content from the site, probably to protect the data, and probably to avoid the mass hysteria that seem to arise whenever a change is made, and people have to decide how they feel about it without being able to see the bigger picture. What I’m blogging about here, however, is stuff we know about already, with the tiny exception of having a little bit more knowledge of how the new eclipse works. I think that it is fairly safe to post about it – but if a Blizzard employe should stop by this blog, feel free to bribe me with a beta key to take it down – or just ask nicely 
Damage and haste
The first mastery bonus is not a very difficult one to wrap our heads around. More damage is, well, more damage. I really can’t come up with any fancy way to talk more about this. It makes you hurt other people more, alright? The second mastery, a flat increase in spell haste, is a bit more interesting to look at.
I’ve already stated my enthusiasm for the preview of the things to come in Cataclysm – I think they are wonderful. I also think that people have a tendency to apply the things they know are coming to our current situation, which is probably a very big mistake. You might say “I don’t want anymore haste” or “But look at how quickly we got haste capped”. Well, this might be the case for Wrath of the Lich King, but it may change completely for Cataclysm.
First of all, to adress haste in our current situation, I have said the same thing time and time again: Haste isn’t bad. Just because wrath gets soft capped at 401 haste, it doesn’t rule out the stat as a whole. Haste is stronger than crit once crit is soft capped as well, and there are times where haste over 401 benefits wrath: I took a look at the uptime of Nature’s Grace and found it at an average of 80%, so that gives us a lot of time where additional haste is still useful for wrath. And lets not forget about starfire.
Second, we don’t know how the itemization will be for Cataclysm. We know that we will share gear with resto druids, but resto druids are getting more options when it comes to their spells. It could be that we will see a lot of crit/spi or haste/spi leather gear, which makes it harder to reach the soft cap for wrath. And with reforging, any additional spirit could simply be converted into whatever stat we feel like having.
Thirdly, we have lost a lot of haste from our talents (Alpha, alpha!), pushing our soft haste cap up. We might also see a change to Nature’s Grace, and even if we don’t, we will definately not have anywhere near a 100% uptime on it. If my NG uptime is 80% in ICC25/HM gear, then it will be way lower as we gear up in Cataclysm – especially with the change to eclipse.
Last but not least, haste is no longer a stat that only benefits wrath and starfire. With the addition of hasted DOTs, haste will play a huge part in our stats. Even if we were to get hasted dots right now, they would move from utility spells to immensely powerful abilities. Currently our dots are only worth casting if they are buffing the spell tied to them, but “only worth it” by a few thousand damage. If you suddenly applied 866 haste to moonfire and insect swarm, they would be immensely powerful. I’m looking forward to that.
As it stands now, haste is a good stat. And I think it will be a very desirable stat in the future as well, making me welcome this mastery with arms wide open.
Eclipse mastery
As I said in another blog post, lunar eclipse will probably be changed to a flat damage increase for starfire as well. It makes sense, because it removes the soft crit cap completely. And by the looks of it, this is probably whats going to happen. When we gain solar eclipse, we get a damage increase to wrath, and when we get lunar eclipse we get a damage increase to starfire.
This is interesting enough as it is, because it means that we will not be anywhere near a 100% crit chance with lunar eclipse, which in turn makes Nature’s Grace in its current form a much better talent. As long as we are balanced nicely around it from the beginning, Nature’s Grace will be a surge of power whenever it procs, rather than something we are dependant on having up all the time. And as our crit increases in Cataclysm, so will the worth of Nature’s Grace.
The mastery shows us that Blizzard is currently thinking of the eclipse meter as 100 power to each side; Solar and Lunar. It will most likely be something like a wrath giving us 10 lunar power and a starfire giving us 20 solar power. Haste will obviously tickle down here, making us proc it faster. Heck, it may even start out with wrath giving us 5 lunar power and starfire 10 solar power, because this allows us to get a full benefit from the 15 seconds of eclipse we gain afterwards. It gives us a bit more downtime on eclipse, but this is again just a balance issue. I’d rather have it this way, to allow us to scale better with haste as time goes on.
We don’t yet know how much eclipse will start out as, but lets just assume that it is 40%. With more mastery stat, this will increase, and work very nicely with the haste and damage masteries – possibly better for us than for other classes. It seems like a really powerful combination.
So, if we proc solar eclipse, and do 15 seconds worth of wrath spam for 5 lunar points each cast, we reach 75 lunar power. Another 5 casts and we proc lunar eclipse. It seems realistic that a starfire takes twice as long to cast than a wrath, so the numbers are probably going to be in these proportions. But there is a few unknown factors:
Which spells generate power? Is it just wrath and starfire, or might moonfire, insect swarm, starfall, wild mushroom, typhoon, treants or perhaps even solar beam generate power as well? They seem to be fairly evenly distributed with an equal number of spells as lunar or solar, so it could be that the last 25 (theoretical) power we need could come from refreshing dots or using cooldowns. Even if that is not the case, it is probably not a big deal – these spells will most likely be able to stand on their own, and dots return to be what they should be: A lot of damage for an instant cast, but they take a while to get there.
Second, there is starsurge. I don’t know if Blizzard decided to change their mind, or if this is an old name for the ability, but it looks a lot like Nature’s Torrent. I doub that they would give us two abilities that does excactly the same, so for now lets call it Starsurge – which sounds cooler as well – and assume that this is Nature’s Torrent. Starsurge seems like a powerful spell, something we will use after we have moved a bit to make up for the time we spend running around, and something that will probably generate a lot of power. Say, 10-25 power to whatever power we have the most of – because the whole point of the spell is to move us closer to an eclipse proc.
Our rotation will probably be something simple like wrath until near lunar eclipse, starsurge, starfire until near solar eclipse, starsurge, repeat. DOTs will most likely be strong enough to make us want to refresh them whenever they fall off, and we will probably do this in the time between one eclipse going off and us proccing the next. Throw in your general cooldowns like starfall, treants and whatnot in between. How Wild Mushroom plays into this, I really have no idea, but according to Blizzard, we will be motivated to use that against single targets as well. We will see.
In any case, I retain my sheer optimism for all of these changes. I believe that Blizzard knows where our problem areas are, and that they are taking steps to correct them. The rest is just numbers, really. Remember how rogues used to complain in the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King, because a blueposter openly admitted that they wouldn’t fix them until they “saw where they were headed”? I think Blizzard has learned a lot from this expansion, probably more than we give them credit for, and I am certain that they have all classes and specs in mind.
Also, alpha, alpha, alpha!
How about Masterkin or Moonkineries/Boomkineries? I had a guildie that referred to Moonkins as “Masters of the Art of Boomkinery” and it’s stuck with me since
As for DoTs giving us Lunar/Solar energy; I hadn’t thought of that but I get the feeling that Blizzard is not going to go in that direction. This idea hinges heavily on the ideas that a) our DoTs contribute to our Lunar/Solar energy, and b) that each individual DoT on each individual NPC contributes to our energy. If I were to DoT up a group of mobs and each individual DoT contributed to my energy, it may be possible to avoid having to cast Wrath/Starfire/Starsurge to ramp up my energy and I could just swing from Eclipse proc to Eclipse proc like we do today. I think it’s far more likely that our rotation will be like your simple rotation example above.
I think that most likely dots would give power on the cast, not on damage. I seriously doub that we would see our solar/lunar power scale with whatever damage we do with starfire/wrath. So it would probably be the same for dots. And assuming we go through our dots after each eclipse, them giving five power each could probably be part of the last 25 points in my imaginary scenario above, finishing with – what, starsurge probably.
Good point. If the energy were only gained on the initial cast of the DoT I could see that working. I wonder though with DoTs having the ability to crit now though, if that may also affect energy gained from the DoT application (say 2 energy for a normal cast and 5 energy for a crit cast). However I’m not sure how that would work with a DoT such as Insect Swarm that does not have an “initial” damage component like how Moonfire does.
Another interesting thought to DoTs providing lunar/solar energy would be what about items that have a DoT component (ie 4pcT10). If we take Languish for example, if it could provide energy what type would it give? Would it correspond to the spell that charged the “Languish bank” or fall more in line with the energy provided by Starsurge. I’m not sure of an easy and clear way for Blizzard to balance energy granted from a DoT that comes from a set bonus/item, so I think we may find that energy from DoTs only comes from our class spells (MF/IS) if they allow that at all.
However allowing our DoTs to contribute to energy generation leads to some very interesting options for Blizzard. For example a new tier bonus could be that on top of the initial energy gained from the application of the DoT, there is a chance that you could gain energy (albeit a small amount) from the periodic damage from the DoT (ie, 5 lunar energy from the initial cast of MF, and the potential to gain an additional 1 energy per periodic tick of the DoT for a possible maximum of 10 energy per MF application). I would find this to be a very attractive set bonus