Lots of things has changed in Cataclysm, most notibly the fact that Hurricane is terrible for both damage and mana at this point in the game, but also the fact that Typhoon is actually a pretty awesome spell now.

But alas, many people seem to look down on Typhoon and on Gale Winds as a talent. I opt to change that!

Since the change to our eclipse, where we are buffing either nature or arcane spells, rather than just Starfire and Wrath, typhoon has been close to my heart. It’s been an ability that I’ve tried to use as much as possible, whenever it made sense to use it.

Obviously, Typhoon is a highly situational spell, but it’s should not be disregarded as easely anymore as we did before. As it turns out, Typhoon is worth casting instead of a Wrath when you have three targets or more. A typhoon does just around half the damage of a wrath when neither crits, so three targets would be a definite damage increase.

As an added bonus, Typhoon doesn’t generate any eclipse energy, so if you can cast it while in solar eclipse, you can dish out a lot of damage. It should be noted, however, that Typhoon does not gain as much crit % as wrath does, but three targets or more is still a good guideline.

It should be noted, of course, that it’s only worth casting Typhoon if the extra targets has to die. Sure, you can inflate your DPS, but if the adds doesn’t have to die, you are inflating your DPS on the meters, but you are doing less damage to the boss – where it matters.

But there are quite a lot of fights where Typhoon is useful. I’ll write some suggestions here, on the fights that I try to use it as much as possible, to give you a bit of inspiration:

Magmaw: Typhoon is a killer on Parasites, when you do it on normal, or for Constructs when you do it on heroic. There are usually two constructs and a giant worm up on heroic, but you are not doing your raid a favor if you are showering the Parasites if you are just going to kite them.

Omnitron: There are a few uses for the Omnitron encounter, namely when Toxitron spawns his adds. There are enough of them to do Typhoon even if you are in lunar eclipse.

Maloriak: Be it the Abbirations on normal or the Vile Slew on heroic, Typhoon is going to add a massive amount of damage.

Halfus: Do I really have to spell this out? Several dragons, especially on heroic. A ton of damage on the Whelp pack between Wild Mushroom Detonates.

Cho’Gall: The Corrupted Blood and the Tentacles are great targets for Typhoon.

In the end, there are probably a ton more uses for Typhoon. If you haven’t used it yet, now is the time. And since we are swimming in mana, once you are comfortable with your regen, you should have the points to spare for Gale Winds.

- QQ

Of course, when people actually managed to get the 4-piece bonus, they started doing the math, and as it turns out, it’s really rather badass. But, I figured I might as well continue my epic-upgrading, and I have now finally managed to get my very last item from Valor Points.

Of course, had I actually run the random heroic every day, I would have gotten this a long time ago. Several guildies of mine has been making a killing on selling valor boots, and now that I’m finally finished, maybe I can catch in on some sweet goldmaking. But that is not the topic of this blog post.

With getting the 4-piece bonus, we get a rather significant change to our rotation. See, if we simply follow up with refreshing DOTs and casting starfall whenever we enter an eclipse, we will use up the bonus charges. It’s not that exciting to spend a +99% crit buff on a moonfire or three stars.

From now on, whenever you proc an eclipse, you simply follow up with a nuke no matter what. Starsurge is obviously an awesome spell to guarantee a crit on, but starfire and wrath still works wonders. You have to continue your casting, because if you don’t use the bonus before 8 seconds, it will run out.

In short, you have to avoid using anything that has direct damage that can crit – which is moonfire, sunfire and starfall. Instead, you simply make sure that you cast it before you exit eclipse, to be sure that you gain Nature’s Grace and eclipsed buffs up.

Sometimes, your DOTs will run out just before you proc eclipse. This is an ideal time to recast them, before you proc eclipse. The ~8 seconds of extra crit will transfer into your DOTs and make you very crit happy. In this case, recast your DOTs just before this eclipse runs out to proc NG. If your DOTs are still running as you enter eclipse, simply keep nuking and enjoy the big numbers. When your DOTs run out outside of eclipse, simply refresh them.

If you are using the Glyph of Starfire, you have to pay extra attention to your DOTs. Sometimes this rotation will keep sunfire up until you enter lunar eclipse, which is fine – starfire will increase the duration of sunfire as well, but do get that moonfire up before you exit lunar eclipse. Also, keep in mind that it is perfectly safe to refresh insect swarm – it won’t eat up the charges.

I like how this bonus changes our rotation. When I know that my next cast will proc eclipse, I can now continue with wrath/starfire/starsurge and continue on in the other direction. I don’t have to do an extra cast or wait for moonfire or sunfire to get eclipsed. This feels a lot more natural to me. And even though we have to focus a tad more on our DOTs now, I’m only happy to do that for the massive DPS gain we get.

Fun fact: Wild Mushroom acts a bit funny with the 4-piece bonus. If you have shrooms up and detonate them with the buff on, they will all crit on every single target. But if you have one shroom up which hits two targets, it will eat up two charges. I guess that since you detonate all three shrooms at the same instant, they all get the benefit of the added crit. Of course, it is a little bit difficult to time an eclipse right when you have to detonate your shrooms, but it’s a neat little trick.

- QQ

Yesterday, we finally got Lich King down on heroic again after the patch. The first few weeks were sketchy, with people trying hard to get used to their new rotation, and it meant going from one-shotting Lich King to many, many wipes.

I must admit, I had my issues with my rotation as well. It’s hard to get used to the new rotation, when it’s so easy to fall back into old habits. I got a feeling, though, that its finally beginning to sit, but with only two raid days a week these days, I don’t excactly get a lot of practice.

The patch brought a lot of bugs and weird quirks, though, and I feel like I should address those.

Eclipse delay

As you might have noticed, there is a slight delay from casting a spell that should push you into eclipse, and when it actually does it. This is most clearly evident on lunar eclipses, because of wraths travel time. But it also seems to happen on many solar eclipses.

To get around this, I begin casting a wrath/starfire, counting on eclipse to kick in before the cast is over. That usually covers it up nicely, but I have seen instances, especially on proccing lunar eclipse, where I can go several seconds after the cast that should proc eclipse, before it actually kicks in. It is slightly annoying, because I get the feeling that I can’t completely trust my eclipse procs, and I have to compensate by either waiting, or casting starfire until the eclipse proc shows.

Of course, this could be due to any number of reasons. Addons, latency, some weird quirks on the boss. In the end I decided that it’s not really a huge case at present time. I’m still rocking the meters, and one cast gone wrong is not the end of the world. The issue will either be resolved in Cataclysm, or we will find a decent way to deal with it.

Hasted DOTs and Nature’s Grace

If you look at your DOTs, they look like they change the frequency of their ticks whenever your haste value changes. Unfortunately, it seems like this is just a tooltip bug, and the DOT will only tick as fast as whatever haste you had when it was casted.

This causes a few problems, as we would generally want to have our most powerful DOTs hasted by Nature’s Grace. I am guessing that DOTs should scale with haste as it changed, but that is simply not the case. Fortunately, sunfire and insect swarm are generally very close in damage, and on our lunar eclipses, insect swarm can proc Nature’s Grace for us, and that haste can benefit our eclipsed moonfire.

Still, I would like this to be fixed before we start raiding in Cataclysm. As with the eclipse delay, it is not something that I am terribly worried about, as our damage is more than fine these days. The differences are rather minimal, after all.

Combat ress

There seem to be a nasty, undocumented bug with combat resses. I had heard about it, but hadn’t experienced it myself until yesterday. On trying to combat ress, a little feral druid suddenly got the message “You can no longer ressurect in combat”.

Now, Blizzard aired some thoughts on limiting the amount of combat resses per match. None of this is confirmed by a blue poster, but it seems silly that they would do that and still increase the cooldown of our Rebirth to 30 minutes. What’s more currious is that when our feral druid couldn’t combat ress, another druid could. On some fights, we got it after using one combat ress, and on other fights, we used three resses with no problem.

When the problem happened to me, we had just pulled Lich King, and a paladin skillfully pulled aggro and died. We were no more than 20 seconds into the fight, so suffice to say, we hadn’t used any in that fight. What’s more currious is that when I pressed my combat ress outside of combat, like when running back after a wipe, I still got the bug, despite the fact that I wasn’t targeting anyone.

It is certianly a weird bug, and if Blizzard did try to mess with the amount of combat resses, I think they should revert to the previous system and keep the cooldown at 30 minutes, or add the restriction but keep the cooldown on 10 minutes. It can’t really be both.

Grumpy gryphons

Oh, and it’s not like this is a druid specific problem, but what is up with those damn gryphons from the graveyards? Heck, I’d rather run from the ICC graveyard than having to slowly drift through the nether air!

- QQ

I was on a good 20.000+ DPS on the good fights, and if I wasn’t #1 on the damage meters, I sure as hell was close. And even if I died, our other moonkin would dominate the damage meters.

So with a knowing smile, I read the blue post telling us that they were looking into balancing other classes – but didn’t specify which – and I went to bed. I woke up to a blue post, a handful of mails and a lot of angry forum posts.

A lot of our spells have been nerfed, Insect Swarm in particular, and I was very currious to see how big of an impact it was. Before the nerf, when the patch just came out, I tested my DPS on a dummy. I was pulling around 14,2k DPS at a decent try. Today, I just finished a few test runs where I feel that I managed my new rotation fairly well – it’s still easy to fall back into old habits – and it seems that my DPS has dropped about 1700-2400 DPS. An average of 2000 DPS lost.

That’s not really a massive nerf to be honest. And to be even more honest, I think that it is completely justfied. Yeah, I said it. I think that the nerf was completely justified. And as my mind wanders back to the time where someone told me to “Not say that we are fine, cause then people won’t complain and we wont get buffed”, I feel like I must elaborate a bit on this point.

First of all, I don’t feel like this is about the damage at all. If you just logged in and missed out on being the most powerful being in the whole world, then you will still see that your damage went up by a metric fuckton (technical term, sorry). We are a lot more powerful than we were before the patch, and we have been fixed in a million ways and more.

The whole deal with this nerf is that our overpowered spells caused us to play in a way that we were not meant to play. I did the entire Gunship battle without leaving solar just once, because putting IS and Sunfire on all mobs and Sunfire-spamming the mage with lunar shower did insane amounts of damage. That’s not right. When we would rather DOT up 10 mobs than to simply use a solar hurricane. That’s not right. And when a DOT is responsible for 30% of our damage, then that’s just not right.

Don’t get me wrong, a bit of creative use is fine, but when spells are being used for something that they are not designed for, when we are getting more out of doing something we’re not “supposed to”, then that sort of screws over the whole concept of the class. Blizzard probably has a grander scheme of things, and I am thinking that if that’s the end result, then we will probably turn out fine.

The nerf turned out to be not-that-bad. Our damage is still awesome. We are still powerful. It’s not that bad, guys

- QQ

Mana is not a problem at level 80. It’s only around level 84, where the mana costs of our nukes goes up by a factor of five, that our spells begin to seriously hurt our mana. In fact, reality was that we could barely get through two eclipse cycles before running out of mana.

The roundtable druids agreed that a fix to this problem would be to reduce the mana cost of our spells and perhaps increase the potency of Euphoria. And in fact, this is excactly what Blizzard has done now.

Wrath and Starfire has both gotten their mana cost reduced by 5%. That means that Wrath’s mana cost was cut by 35,7% and Starfire’s mana cost was cut from 16% base mana down to 11%. That is a reduction of 31,25%. At the same time, Euphoria was increased from 12% total mana return upon proccing eclipse, to 16%.

The big question is whether or not this is enough. Our main nukes costing ~33% less and Euphoria giving back more mana is a good place to start, and these numbers are thankfully easy to tamper with. If we need to adjust it more, then that is a fairly simple procedure.

We might have to employ some pretty elaborate innervate tactics once we get up to level 85, but that is a topic for another day.

- QQ

Patch 4.0 is right around the corner, and with it comes a whole lot of changes to our class. For some reason, I thought I had plenty of time before I needed to re-write the Moonkin guide, failing to realise the abundance of questions that are bound to come when 4.0 hits the live servers.

So I buckled up and started typing. Obviously, some things are still the same. Professions and enchants hasn’t been changed on the PTR, so I won’t meddle with them in the guide before the changes are active. I assume that most enchants such as +81 spell power will be changed to +81 intellect, but until they do, I’ll keep those sections as they are.

Rest assured that I will keep updating this as 4.0 comes out, and naturally throughout Cataclysm as well. I’ll add this guide to the button at the top once 4.0 hits the live servers. I’ll also post this guide out to MMO-champion and the like when 4.0 comes around – you get to read it now, because you are here

Table of contents

1.0 Disclaimer – The 4.0 moonkin guide (new)
2.0 How to get help
3.0 Stats n’ caps (new)
4.0 Gems (new)
5.0 Talents (new)
6.0 Glyphs (new)
7.0 Enchants
8.0 Professions (slightly new)
9.0 Consumables
10.0 Rotation (new)
11.0 Eclipse (new)
12.0 Tips and tricks (new)
13.0 Useful addons (new)
14.0 Other moonkin guides (new)
15.0 Things to check (new)
16.0 Contributors (new)

1.0 Disclaimer – The 4.0 moonkin guide

Welcome to the 4.0 moonkin guide. Before proceeding to read this guide, I need you to read this paragraph very carefully. There are two things that you must keep in mind:

• This guide is for a level 80 character playing patch 4.0. What this means is that this guide is current for what is on the live servers, and not on the beta servers. As new patches are released, the guide will be updated.
• Information changes all the time, and we are still working hard on figuring out the finer points. Some of the information in this guide will be based on the research of others, while other parts are merely my own interpretation. I strongly encourage everybody to discuss and give feedback in this thread.

2.0 How to get help

If you have a moonkin related question, feel free to post a reply to this topic, and the community will attack it like hungry piranhas. However, to make it easier on yourself – and on everybody else – follow these tips first:

1. Read the guide. Most basics are covered here.
2. Identify your problem. Are you asking about gearing up, gems, enchants, rotation, addons, how to get girls or something else?
3. Check the guide again – maybe you missed something that answered your question!
4. Post as much detailed, relevant information as you can; Armory link, maybe a raid log, and an explanation of what your issue is.
5. Are you sure it’s not in the guide? It goes a lot faster if you just read the guide, rather than you waiting for us to repeat what is written here.

We love to help, but many times the information is readily available, and you can save a lot of time by scrolling down to whatever area might give you problems. If that doesn’t help, or something in this guide isn’t clear, don’t hesitate to post in this topic, and we’ll help you out!

3.0 Stats n’ caps

You should always attempt to only use leather gear. Wearing only leather items will increase your intellect by 5%. Equipping just a single piece of cloth gear will remove this bonus, and that is a massive hit to your intellect, and thus spell power and critical strike chance.

To best equip your moonkin for what’s ahead, you must have a basic knowledge of how each stat affects it. Here is a rundown of the stats and their caps:

Hit rating: Hit is an important stat for every single class. Thankfully, it is fairly easy for us to attain hit, so this should always be your first priority. Each ~26,32 hit rating gives you 1% chance to hit. Additionally, each point of spirit gives you 1 point of hit rating, meaning that 26,32 spirit increases your chance to hit by 1%. Because of this, we can simply assume that spirit = hit, and treat them both as the same.

You will need 17% hit (446 hit rating) to never miss a spell. You can also hover your mouse over your spell hit rating to see your chance to miss against mobs of equal level, or boss level monsters.

Intellect: Intellect is our strongest stat after hit rating. This is obviously something you want a whole lot of. Intellect gives you the following:

• More mana
• Additional spell power. One point of intellect gives you 1 spell power.
• Higher chance to score a critical strike with spells. One point of intellect gives you 0,006% crit chance. In other words, you need 166,667 intellect for 1% chance to crit.

Haste rating: Haste is a very powerful stat for us, as a lot of our spells have been changed in 4.0 to benefit greatly from it. Haste will affect the following:

• Reduces the global cooldown of your spells.
• Reduces cast time of your starfire, wrath and starsurge.
• Increases the frequency of your moonfire, sunfire, insect swarm and hurricane ticks.

Crit: We are no longer as addicted to crit as we have previously been. The most noticable change to crit is that we are no longer dependant on it to proc Eclipse or Nature’s Grace, and crit has become more easy to understand. Crit will affect the following:

• Increases your chance to do double damage with direct nukes.
• Increases the chance that each tick of your DOTs will do double damage.

Please note that critical strikes from hurricane only do 50% more damage.

Mastery: Mastery is a new stat introduced for patch 4.0 and Cataclysm. Once learned from your trainer, mastery will increase the potency of our “Mastery: Total Eclipse”, which is visible under the summary of our talent trees.

Total eclipse initially increases the bonus from Eclipse by 12%. Each point of mastery increases this bonus by 1.5%. In other words, a point of mastery increases Total Eclipse to 13.5%, making your Eclipse increase the damage of your spells by up to 38.5%.

For one point of mastery at level 80, you need 46 points of mastery rating.

Crit versus mastery: Prelimenary theorycrafting show that crit and mastery rating, at level 80, are fairly close to each other, but not as strong as haste is. There are arguments for both stats:

46 crit rating increases your crit chance by 1%. 46 mastery rating increases your mastery by 1,5%, but your mastery is only active for about 60% of the time. This puts crit rating at a very slight advantage over mastery rating, but this might very well change as we level to 85.

Reforging:

Reforging allows you to change 40% of one stat on an item into another. You can only swap between spirit, haste, crit and mastery, and you can only change one stat into another stat that isn’t already on the item. This means that if you have an item with haste and crit, you cannot turn 40% of the crit into more haste, but you can turn it into mastery rating if you are so inclined.

When reforging, you should work from these principles:

• If you are below the hit cap, convert some crit or mastery into spirit or hit. Either stat is fine, although spirit would give you a bit more mana regen outside of combat. If you are above the hit cap, try and reforge some spirit into more useful stats. Just make sure that you stay above your hit cap, rather than below it.
• If your items has no haste on it, you could reforge some crit or mastery into haste, as haste is generally stronger than crit and mastery.
• As crit and mastery are generally very close at the moment, either one is fine. If you want to play around with a lot of mastery or a lot of crit, then knock yourself out.

4.0 Gems

Gemming is fairly straight forward for moonkins.

Meta: Always use the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond.
Blue: You will want to only use two blue gems to activate your meta. You should be using an Intellect/spirit gem and a Nightmare Tear. Preferably in blue slots only.
Red: Red slots should always, always, always be pure intellect gems.
Yellow: Intellect/haste should be your current preference

5.0 Talents

Your talent spec should largely be decided by one factor: Your mana. If you do a lot of damage, but run out of mana after 2 minutes, then your overall damage is going to suffer. On the other hand, if you can keep casting forever and never run out of mana, you can probably spare a few points in damage talents.

We are no longer the manakins we were in Wrath of the Lich King, but at level 80 in patch 4.0 you should still be fine. You will need to find a balance between damage and mana talents, though. At best you should be able to end a boss fight with 10% mana. If you have less, you will run out of mana, and if you have more, then you can try reducing your mana regen through talents.

From the talents currently available to us, we can produce two talent specs: Focus on mana and focus on damage.

As you will notice, these specs are very similar.The only real difference between the two is that you are moving points from Moonglow and Furor into Owlkin Frenzy and Blessing of the Grove. The impact of mana-to-damage changes will be a lot more significant at level 85 where you will be able to grab Master Shapeshifter and ditch talents like Dreamstate in favor for Gale Winds. Even so, apart from Master Shapeshifter, the other damage choices are fairly slim.

You can freely choose to spend the single point in Typhoon in Solar Beam or similar talents if you are so inclined.

6.0 Glyphs

Glyphs are fairly straight forward. With the addition of Prime Glyphs, it’s pretty hard to go wrong. Some combinations are slightly stronger than others, however.

For Prime Glyphs, you have the choice between two sets:

Insect Swarm/Starsurge/Starfire:
This setup gives you slightly more damage than the one below. However, it has a major “but” tied too it. Glyph of Starfire is a suprisingly strong glyph, even if it only does increase moonfire. However, as soon as you start clipping your extended moonfire, this glyph combination loses its advantage. Glyph of Starfire does theoretically increase the duration of sunfire, but you would never cast starfire while sunfire is up, because that would always be during lunar eclipse.

What this means is that, if you have enough haste to cast your moonfire at the beginning of an eclipse, and can reach the other end of the meter where you have to cast sunfire, before the moonfire gets to run out, you will not gain anything from this setup.

Insect Swarm/Starsurge/Moonfire:
This combination of Glyphs generally gives you the strongest damage increase if you have a lot of haste. If you are clipping the extended moonfire with the combination above, you can with confidence swap out Glyph of Starfire to Glyph of Moonfire. This is assuming that Glyph of Moonfire affects sunfire.

For major glyphs, Glyph of Starfall is the obvious choice. The remaining two glyphs is a free choice. You can go for Glyph of Focus, but then you have to be aware of your range. The limitations on your movement might be too much to sacrifice – I would personally not give up half of my range on spells, just for a 10% increase to starfall.

All other glyphs can be choosen based on your preferences and the encounter you are doing.

7.0 Enchants – nothing changed here so far

Enchants are usually pretty straight forward. Here is what you should generally go for:

Head: 30 spellpower/20 crit, or 30 spellpower/20 spirit if you are low on hit – obtained from Kirin Tor at revered reputation
Shoulders: 24 spellpower/15 crit obtained from Sons of Hodir at exalted reputation
Back: 23 haste
Chest: 10 stats
Wrists: 30 spellpower
Gloves: 28 spellpower
Leggings – 50 spellpower/20 spirit
Boots: Tuskarr’s Vitality (for the speed increase)
Weapon: Black Magic for 1-handed weapons, 82 spell power for 2-handed weapons.

But what about…?

An alternative to Tuskarr’s Vitality is to get 12 crit/12 hit on boots. However, it is generally accepted that the 8% run speed increase from Tuskarr’s Vitality is a bigger increase in damage, as it allows you to move from A to B faster, giving you more time to stand still and nuke.

8.0 Professions – nothing changed here so far

The short answer to which profession you should choose is “Whatever you like”. Professions generally give you roughly the same bonus. Two crafting professions will give you double the bonus, but is obviously more costly. The general difference between most professions turn out to be nothing more than ~8 DPS. There are two professions that are largely giving a higher bonus.

From each profession, you can expect to gain:

• Alchemy: +47 spellpower
• Blacksmithing: +46 spellpower
• Engineering: -1 spellpower, -23 haste, + Hyperspeed Accelerators *
• Enchanting: +46 spellpower
• Inscription: +46 spellpower.
• Jewelcrafting: +48 spellpower
• Leatherworking: +46 spellpower
• Tailoring: Lightweave Embroidery **
• Skinning: +40 crit rating

** Tailoring comes out slightly stronger than other professions due to the the Lightweave Embroidery you can put on your cloak. It will generally turn out to be a 55-70 spell power increase.

* The biggest winner when it comes to professions, however, is Engineering. While you sacrifice a little bit of spell power and haste, you gain access to the Hyperspeed Accelerators. Using these during a Lunar Eclipse will greatly increase your DPS, much more so than what other professions can offer. You should use the Hyperspeed Accelerators primarily as you start a solar eclipse, as the haste buff can increase both your wrath, insect swarm and moonfire. Should it be available during a lunar eclipse, however, feel free to cast it. Waiting 10 seconds to get to solar eclipse reduces the benefit from it by 1/6.

You can use the following macro to automaticly cast your Hyperspeed Accelerators whenever they are ready, and you are casting an Insect Swarm:

TL;DR: The biggest DPS increase from professions would obviously be Engineering and Tailoring. But to be fair, if you enjoy being a Blacksmithing Inscriptor, then just go with that.

9.0 Consumables – nothing changed here so far

Flask of the Frost Wyrm is by far the best choice over elixirs. For food, grab a fish feast or a bite of Firecracker Salmon.

To boost your damage in an encounter, use Potion of Speed. Keep it ready for a lunar eclipse when you know that you can stand still for the full 15 seconds, and use it as soon as you are showered in blue moonlight.

10.0 Rotation

Our rotation is fairly simple on paper. Getting used to it is a whole different matter. I suggest that you spend a while on target dummies to get used to your new rotation. It is one thing to do a rotation as you are standing still, hurting a poor dummy, but it’s entirely different once you are in a PvE setting. Practice is key.

Our rotation works from three principles:

• Cast wrath until you proc lunar eclipse. Cast starfire until you proc solar eclipse.
• Keep both DOTs up and cast them when you have just procced eclipse. Cast Insect Swarm before sunfire/moonfire, to allow your moonfire time to morph into sunfire before you cast it.
• Use starsurge whenever it is off cooldown, and always when Shooting Stars proc.

If you can anticipate it, try to be inside an eclipse when you have to move. Throw up both of your DOTs and spam your moonfire/sunfire. The damage from Lunar Shower, and eclipse if you have it up, will provide a decent amount of damage even while moving. Make sure that your Insect Swarm is up as well, for a higher chance of proccing Shooting Stars on the run.

Cooldowns: Cooldowns are great for burst, and your benefit from them is increased depending on when you use them. We only have three spells with a noticable cooldowns, so there are just a few pointers to remember.

• Starfall is the most powerful spell in our arsenal. Against single targets, you can get 10 stars off at your target. If you know that more targets will spawn soon, you can hold it off as long as you are not in danger of pulling aggro, which will allow for all 20 stars to fall. Don’t hold back too much though, as you would want to cast starfall as much throughout a fight as you can.
• Treants is a lot of damage in one global cooldown, if they can stay alive for the duration. Usually you can cast these as you run in, and then 3 minutes later when they are off cooldown. If you know that a bloodlust is coming, try to spawn them just before the bloodlust to give them the haste benefit as well.
• Typhoon is fairly decent to use if there is more than a handful of targets. You can glyph it to remove the knockback, and cause a lot of damage to trash packs or during encounters that spawn adds that needs to die. Typhoon is particulary strong if you are under the effects of solar eclipse, and have a handful of mobs to fire at.

11.0 Eclipse

Eclipse benefits almost all of our spells. Keeping this in mind allows you to gain a higher benefit from some spells. Don’t go out of your way to delay a spell on a cooldown, but if you are 3 seconds away from a lunar eclipse when starfall is ready, you might want to hold back a bit.

Lunar eclipse increases the damage of:

• Starfire
• Moonfire
• Starfall
• Starsurge

Solar eclipse increases the damage of:

• Wrath
• Insect Swarm
• Sunfire
• Typhoon
• Starsurge
• Hurricane

Please note that our two AOE spells, starfall and hurricane, are arcane and nature damage respectively. If you are doing AOE damage, a solar eclipse would be a bigger increase, but if you are caught in lunar eclipse for an AOE pack, it is not the end of the world.

If you are in solar eclipse, and your starfall is ready, you should still cast it, even if it doesn’t gain the bonus from eclipse. Delaying it for too long would, at best, make you come out even, but it will delay your cooldown significantly.

Eclipse doesn’t decay. This allows you to stay inside an eclipse indefinately. So if you are eating through those ICC trash packs, put yourself under a solar eclipse and fire away that hurricane.

12.0 Tips and tricks

Practice, practice, practice. Target Dummies are generally not that great for comparing damage, but spending some time there to get really comfortable with your rotation is golden. Focus on being able to cast your rotation perfectly. Then try to distract yourself by moving around, looking at something off screen or drop hot tea down into your lap.

The aim is to teach your rotation to your muscles. Thats right, this is a full-blown finger workout! Your hands need to be able to click starfire without you really thinking of where the button is, and your brain must be used to adapt itself as you go through your eclipses.

The purpose of this is to prepare you for high paced raid encounters. Once you are so adapt to your rotation that you can follow it with little thought, it frees up your eyes to look away from your action bars. Instead, you can be staring at the damage meter, your character sheet or – if you are so inclined – look out for any hazardous events happening in the fight. Tunnel vision is not very good for your health, and if you are able to do the damage you have to do, while looking out for Malable Goo’s, you will increase your survival rate, and thus your contribution to the raid.

You can use your Thorns as a mini-misdirection. On a boss swinging at your tank every 2nd second, the base damage adds around 21.000 damage. The damage scales with your targets spell power or AP, whichever is highest. The damage done by your thorns will be credited to your target. Thorns is very powerful on AOE packs, if you want to give your tank a bit of a boost. You can have your tank as a focus target, and use the macro “/cast [@focus] Thorns” to quickly cast thorns on him or her.

If you are casting your starfall inside a lunar eclipse, cast it before you cast any DOTs. It doesn’t benefit from haste, so if you cast your DOTs before starfall, you lose a GCD on a non-hasted spell.

13.0 Useful addons

There are plenty of addons to choose from, and most are merely a question of preference. You don’t need all of these, but here is a list of common addons you could and should consider using:

Proc tracking:

• Balance Power Tracker: A highly configurable mod designed to track Lunar and Solar energy for Balance Druids in 4.0.
• Squawk and Awe: Useful for tracking eclipse, eclipse cooldowns, DOTs, trinkets and the like.
• ClassTimer and ClassTimer Eclipse: Offers the same as Squawk and Awe, in a different layout.
• Power Aura’s: My personal favorite, Power Aura’s allows you to add visual notifications to practically everything. Eclipse procs, DOTs with timers, debuffs on a specific fight and so on. It does take a bit of time to set up, but it is an awesome addon that allows for much customization. Big visual effects when eclipse procs allow you to notice an eclipse out of the corner of your eye, and helps you get an overview of your buffs. If you need suggestions for customizing Power Aura’s, check out Jamara’s post here.

General raid addons:

• Omen Threat Meter: Nearly invaluable in a raid setting, allows you to avoid pulling aggro.
• Deadly Boss Mods: Adds alerts and countdown bars to literally every encounter in the game, from 5 mans to raid bosses. This is such an old, stable addon, and is so useful in any raid setting. DBM has been around the block for a long, long time.
• Recount or Skada: Damage meters. Recount is the most popular, but I prefer Skada as it requires a lot less system memory. It doesn’t have fancy graphs, but it does include a lot of interesting features, such as segment saving and looking up raid members damage to a specific target.

Miscellaneous:

• Unit frames such as Grid, VuhDo and the like, gives a great overview of your raid allows for quick decurses, innervates, rebirths and so on.
• Gearscore: lol
• Quartz: A well used cast bar for tracking casts, cast times, DOTs and HOTs on various targets and so on.
• ForteXorcist: A fun little addon that adds a bar showing you the time before your cooldowns are ready to use. This addon is very customizable and gives you a good overview of cooldowns, debuffs and so forth.

14.0 Other moonkin guides

Graylo’s Moonkin guide for 4.0.1
Elitist Jerks moonkin discussion

15.0 Things to check

Problems I have either noticed myself, or which has been pointed out by other players. This all needs to be tested a bit more thoroughly as 4.0 comes live.

• DOTs doesn’t tick faster if your haste is changed after they are cast, even though the tooltip sais so.
• That moonfire/sunfire isn’t affected by Nature’s Grace.
• Sunfire isn’t affected by haste at all (verified on PTR)

16.0 Contributors

Thanks for these people for comments, suggestions and corrections that turned into actual changes to the 4.0 moonkin guide. Sorry, all of those commenting before 4.0 isn’t listed. Names are not necessarily MMO-Champion user names, but the user names from the source or site where people have posted it.

Psynister, Emilios, Tilgare, Luna, Sunfyre, and that “ghost” in a dream I had. Yes, really.

So, I wanted to talk a bit about Glyphs. There will probably still be glyph changes around, but for now, I want to talk to what is available and what we have in store.

Playing on the PTR, I’ve been working hard on trying to settle in with a new rotation. I’ll admit, it’s not easy to get used to. I had to concentrate quite a lot on not forgetting starfall, which is odd, since I am usually spot on with that. Starsurge feels odd to get into our rotation as well, but I guess its just a matter of getting used to it. When I started out as a moonkin, my rotation was so messy, so having to learn something new probably isn’t that bad.

But now it is time to see how our glyphs might affect our gameplay. Lets theorycraft!

To begin with, I stood at the dummy for some 10 minutes, casting away, trying to keep a proper rotation. I just wanted a relatively stable log to analyze. Please refer to the screenshot for approximate numbers. The lag was pretty bad, so my 13.000 DPS isn’t excactly a superb representation, but then again, the lag is equal for all spells, so I am fine with this initially.

Not all glyphs are available, so my approach to this was actually to remove all of them. Well, I did keep Glyph of Starfall, because I am fairly confident that I will keep that anyways. Just keep in mind that the numbers above – except for starfall – are all unglyphed.

These are supposed to be easy choices for DPS increases. Blizzard wants you – thats right, YOU – to be able to take the right glyphs without having to go to third party sites for tips. But “supposed” doesn’t really work very well, when the actual DPS increases are sort of hard to gauge, and I’ve changed my mind repeatedly over the last few days myself.

Prime Glyphs

Insect Swarm – Increases the damage of your Insect Swarm ability by 30%.

Insect Swarm has a massively huge DPET, somewhere around 35-40k damage in a single GCD in my current gear. So I figured it would be an obvious choice to pick. Insect Swarm was 17,7% of my total damage. With a 30% increase to that number, I would get another 5,31% more damage overall.

Moonfire – Increases the periodic damage of your Moonfire ability by 20%.

Moonfire’s DPET was somewhere around 25.000 damage each cast, and with moonfire being 8,4% of my total damage, the glyph would increase my overall damage by 1,68%.

EDIT: I forgot to take into account that Glyph of Moonfire should affect Sunfire as well. That would double the bonus from this glyph.

Starfire – Your Starfire ability increases the duration of your Moonfire effect on the target by 3 sec, up to a maximum of 9 additional seconds.

I got to tell you, I am not a huge fan of this glyph. Moonfire’s DPET is around 25.000, which puts its DPS at 1388,89. 9 more seconds would increase the duration of moonfire by 9 seconds, giving it a DPET of 37.500 – the DPS stays the same. It is a 50% increase in the damage done by moonfire, which does increase my total damage by 4,2%.

At first glace, if we bump this together with Glyph of Moonfire, we are looking at a 5,88% DPS increase from both glyphs in total. However, I was often clipping my moonfires, because I had to put up Sunfire whenever I procced a new eclipse. That cuts away a lot of the extra damage. This is fine at low levels of haste, but once we get a lot of haste, the Glyph becomes less useful.

Glyph of Starfire does increase the duration of sunfire. But I don’t really see any argument for casting starfire while sunfire is up, because this would be either in solar eclipse, or when we are rushing to proc our next lunar eclipse.

Starsurge – When your Starsurge deals damage, the cooldown remaining on your Starfall is reduced by 5 sec.

This is really hard to calculate, because the number of starsurges we cast is really random. I am going to disregard Shooting Stars completely for now, because we could either proc it just before Starsurge would be off cooldown anyways, or just after – it is a huge difference in damage.

Without shooting stars, we get 4/6 starsurges off between each starfall. This reduces the cooldown by 20/30 seconds, which means it effectively increases starfalls damage by 33%. This doesn’t really change whether starfall is glyphed or not glyphed. Any procs of Shooting Stars will just increase the bonus.

Using this number, and assuming that starfall (see below) is either 6,6667% of my damage (unglyphed) or 10% of my damage (glyphed), the total damage increase from Shooting Stars would be 2,22% or 3,333%.

Wrath – Your Wrath does 10% additional damage to targets afflicted by your Insect Swarm.

This is pretty straight forward. Wrath was 24,8% of my total damage. 10% more to this number is a 2,48% DPS increase.

So where do we stand? The top damage increases are:

• Glyph of Insect Swarm: 5,31% more overall damage.
• Glyph of moonfire: 3,36%, assuming it affects Sunfire as well.
• Glyph of Starsurge: 2,22% to 3,33% (unglyphed/glyphed starfall) – plus even more whenever Shooting Stars proc.
• Glyph of Starfire: 4,2% – however, we lose 1/9th of this bonus for each second of moonfire we clip. If I clip 3 seconds, the bonus is down to 2,8%, which is why I place it here.
• Glyph of wrath: 2,48%

From this, I can conclude that glyphs of IS, Starsurge and Moonfire gives me a total increase of 12% more damage. Glyphs of IS, Starsurge and Starfire gives me a total inscrease of 12,84% more damage, but this drops very quickly if I happen to clip a DOT. It might prove very potent when we are just in level 85, and if we realise that we are still a long way from lunar eclipse when moonfire falls off, but we need only to clip an extended moonfire by 2 seconds before this bonus falls below the IS/Surge/MF combination.

We will have to see how our haste looks at level 85. Ofcourse, with less haste, it will also take less time to reach the other side of, so it may very well be that IS/Surge/SF is more beneficial at first, and that we then transition into IS/Surge/MF.

Major Glyphs

Focus – Increases the damage done by Starfall by 10%, but decreases its radius by 50%.

Definately not a fan of this. Starfall is powerful, but I don’t like to limit my range of movement to 20%. However, there aren’t really that many choices for major glyphs at the moment.

Monsoon – Reduces the cooldown of your Typhoon spell by 3 sec.

Unless Blizzard does something radical to Typhoon, it will continue to be a relatively weak spell for PvE. But alas, what else is there to take?

Starfall – Reduces the cooldown of Starfall by 30 sec.

In my parse, starfall did 88.900 damage. This was with the dummies around, so I would have gotten 20 stars off. Assuming a single target fight, the damage per starfall would be 44.450. I didn’t always cast it during lunar eclipse, mind you.

Using reverse math, as if I wasn’t glyphed for starfall, we can cut off 33% of its damage. In other words, my total damage would have been 3,3333% less. In my world, and with my stupid math, that puts the Glyph of Starfall at a 3,3333% DPS increase, give or take.

Definately the strongest of the current major glyphs. There is no competition here.

Glyphs of Entangling Roots, Hurricane, Rebirth, Solar Beam and Thorns might all be very nice, but they are situational at best. You can probably swap these for Glyph of Monsoon if you’d like, because you’re probably not going to be using Typhoon very often. Heck, you might even pick one more for funsies, and put it in instead of Glyph of Focus. Starfall takes a hit, but at least you don’t have to be sure that you are within 20 yards of your target. I think this is a great discouragement to Glyph of Focus.

So the choices for major glyphs are really dim at the moment. Your optimal damage setup is Starfall/Focus/Monsoon. I think I could live without focus and monsoon, though.

Minor glyphs

lol

What needs to change?

This was a lot of text. And I’m sure that Blizzard will have changed all of this tomorrow, making this huge post redundant. But through my stupid-math, I have estimated what glyphs I want to use, if they stay as they are. But that doesn’t mean that I am quite satisfied with them yet.

I’d like to see a Glyph of Treants. Let’s have a pet, eh, that would be kind of fun. I’d love Glyph of Starfire to be changed, because it doesn’t have a lot of transparancy. Glyph of Moonfire could probably need a buff, maybe making it 40% so it comes closer to Insect Swarm. Glyph of Wrath seems dull in general. I feel like these prime glyphs should probably all be very close to each other, so it is more of a choice of playing style where the DPS differences are marginal.

Major Glyphs are lacking badly. We have two glyphs for Starfall, one that cuts our range in half. The last one reduces the cooldown of a spell that is always off cooldown because we never use it. The rest of them are major changes to situational spells, which is fine. We might just be swapping glyphs often enough, but on a large scale of boss fights, not one of them are common enough to be “standard”. I’m hoping we’ll see more glyphs here.

What is to come? I don’t know. The glyphs are fun, but not very transparent, and they definately still need some work. I just hope they don’t change it too much – this post took like two hours to write.

- QQ

I had a lot of unanswered questions, and I really needed to get a feel for the new talents, rotations, glyphs and gems myself. Unfortunately, not all of the glyphs are working, and my stupid-math can’t quite cover gems, but I did discover quite a lot of niffy things which I would like to share with you guys.

As always, remember that this is all in level 80 gear, and nothing is finalized yet. Things may change before 4.0 hits the live servers, and before Cataclysm comes.

Power to our kin

Starsurge is a crazy ability. It has the same cast time as wrath, but does upwords of 14.000 damage non-crit if you cast it during eclipse. This is approximately twice as much as an eclipsed wrath. The Shooting Stars talent usually procs once or twice between eclipses, so an instant 14-25k hit at level 80 is very potent.

Sunfire is also an awesome little spell. It works just like moonfire, gets the same benefits as moonfire – heck, Glyph of Starfire even extends it, and it is modified by Lunar Shower too, as would be expected. The sheer power of Lunar Shower is quite dazzling. Dotting up a target with IS and MoF/SoF does quite a lot of damage. Spamming fire’s while kiting the target, and throwing off instant starsurges when Shooting Stars proc does so much damage, it’s nearly unbelievable.

The new eclipse system works really, really well. I am very pleased with it. Solar eclipse buffs wrath, insect swarm and sunfire, and Lunar eclipse buffs starfire, moonfire and (I am fairly sure) starfall – although I didn’t test it much. My DOTs tick for 1-2.000 damage noncrit when they are eclipsed – heck, Insect Swarm even crits for a staggering 5.1k damage. This is quite potent for a level 80 moonkin.

Rotations

It took a little while to get used to the new Eclipse system. The main problem was to gauge if the next spell would get me to the end of the meter, but I think this could be covered quite nicely with some addon showing our actual eclipse power. It’s not like it’s hard to judge, but sometimes I was wrong.

Our new rotation seems fairly straight forward. It is not a walk in the park, but we should be able to get by. I didn’t have any damage meters so that I could do some comparasons, but it doesn’t seem overly difficult to put together a few rules for the rotation:

Wrath/starfire until eclipse. Cast both DOTs after proccing an eclipse (making sure to cast IS first and then MoF/SoF, so the spell has time to change). Cast starsurge, starfall and treants whenever they are off cooldowns, but try to use starfall during an eclipse. Starsurge will also do more damage if it’s cast during eclipse, but you should by no means hold back if you get a Shooting Stars proc right after dropping eclipse.

With the rules above, I was able to reach the other side of the eclipse meter just a second or two after my DOTs fell off. This is with my 1110 haste, however, and we might not be able to run with this as we lose the efficiency of our haste as we level up. However, it makes sense to cast both DOTs after eclipse has procced, as we need the haste bonus from Nature’s Torment anyways. I guess we could cast Insect Swarm before proccing lunar eclipse, but we would have to cast it after proccing solar eclipse. I try to keep my rotation simple for the time being, and then I can tweak it later.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about mana being difficult to master. At level 80 on the PTR, I didn’t seem to have any problems. Even though I had the mana spec I talked about before (or, what I could get of it), it was a good 5+ minutes before I even reached 50% mana – and with innervate giving me just that, it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Things might be a whole lot different at level 85, but for now, I don’t worry.

Glyphs and gems

I am not the kind of mankin to ask about gems. My brain can handle relatively simple math, and as of yet, I have no real plans for how I am going to gem. I am guessing that whatever gems we have in now is fine, and by the time we get to 85, people who are a lot smarter than me will have figured it out, and expressed it in a way so that I can understand it and convey it to you.

Most of the glyphs wasn’t active in game. Glyph of Moonfire was changed, but Glyph of Starfire wasn’t. Glyphs like Starsurge and the like wasn’t even available. But enough of that, I think I’ll cover Glyphs in another blog.

Overall state

I am fairly pleased with the changes I’m seeing. Some people expressed a few of our damage being nerfed when 4.0 hits. I don’t feel that this should be a problem. Sure, we spend more time outside of eclipse, but not that much. And the spell changes themselves are quite potent:

• Starfire now scales with crit again!
• Wrath now scales with haste again!
• Insect Swarm, Moonfire and Sunfire scales with haste, crit and eclipse!
• Starsurge is crazy!

The base eclipse was indeed changed to 25%. But right off the bat when 4.0 comes out, we’ll be able to train mastery, increasing our eclipse bonus by 12%. That brings us to 37% more damage during eclipse, instead of the 40% we have now. But when DOT’s and Starsurge also scale with eclipse, I foresee quite an increase in our damage. I think we’re in a very sweet position as we are now, and all we need is a few minor tweaks.

Oh, by the way…

I know I’ve listed two cloth items on my BIS list a few months ago. Personally, I’m still pursuing the Plague Scientist’s Boots from Festergut and the Crushing Coldwraith Belt from Marrowgar. Or well, I was, until thursdays raid where a guildie just had to air the phrase “So, will you change those cloth pieces back to leather when 4.0 comes out?”

I’ll let it sink in for a bit. It took a minute to really register what he said… …

When 4.0 comes out, we will be able to train Leather Specialization. And if we have just one piece of cloth on us, we can say goodbye to a massive 5% intellect increase. Dammit, I better replace my Brittle Bracers soon. I can live with the spirit items.

- QQ

• 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.

- QQ

Thank you for rea–… oh, alright, I guess I can elaborate. The current 51 point talent trees has a lot of random stuff that you have to take, either because you need to accumilate the bonuses, or because you need to advance down further into the tree. For you and I, this might not be that much of a hassle, but for new players it doesn’t excactly help them. There are a lot of talents, and it can quickly become confusing. There are a lot of places one can go wrong.

Simplifying the talent trees is a good thing. What would happen if we didn’t? Do you expect 101 point talent trees in level 150? Jeez, what a mess that would be. Cutting down the talent trees is a great idea, especially if it all becomes a little bit more transparent. It might even root out some of all the inquiries from newly dinged level 80′ies (or, well, 85), because it will be a little bit more clear which talents they have to take.

Talent specializations

Upon reaching level 10, players will now have to choose between one of the three talent trees. This will mark the tree as the players specialization, and allow for talents to be spent in this tree. It will also give you a couple of abilities tied to that talent tree, and add a load of passive abilities.

What this means is that druids chosing balance at level 10 will probably recieve their moonkin form right off the bat, and, most likely, a couple of moonkin related abilities such as insect swarm or even treants. I’d also venture to say that it is pretty safe to assume that we will get the new eclipse meter at level 10 if we choose to specialize into balance. We will also get a lot of passive bonuses, and these are the ones that you would otherwise have to spend talent points on previously.

Blizzard’s vision for the new talent trees is that they want the player to become a balance druid right away, not after spending 30 talent trees in the tree. This would greatly improve the leveling experience for anyone, new and old to the game. I leveled my druid as feral, so I got into the feral mindset rather quickly, but I do see the point from a moonkin perspective. In fact, I have been leveling a shaman as enhancement, and it is only now – when it has reached level 43, that I actually begin to feel enhancement-like. For moonkins being able to turn chicken right when they reach level 10 would be an awesome addition to the game.

What goes bye bye?

A lot of talents will be removed, but this isn’t the same as saying that they disappear. They will be tied to your specialization, and will be available right there at level 10. This would be talents such as Nature’s Reach to give you a threat reduction and further range on your spells, or effects like those of Wrath of Cenarius, adding more damage to your starfire and wrath. These are all of the talents that you would have to spend 5 points in to advance further down, and all you would get is a measly percentage modifier to some stat or spell.

Think about a talent such as the warriors Cruelty, where each point provides 1% critical strike chance. Imagine having to spend your first five talent points in something that ultimately doesn’t really effect your gameplay at this time. You are not going to notice a 5% crit addition when you are level 15, fighting mobs that die after 20 seconds. These are the talents that you would notice at level 80 on long boss fights, where five percent would be a huge increase in your damage.

The new talent trees

The talent trees will then consist of more powerful talent choices. New abilities like starfall, gameplay changing talents to reduce the cooldown of your abilities or maybe talents to change the cast time or the effects on your spells. Add to this that you are getting core specialization skills as soon as you hit level 10, spending talents should be a lot more interesting, even in the very low levels.

You will have a total of 41 talent points, and you can only put new talents into another tree once you have spent 31 talents in your primary tree. For some, this might spike a “Well, what if I wanted to take Omen of Clarity?!” comment. But with the new talent trees, there is no reason to think that you would take talents such as that, because you are getting nearly anything you need as soon as you spec into balance, and then you’ll just add more awesome to your abilities. Omen of clarity might become a trainable ability, and even if it doesn’t, I’m sure there will be plenty of other stuff we can play around with.

You will, ofcourse, still keep your special mastery bonus – in our case, the bonus to the eclipse system.

Limiting choices

Already, I am seeing some posters expressing worry that they do not get enough options to specialize their talent trees. They want to be able to choose between genesis and brambles, between mana regen talents or damage talents. I am sure that you can still do this, to the same extent as you did before. Do keep in mind, though, that you don’t really have that many choices as it is now. We have a cookie cutter PvE spec, and at the moment, if you are not using that, you are not optimal. I wouldn’t excactly call that “optional”.

I think it’s a great idea to reduce the talent trees. It will help new and old players alike, and it might just make it a tad more fun to level up new characters. We will have to wait for the new talents to be released before we can really see Blizzard’s vision. I would expect them to come around in the coming week, and until then, we can only wait.

- QQ