If you could change one talent in any of the druid talent trees, what would it be? You could talk about what you want it changed to, or just talk about what makes it a weak talent that should be either changed or replaced in some way.^[1]

This question grabbed my attention and I think it has some merit as a Shared Topic. I noticed Graylo made a post on the idea as well. And curse him for having the time to push this out before mine because I will be echoing his sentiments on many things. Oh well, imitation is the best form of flattery, or so they say.

Improved Moonfire

Improved Moonfire as a talent has been lost for awhile. So much so, that even as a second tier talent, it is often overlooked. It took one of the better set bonuses that we have seen to convince us to even consider the talent. This indicates that the talent needs to be reworked.

So what would I do to it? Scrap the increased critical percentage. As a modifier in PvP it does have some usefulness, but I think even using MF spam to finish off an opponent has lost most of its viability. Lets give this talent the 2T9 bonus. "Moonfire DoTs have a critical strike chance equal to 50/100% of your critical strike percentage. Also increases damage dealt by Moonfire by 5/10%."

I think critting DoTs have been on their way for awhile and this set bonus was a "test run" to see what it would do to our DPS. I also think it's been a good change and one worth keeping in the class for awhile. I considered extending crits to Insect Swarm, but decided against it based on two facts. First, IS is a talent. I really dislike talents that buff talents because I feel like it becomes mandatory to pick up the talent as gameplay was probably balanced around having both. I believe that critting IS would require a reduction in some other portion of the Moonkin arsenal and I'm not interested in walking that path. Second, IS is already glyphed for damage. I believe critting IS would require a re-evaluation of the glyph, reducing the damage increase (circa 20%).

Genesis

Raise your hand if you hate Genesis. From a Moonkin point of view, it simply does not deliver. Now yes, I have read the posts about how it's really for Resto and blah blah blah. Here's my problem: There are so few viable options in the second tier that we are forced into the least unattractive option. Nature's Majesty seems a pretty clear must bu what of the other three points? Clearly, Moonglow fills this out nicely, but what if you aren't experiencing mana problems? Where else can you put those points? In order to reach the third tier, you would need to put at least 1 point in Genesis if you didn't want Moonglow. I have Moonglow in my build simply because I wanted to make sure I didn't run out of mana. But in a 25 man, I'm sitting pretty with my mana pool and replenishment.

Fixing Genesis is a whole different beast. I believe it should maintain its viability for Resto Druids so that they can progress down the tree with some type of benefit. I also believe that the talent should offer some viable benefit to Boomkins. Since PvP oriented talents shouldn't really be prevalent until the upper tiers, I suggest a talent that maintains its healing benefits to DoT's and increases the damage and cast time on Wrath.

Wait . . . wha?!? A talent to make a spell . . . slower? Yep. I hate clipping the GCD. I hate having the value of haste reduced because it stops affecting a large percentage of my rotation. I would much rather have the spell seem more like Starfire (since they are fundamentally the same) and get the full benefit of my stats versus firing snotballs every second with no spell queuing and often clipping the GCD.

Resto Tree

While I agree that there are problems in the Resto tree as far as progression down the tree goes, I can't say that I am overly interested in posting fixes to it because I feel like a Resto redesign will mess up what I would say anyway. If you want to see some good ideas on the Resto tree, visit Gray Matter

The patch went live today and while the servers have been down I have been thinking about the new rotation. Then I read Macbook's post on the new rotation and it sparked into text some thoughts that had been brewing in my head. Here's the comment that I left on his site:

I would love to make a recommendation for spell twisting. Start by casting Wrath. Since it only has a 60% chance on crit to proc Eclipse, here is what I recommend. We use to have to wait until the actual Eclipse proc triggered (on impact) in order to switch spells. That generally led to one and possible two extra Wrath casts and some time lost off of Eclipse.

Now, I would recommend switching the instant you get a Nature's Grace buff as you are opening your rotation. If you don't proc Eclipse, meh, whatever, looks like you're gonna start with Solar. If you DO proc Eclipse, you will get extra time casting Starfire under the Eclipse effect. You might, in fact, squeeze in one extra Eclipse.

If we keep hold of Squawk and Awe to track the individual internal cooldowns, it might also answer the question of how long to stick with a Lunar Eclipse precasting phase. I.e. if both Eclipses are off cooldown (or will be in ~2 seconds) then it is worthwhile to "anticipate the Eclipse" by doing a premature spell switch on a crit wrath prior to its impact and subsequent possible proc on the boss.

Hell you can even switch back to Wrath after that one Starfire (since you will have used all of the Nature's Grace time anyway) and continue attempting to proc your Lunar Eclipse. Good stuff eh? I need to post this crap on my blog and not in your comments Macbook!

TL:DR

The new rotation eliminates the fear of a "wrong" Eclipse proc. This enables us to anticipate the Eclipse with zero penalty. Previously, if we anticipated a Lunar Eclipse on a Wrath critical, got it wrong, and then crit with the anticipatory Starfire, we would proc a Solar Eclipse and bemoan the loss of DPS due to the incorrect idol and likely some gearing issues. I do think some people were making a mountain out of a molehill with this issue but in terms of max/min theorycrafting, it was a DPS loss.

Enter 3.2. Now, if the exact same situation were to happen, we would not be penalized. In fact, we would be rewarded. We'd have procced a Solar Eclipse with a Nature's Grace influenced Starfire, cutting down on any theoretical precasting phase time. If the Wrath crit does proc an eclipse, we would get to utilize more of the Eclipse time casting the impacted spell. All-in-all, this is a win-win situation for all of us. So don't be late! Anticipate!

I was enormously surprised to see that Blizzard changed the way our bread and butter DPS talent functioned. It was a very simplistic solution to a few of our problems that also gave Blizzard what they wanted. Blizzard had implied that they wanted Druids to use both spells but that they were unhappy with requiring an addon like Squawk and Awe to manage the internal cooldown. For those of you who don't know what I am talking about, allow me to break it down:

The Starfire and Wrath buffs from this talent are now on separate 30 second. cooldowns. In addition, it is not possible to have both buffs active simultaneously.

Them some powerful words! So with that in mind, let us look at the new Eclipse and why we'll no longer talk about Solar vs. Lunar or even say that Squawk and Awe is necessary for a good rotation.

The New Eclipse

With separate cooldown timers, it will now be possible to spend 15 seconds in a Lunar Eclipse, then continue casting Starfire until you proc a Solar Eclipse and suffer no internal cooldown whatsoever. The new spell mechanic will allow us to drastically increase our time under a given Eclipse, forcing us to switch spells only when the new Eclipse procs. We will no longer have to track an internal cooldown because even if we procced the second Eclipse the instant the first finished, the cooldown on our first Eclipse will have just finished by the time we were ready to proc it once again.

I had mentioned that I thought the Idol was the best thing out of all of this stuff, yet here appears to be one of the greatest changes to the Balance Druid in quite some time. Now you should be asking yourself "What is Rel smoking?" The answer is. . . well I'm pleading the fifth there. But lets take a look at what this change does for gearing.

Previously, someone who ran a Lunar rotation was much less effected by the 400 haste soft cap. The could blissfully stack on haste and not suffer much loss from Wrath clipping. Say goodbye to those days. Now, Wrath will compose a much larger chunk of all Lunar druids arsenal. Therefore, this mechanic change simply reduces the value of haste on all gear once a player reaches 400 haste. Graylo ran his model on the new Eclipse and found that crit rating was better than haste rating after 400 haste.

I really dislike being forced into certain gear because a spell is clipping the GCD. I feel that this indicates poor planning on the designer's part and often results in a reduction in good gearing choices since we are already limited by a hard hit cap. I'm still praying for a new Glyph that modifies the Wrath cast time to allow for more gearing options. Regardless we will most likely determine a BiS anyway and that will guide a good majority of players so perhaps I am being a little overly pessimistic. I guess we shall see.

The second thing I don't like about this change is that it simplifies the druid rotation a great deal. Personally, I like the idea of a priority list instead of a rotation. I feel that this change takes us one step away from a true priority and one step closer to a rotation. I spam one nuke until a little orb appears over my head or MSBT says ECLIPSE!! and then I switch. The only true decision making I have to do is with regards to DoT's and long cooldown abilities. Do I use Starfall with my Lunar or Solar Eclipse. Do I throw down my Treants now? Innervate yet? (Oh PS, all you Lunar folks are gonna find yourselves using more mana than before. Wrath does that to you!).

I guess all in all I am just a little worried that this great change was made to look so great because it was really just a bandaid. In some ways I see this conflicting with Blizzard's stated desire to get away from the rotation and emphasize a priority decision based play-style. I worry that this little piece of cheese dangling in front of me will be snatched away at the last second and I'll be left with only a rumble in my stomach and a heart full of disapointment.

Next up. . . set bonuses. If you thought this was ranty . . . just you wait *eyes glint in the darkness*

So there was an interesting post on EJ and I let it slide off but then Graylo blogged about it and I thought at this point I'd throw in my two cents as well. My issue with recommending the speed enchant [Tuskarr's Vitality] is when you remove [Icewalker] and fall below the hit cap, you are required to regem your sockets to reach the hit cap again using [Veiled Monarch Topaz]. This results in a net loss of stats.

What I'd like to do is take my theoretical druid and change his boot enchant from [Icewalker] to [Tuskarr's Vitality] and swap out one gem to gem for hit. In fairness, it is difficult to model what 8% run speed will do for your DPS, so I will be ignoring the added DPS time on the boss, assuming that it is negligible (at most 8% of the time you are moving). My theoretical druid carries 3k SP, 40% crit and 389 haste. His counterpart carries 2990 SP, 39.73% crit, and 389 haste. If I needed more than 8 hit (either 9, 10, 11, or 12) then I would need two [Veiled Monarch Topaz]. That druid would look like 2980 SP, 39.73% crit, and 389 haste.

I will be comparing straight spell spamming instead of a rotation so that I get a look at the impact to the individual portions of my rotation. I shall name my druids Icewalker, Tuskarr 1 Gem, and Tuskarr 2 Gem. For sake of comparison no idol is equipped.

Icewalker

Tuskarr 1 Gem

Tuskarr 2 Gem

Percent DPS Lost

TL:DR

Every DPS loss was rather minimal (on the scale of .75% to .3% depending on the spell). Were we to weight the percentages of damage done by each spell, I think we would find that for Tuskarr 1 Gem, we tend towards the chosen Eclipse percentage. The real question then becomes, how much more casting time will a player acquire by being able to move 8% faster? Let us assume that we are Tuskarr 1 Gem. Then we would need to find an additional 0.5% of our fight time to be casting.

Let us take a 6 minute fight that forces us to move for 10 seconds ever minute to avoid some fire mechanic. This amounts to 1 full minute of moving. Now, with a speed boost, to escape the mechanic we would only need to move for 9.2 seconds per time. This is 55.2 seconds of movement as opposed to the original 60 seconds of movement. Naturally this allows us 8% more casting time during the movement portion. This amounts to 0.8% more cast time over the course of the entire fight. A DPS increase for Tuskarr 1 Gem and possibly a DPS increase for Tuskarr 2 Gem if an extra spell were able to be cast in the given time.

That kinda failed as a summary since it rambled on a bit so here is TL:DR v2. It seems like the DPS loss from [Icewalker] on a fight that requires movement at least 10% of the time will be less than the casting time gain from [Tuskarr's Vitality] for the replacement of 1 gem. 2 gems will require ~15% movement for this to happen.

Musings

While I agree that such fights exist (General V. etc) I feel that there are many cases where having a speed increase will encourage a player to stand longer to try and get that single cast off. I suppose technically you can squeeze in an extra 8% of your run time as casting if you've got the enchant but that will vary with every movement mechanic and therefore is unreliable. It is therefore my belief that Tuskarr's Vitality promotes laziness and bad habits among raiders, decreasing raid awareness and reducing the emphasis on reaction time even though reaction time will still be a vital component of the raid environment (i.e. spell switching, treants for BL, rebirth, etc). In addition to the aforementioned points, I also want to point out that a good raider is already moving out of the fire, moving onto snow mounds, avoiding shadow crashes, and performing a myriad of other maneuvers already without the speed aide. And if sh!t really hits the fan, there's always catform/sprint. If you need this more than once a fight, you might want to consider why you're reacting so slowly.

So if the early bird gets the worm then I guess the researching moonkin gets the DPS worm! Maybe?

Ok, all bad analogies aside, it's time to digest this information and see if we can come up with any useful tips or thoughts. Do not take these numbers as a comparison of Solar rotations vs. Lunar rotations. Your choice of rotation should be based upon your preferred playstyle and your gear selections.

Flaws:

I ignored a few things that could have a drastic impact on a solar rotation. When a cast time begins to reach 1 sec, the spell queuing system begins to break down. This introduces some lag in cast times and you can't actually cast the spells as quickly as you theoretically can. All of this amounts to getting less wrath casts than you should be getting. Since no spell can queue until the 1 second GCD is over, when your wrath reaches a 1 second cast, your next cast suffers your latency as a casting time penalty on top of the 1 sec hard GCD.

Musings:

The Solar rotation seemed to be based upon your wrath damage. I filled with Wrath and with Starfire and Wrath dealt more damage in the cooldown phase so it looks like we should fill the solar rotation with wrath given perfect spell queuing.

As far as casting DoTs inside of a Solar Eclipse, we came to the conclusion that you should only do it if there are 10 seconds remaining on the buff. Now, I didn't take into consideration that the DoT continues to tick after the Eclipse phase ends, but I think it's misleading to talk about DPCT because technically all you are doing is offsetting your DoT casts. This means that by casting IS under the Eclipse buff, you are pushing back your next IS cast by 14 seconds. Given this shifting, I came to the conclusion that we just wanted to see a raw DPS increase under the Eclipse buff.

The Lunar rotation seemed to carry an excessively high amount of damage caused by Starfire. I can only assume this is because the RNG monster didn't get me because I played an averages game. I think the lunar rotation suffers disproportionately when you get a bad eclipse proc rate. Along the same lines of "shaky results" was the discovery of the fact that sometimes you can cast a Moonfire and suffer zero DPS loss from Starfire. I laid out some guidelines for when you should refresh and when you shouldn't, but it was pointed out to me that these guidelines were pretty useless.

The DoT reapplication is a case by case basis where we would be unable to determine if we had the proper haste percentage until after the eclipse cycle was over. Therefore, we never really know if we will hit a dry spell and have zero NG procs throughout the eclipse cycle. I, personally, am always refreshing Moonfire within my Eclipse cycle so long as I do it within the first 6 seconds. I'm sure that I've been bitten by the RNG monster by doing so, but I also feel fairly confident that it has provided me with a DPS increase.

Long story short, I feel that what I have found here supports what I do in game. I am currently waiting for a second piece of T8.5 (yay for being low on the totem pole) before switching out a great deal of gear, but I am turning out solid DPS using a Solar cycle and refreshing my DoTs within Eclipse if I have 10 seconds or greater left.

I think in the near future I will be doing a post on the good, the bad, and the ugly of a Solar Rotation versus the RNG nature of the Lunar Rotation. I know Graylo holds a Lunar rotation as superior to a Solar rotation and I have seen many great Lunar parses to back up that theory. I have also seen some great Solar parses and once my gear improves to their level, I anticipate comparing my parses to theirs.

On an unrelated note, I apologize for this post taking so long to come out with so little true content. I had my birthday this weekend and was subsequently incapable of coherent thought. You should have seen Friday's version of this post. Quite comical!

to the tune of The Gambler (thanks BBB!)
Well you gotta know when to DoT 'em
know when to nuke 'em
Eclipse is a'tickin
When do you DoT 'em?


Ok ok, sorry. I actually did sing it to the song too, but reading that is probably torture enough. But the focus of this post is to help you decide if/when to refresh your DoTs during the Eclipse. I would say that I will present empirical data and then give you a black and white view of things, but our rotations and therefore our choices are fluid, based upon procs and uptimes. Consider this as my attempt at a guideline.

Before we dive into the math and start dissecting the eclipse bonuses and whatnot, it is important to get a conceptual idea of what our DoTs do and why we would ever want to sacrifice a cast (or part of a cast) for a DoT refreshment. Because of Improved Insect Swarm, our DoTs increase our two main nukes. Thus acting as not only a damage dealing spell but also as a target-based debuff. Naturally, we would want to benefit from this debuff for as long as possible while we are casting the relevant spell. In an infinite amount of time, this boils down to DPS gained by the debuff plus DPS of the spell itself vs. the DPS of what you would have cast instead. However, in a fixed amount of time (say 1 eclipse buff) this gets a little trickier to account for damage done. I will do my best to explain why I chose to work with DoTs and timeframes the way I did while I lay out my math.

My theoretical druid is still rocking out that 3k spell power, 45% crit and 389 haste. I actually ran these calculations with drastically higher haste (~650) and none of the overall results were changed.

Lunar Eclipse and MF

Moonfire directly benefits Starfire by increasing Starfire's crit chance by 3%.
Here's a glimpse at what is happening within the Eclipse cycle with and without Moonfire on my target. Since I decided to use timelines instead of DPS to construct my DPS gains/losses, I chose to look at all of my spells in terms of damage per cast (DPC)
As I looked at my Eclipse phase, I continued to reduce the effective Eclipse time by one Wrath cast, giving me a total Eclipse time of 13.9629. This gave me 6 Starfire casts that benefit from Eclipse with a total casting time of 12.1611. Notice, this leaves 13.9629 - 12.1611 = 1.8255 seconds of spare time in the Eclipse phase. At this point I did a LOT of math, all of which will be rendered irrelevant by my next point, so let's just skip to it. Because I have over 1 GCD of spare time in my Eclipse phase (due to Starfire cast time) it is ALWAYS a benefit to cast Moonfire since I will still receive the same number of Starfire casts.

Naturally, if I change the values of haste and/or crit I change my results. So my guide, as promised, is to calculate the average effective portion of the Eclipse phase and subtract from that the average cumulative cast time of your Starfires. If this is greater than the average GCD during your Eclipse phase, ALWAYS refresh Moonfire. (With the same level of crit, haste between 445 and 725 lead to the loss of a Starfire to cast Moonfire). If the number you get when you subtract is less than the GCD, only refresh if the Moonfire DD plus the Moonfire DoT is greater than the lost Starfire (approximately 10 seconds remaining on eclipse).

Well, wasn't that a messy answer? Sorry about that, but it turns out it's entirely dependent on how much spare time is in an Eclipse phase once all possible Starfires are cast.

Solar Eclipse and IS

Insect Swarm directly benefits Wrath by increasing damage by 3%.

The Solar Eclipse model is simpler. Every Wrath cast is equal to the GCD at that time. Therefore, one IS cast takes the same span of time that one Wrath takes. Thus, to see if we should recast IS during the Eclipse phase, we need to look at the DPS of the wrath cast we lose vs. the DPS of the IS that we gain in addition to the boost it provides the subsequent Wrath casts.


Since the average Wrath will deal 6267.485 we would need that much damage from the IS tick plus the increased damage in wrath. As we can see above, IS adds 160.4392 DPS to wrath. IS itself does an additional 567.4862 DPS, but only does damage every 2 seconds.

Since we see that IS ticks every two seconds, to get a true benefit within the Eclipse phase we would need to refresh with 10 seconds left under Eclipse.

TL:DR

So it turns out that the Lunar Eclipse is much more difficult to work with in regards to DoTs. The answer of whether to refresh or not is entirely dependent on the speed with which you are casting Starfire. The quick answer is

If casting Moonfire causes you to cast one less Starfire, then only do it if there are >10 seconds left on Eclipse. If casting Moonfire does NOT cause you to cast one less Starfire, refresh Moonfire when it runs out.

The Solar cycle was easier to conceptualize because Wrath and IS have the same cast time (I view the GCD penalty as cast time for DoTs). To see a DPS increase within the Eclipse phase you should only refersh if you have 10 or more seconds left on Eclipse. However, the DoT continues after the Eclipse phase has expired, and so that also counts as a DPS increase. The overall net effect should be that it increases your DoT uptime.

Now it's time for my caveat: These increases are dependent upon the time window that we have available to us. Since Eclipse is a fixed time window, we can talk about a pure DPS increase. This is much harder to do in terms of a never-ending or even non-static timeframe.

I will be using all of the assumptions from the first post and all of the same calculations save one: The Idol of the Shooting Star will be equipped. As a result, I will be truncating my math for this post. If you're absolutely dying to see what I did, I can send you my spreadsheet where I calculated all of this out.

Precasting

Eclipse

Cooldown

DoTs

Same rules apply here. I assumed that the DoTs were cast immediately before the Precasting phase and at the conclusion of the Eclipse phase. I included the post-Eclipse DoT damage in the Cooldown portion, as that is where the time spent to cast them was alloted. Here is the damage for the DoT's cast before the Precasting phase.

Totals

TL:DR

Seriously, you didn't read that? It was so tiny in comparison. . . *sigh*. On to the results: The DPS of the Lunar rotation was 4806 DPS. I went ahead and broke down the percentage of damages. Remember we're playing the averages game here, so nothing is precise and if this isn't what your damage looks like (and you have these stats) it's ok.

We've talked about percentage damages and it is very rare to see a Starfire contribution percentage over 60%, even after adjusting for treants and starfall. Movement cuts into our ability to reach these numbers as does our good pal, RNG. And it's always possible that I made a mistake somewhere. But much like proofreading your own paper, your eyes tend to tell you what you meant, not what you wrote.

This is part one in a series on the possible Moonkin Rotations, the two different Eclipse Procs, DoT uptimes, and anything else that creeps into this abysmal place between my ears.

If you couldn't tell already, I am looking extensively into the viability of the Solar rotation (an eclipse procced by Starfire). In general, I find that the Solar rotation is more fun to play. It seems to move at a faster pace during the fights. I find that a Solar rotation is a little more forgiving if you need to move.

This post will rely heavily on Graylo's previous look at the Eclipse mechanism and his calculations of the Lunar rotation. If you haven't seen this post yet, I recommend that you head on over and take a look.

I will be using my same theoretical druid primed for a Solar rotation at 3000 spellpower, 45% crit, and 389 haste. A side note to my theoretical druid: I have reduced the crit percentage from ~50 to 45% to account for the fact that many raids do not have every crit buff, especially in the 10 man world.

There are essentially three portions of the rotation. There is the precast, where we are attempting to proc the eclipse buff. Next is the eclipse portion of the rotation. This includes all of the spells that are cast while under the eclipse buff. Finally, there is the cooldown, while we wait for the internal cooldown of the eclipse buff to expire.

Assumptions: Beneficial DoT is up while corresponding spell is cast. Idol of Steadfast Renewal is used. Precasting period starts with both DoTs up. I chose to use Starfire's Nature's Grace Uptime for all non-Wrath casts since it was smaller and presented a more conservative view.

Precasting

Eclipse

Cooldown (Wrath Filler)

DoTs

I sorta gave these a hand-waving assumption that they would always be up and this is strictly FALSE. So to semi-rectify the problem, I will be including them in the damage and adding two global cooldowns to the front of the Precasting phase. I intentionally included a refresh period for my DoT’s in the Cooldown phase. However, at some point IS fell off during the eclipse proc. I would have to choose when/if to reapply the DoT. I shall be looking into this a little closer when I talk about DoT uptime.

Total Damage/DPS

TL:DR

The Solar cycle is putting out approximately 5185.4602 DPS. This is excluding any starfall or treant damage. I am also not accounting for any BL or any other type of haste buff.

Before you run off and tell your guild that you can do x DPS, keep in mind there are MANY flaws in this calculation. For instance, I calculated average Starfire damage, knowing full well that only 1 (and possibly two) Starfire crit. I assumed that the IS DoT was applied throughout the Eclipse proc without calculating the cast time involved for that. I made assumptions about glyphs and specs that aren’t universally true (but are pretty darn close). This is theorycrafting, folks. Take it with a grain of salt because it really only gives you an idea of what the moonkin arsenal can look like. That said, the following is a breakdown of the percentage contribution of each spell.
Which is not drastically far from what I experience when I am able to "stand and deliver". I'm much happier overall with these results than with the others.

Eclipse Proccing for Lunar Eclipse

Wouldn't this significantly increase the time it takes to proc a lunar eclipse?

Theoretically yes. Although theoretically this would allow you to use higher values of haste with wrath before GCD clipping. With 600 haste, a 2 second cast with Nature's Grace would become:

As you can see, we'd still be hitting the hard cap of the GCD during Nature's Grace. This means that despite the increase in cast time, increasing the proc rate on Eclipse would probably cause Lunar rotations to be easier to proc. (Although there would be a significant increase in Solar eclipse damage at higher values of haste, allowing that to scale as well so maybe that would be a balance). So to answer your question, not really. Especially considering most Lunar Boomkins run with higher haste anyway.

Solar Rotation Impact

As mentioned above, I was worried about what would happen to the damage of a Solar eclipse rotation once the cast time got bumped up and we could fire off wraths with larger benefits from haste. For the following calculations, I will assume that my raid buffed druid has 3000 spell power, 45% crit, and 600 haste. Yes, I realize this set may not exist, but it is entirely for demonstrative purposes.

Here are some numbers that I'm gonna be using throughout to calculate this. Now on to the actual details. I am just focusing on the 30 seconds of the fight that we are either in Eclipse or on an Eclipse cooldown. Given the increased cast time, I'm going to assume that Solar rotations are now filling the cooldown time with Wrath spam. For sake of comparison, I will assume that we manage to predict when Starfire was going to crit and did not waste a cast in Eclipse on Starfire. We open by refreshing IS. Then we refresh IS and MF after the Eclipse proc expires.

Normal Wrath Eclipse Glyphed Wrath Eclipse

TL:DR

So it seems to me that the glyphed version of the solar eclipse cycle would allow for an increase of 4772.93 - 4601.47 = 171.46 DPS which is clearly a nice increase. This "extra" dps came from the glyphs ability to allow wrath to scale with haste. This allows the solar rotation to continue to scale with stats just as well as the lunar rotation does, where currently the lunar rotation begins to scale better after 400 haste when wrath casts begin to clip the GCD.

A side note, since editing: The DPS of the glyphed Wrath cycle suffered by essentially one wrath cast in the eclipse cooldown portion. I had .91 of a cast which is easy to imagine that with a good RNG (or even decent RNG) you would garner that cast instead of switching to avoid proccing the wrong eclipse.

Oh Mumurs. I just talked and mathed myself into this as a fix for just about everything excluding our movement issue! How elegant and easy of a solution! Introduce ONE minor glyph that doesn't change the DPS of Wrath and solve a large chunk of our concerns! Well played sir. You have my vote in 2012!

Debates are raging! Procs are being watched! Combat logs are being combed through! Cowpies are being hurled with precarious disregard! And all the while we're wondering what the final judgment will be.

Here's what we know: It's a 15% chance to proc a GCD Starfire every time that Insect Swarm ticks. There is no internal cooldown.

I will be using a slightly uber druid for stats because with 4T8, I'm assuming you've garnered some good gear. Therefore, my druid has 3k spell power, 45% crit, and 389 haste rating. As always, there is a TL:DR for those of you looking for the "express" ride.

Math Stuff

Chances to proc: Insect swarm ticks 7 times over 14 seconds. So I have
Thats 4.5 procs per minute. To even out the numbers, I'm going to be looking at 120 seconds (two minutes) so that I would get 9 procs.

Nature's Grace Uptime: I will be using Starfire's NG uptime for this so
GCD:
Average Starfire Cast Time:
Average Starfire Damage (assuming SF idol and moonfire buff to crit):
I would get 9 instant Starfires @ an average GCD of 1.065 seconds for a total of 9.585 seconds of casting time. In this time I would normally do an average of 4.5 Starfires.

TL:DR

My theoretical druid picked up 328.78 DPS through his 4T8 piece bonus assuming that the buff never overwrote itself and wasn't consumed by the casting bug. That, to me, is a significant increase in DPS and warrants the inclusion of the 4T8 bonus into the BiS gear.

A small note on all of this: The benefit of the proc decreases as Haste increases. Logically, this makes sense because there is less gain in casting time per proc as you cast faster. In Bloodlust and Heroism situations my druid is popping off Starfires at a rapid 1.434 seconds per cast. Here, the DPS boost of the proc is minimal. I speculate that Solar rotations will make heavier use of the 4T8 than Lunar rotations using high haste. For example, a druid with 700 haste will find himself gaining around a mere .9 seconds of cast time through the proc. My druid was gaining well over 1 second per proc.

EDIT: This workbook is constantly being updated and I will (hopefully) soon have a user friendly version to bring you full of dropdown selection menus, automated importing of the selected item's stats, and creamy goodness. If you think I missed an item (and I know i did) send me a message or leave me a comment. I'll add it in!

I have been working on modeling this DPS spreadsheet for a little bit now. The long and short of this is that this is an alpha release of this. I'm stuck seeing this as I want to see it. So what I need from any interested reader is a review of it. What buffs/debuffs are missing in my dps calculations? The percentages for the rotation came from my own WWS reports on uptime of DoTs and spellcasts all normalized to 100%. Treants and starfall were ignored. Along with this are some other proposed BiS and some musings on NG uptime. If you don't have a pretty good knowledge of excel, you may not want to tinker with this. PS, this is a total clutter. It needs to have all the names cleaned up and much much more. I'm looking for content at the moment, not succinctness nor aesthetics. Thanks!

Moonkin Spreadsheet

I do realize there is a spreadsheet out there called WrathCalcs. I built this to try to get a better understanding of how to model moonkin damage (and thereby choose stats). It is not intended to correct or compete with WrathCalcs in any way.