We noticed that Balance druid gameplay was seeing a trend towards sitting in Solar and trying not to leave it, especially in Multi-DoT situations. Not engaging with a decent chunk of your core rotation to stay in Solar Eclipse is not a playstyle that we nor the original developers had intended, so we released a change last week that was aimed at preventing mastery snapshotting pre-pull by resetting Eclipse when engaging a boss.
Having your Eclipse state reset on boss pull does a few things:
It lets Balance druids start pulls on a relatively even playing field (even after wiping)
It makes you less reluctant to participate in trash pulls instead of saving an Eclipse state, and
It also doesn’t punish a player who was recently in Solar, and starts a boss with their bar pushing towards Lunar Eclipse
We acknowledge this change required breaking a few Moonkin eggs and understand this could be a damage reduction in many scenarios. As a result, we went looking for a lightweight change to bring back the DPS lost from not being able to start in a specific Eclipse state, and to attack the core problem that Moonkins were facing that made them want to play ‘Sunkin’ in the first place–it feels bad to leave Solar Eclipse.
To address this, we recently deployed a hotfix that changes Insect Swarm to now deal Spellstorm (Arcane/Nature) damage so it can now benefit from Lunar Eclipse. This means that when you end up in Lunar Eclipse, you will still be buffing your two core DoTs. We estimate this change to be about a 15% damage increase to Insect Swarm, which is typically a Balance Druid’s second most damaging ability on non-single target encounters. There may still be situations where staying in Solar Eclipse is ideal, and that’s totally fine, we just don’t think it’s healthy for that to be every situation and on every pull.
We recognize that the lack of communication when the first change went live was frustrating, but we wanted to get the initial change out quickly so that the gearing meta did not settle in a specific way for Balance Druids, only to have that change a few weeks later while we continued to iterate on this set of changes. We look forward to seeing your Lunar Eclipsed swarms in action and will continue to monitor druid performance after this change.
While I will need a raid to give proper feedback on this, please note that I greatly appreciate official word on this. My initial thoughts are that this seems like a great change, I’m excited about lunar eclipse being a more momentous thing to reach.
This is definitely a positive change, thank you for the improvements!
I’m not sure it will adjust much about the fact that with the nerf we went from being in a good place with Sunkin to being one of the worst DPS specs in the game. Time will tell, but I expect we will still need more changes to bring us more in line with other specs.
still won’t fix the lack of aoe damage and the garbage inntervates that gives you almost no mana. takes you 5 to 6 cast to even get into solar. i mean Blizzard manage to completely tear this class apart in Cata. At this point the damage has been done. raid spots has been lost. Ferals and Moonkins are bottom of the barrel in DPS. Our support utilities has been strip from what we are known for. Battle res , Innervates, even turning MOTW into a Kings buff?
We are a support class we don’t expect to be to top dps but we make us useful
This is great for raids and heroics but I can’t see it really changing anything for those of us that pvp and just do dailys (because our dps is so crap we don’t want to burden anyone in a dungeon group) Our Armor from moonkin is trash now and we don’t have the dps or heals to save ourselves from multiple spawns doing the tol barad dailys, I mean come on test moonkin yourselves they really suck in just normal non dungeon/raid content.
I’m not trying to be rude I’m just frustrated at how bad my fav class is now. (seriously check out moonkin self heals they are a freakin bad joke)
Yeah were not a support class anymore, they took everything that got us invited into raids and gave it all away to classes that actually can dps and or heal.
Maybe I’m off base here, but I’m pretty sure Moonkin is solid middle of the pack before this change in the hands of top players. The Eclipse system works against the average player imo. Top players do well they are Mutli-dotters. And there are only 3 pure single target fights this phase. This change should make the average boomkin better too and bring up the top 2%. Single target fight was never boomies’ strength in Cataclysm. Even Sunkin was bad on single target but was like 12k ahead of the next highest spec on Multi-Target fights at end game.
classic.warcraftlogs dot com/zone/statistics/1023/#dataset=99
At 99% it’s a 91.27 out of 98.66. 2% increase with this would be 93, which bumps them up into 6th? Again could be off-base but I don’t believe they’re in a bad spot? What is wrong with them.
