A somewhat interesting question, then, is what are the good PvE bandaids Blizzard could throw our way to help a little bit with scaling? Some important criteria:
1) Minimal impact on restoration (both in PvE and PvP), and on moonkin PvP. This rules out most Nature's Grace changes and most outside cooldowns we could add.
2) No massive changes to moonkin PvE - so no Eclipse redesign (yeah, I know).
Within those boundaries, however, there are some changes we could see that would help clean up moonkins a bit. Some examples:
- Celestial Focus - changing the haste on this talent to either raw spell damage (or damage and healing) would be a positive change. This both raises our soft haste cap slightly and provides a small dps boost. There is an impact on restoration, but it is overall a very small one given that not every restoration druid specs into the talent and that the benefit is relatively minor.
- Improved Insect Swarm - this one is easy. Reverse the bonuses. 3% crit to Wrath helps proc that elusive Lunar Eclipse, and 3% damage to Starfire is just as good as 3% damage to Wrath. More importantly, however, this lowers the soft crit cap slightly which helps out endgame moonkins.
- Nature's Splendor - increasing the duration this adds to Moonfire and Insect Swarm helps moonkin pve dps, but does not impact moonkin PvP or restoration to any great extent.
- Insect Swarm and Moonfire - allow some combination of these spells scaling with haste or crit. Doesn't have to be both with each, but this is a very simple way to let moonkins scale better with the relative stats. This improves damage without improving burst.
Challenge:
What - if any - useful "bandaids" would you like to see moonkins get before 4.0? Again: nothing major, hopefully nothing hard to implement, but changes that would help moonkins with scaling and give us some help in PvE.
Respond here, respond on your blog (but let me know if you do!), send me an email, or even send up smoke signals - I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Bandaids are hardly an ideal solution, but they are a practical one.
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It was tough trying to find a change that fits your criteria so I had to trash my initial idea. I spent some time looking over our talents and glyphs and decided to focus on a talent.
ReplyDeleteIn this case, Moonfury. My idea is to increase the bonus damage from 10% to maybe 15-20%.
My other idea, involving Moonfury, is to additionally have it increase the damage that Moonfire and Insect Swarm deals by a certain percentage of our crit and haste, respectively. So Moonfire would benefit from crit, and Insect Swarm from our haste.
I couldn't even begin to fathom the math behind these ideas so I'll leave that up to others. I also apologize if my idea is kind of boring or unoriginal. I did my best!
Glyph of Starfire: Remove the limit on three refreshes of Moonfire.
ReplyDeleteStarlight Wrath 5/5 now:
ReplyDeleteReduces the cast time of your Wrath and Starfire spells by 0.5 sec.
Starlight Wrath 5/5 fixed:
Reduces the cast time of your Starfire by 0.5 sec and increase the damage of your Wrath by 33%.
I don't like the blizzard's last buff (+3% dmg). It doesn't solve my scaling problems (i'm haste capped and crit capped). All i need is a way to scale better with gear.
ps: sorry for my english, i'm russian
Perhaps change Owlkin Frenzy back to proc from damage done, not only direct attacks. Would probably have to remove the mana regen component.
ReplyDeleteWith every other casting class getting a benefit from our Aura, it's kinda built in that we get the 5% all the time..however each casting class gets buffed in the raid when a moonkin is around. I would advise that moonkin form also give another 2-3% crit chance on top of the 5% to moonkins only.
ReplyDeleteAnother suggestion would to have moonkin form give us innate chance to crit on moonfire/IS or both.
Another would be have moonkin form give something like a 10% chance for IS to refresh half duration up to 2-3 times of half refresh. (can't really do it with moonfire do to the glyphs)
Will try to brainstorm more and come up with further suggestions.
An idea I saw on the forums that I really liked was to change Glyph of Wrath to the following:
ReplyDeleteGlyph of Wrath: Increases the cast time of Wrath by x% and the damage done by Y%.
These numbers would have to be mathed out, but perhaps something like 25 and 30%. This could definitely affect pvp, but I think it wouldn't be very likely to because pvp moonkin usually (so far as I'm aware) want the machine-gun effect of wrath. Faster casts=win in pvp.
I'm really sorry to keep saying this on blogs and forums across the interwebs, but "preserving" balance PvP is asinine. And the more I hear about people complaining the more I just want to scream "Let it die!" Balance PvP is a a corpse at this point. It's consistently underrepresented in upper tier PvP. It has terrible spell choices, low survivability, movement issues, few practical stun/snare escapes and basically one spell school. I don't feel that Balance PvE is far from "working" and to sacrifice fixing Balance PvE to maintain one of the worst PvP specs "viability" is plain silly. I'll post another comment here if this pisses me off to the point that I feel the need to blog about it.
ReplyDeleteSomeone posted a while ago with a brilliant idea for glyph that converts a certain % of your hasterating to wrath into critrating to wrath. The idea is simple and shouldnt be to hard fix.
ReplyDeleteThis would solve alot of our problems. I'm sure that most boomkins wouldnt mind sacrificing like 15% of our hasterating from wrath which converts into 15% crit to wrath. It will help us get that eluvsive lunareclipse proc easier also.
Only me who thinks this is awesome?