A new build is on the beta, and with it, a few changes to our spells:
- Wild Mushroom changed, only 3 mushrooms can be placed at one time (Down from 5).
- Cyclone cast time increased to 2 sec. Up from 1.5 sec.
- Faerie Fire now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
- Insect Swarm now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
- Starfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
- Entangling Roots now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
- Thorns now lasts 20 sec, down from 10 minutes. Damage increased by 1400% (Deals 447 damage instead of 32)
- Moonfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
- Wrath now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
- Moonkin Form now increases Nature and Arcane spell damage by 10%.
- Starlight Wrath now reduces cast time by 0.15/0.25/0.5 sec. (Up from 0.1/0.2/0.3 sec)
First off, props to the creative way to make us want to stay in moonkin form. Ah well, we don’t really need anything fancy to do that, the “you get more damage here” sign will do the trick.
A lot of our spells have gotten increased range. In our case, it seems like a generic 40 yard range, but this is not the case for all classes! It would seem like some spells, for all classes, are capped at 30 yards where others have a 40 yard range. This is interesting because it means I can nuke a warlock from 40 yards range, but he would have to walk 10 yards to be close enough to cast a fear. Not a bad way to force people to make the decision between nuking, healing or CCing.
Starligth Wrath was buffed, which makes sense, while Wild Mushroom was nerfed to 3 shrooms at any one time. Lets take a moment to write up a long blog post about Shrooms being nerfed, so that we.. wait, nevermind. We don’t know the amount of damage it does, how it plays into our rotation, what glyphs it will have and so on. I guess we’ll just wait and see instead.
Lastly, a very interesting change to thorns: It is now a defensive spell. Defensive in the way of saying “If you touch me, you’re going to hurt!”. It is a fine way to do some extra damage, especially if you are either AOE grinding, tanking a bunch of mobs, or if you are being ganked by a rogue. It is no longer a weak retribution aura, but an offensive defense spell, which should give us a bit of fun.
Shrooms is something that isn’t available until level 85, so it’s something the players haven’t really gotten a chance to play with at all. I always thought that trying to put up 5 shrooms before detonating seemed like a waste of time.
I’m very interested to see the full tooltip for Thorns. Does it come with a cooldown? Will we want a tree to keep this up on the main tank?
It would be very interesting to have the damage attributed to the druid no matter who it’s cast on. We’d be rewarded for quick decision making and a high raid awareness while not always expected to do so. Essentially it would be a second ‘hit it and forget it’ cooldown similar to Starfall, giving 20 seconds of damage for 1 global. For multiple add scenarios or bosses with fast swing speeds, this could really add up.
Secondly, Nature’s Swiftness currently reads as “Requires Moonkin Form” but it’s in the 3rd Tier of the Restoration tree and inaccessible to Moonkins. Either the form requirement is wrong or they’re considering moving the talent to Resto Tier 2 or to the Balance tree all together. We’re spending 1 less point in Resto now that Natural Shapeshifter is only 2 points instead of 3. But, it would be odd to have a Moonkin-only talent in the Resto tree.
They still haven’t fixed the Earth and Moon talent to read correctly, so I’m eager to see if it will remain an overbudgeted 1-point talent or will be upped to a 3-pointer for 8% spell damage debuff and 6% personal spell damage (as it should end up being).
Agree with lissanna, they may have brought it down, but maybe you can glyph it back up again. but the question is, at what cost?
Is all my witty points shooting straight past people these days? Im just saying, people are already “raging over the Shroom nerf”, when nobody has even gotten to play with it.
In truth, i think we will glyph it down to one for PvE. One big, powerfull shroom!
Still hopeing for some change to our new silence mechanic, its not much use wen a player can simply run to the left 5 yards.
Solar Beam is nice. They can’t “just” step out of it. They have to react to it, and when they are running, they can’t cast anything anyways.
Heck, you can even root people inside, and they cant do squat about it, or you could actually silence an unlimited amount of people.
I sure hope they put a cooldown on thorns, otherwise we’ll be forced to cast it on the tank every 20 secs.
You mean, much like rogues and hunters are used to MDing tanks? This is basicly a massive threat buff on the tank, for whatever is attacking him already.
Exactly… I’m okay with opening with thorns, but don’t want it part of our rotation.
You could macro Thorns to a focus, it wouldnt be that hard to mannage, but i dont think tanks would need to rely on it.
And people will be casting while moving, both shamans and mages, will be casting while moving, not to mention Instant cast spells.
The increased range is to compensate for the loss of the Nature’s Reach talent, and most other classes that had range extension talents also got the same range increase to their spells. Nothing really new or special there.
Was very surprised to see the Thorns change. I wonder if there will be a Glyph that would extend it’s duration. Makes me think that Blizzard could be thinking of some more potential changes to the spell.
Duskstorm: I was being heavily sarcastic – rogues and hunters have been doing it just fine for over a year now, and it is an amazing bump in threat. I don’t really see the big issue. We’ll just make a focus macro like they did, and everything will be fine.
Pahimar: Well, with nature’s reach, we’re at 36 yards. Some of our spells in Cataclysm has a 40 yard range
Glyph of Thorns will probably get changed, because that would be insanely powerful, even if its on our own.
@Qieth, I get it now…. anyways looks like there’s a 45 sec cooldown as well. I didn’t want to have to sacrifice a global cooldown every 20 secs, when I’m not even a class that pushes the tank on the threat meter.
Whats the big deal? Having to push one button once in a while, if it means that your raid is much better off, is hardly a problem.
In any case, we’d probably just use it on big trash packs, or if the tank needs a bit of extra threat on a boss.