I am not worried about overall tuning; the spec was doing well in ptr testing in raid with many cleave fights. Deep Breath and Pyre buffs are good for M+. They will aura buff/nerf many specs after final ptr week, preseason, and rwf. But what a strange reversal for a tier set.
This was actually a necessary change; Scint Stars were doing unreasonable damage in low-target spread cleave, so without this we would likely have caught an aura nerf aimed at raid performance that unfairly impacted other abilities. It also warped our gameplay to spam Disintegrate at much higher target counts, gambling for procs.
Applying Scintillation’s ratio to stars was the preferred solution in a community poll on Wyrmrest Temple and I am glad to see it.
But this seems like an overreaction. The massive Disintegrate buff should make up the lost Shattering Star damage in single target (and for Scalecommander, spread cleave). But the aoe value is gone; we already get max-rank stars from upranking Eternity Surge, so the 2pc’s only effect in AoE is now +50% Star damage, which seems like too little to justify taking Star Salvo. Dropping it sends us back to rank 1 Eternity Surges - with just a bit of prio damage added - removing the main “gameplay impact” of the tier set.
This seems like a failure of design; refusing to fix the talent tree problems makes the tier set subject to those problems. Star Salvo is bad and we have no talent points to spend on it; the capstones, and Shattering Star, need a rework. It would have been better to make the 2pc “+X% Eternity Surge damage” to grant similar value without the talent costing issues.
I will have fun playing Scalecommander with Power Swell, buffed Deep Breaths, and very strong Mass Disintegrates on short cooldowns, and I expect it can be competitive. But I’ll consider it a failure if Star Salvo doesn’t see play in M+. It may be too late for more creative changes, but either rethink this tuning, or plan to rework some talents by 12.1.5