Before I continue this post, I want to make it absolutely clear that this is pure speculation. I don’t know whats going on in the Alpha, and I don’t have any information that you don’t. Just so thats covered.

But that doesn’t stop us from guessing a bit. I was thinking the other day, about what kind of glyphs we might see in Cataclysm..

First off, I think its fairly reasonable to think that we wont be rolling with the same glyphs at level 85. Even something as strong as Glyph of Starfall is probably going to be outdated. Anything else would be pretty poor. So far, our glyph choices have been slim pickings: Glyph of Starfire and Moonfire both affect the same spell, and then the choice was down to Glyph of Insect Swarm – a glyph for a weak spell, only a minor part of our damage – or lately, Glyph of Starfall.

Its been bugging me that our glyphs, prior to the Starfall buff, affected something that was only around 10% of our total damage. I mean, buffs are nice and all, but I’d like them to have a bit bitter impact on our damage. The Glyph of Starfall suddenly became quite powerful when they buffed the ability, and thats the kind of thing I want to see. Most of all, I want to see glyphs that has a major impact on how we play, like the frost mage glyph that turns their Water Elemental into a pet, or something along those lines.

What else has there been? Glyph of Wrath reduced our pushback, and Glyph of Hurricane added a slowing effect we don’t need. Then theres Glyph of Monsoon, which also buffs a weak spell. I want to have options. I want to want to re-glyph between figths, and in order to do that, we need something with a bit more juice.

I think it’s fair to assume that we will see Glyphs for all new abilities, and some new ones for old abilities. Lets see what we can come up with!

Glyph of Wild Mushroom

Gives the mushroom a 1 minute duration. During this time, it will pulse every x seconds for y damage.

I’m trying to figure out how Blizzard might make this into something we would want to cast on a single target fight. If it works somewhat like a long DOT or a beacon of sorts, it would be very nice to have around. It would also make for some killer Shroom Parties in Orgrimmar.

Glyph of Starlight Wrath

I have a feeling that Starlight Wrath/Nature’s Torrent will be a big part of our rotation come Cataclysm, probably something we do just before each eclipse. Or even more likely, it will probably generate a lot of Lunar/Solar energy, and be the last push after we put up our DOTs and use other cooldowns. I could imagine a buff being something like:

Increases your damage by x for y seconds after casting Starlight Wrath. Simple as that. But it could also be used to bring back a favourite: For 10 seconds after using Starlight Wrath, your wrath and starfire critical strikes leave a languishing DOT on the target. You know the drill.

Glyph of Force of Nature

Turns your Force of Nature into a permanent pet, but spawns only one Treant at a time.

Come on, it’s bound to happen. Mages probably wont use their level 80 frost glyph in level 85, so it leaves room for a little pet class, should we choose to. It could even have a cool stance system, as a tank, DPS and a healer. Nothing that could substitute any real class, but something along the lines of tank pets for hunters, a DPS mode with melee swings and a healer type that chugs around some HOTs.å

Glyph of Frenzied Insect Swarm

Gives your Insect Swarm a chance to cause the target to Frenzy, leaving it volunerable to your attacks for 10 seconds.

I’d like to see Insect Swarm play a bigger role for us in Cataclysm. I mean, think about it, spawning a swarm of Bees is cool, isn’t it? And if I had a hundred bees buzzing around me, I’d be pretty frantic too. It could merely be a small 5 second buff, but it would be nice to have IS bring more to the table.

Glyph of…

What do you think?

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!

- QQ

Surely, these seem like rather interesting and creative changes. We can only muse about how they will play out once Cataclysm goes live, so in the meantime, lets take an in depth look at the changes.

Please refer to my previous post for a list of all changes.

Eclipse

This is a very interesting change. Right off the bat, it means that we will not suffer nearly as much from moving as we do currently. This mechanic is very similar to the stacking suggestion I made somewhere: When you cast a nature spell, you gain a stack of lunar eclipse and vice versa.

The easiest way to look at this is to consider Starfire and Wrath a 100% damage spell. If you cast a starfire, the next will do, say, 90% damage, the next 80%, 70% and so on. At some point you decide that you do not want to cast starfire anymore – probably when your moonfire runs out – and you switch to wrath. Your first wrath will be buffed to do, say, 150% more damage. The next will do 145% damage, then 140% and so on. I am going to assume that it takes roughly two wraths to move the meter the same distance as one starfire does.

If you are just spamming these abilities, the net damage will be the same over any length of fight – much like an mage that does nothing but spam Arcane Missiles. Thats fine, because the spells will probably be normalized, where we right now need eclipse to be up to do comparable damage, but now we will do it right off the bat. Where this system can really shine is when you are able to plan ahead. How can we use this to our benefit?

You know that bloodlust is coming in 10 seconds. You spam a lot of wraths, making your starfires really powerful. When bloodlust comes, you can throw some very fast, very big starfires. I am not sure how this will effect the meter – it would obviously deplete the meter faster, but I would think that Blizzard has a way around this. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that our spells cannot go below 100% damage – so once your meter is at the middle, your starfires will still do 100%, but the wrath buff will stack up. This allows you to still take full advantage of bloodlust, with a big burst at the beginning, and then spamming normal damage starfire for the remaining duration. This also means that we end each bloodlust with a very powerful wrath, which we then switch over to afterwards. If Blizzard DOES allow our starfire/wrath to go below 100%, then they will need to find a way to compensate for this.

When you have to move, you can spam instant cast spells to stack up whatever eclipse type you prefer. It will give you a lot of control when you get to know a fight. This change actually makes movement much less of a trouble than before, because we are compensated for the movement by getting more powerful spells when we stand still.

Eclipse Mastery

How Eclipse Mastery will play out is very hard to tell. The simplest way to implement this is to simply make the additional bonus stronger. It might make the eclipse meter longer, so we are able to stack it further to one side if we wish, although that would make us switch spells less. It might stack up the buff faster, but that would probably mean that our current buff depletes faster. I am probably going to have to go with the first suggestion made, and assume that spells can be buffed, say, 50% in either direction, and the more mastery we have, the higher will this scale go. If it takes 10 starfires to buff wrath to 150% damage, then more mastery could make 10 starfires buff wrath to 175% damage.

Nature’s Torrent

I am not sure what to think of this. It will probably be a big hitting spell, although I am not sure if it is instant or not. It will do a different type of damage depending on how your eclipse meter is looking, and it is probably something we will want to use everytime it is off cooldown. If it didn’t do very much damage, it would have to be instant, so we could quickly move the meter, but my money is on a big hitter that we use once we are done casting one type of spell, do a large amount of damage, and then switch to the other nuke.

From this, our rotation would probably look something like this:
Moonfire, Starfire until full solar eclipse, Nature’s Torrent, Insect Swarm, wrath until full lunar eclipse, Nature’s Torrent, Moonfire, repeat.

Wild Mushroom

This is a very currious ability. I am not sure what to make of it. It seems like Blizzard wants to give us more options to do AOE damage. But for some reason, Blizzard thinks that it is fine to do on a single target fight as well, probably when it is buffed by eclipse. I think of it somewhat like warlock’s Seed of Corruption, although it doesn’t require damage to explode.

We can probably only have one mushroom up at the same time. Casting it again will probably simply detonate it ahead of time, which is the only reason I can come up with to why we have the ability to explode it at will. If we simply plant it in a pack of mobs, or near the boss, it probably wont explode before it turns invisible, but if we detonate before it turns invisible, it might blow up right away. But if we can simply detonate it right when we spawn it, the damage would have to be comparable to starfire and wrath, because otherwise we wouldn’t use it on a single target unless we are moving around. It is probably nature damage, and would affect our eclipse meter as well.

I must be honest, this ability confuses me a little bit, but once we get more information on it, and are able to brood over the posibilities more, a way of using this will probably arise. In any case, it sounds like a fun little “proximity mine”, and I am sure that PvP’ers will love to set up traps in BG’s and arenas.

What about DOTs?

Unfortately, it doesn’t appear from the preview that our DOTs will be affected by crit and haste, is other classes are. HOTs are surely affected, but it may be that Blizzard hasn’t decided on it yet. I still think that DOTs will be part of our rotation, and we will probably cast them with a fully charged eclipse meter to get the most out of them. The way they scale with spell power will just have to be corrected a bit.

Stampeding Roar

I sort of feel like I should mention this ability. There is nothing stopping us from switching into bear or cat form to cast this on our raid members, or we could even use it if we have to move a long distance, like if you are far away from the spore meeting point on Festergut, or if Sindragosa pulls you in for a Blistering Cold just before you wanted to reset your stack. As always, I am sure that we will find a way to use this ability, at least in some fights.

Unanswered Questions

There are a lot of “What about”‘s and “What If”‘s hanging in the air, but we must keep in mind that this is probably not every change that is coming with Cataclysm. Preview is preview, one might say, and there are still months before we will actually see Cataclysm. Some of the things I wonder about are:

• Starfall – Will each star hitting the target count as one cast, or will the stars have a set damage depending on the eclipse meter when they were cast? They are obviously arcane, so they would favor a full lunar eclipse meter.
• Treants – Are they nature? Will their damage depend on the state of the eclipse meter?
• Typhoon – Assuming that this is a nature spell, is this just going to be a weak version of Nature’s Torrent that we use when we move about?
• Hurricane – Much like Starfall, will this count as one movement on the eclipse meter, or will each hit change it? That could make AOE look something like Hurricane > Mushroom > Hurricane > Mushroom. Although, Hurricane is nature as well, isn’t it?
• Eclipse – A guildie of mine mentioned that the change to Eclipse sounds a bit like a meter that Goblin Shamans have in Warhammer Online. But in this version, you can supposively stack the meter up to five, and the next cast resets the meter completely. I wouldn’t like this idea very much. I would much rather have it that spells could not go below 100% damage, and that the Eclipse meter works as a scale that moves in one direction or the other.
• Will there be a change to Nature’s Grace or Wrath, to allow Wrath to scale better with haste? Obviously, we will need more haste, because we will get less haste per haste rating, but we seem to get a lot of haste just by spending talents in the balance tree.

Lots of information, lots of answers, lots of things to theorycraft about. It is currently 4:30 AM. I have pneumonia, I am very tired, and my head is buzzing with ideas. Give it some time to settle in, and lets see what the future brings.

What do you think about the changes?

- QQ