I really wanted to join in on the Blizzard developer chat on Twitter. I was waiting up for it to start, only to fall asleep on the couch 30 minutes before it was supposed to start. Waking up 8 hours later, the chat was over and out, but at least I could read the logs. I had a few questions that I wanted answered, so I guess I’ll post them here. Ghostcrawler, could you be a sport and reply when you read this? (well, one can dream, right?)
What I really want to know is:
- Do we get to keep moonkin form as a permanent shapeshift, or are you planning to empose the same deal on us as with restoration druids?
- Will we get more choices for customization than what we have in our current talent tree?
- Will there be more options in the restoration tree, rather than the current 5 points we can put in?
- Will balance and restoration always be tied to each other, or might we ever see options in the feral tree for our last 10 talent points?
- What’s the deal with Nature’s Grace?
In any case, Blizzard did answer a lot of questions, but some of them very quite vague. There was no questions about our moonkin form, which means that either nobody was concerned about us maybe losing our forms, or that they didn’t answer because they haven’t decided.
Blizzard responded to two questions regarding eclipse:
Q: Will Arcane spells do more damage with higher Lunar power on the scale? And will more Mastery increase that bonus damage?
A. Currently, the plan is for Mastery to increase the damage bonus of Eclipse (both Lunar and Solar).
Q: Moonkin: What are your plans for Eclipse, and why does it infect so many of our talents? What are your plans to make Moonkin fun?
A. The model we are trying now lets Solar and Lunar Eclipse procs last for about 45 seconds, and each spell of the appropriate type that you cast moves the bar back closer to the middle again. The buff is canceled by reaching the middle. This should let Moonkin “hold” the buff for short periods of time when they need to move or get out of the fire.
Kinda weird. Kinda vague. Kinda don’t know what to make of it. My biggest concern is with this new eclipse system they are testing out. Obviously, its not even on the beta yet, they are just playing around with the ideas. I loved the previous (currently on beta) system, as it allowed us to scale perfectly with both crit and haste, and with better gear we would get more out of eclipse and proc eclipse faster.
With the new system, no matter what we do, half of our time would be spent inside eclipse and the other half out of eclipse. With more haste, we would just get back to the middle of the meter faster, but with the same amount of spells, and we would reach the other end faster, but with the same amount of spells. Whats worse, the more crit we get, we would actually reach the middle faster, as crits generate more power, and we might actually lose a cast. This is the sort of non scaling and negative scaling that we’ve been struggling with in WOTLK.
Allowing eclipse to last 45 seconds does give us room to move without losing too much eclipse. And maybe, with this new system, we would use starsurge in a different way. When we are close to the middle, but still under eclipse, a starsurge would in theory push us back towards “the way we came”, giving us a few more casts. And then, when we pass the middle, we go all out towards the other end as fast as we can.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Blizzard decides. If they feel like they have a decent system, it will come out on the beta servers and people can start cracking down on it. Then, we might come up with new ideas to deal with this. Still, I like the current beta system more, as it will give us control, better scaling and a fun tool to deal damage with.
I see one of two things happening:
1. Either our damage is high enough that we are raid viable,
OR
2. They discover it isn’t, and they buff us until we are.
“Is my rotation actually fun” is not something that really crosses most poeple’s minds who play this game, but I for one am excited for the changes because I think the rotation will be a lot more fun. We’ll be able to “store up” damage via eclipse charge and “release” it at the most strategic time. I see us working out our rotation on the fly dynamically for each encounter.
I *know* our DPS will always be viable; Blizzard is committed to that. I’m personally more interested to see if the new Moonkin play style is more fun.
I am not concerned about numbers. Im sure they will do what is needed to make us come out alongside with everybody else. What does concern me is the negative effects this particular system could have: Haste doesn’t scale, and crit suddenly means we get *less* out of an eclipse. This is a problem.
I don’t think the rotation will be very dynamic. I think we will discover that Eclipse is powerful enough that we want to maximize uptime and thus we will work on proccing Eclipse as rapidly as possible.
As far as using Starsurge to extend the Eclipse, by doing that, you are ensuring that it is not available to push the meter to the other Eclipse. Also, the verbiage on the second quote implies to me that the meter can only be lowered during an Eclipse proc. So if you cast Starfire under a Solar Eclipse, then the meter will not move at all.
RE: Crit – While we get less per proc, that also has the same effect on the Eclipse downtime. I think it will be a wash mostly and our percentage uptime will stay relatively similar.
I personally wish Blizzard would change the properties of solar and lunar eclipse so that they both have distinctly different functions. Solar eclipse could be the max dps, low mana efficiency, snap “add killing” burst, and lunar eclipse could be more for mana regen, slow ramp up time, etc.
As it stands, apart from the mathy problems with eclipse, my biggest gameplay “feeling” issue is that solar and lunar eclipse are functionally the same thing.
I would love for there to be more strategy around it. Is a valk spawing in 10 secs? OK, charge up solar eclipse now, and once it spawns I can “unload.” Heroism/bloodlust would be perfect for solar eclipse. But you can’t do that the whole fight… not because the mechanic forces you to swap between the two eclipses, but because you’ll certainly oom. So you’ll need to time some of your time around lunar eclipses, for steady, respectable sustained damage.
Lunar should be like 90% the sustained DPS of solar, but take a full on 20 seconds to ramp up. Solar should do great dps, especially in the first 20 seconds. But you can’t sustain it because you’ll OOM.
To me, one of the things missing in our rotation is longer term decision making.. we have addons that tell us basically exactly what spell to cast; there’s virtually no longer term decisions to make.
I’m starting to hear a lot about Eclipse being boring. It is, I agree. But I think we need to stop talking about it on the blogosphere and start talking about it on the beta forums where balance druids have been remarkably quiet. While I’m sure that there are Blues that read this blog (and hopefully mine) I think we need to collect as a community on the beta forums to develop a voice. I think we’ve gotten few (if any?) blue responses there because we are far from the squeaky wheel. Let’s raise the squeak volume and get some attention, eh? I said the same on EJ and plan on putting up an Eclipse discussion there.
@Relevart
Too true. I think I’ll try and score a beta invite just to post some thoughts.
What I’m thinking with Eclipse is that they are wanting us to see if we can make an Eclipse last 45 seconds. We have the new ability that will give us either more Lunar or Solar Power based on which is higher. I could see moonkins casting until it is close to center and then either casting our new spell or Wrath to push it back to more Lunar to get more Eclipse procs.
Relevart 1 > So what you’re saying is that its fine that Eclipse – which is the major focus of our spec, mastery and so on – does not scale with haste or crit? This just doesn’t sit well with me.
As for starsurge, with the proposed idea, we could use starsurge just before reaching the middle to get more out of eclipse – say, another two casts perhaps – and then pass the middle and fire away to the other end. So it could still work out like this.
Im just not a big fan of eclipse being static. In our live version, eclipse procs faster now than when we were in Naxx gear. This would be a major part of our scaling. Having it half and half would make it redundant. Not a perk but a hassle. We need some way to take advantage of eclipse, to extend it, to make more use of it as we level up – otherwise its just a hinderence.
Starsurge might help. They might scratch the idea completely. To be fair, the current implementation of eclipse on beta servers is an awesome system that allows for scaling with gear, a lot of control, and a fun way to use the eclipse system. If we suffered from movement, then its no more a problem than it is now, but the beta system still offers control.
Still, I don’t judge. Its not on the beta servers yet, so they might scrap it, or add to it.
Duskstorm > Eclipse forces us to use different spells. Heck, its the only system of its kind. Do you remember back when we would proc lunar eclipse, spam starfire, reapply dots, then spam starfire again. Then we would do a couple more wraths, then back to starfire spam. That wasn’t fun at all.
Eclipse in its current and future forms will push us to alter our gameplay to take advantage of the proc. I don’t want to risk having to move when I got the bursty damage, and then stand still when i regen mana.
Relevart 2 > Like I said above, I don’t consider eclipse boring. I find it amazing that we have such a unique system. Unfortunately, I don’t have beta access, so I don’t have access to the beta forum either. And I really don’t think that there are any blues that read my blog – if they do, I have no indication of it
I can’t just assume that they do 
Redhawks > This will only work if it takes longer than, say, 20 seconds, to reach the middle. Then we would use starsurge when we had used enough power (or distance on the meter) to get back to the end of it, then keep nuking, then when the 15 second cooldown is up on Starsurge, we might use it again. Then when we pass the middle, we rush to the other end. However, it would require a short cooldown on starsurge, or a long time to reach the middle of the meter.
They are considering giving us a long duration on eclipse so we don’t suffer movement, but they probably expect it to cancel out much sooner.
@Qieth
Hell, I remember when my rotation was IS SFx4 ad infinitum
It’s true that eclipse forces us to change spells, but a more complicated rotation isn’t (and mustn’t) be the only way to make a DPS class more fun. Instead, we need to be making more long term decisions.
You make a good point about my suggestion; if it were trivial for someone to come up with an idea that addresses all the issues without creating new ones, Blizzard would have made every class perfect by now
Still, I want to see more complexity coming in the form of additional decisions about overall DPS strategy over the course of the entire fight, rather than more micromanagement.
In the response to Eclipse, GC stated that the goal was to let Druids “hold” the buff for a little time so that movement is not so disastrous. Given the following, I am inclined to believe that the bar will be uni-directional after an Eclipse proc:
“and each spell of the appropriate type that you cast moves the bar back closer to the middle again”
There is specific mention of an obvious mechanic that we know and an omission of moving the bar back the other way by casting the “inappropriate” spell. I really think that they’re trying to stop us from “milking” the longer Eclipse buff. It’s really their bandaid for movement. If we can milk it, great, but I’m not counting on it.
Do I think it’s ok that Eclipse doesn’t scale with haste and Crit? Not particularly. But at the same time, if the Eclipse cancels at zero it will always do this. That’s identical to charges in that you don’t have a time limit, but rather a set number of casts (or a minutely dynamic number of casts).
I am on Beta and Eclipse is boring. It’s taken the live reactive system and turned it into predictable bar watching. Eclipse doesn’t add any dynamics to the situation, it simply says “hit 5 instead of 4 now”. It also doesn’t change how my spells interact. It only offers me a meager bonus for switching spells.
sorry, upon re-reading that sounded a little pretentious. I simply meant that I have fiddled with the new Eclipse meter system in a movement free environment and I find it lacking in many ways, most noticeably in dynamics and “fun”. I see Eclipse as a binary operation telling me when to switch spell schools. Eclipse feels slow and clunky and DoTs/Starsurge currently don’t mesh well due to bugs with starsurge and no extra buffs from DoTs.
Duskstorm > But the current beta system is perfect
Relevart > This is not charges. It will come out to 50/50 unless we are able to prolong the time it takes to get to the middle, without actually losing the benefit of the buff (like, casting wrath during lunar eclipse to move it back towards eclipse). If its purely 50/50, then we might as well not have it, other than to force us to use different spells.
One of the good examples of long-term strategy is Arcane mages.. as I understand it, they can do really, really high burst damage, but have to switch to more mana efficient rotations when they threaten to OOM.
Their actual rotations are simple, but the complexity and depth comes from mana management.
I’d like to see that combined with eclipse, where we choose one or the other situationally, rather than bounce between them because of an artificially contrived cooldown mechanic.
About rotation on the current beta. Consider eclipse compared to, say, a mage rotation. AB AB AB AM. Repeat. At least with eclipse, we can sit in anticipation of our proc and use abilities during these situations. Like, popping our haste potion during lunar, or whatnot. I think eclipse is a lot more interesting than so many other rotations, and I’m looking forward to the future – at least with this system
@Qieth
Having played a balance druid for several years now, I’ve just come to the conclusion that if rotation is merely a sequence of buttons you push over and over again then it well eventually get boring. It’ll get boring faster if your rotation is 1 1 1 2, but even 1 2 3 (until proc) 4 4 4 2 3 etc. will still eventually get boring.
My problem is that, currently, our rotations are all but entirely decoupled from the fight itself. The only time the fight interacts with our rotation is when a mechanic forces us to move, or when a mechanic forces us to switch targets. Saving our starfall for when adds pop is interesting, but it still is, at its core, a response to a scripted event. Basically, our rotation is currently connected to the fight itself only in primitive ways.
We need more complexity for our abilities to stay fun, but that complexity cannot come from additional burden on our rotation. That’s why I say give us essentially two rotations for two situations, and the need to plan out which ones we use based on what’s going on. Eclipse should be a way for us to decide when to change the rotations based on what the fight throws at us.
A more complicated rotation isn’t needed. More predictability will make it boring. More RNG will make us tear our hair out. I think the best solution is to make which eclipse rotation we use our choice, but make the resource implications of that choice force us to use both of them situationally.
The Twitter dev chat said they were looking at 45 seconds to return to the middle if you do not cast any Starfire.
Q: Moonkin: What are your plans for Eclipse, and why does it infect so many of our talents? What are your plans to make Moonkin fun?
A. The model we are trying now lets Solar and Lunar Eclipse procs last for about 45 seconds, and each spell of the appropriate type that you cast moves the bar back closer to the middle again. The buff is canceled by reaching the middle. This should let Moonkin “hold” the buff for short periods of time when they need to move or get out of the fire.
Actually, it’s almost identical to charges. You have a certain number of spells that will benefit from Eclipse assuming that the bar is unidirectional under its effects. You have a set time in which to use these charges (or number of spell casts) before the effect wears off, canceling all unused charges. Granted crit will change that number slightly, but in the end, it falls within a rather small range. As I said before, I don’t know if the bar will be unidirectional but the way it was stated strongly suggests that it will be.
Currently, what you describe:
“If its purely 50/50, then we might as well not have it, other than to force us to use different spells.”
is exactly how it feels. The only reason I am switching spells is because Eclipse happens. With the proposed changes, that feeling will only become more prevalent.
I’m sure you know by know that I am looking for a more complicated rotation that borders on triage and that’s what I find interesting. I’m sure the easiest answer there is “lawl go feral” but I’ve always had a little attachment to caster druids since that’s how I leveled in vanilla wow. I’d really like to see the rotation become both interesting and rewarding.
I understand the comparison to Arcane Mages and I don’t find their rotation interesting either. But not being the least boring rotation is not a good reason to say it’s ok. I’d still like to pursue a less static rotation.
@Relevart
I don’t think a really complicated rotation is good for balance druids. If a spec is really hard to play, it becomes harder to maximize your rotation *and* be raid aware.
Again, a cat druid’s rotation may be more intricate and complicated than ours, but there’s still no more strategy — no more decision making — than ours. Just a tougher script to follow. But you’re still going to get to the point where you’ve got your rotation down to the point where you could do it in your sleep.
So I think in the long run we’d get bored with a more complicated rotation, too. It would just take longer. Medium complexity rotation with more *situational* decision making makes most sense to me. Don’t give me two nukes with slightly different cast times and arbitrarily force me to switch between the two with a gimmicky mechanic. Give me a real *tradeoff* between the two, and throw a variety situations that each force me to decide which eclipse is the best.
“Medium complexity rotation with more *situational* decision making makes most sense to me. Don’t give me two nukes with slightly different cast times and arbitrarily force me to switch between the two with a gimmicky mechanic. Give me a real *tradeoff* between the two, and throw a variety situations that each force me to decide which eclipse is the best.”
Ok, that sounds good to me. I like the idea. But I think for it to work, Eclipse needs to do more than just provide a static damage buff. That’s just not very interesting for decisions. I’m all for situational decisions but I’m not sure how we’d accomplish this with the current or proposed systems outside of “Oh I’m moving soon so I might want to hold off on that Eclipse and spam some Moonfire first.”
@Relevart – I tend to agree, though I wouldn’t be opposed to a static damage to the nature or arcane schools of magic themselves.
Couple of scenarios:
1. One eclipse is good for mana regen, the other is good for “snap” burst damage. So, in this example, lunar eclipse would cause starfire crits to regen mana, and each moonfire tick to increase arcane damage by 3%, stacking up to 10 times. That way there’s a slow ramp up, and it gives back mana. A 30 sec cooldown to make the next starfire instant combined with moonfire spam could be our “movement” dps. On the solar side, we could increase the damage of wrath by 60%, but increase the mana cost by 40%. So you could only take about 20 seconds of this before you OOMed.
2. One eclipse is good for movement, the other is good for standing still. So, solar eclipse could cause wrath to be an instant cast. Lunar eclipse could cause each starfire to increase arcane damage by 3%, up to 10 times, with movement cancelling the stack itself. Probably a bit too unforgiving, but you get the idea.
3. One eclipse is good for single target damage, the other is good for aoe. Solar eclipse causes your wrath to “chain” to up to 2 targets (3 if glyphed). It reduces in damage by 20% each step. Lunar eclipse causes your starfall ability to “focus” on only one mob, doing intense damage and further buffing your starfall.
Just random thoughts off the top of my head, but Blizzard with their team of much brighter and more experienced game designers could clearly do much better than me.
Duskstorm > Yeah, but you just described every rotation for every class in game. All of them are eventually nothing more than 1 2 3 4 or 1 3 2 4 or 11 22 33 44. At least we can react to procs, rather than durations. I find that a lot more entertaining than a completely static rotation. Kitty DPS might be more complicated, but eventually, it still comes down to a set rotation.
Redhawks > You misunderstand the blue comment. They just want it to last for more than is needed to make sure that we can move for 20-30 seconds and still have eclipse up when we stop moving. They never said anything about grossly prolonging the time it takes to move from one end to the middle. Heck, if this was the case, then we would *really* be spamming. You’d be casting 22,5 starfires during a 45 second eclipse.
And even then, this would mean it would take 45 seconds to get to the other end. Still 50/50.
Relevart > I disagree. If it was charges, then we could – as we do on live – reduce the time between new eclipse procs. Lets say you had the current live system, but with charges. You would go through 10 lunar charges in, say, 20 seconds, but then it would only take you a few seconds to proc the next eclipse because of your crit rate.
But when you have 10 starfires to the middle, and 10 starfires to the other side, you still end up at 50/50.
With the beta system, you will know when you will proc eclipse. You get, say, 15 seconds, and as you get more haste, you will be able to get out more starfires – as it is now. And with more starfires, and with more crit, you generate more eclipse power. This means that in the beginning of the expansion, you might be at the middle again after 15 seconds, but with endgame gear, you might be halfway to the other side when your eclipse ends, meaning more eclipse uptime, and scaling.
Moonkin rotation is not much different than other classes. But at least we react to a change, not whenever a cooldown is up. With the beta system, we would get more eclipses faster, swap spells more, heck, we might even change our rotation later to adjust for more haste.
As i said above, Feral might be more complicated *to understand and get used to* but its not really that different for a pro. Im sure my feral druid friend could do it in his sleep as well.
Duskstorm and Relevart > Remember that our rotation might be different from what we have now. For example, IS will probably be up all the time. We can use starsurge at our own choosing, and this will affect our rotation. Wild Mushroom is a wildcard, cause Blizzard wants it to be useful on single target fights as well. How that will play in is anybodys guess. With starsurge and wild mushroom, I think we get a lot of situational decisions. I’m looking forward to it. I can’t think of anything to do now, but we have no idea what Blizzard has in store for us with those abilities.
Heck, simple idea for Shrooms: Glyph of Wild Mushrooms – you can only cast one mushroom, but damage is increased by…
Duskstorm (last) > Neither of those ideas will work. They are not very transparent for newbies, heck, not even for pros. Just imagine trying to theorycraft that. They also suffer greatly from suddenly have to move. What if you spam wrath and lose all your mana, but then have to move while you’re spamming starfire, and you are bonkered on mana.
Although I find Duskstorm’s ideas very interesting, I will not comment on them for now and instead suggest a way the “current” Beta eclipse, the one that Qieth discusses, could be influenced more by crit (less so by haste).
Why not make it so that if you are “on one side” of the eclipse-o-meter, critical strikes will grant so-and-so many points on the respective side?
An example: I try to pop Lunar Eclipse. I spam Wrath a couple of times. Whenever I crit with Wrath, the bar moves, say, 4 (of 40) additional points to the “Lunar end”. So far this is how we all expect it to work. But now you procc Lunar and start spamming Starfire. In Qieth’s scenario critical starfires will generate “Solar energy”, whereas in my scenario, a crit with whatever spell will generate points on the side the eclipse-o-meter currently leans towars, i.e. in this scenario a Starfire crit under Lunar will consume, say, 10 Lunar points (=moving the bar 10 points to Solar), but will generate another 4 Lunar points (=moving the bar 4 points to Lunar again).
I hope, you get what I am aiming at. I know I often write confusingly.
Another word to my suggestion:
This approach would: a) prolong actual eclipse procs (I like the idea that we can use starsurge to prolong procs, but why should crit work “against” us here?) and b) not slow down proccing the next eclipse.
So essentially, with more crit, your eclipse will last longer and proc faster.
I guess I don’t understand what you’re getting at here. We accept that the balance bar moves on cast, do we not? Based on that, more haste and more crit would reduce the average time to proc just as it would reduce the average time to use an Eclipse. Of course charges look different without the Balance Bar. But that seems like the one piece of Eclipse that Blizzaed has already set in stone so when I’m talking about charges, I’m assuming the Balance Bar. In fact, lets break it down:
Let’s let X be the number of casts and N be the number of crits out of X casts.
Each Starfire generates +20 power. Each Starfire crit generates an additional +8 power. When a Lunar Eclipse is procced, we are given 25 Lunar Charges. Each Starfire cast consumes 5 charges and each critical Starfire consumes an additional 2. Then
5X + 2N >= 25
is the end of the Eclipse (or when the balance bar reaches zero because 20X + 8N will always be strictly great than 100 power.
Wrath doesn’t break down as nicely because each Wrath generates -13 power. Each Wrath crit generates an additional -4 power. Unfortunately, 100 and 13 are not numerical friends. That means we don’t get to divide and we get a similar equation with 100 Solar Charges. Each Wrath consumes 13 charges and each crit consumes 4. Then
13X + 4N >= 100
is the end of the Solar Eclipse since 13X + 4N will always be strictly greater than 100 power.
One could say the exact same thing about proccing Eclipse so it’s 50/50. But haste decreases the time it takes to cast these spells so we are able to decrease the time it takes to proc an Eclipse. What we aren’t able to do (over a long period of time) is increase our Eclipse uptime. I agree this causes a scaling problem and I think it should be addressed. However, this scaling problem is a direct result of charges when both the Eclipse, and the way it is procced operate on a charge based system (as any numerical slider can be broken down into a charge system with 100 charges on each side of neutral). That’s one of the reasons we can control the proc: We can control the charges left (or eclipse power left, if you like).
Anyway, charges or no, I think the point I’m trying to make is that currently (and the proposed version doesn’t change this) Eclipse is just a marker that tells me to switch spells and offers me incentive to do so. It does nothing to change the function of my spells or even how they interact. It simply makes one slightly stronger than the other.
@ Bartol
You mean like a refund for critting? I like that idea. It certainly allows us to prolong Eclipse by critting more frequently. It does add a good deal of variability from Eclipse proc to Eclipse proc (as I am sure to have some with all crits and others with none).
While this is not exactly what I meant when I said change the way they interact, this DOES change the way the spells interact with the Balance Bar as we proc Eclipse.
@Qieth
What makes them not transparent? The tooltip’s could convey the advantages and disadvantages. There’s a warlock ability that says “does a lot of damage, but also causes a lot of threat.” This wouldn’t be the first time that choosing an ability is a tradeoff.
Regarding theorycrafters having a hard time with new mechanics, I would argue the opposite. They’d have two (ostensibly) simpler rotations to optimize. The larger choice of which to use would be left to the player.
I like the idea of having aspects of fight that ultimately break down to pure skill of play, rather than whether you’ve read the right elitist jerks thread that has number crunched the life out of everything you’re doing. This is coming from a guy that loves math.
Regarding suffering from suddenly having to move, I can’t think of a single fight in the game where you have to “suddenly” move. I know when defile is about to happen, and when it does, I know that I have a roughly 10% chance of being targeted. I know when the next malleable goo is about to happen, etc. I may not know if I’ll be picked, but I certainly know to be ready.
You may not like my solution (for good reasons), but I’m merely offering possible solution to a problem that I think can’t be ignored: they’ve added eclipse to force us to switch between spells, but wrath and starfire are essentially the same spell with different cast times. They used to be distinguished by mana efficiency, and to a lesser extent magic school (for fights with actual magic immunities), but that’s gone. They *need* to give us a tradeoff. Otherwise they’re really not making anything more “fun.”
Way, way, way too complicated for anyone to understand. Heck, you lost me there as well
Lets keep it simple: There is no way that the proposed new eclipse system, on its basic level, can be anything more than 50/50. But the system currently on the beta will scale with haste and crit, and greatly at that. This is my basic beef.
@Qieth – yeah, I feel ya.
I’m having a growing problem in that I’ve been raiding for a few years now, and encounters still have this “scripty” feel to them that makes them sort of bland to me. You come up with the strategy, that is essentially a giant choreography, and you win when you get everyone to execute it correctly. The bosses never strategize against you, so there’s no dynamic element to the fights.
What I really want is more adaptive intelligence from the encounters that forces us to make decisions in real time. The whole three step process of “1. read up on the fights, 2. work on my rotation on the training dummy, 3. get myself the best gear available” has become stale. I love the game, and I love playing a Moonkin, but I really, really find myself craving boss encounters that force more outside the box thinking, rather than rote memorization and dutiful performance of dull and repetitive rotations.
Yep I agree. 50/50 with the new system. I proposed over on my blog that they take the later of 15 seconds or halfway. This will help babykins as they gear up and yet allow scaling to take over once haste and crit push an Eclipse past the halfway point. It’s sorta like putting a hard cap at the bottom with room for upward growth as gear progresses. The proposed Eclipse is a catch-22 in a way. By increasing the buff time to accommodate movement, they have to place a cutoff point somewhere to stop us from “exploiting” the increased buff by standing still. Capping the lower limit with a time (15 seconds) and the upper limit with a bar position (zero) allows for a bit of scaling after gear gets good without the downside of “too much Eclipse”. I’m not sure that was clear…
@Duskstorm
I’m not sure fluid scripting would lead to anything but a more detailed strategy. If he does X, we do Y. If he does Z, we do W. There will always be some optimal move or some combination that is best to use and there will always be a pencil jockey willing to figure it out. Until we stop using the Trinity model of Tank/Healer/DPS and start using positioning and surroundings (which implies collision detection) I think you’re stuck doing your highest DPS rotation as often as possible while decreasing incoming damage…
Alright, so you don’t like raiding anymore, Dusk
Nothing more to it 
@Qieth – I think more than anything I’m sick of normal modes. But, it’s really hard to get into hardmodes without a quality group of players, and I only raid two nights a week so there’s not a lot of options for me.
I had tons of fun with Halion because the strats basically sucked (since it was so new) and the boss mods hadn’t been updated. I felt like *I* was playing the game again, rather than just doing my best to imitate a Tankspot video.
What would really be the most fun for me would be to raid with 10-12 people that all agreed to never read strategies. I know that sounds masochistic, but the fun for me is (and always has been) in the strategy.
Relevart > But that means its going to take at least 30 seconds to reach the other side, if not more. If you want babykins to be able to experience 15 seconds of eclipse, and still haven’t passed the middle, then you’ll be spamming starfire for thirty seconds or more.
And I am not too fussed about how the state is while leveling up. It is much more concerning how it will turn out when you get more haste and crit, at which point, it will be 50/50. If it wasn’t clear, I’m no fan of 50/50 and eclipse not scaling
Dusk > Aye, once you’ve done the normal modes, they are quite trivial. Best go find yourself a guild that can take you to hard modes, although I must admit, when you are clearing 11/12 HC in 2-3 hours, they are somewhat trivial as well. Then again, we are still having loads of fun, so I dont complain
And with 10 man raids being equal to 25 man raids in Cataclysm, you might be able to find a guild that better suits your needs
PS. New blog post
It will only take 30 seconds or more for a boomkin that cannot get to the halfway point within 15 seconds. But that means that the boomkin has either low haste or low crit (or maybe low both), so shouldn’t he get less out of his Eclipse? I logged on to my druid and in ICC 25 gear, he got past halfway in 15 seconds on almost every Eclipse. And quest rewards are starting to outshine my gear (at 82). I was turning Eclipses around in 20 to 25 seconds (from proc to proc) on Beta. This means that with my gear, my uptime would not be 50% given my proposed scaling (15 second minimum on the Eclipse buff). It is greater (around 60%).
But yes, no scaling = bad. I think the new Eclipse system will be coming out today or tomorrow so I’ll have some words about it then.