Asking for a friend who’s going to be raiding as Balance. When should lunar strike be cast, and how often? Is it only during empowerments? I simmed my friend and it said Lunar Strike should be her second-highest damaging ability, but I’m not sure how that works out if she’s only going to be possibly using it during Lunar Empowerment.
With no empowerments I believe Lunar Strike has priority if it can cleave 1 extra target. In my experience, most of your casts should be empowered if you are playing correctly. Generally I try to keep the empowered versions balanced so if VOP or Pulsar procs you can go back and forth together for streaking stars.
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Tell your friend not to worry about it too much, most of the time you will have more empowerments that you need.
Cast Starsurge when either:
A) You’re close to capping Astral Power (80+)
B) You have no empowerments.
After that you basically cycle between Solar Wrath and Lunar Strike. You will rarely cast the same spell twice in a row as you risk starving yourself from that empowerment later.
There’s a bit of variance depending on number of targets and her azerite setup, like if she’s running Power of the Moon, she’ll have more Lunar Empowerments than normal (and may have to bite the bullet and overcap)
As a general rule, casting either empowerment is higher priority than casting anything unempowered, regardless of # of targets. If you run out of empowerments and you don’t have enough AP to starsurge (it can happen, but it’s uncommon), then you’ll cast Lunar Strike on 2+ targets and Solar Wrath on single target.
When simming, I wouldn’t worry about what the order of damage comes from in the sim, there are factors that can change that order based on RNG (vision procs, eclipse procs, etc). Just have her focus on not overcapping resources, filling her globals by always casting, etc…
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Speaking to single target fights, generally starsurge is top, followed by streaking stars, lunar strike, and solar wrath in any order. This is dependent upon vision procs.
What is important is that your friend has 3x streaking stars and 1 arcanic pulsar. This turns celestial alignment into an extremely powerful cooldown as long as spells are not being repeated. Streaking stars at 3x hits harder than any other spell except for starsurge. If movement is required during CA, alternate between sunfire and moonfire while using starsurge when you are able.