I felt like an appropriate follow-up to my last article would be to look at the talent responsible for creating such a low soft cap on haste. For a more intimate look at the talent responsible for crit's soft cap, visit Graylo's guest post over at WoW.com

Nature's Grace. The butter to Eclipse's bread. The speed increase associated with this talent adds excitement to the Balance Druid's rotation, allowing a player to rain down massive Starfire bombs upon the heads of his enemies or bring out a Gatling gun of Wrath casts. There really is nothing as exciting as watching a Wrath a second fly out from your druid and wreak havoc. And there's nothing as frustrating as watching that Wrath cast in .6 seconds only to have to wait almost as long as the cast took before you can start firing another.

Unlike Eclipse, many druids do not see a problem with Nature's Grace. They enjoy the faster Starfire casts and adhere to a 400 haste rule so that they never really feel the effect of the downtime because they gimp their stats to stay at 400 haste. In my last post, I looked at the haste soft cap and (hopefully) encouraged people to continue gearing haste after 400, despite its lowered relative worth. In this post, I will look at how Nature's Grace is causing issues with the global cooldown and haste.

Power

Nature's Grace is an extremely powerful talent. Previously, Nature's Grace affected a single cast. Now, the buff persists for 3 seconds, allowing us to cast 3 Wraths or 2 Starfires. While this seems like a buff, and I posted some other peoples thoughts on the matter, I am beginning to wonder if it is not part of the fundamental problem with Moonkin DPS and scaling. As mentioned above, Moonkin currently gear to 400 haste as a priority. At this point, haste takes a dive in its relative value. This is due to clipping the GCD with Wrath while Nature's Grace is active.

I have seen a plethora of ridiculous suggestions lately that include, but are not limited to: Dropping points from Nature's Grace to lower uptime, dropping points from Starlight's Wrath, dropping points from Celestial Focus, or dropping points from Improved Moonkin. All of these suggestions are ludicrous. First, if you did drop the points, where would they go? Our two floater points tend to be placed in one of three places. Gale Winds, Brambles, and Owlkin Frenzy all provide sub optimal DPS boosts. Other options are even worse. Genesis is a complete waste, even with impMoonfire and 2T9. Typhoon is situational at best. Also, dropping a talent that provides stats (as Nature's Grace does) only leads to gearing difficulties or multiple respecs in order to maintain the "right" amount of haste. Don't go down this path. It's a disaster. You would be sacrificing faster Starfire casts for Wrath, a poor trade-off. Another way to think of this situation is to look only at Wrath. Where previously, 400 haste brought Wrath to a GCD cast with Nature's Grace, you would now need more haste (and therefore more itemization points in haste and not crit or spellpower) to reach that same value. At the same time, your Starfire would suffer the same increase in cast time, essentially managing to boost the relative value of haste by cutting out haste boosts from your spec. That's like saying "I really value my left hand after cutting off my right!"

Scaling

Nature's Grace increases your casting speed by 20%. With a long nuke such as Starfire, this bonus is great. Channeled spells also reap great benefit from haste boosts such as this. The only pitfall with such a buff occurs when the spell being cast has a short cast time. There is a minimum of a one second global cooldown that cannot be reduced. Cast times can be reduced past 1 second. So what happens with the extra time between the end of the cast time and the expiration of the GCD? Exactly nothing. This presents a scaling problem similar to the one laid out by Graylo in his article. To quote:

The size of Eclipse not only amplifies other problems but it actually causes other problems as well. The prime example is how moonkin scale with crit rating. A lot of people assume that Eclipse increases the marginal value of crit rating for moonkin because Eclipse procs off of critical strikes. In reality Eclipse hurts the marginal value of crit rating relative to other stats more then it helps. This is due to diminishing returns felt as critical strike chance increases.

To put it in less mathy terms, increasing your critical strike chance increases the DPS of only part of your rotation. If you have a 50% crit chance and cast 100 spells, the 50 spells that would have crit anyway won't crit harder because your crit chance is increased to 51%. So, as you increase your critical strike chance, there are fewer and fewer spells that can be affected by increasing your crit rating. This decreases the marginal value of crit rating. When you have a buff like Lunar Eclipse that increases your crit chance by 40%, the marginal value of crit rating goes down a lot. In fact, the Lunar Eclipse buff is so large, that moonkin are able to cap their critical strike chance with normal ICC 25man gear, thus reducing the marginal value of crit rating to zero for Starfire while Lunar Eclipse is active. This is important, because it means other classes will improve with better gear more quickly then moonkin will.

Likewise, Nature's Grace actually hurts the marginal value of haste, although not in exactly the same way. Given the bottom line of the GCD, any haste that pushes a spell below the GCD no longer benefits that spell. My last article showed that this value with Nature's Grace is 400 haste and without Nature's Grace is around 1100 haste. Putting the Eclipse argument outlined above together with the Nature's Grace argument presented here implies that the only stat that Moonkin's scale fully with is spell power. Both haste and crit suffer from some type of soft cap.

I pulled this slightly out of context, but it came from Murmurs quite awhile ago. I think it does a good job explaining the interaction of haste, crit, and Nature's Grace. Murmur's is referring to Wrath casts here.

It's odd because haste and Nature's Grace have something of an inverse scaling with each other. In theory, the more crit you have, the less value the Haste from your gear is going to hold because you'll see less time benefiting from it, conversely the more Haste you have, the lower the impact Nature's Grace has on your overall casting time. If you already have 50% Haste, then Nature's Grace is worthless. If you have 100% crit, then Haste is worthless.

Putting the Puzzle Together

Nature's Grace is the cause of the very low haste soft cap. For progression raiders in ICC gear, running with less than 600 haste takes some tricky gearing. As such, we have begun to see a scaling problem with haste on our gear. Recently, we received a buff to Earth & Moon to help us keep pace with other DPS classes, but this is clearly a band-aid.

Likewise, as our crit rating increases, our Nature's Grace uptime increases, decreasing the marginal value of haste further. Additionally, as uptime increases, this talent becomes a larger contributer to our DPS. Changing the talent has the potential to drastically alter Boomkin DPS, so it is understandable that Blizzard is waiting to rework the talent (if they intend to do so).

Looking Forward (TL:DR)

It's probably foolhardy for me to lay out some ideas here, since they will most likely never reach the right eyes, but I wanted to consider some alternatives to what I consider a stat boosting spell. I also understand that mechanics that increase damage done by a flat modifier are pretty lame. It is my hope that if/when a Nature's Grace redesign occurs, it will not be converted to such a talent, as I feel this would be an injustice to our game play and remove the cross-spec utility of the spell. A good talent will retain its usefulness to both specs (resto/balance) and contribute to a dynamic play-style.

I tossed around several ideas that involved charges or complicated mechanics. I wanted to make sure that the talent still maintained a reliance on multiple stats (and yes, this will probably all be moot when Cataclysm hits). I finally settled on a spellpower boost that comes from your haste rating. Without a 20% haste buff, the soft cap rises to ~1100. Given this new (and much higher haste cap) along with the increase of haste priority in gearing, we would begin to see much larger haste values (~800). If all of these conjectures were to become true, then this is what I would propose.


I particularly like the fact that this talent would then scale with gear while not creating any specific soft caps. I did not try to balance the talent with anything more than the briefest of napkin maths, so the 25/50/75% business might be a little funky and need some fine tuning. It has the interesting side effect of increasing the power of the Lunar Eclipse (which as I understand it, is not scaling as well as the Solar Eclipse).

All suggestions aside, I hope we can agree that while Eclipse may be the most obvious focal point for Moonkin rage due to its seemingly RNG nature, Nature's Grace presents a problem that is as fundamentally challenging for the Moonkin rotation. Here's to hoping that Cataclysm holds some changes for us in this department!