Since tier 8 was nerfed last week, and WiseEclipse was dumbed down to nothing more than a waste of space, the forums have been hot with discussions. All we got was a slight bump to our 4pt10 set, and people haven’t been happy about it. The biggest discussion was the “When you did this to rogues, you buffed their abilities!”, and I have been following that discussion – and the responses Ghostcrawler has made to it – with great intrest. And now, it seems, we have got what we wanted:

Patch 3.3: Eclipse now increases damage done by Wrath by 40% (up from 30%) and the critical chance of Starfire by 40% (up from 30%)

This is a very interesting buff. While it certainly has some positive implications for us, it might still lead us into some problems in Icecrown Citadel.

Lets start off at the bad end. I’m not going to bitch and moan too much, but a little bit is in order. The prospect of dropping 2pt8 was very nice to all of us, because any well geared moonkin is getting dangerously close to being crit capped in raids, if they aren’t already.

Losing the extra 15% chance to crit during lunar eclipse gave us a bit more air before crit becomes just like haste, but now it seems like we will be pushing caps once we get into Icecrown. I made a small comment on Elitist Jerks about this, and I will be no more than a few percentages off 100% crit chance when 3.3 hits – and that is without 2pt8. This is obviously just to fix us after the recent nerfs, and it does just that – and then some, I believe – but it is not a long term solution to our problems with stat caps.

The buff, however, is a buff, but what does it mean? We lose the 15% from 2pt8, but we get 10% of it baked into our Eclipse talent. At the same time, we are able to get rid of 2pt8 and gain the bonus from 4pt9. When I tested 2pt8 against 4pt9, I found that 4pt9 was only 50-150 DPS behind tier 8 on a target dummy. If we are able to retain 10% of our 2pt8 bonus, and put on four pieces of tier 9, this is an amazing buff. This not only makes up for the fact that we lose the most overpowered set bonus before, it should also cover the loss of WiseEclipse.

But it doesn’t stop there. Yesterday it looked like we would drop a bit of damage when 3.3 went live, and now it seems we will have a nice, little increase. The extra will also affect our tier 10 set bonuses. While tier 10 was sort of weak, it was modelled around not having the 2pt8 bonus, so by letting us keep 10% of the 15% from the set bonus, we carry along a buff to tier 10 aswell.

The more damage we have, the more we gain from our 2pt10 bonus, that’s a given. But the biggest effect will be to the 4-piece bonus on tier 10. The added crit – to a point where I am still statistically sure to crit with most, if not all, of my eclipsed starfires – will ensure a lot of nice Languish dots, and the extra 10% damage on wraths will ensure bigger Languish dots than what we had in store before this change.

We will get a buff to our damage, which in turn also will be a buff to our tier 10 bonus, bringing it closer in line to the bonusses other classes have, and we will be in a good position to continue to rain down star-glittering terror on our foes. Now, if they would only fix Nature’s Grace and allow us to stack a bit more haste, I would be a happy turkey, but even so this buff is dearly welcomed.

- QQ

Tier 8 nerf

The day has come. Well, it hasn’t actually, but it will. When patch 3.3 hits the servers, tier 8 is finally getting nerfed. It’s not like we didn’t know it was coming. Just a few days ago they nerfed elemental shamans’ tier 9, and we have been struggling with tier 8 for way too long.

The bonus from 2 piece tier 8 is getting nerfed to 7%, less than half of what it usually gave. But it’s not a massive bother. Any moonkins coming after that will be swimming in triumph badges to just get tier nine instead, and the rest of us will move on to tier 10. This makes tier 9 viable as a full set, but unfortunately, it had to happen as a nerf.

Tier 9, unless you have four pieces of ilevel 258, is slightly worse than keeping 2pt8, and I can’t realisticly say that I will have more than maybe one or two pieces of 258. It may only be a few hundred DPS, but it’s still a nerf that isn’t really justified. It means that we will actually go into Icecrown a little worse than just before the patch, and it seems a bit unfair.

On the other hand, there is still another month until 3.3 hits Live, so we may still see even more changes – a buff to tier 9, perhaps, or the long awaited fix to our talents. One can dream.

Tier 10 buff

The big guys at Elitist Jerks were contemplating that the 2pt8 was actually worth holding on to until you managed to get four – yes, four – pieces of 264 tier 10. That’s the second level of tier 10, which you get from trophies inside Icecrown Citadel 25 man (presumably). This tells us a bit about how weak the tier 10 bonuses are, and because of that, Blizzard has buffed the four piece bonus.

Instead of doing 5% of our criticals as a dot, the number has now been bumped up to 7%. Not a massive buff, but after considering the massive stat increase we will se when switching to tier 10, with our crit being much higher, I think it’s alright. I can certainly live with it until i see how we actually fare in a decent set of ICC25 gear.

Evil Blue Curse

Blizzard doesn’t like us to depend too much on addons to DPS. Strange, really, because the easy fix is to just make it possible to function without them. In our case, they decided to simply prevent the addon WiseEclipse from working, by making sure that you cannot proc an eclipse more often than 15 seconds apart. This means that once you get lunar eclipse, you have to let it run off before you can proc solar eclipse. You can still use WiseEclipse, but it wont have any real function, as the final crit you do will not proc solar eclipse. This is a minor nerf, but couped with the tier 8 nerf – and the indifferent tier 9 bonuses – we will probably see a small, but noticable drop in our DPS when we enter Icecrown.

There has been a lot of people on the MMO-Champion forums today that seems genuinely stu.. confused about the wording of the eclipse change: Eclipse: This effect will not activate again within 15 seconds of either type of Eclipse effect firing, in addition to the existing 30-second cooldown for each type of Eclipse. They seem to think that Eclipse has been reverted back to its old form, but I can assure you that is not the case. The 15 second cooldown will start when you gain eclipse, not when it runs out, so you have two cooldowns to consider: A 30 second cooldown of the respective eclipse you procced, and a 15 second cooldown of ANY eclipse. In practical terms it means that you can’t proc another eclipse until the previous has run off by itself.

- QQ

For the blissfully ignorant, let’s just cover the caps: 263 hit rating, 400 haste rating, and then pump up your crit. Spellpower is not really something we can gear for – we try to get as much spellpower from our gems, but other than that, it pretty much comes along as we get gear upgrades.

Hit is obviously a great concern. While I wouldn’t lie sleepless at night about being 10 hit rating below the cap, I do generally want to stay above the cap – actually, because of my “luck” with gear, I was recently as high as 130 hit rating above the cap. I want to keep my haste around 400, but my general rule of thumb is to allow it to swing down to 350 and up to 450 – although if I reach that high, I can easely switch my haste ring for another ring with crit. But once these caps are met, the issues start surfacing.

After 400 haste, it stops being beneficial to wrath. It can still benefit starfire, but crit becomes better. However, at tier 9 gear, our crit is so high that it stops being a major benefit to starfire, especially since most of us are running with 2-piece tier 8. I am a few crit away from having 100% crit during lunar eclipse, but once I reach that point, I will only have heroic upgrades left in TOTGC and Icecrown Citadel will probably be just around the corner. But even without the added bonus from the tier 8 bonus, with 85% chance to crit during lunar eclipse will reduce the worth of crit. And we are going to get more crit in Icecrown, surely.

So what does this mean? My concern is that it will make us look at crit just as we do haste. It will basicly come down to crit not benefitting starfire and haste not benefitting wrath. There you have it: Two of our most important stats, will only be benefitting one spell each.

Other casters will still gain the full benefit from their stats as they are used to – they have instants, sure, but their main nukes remain unchanged, and the increase will be constant for them, but we are at a point where haste and crit lose some of their worth.

What can we do? Assuming Blizzard doesn’t turn around and make a class defining change, theres not much we can do other than bite it. I suppose a plus side can be that the added crit will benefit our T10 bonuses – especially the 4-piece bonus – and the extra haste will make sure we cast more spells which crits more. But it still doesn’t remove the feeling that we have to compromise the benefit we get from gear – all because of two talents.

- QQ