Friday, February 5, 2010

New Shifting Perspectives Post on Balance Druids

There is a new Shifting Perspectives post up on WoW.com, by the newly-hired Balance specialist.

I'm going to be honest.  This post was overly detailed, rambled at times, and was somewhat poorly organized.  It is his first post, and it did give a good overview of the current problems of Boomkin (which, he argues, aren't that bad because we're having scaling problems only at the highest limits of gear in Wrath).  But I had to read it a few times, which was frustrating.  I'd recommend that he put a lot of the detailed number explanations in a forum post and simply link to it, just showing his conclusions in the actual column.  It would make it easier to follow, while preserving all of the detail for those who want it. 

The biggest things he argued were that (1) scaling isn't the issue we make it out to be since we're just barely over the effective Starfire crit cap (he did not talk about the Wrath haste cap), and (2) movement and lost Eclipse procs are frustrating at the time, but equal out over the length of the fight and thus aren't nearly as much of a problem as the boomkin community makes them out to be.

Lissanna, in comments, pushed back a bit on the second point, noting that her dps fluctuates to the tune of several thousand depending on whether she is at melee or out at range in the Festergut encounter.  Given that Festergut doesn't actually require that much movement, I think it's a fairly telling example.

The biggest takeaway for my play style is the ABC rule that the column references.  "Always Be Casting."  I need to remember to use movement phases to refresh DoTs, hit Starfall and Treants, and knock out a Typhoon when, for example, I'm running through Rotface to avoid his spew.  Even if it's not the most mana efficient, you might as well refresh DoTs just before the end of a movement phase so you don't need to waste the GCD during the standing-still phase and can concentrate on Wraths and Starfires. 

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