Where was this trend seen? None of the logs on warcraft logs reflect any boomkin parsing blue and above utilizing this? Even if you could snap shot mastery the ONLY fight that this could possibly be logical of doing it on would be halfus. Playing boomy normally stacking haste and getting resets on nature’s grace for 3-4 haste break points on dots yielded far more damage than mastery stacking and sitting in solar.
The only time boomy sits solar is clearing trash before bosses. I’m glad SOMETHING was given to boomy AND an explanation of the shadow nerf to attempt to make up for it, but I really don’t see buffing our 4th highest damage ability by the estimated 15% is going to make up for not being able to pre-pot fights in eclipse state, having our trinket procs not be lined up with eclipse states, having to wait to use engineering gloves until you get into eclipse state instead of at the start causing less glove usage, having cooldowns not being able to be used off the rip of the fight because of having to wait to get into an eclipse state causing less cooldown usage, etc.
I just don’t see this as being a necessary change since playing boomy normally and not sitting in solar yielded more dps anyway according to warcraftlog parses.
This change basically nerfed people playing boomy normally, so you could remove a silly and underperforming way of playing boomkin that did less damage than someone actually playing boomkin correctly.
But besides the fact of this nerfing boomys already playing correctly and removing a playstyle of boomkin that according to warcraftlogs just really isnt even done, You now buffed boomkin in pvp with a damage increase to insect swarm when they already topple over every other dps by miles in damage in RBGs. The meta has now become 3-4 boomkins on a team because the damage is so high that healers just cant keep up and rot out the enemy team in RBGs.
A better fix if the goal was to remove snapshotting, would be to reset boomkin energy meters to 92, not 0, if they were already in an eclipse state at the start of a fight. That way they could still get back into eclipse state quickly and hardly notice a difference in pre-pot, cooldowns, trinket procs, engineering glove uptime, etc. And not indirectly buff one of the strongest RBG classes in the process.
Now I’m not calling the Devs liars when they say they noticed a trend in this type of playstyle happening. Not everyone logs to warcraft logs so it’s very possible people were exploiting this and not recording the logs for it to be seen. But with how gamers are I find it hard to believe that we wouldn’t see at least a few players logging this exploit or playstyle to try to see themselves on the top of the parse rankings if it really was as strong as it is made out to be.
Just as a hypothetical, are we going to put a 10 second cooldown on firemage’s pyroblast ability that resets on hot streak procs? In theory a firemage could sit there all fight hard casting pyroblast instead of fireball for bigger ignites before combustion. It doesn’t preform as well as playing firemage correctly and it isn’t the intended way for firemage’s kit to be played, correct?
TLDR: You nerfed boomkins to remove a playstyle that according to warcraftlogs wasn’t being utilized or just strictly does substantially less damage than playing boomkin the way it was intended and tried to make up for it by buffing our 4th highest damage source. In the process you buffed boomkins in PvP when they were already miles above everyone in damage output shifting the RBG meta to being 3-4 boomkins per team.