Friday, February 5, 2010

Graylo's Guest Post on WoW.com

Graylo, of moonkin theory crafting blog fame, made a guest post on WoW.com about the problematic position of Eclipse in our rotation. 

In short, he argues that Eclipse is too big a part of our rotation to be as random as it is.  That one buff accounts for between 10 and 20% of our total damage output, but we can't control when it occurs and we can't make any use of it when we're moving.  Further, we are rapidly approaching a crit cap for Starfire during an active eclipse (i.e. the point at which Starfire crits 100% of the time).  We're already at the haste cap for Wrath, which isn't helping matters either.

While it feels cool to know that something is as good as it can be (casting as fast as possible and critting every time), that means that we know longer scale with gear.  We can't crit more often, or cast more frequently, so the only stat still helping us is spell power.

It's not quite that bad...yet.  And it never will be, for me, since I will be in mostly ICC 10 normal gear.  But it is possible to hit the crit cap with ICC 25 normal gear, per Graylo's calculations.

So, in short, there are two problems.  First, the Wrath item levels have simply gotten too high, and boomkin have trouble scaling beyond item level 260 or so, meaning we will fall behind other players in full ICC 25 gear.  The developers have acknowledged this as a global problem, indicating that the extra half-tiers of gear they put into Ulduar and ToC were not initially anticipated and caused ICC gear to be significantly more powerful than originally planned.

Second, Eclipse needs to either be more predictable or not be entirely lost to movement, or some of each.  They could also scale it down and give us another spell or two to make our rotation more interesting.  The latter would be more in line with other classes, but I actually like the random aspect of Eclipse (and I adore the moons appearing over my head).  I personally would like to see the Eclipse proc give you a stack of charges that can be used any time in the next thirty seconds.  If used as quickly as possible (i.e. spamming Wrath or Starfire) they would last no longer than the current Eclipse duration.  While you have any remaining, the other Eclipse cannot proc.

That would give us twice as long to use them and thus greatly reduce the chances of losing all or most of an Eclipse uptime to a movement phase.  Of course, in fights like the Professor, we're still screwed, but I can't think of any way to fix that without dramatically changing our talents (or making Eclipse do something totally different and reduce casting time).

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