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!

So with yet another tip of my horns to Murmurs, I'm gonna take a look at eclipse, the RNG, and some of the proposed changes. The original discussion can be found here.

Current Eclipse

The current eclipse mechanism is very RNG dependent. For a lunar cycle, there is a 60% chance that a critical strike Wrath will proc eclipse. Right there are two instances of RNG. Even a solar cycle, which is 100% chance on a Starfire crit, still requires an RNG dependent event.

It is very easy to appear anti-RNG when talking about Eclipse and its current mechanics. Let me be clear that I am NOT anti-RNG. I think that one of the only ways to prove skill within WoW is to show how you react to dynamic situations and RNG dependent buffs/debuffs provide an excellent way to separate the great from the good.

Now that we have that little soapbox behind us, let's continue looking at eclipse. A 30% increase in critical strike chance to Starfire spells or a 30% increase to Wrath damage is the net result of the proc. Now assuming that Starfire and Wrath were doing comparable DPS, then 30% crit ~ 30% damage (with the point going to crit if the RNG loves you or increased damage if the RNG doesn't). So what is wrong with eclipse?

Eclipse provides 15 seconds of this bonus. In a "Stand and Deliver" fashion, this is pretty solid, but it breaks down in high movement situations because the buff doesn't stop ticking down just because we aren't casting. It's not unusual to spam away and once eclipse procs be forced to move in some manner.

So gandering, yes sir, gandering at Murmurs post on the WoW forums, we have the following recommendations:

- Every Starfire you cast has a 20% cumulative chance of making your next Wrath do 30% more damage. So after SF1, the chance is 20%, but after SF5 the chance is 100%.
-Allows for a higher opportunity to benefit from Eclipse procs
-Still completely RNG based and does not promote any true form of skill

Mathematically speaking, this eclipse would be centered around finding the highest probable DPS without doing a 5xStarfire>5xWrath and repeat ad nauseum. This becomes a very standard rotation and I can see the SquawkHard showing a big starfire picture with a number inside of it to count the number of Starfires cast. My brain begins to freeze over a little bit and a small puddle of drool collects around my keyboard as I raid and continually count from 1 to 5 and occasionally refresh my DoTs.

- Every Starfire cast increases Crit chance by 1%, every Wrath cast increase Haste by 1%. Both effects stack and have a duration of 10 to 15 seconds.
-Very simplistic and removes all concept of RNG and gives a flat, predictable bonus instead
-Does not create a very interesting or skilled rotation. Only one 'off choice' spell needs to be cast every 10 to 15 seconds.

This idea turns eclipse from a proc into a ramping DPS talent. First you lay on your haste effect and then you lay on your crit effect and you cast your spell of choice (likely Starfire since you'll reap both a haste benefit and a crit benefit while wrath might do some GCD clipping) with one of the other spell every 8 or so seconds to refresh your stack. I agree that the idea is a solid and dependable solution to the perceived RNG problem but it removes all need for skill. Thus is another place where an addon like SquawkHard would rule your rotation. I find this to be vastly different than the feral druid priority that requires keeping up buffs and debuffs that all have different cooldowns/requirements. Their rotation is a balancing act and the good players are easily separated from the bad players. I think a change of this style would only create a plateau of Balance druids.

The only hope that I see for this change is making it impossible to maintain both stacks completely thereby forcing people to choose between running sub optimal stacks or picking one stack over the other.

- Change Eclipse to be based on 'charges' instead of a timed debuff allotting a specific number of casts to be effected by the proc.
-Increases the opportunity to benefit from Eclipse
-Does little to remove the major RNG factor of Eclipse, though it does lessen it -Removes Haste scaling from Eclipse
-Would still have to have some form of time limit to prevent 'chaining' Eclipse or buffing pre-fight

Believe it or not, I really like the idea because it gives the player control. Gone would be the days of a movement wrecked Eclipse proc. It also preserves the unpredictability of the moonkin rotation. I agree with the thought that there needs to be a time limit on this buff and that it should be in excess of the time needed to cast the spell. There is always the option of starting the cooldown when the buff is either used up or expires. This will encourage druids to use it immediately but not penalize them for having to succumb to fight mechanics.

- Change Wrath's portion of Eclipse to be 100% chance on Crit instead of 60%.
-Removes the larger portion of Eclipse's RNG
-Still does little to help with mobility to making use of Eclipse

I hate to be the naysayer here, but the reason that the Wrath chance is 60% is because a Wrath cast time is less than a Starfire cast time. Now, ignoring the first cast proc, this means that you would have more chances to crit with Wrath than you would with Starfire. This would tip the scales back in the direction of the Lunar cycle and you'd see every Moonkin doing exactly the same thing. Blizzard has made it clear that they don't want to encourage this type of blind dopplegangering within a class/spec.

- Change Eclipse to be two separate 'on use' abilities that share a 30 second cooldown with each other
-Removes the concept of 'spell twisting'
-Allows for the best use of Eclipse buffs

So while this provides the most "user control" it again eliminates any randomness from the druid rotation. In fact, we become uni-dimensional. Pick your spell and subsequent DoT(s). Cast said spell repeatedly. Pop eclipse when most approriate. Replace keyboard from having hit 3 or 4 so many times that they no longer work.

-Change Eclipse to work like Arcane Blast and/or Missle Barage.

Ok, this is backed by Foofy (if I'm reading that correctly). Before I do a review of this I am going to need to see a little more information on it.

- Change Eclipse to add a stackable buff to Starfire and Wrath - such as each Wrath Crit increases Starfire's chance to Crit by X%. The effects don't have a shared cooldown, thus the two are theoretically chained together
- Allows for better use of Eclipse procs
- Less RNG dependent
- Promotes spell twisting
- Has the possibility to be abused in un-intended ways (although I don't think this is a major concern)

Ok, so this was my baby and I'm pretty biased to it, but lets just pretend I'm not and that I am taking as objective a stance as I can. I suggested this adaptation because it still contains the RNG factor based on your crit. It would be 100% on crit for application and in this case, you needn't worry that wrath casts faster than starfire because you'll want to have both buffs rolling. Here's the catch: You may not be able to do that all the time. In terms of gearing, I feel that this also encourages the best balance of crit/haste because you will be using both spells copiously. I agree with the un-intended abuse as it might be possible to stack crit high enough to run both buffs all the time. I feel that doing so would cause you to sacrifice so many other stats that even with both buffs rolling, your dps would be sub-par.

In the end, I feel like we've had some good ideas thrown forth by the community and I hope that GC continues reading past the silly banter people feel the need to throw into constructive threads. If you have an idea but are afraid of GC and the megalithic WoW forums, feel free to leave a comment and I'll post it over there for you.

On an unrelated gear note, I have updated my BiS spreadsheet with some new stuff and a nifty new set of dropdowns on the BiS page to make gear changes easier!

Hello, and welcome to my little blog! If you've stumbled here by accident, feel free to browse around and. . . oh look! This is the first post! I guess there's not much else to see but while this project is under construction, I will continue to put up new posts.

So a little about myself: I am a balance druid in one of the top guilds on Malfurion. We just downed Yogg-Saron and are about to engage the hard modes of all the Ulduar bosses. I'm one of those nosy types that likes to know why things work the way they do. I'm also a perfectionist so I try to maximize my characters abilities and functions in a raid. I currently use a solar rotation for the majority of the boss fights.

You're likely to find my musings on the balance druids' role in raids and PvP (to a much lesser extent) as well as some mild theory crafting about best-in-slot gear and maximizing DPS. I hope this place will be useful to some but be warned, it serves best as a place for me to jot down my often misguided thoughts about how WoW works.