As someone else mentioned, it’s not the pendulum of WoD.
I personally don’t mind the pendulum either way, I didn’t mind it at all back in WoD but I know a lot disliked it. I think balance will ultimately end up fine though.
this what i’m thinking. balance was a good performing spec in wotlk and as long as its balanced correctly it will perform well, which is ultimately what a lot of people care about. i don’t hate the current builder/spender system, i jst think it makes us sorta generic, and i always liked the idea that eclipse made us totally unique
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I’m a vanilla player, but did feral/resto druid in BC, and then balance/resto from wrath till now. While I don’t hate empowerments rn, I preferred wrath eclipse over it (and over both cata/mop eclipse in general)
I think the most fun I’ve had as a balance druid, which would often cause me to start giggling, was having 2 dots up on a boss, bloodlust, and legendary helm gem proc (crazy haste). There were SOOO many shooting stars procs it was silly. I loved it.
I would love if they find a way to get some procs in to the currently eclipse model in alpha, either by talents or otherwise.
100% agree with this!
And also I agree with you trollinator, it was fun getting starsurge procs and I kind of miss that kind of gameplay. But like I said previously, I don’t really mind which one they end up going with because I’ve honestly had fun with every version of balance I’ve played for different reasons.
The only thing that has annoyed me about balance is starfall not being that great right now and tanks moving mobs out of starfall. So I’m glad starfall is changing back to how it use to be. I just hope it doesn’t end up pulling everything in sight lol.
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My biggest issue with the alpha implementation, as pointed out to me by a poster in another thread, is the possible need for cast cancelling.
If you’re chaining wrath casts back to back and a lunar eclipse procs, you’re not going to notice it until you’re part way through your next wrath cast. It would be a DPS gain to cancel that cast in-progress and switch to spamming lunar strike, no? To waste as little of the buff as possible. That doesn’t sound like a fun way to play or an improvement over the BfA iteration at all.
Also, it sounds nice to no longer have to track empowerment charges but having to track two independent 30 second internal cooldowns sounds like more of a pain to me, not less.
Maybe I’ll feel differently when the system is in my hands but it’s hard to be optimistic about it with the information we’ve been given.
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Both valid concerns that make this iteration less fun than what we have now.
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What I anticipate being the most un-fun about this, is in dungeons trying to wrath to get my AoE starfire proc, then watching the other dps blow up the pack just as it procs with their immediate AoE abilities.
I think Balance is more fun now than it’s been in years. I think just a few touch-ups to weak cleave is really all we needed, but that’s just my opinion. I think the vision of perfection/arcanic pulsar/streaking stars combo made for a fun rotation.
The starfall changes are basically the only thing I’m looking forward to.
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yeah we are gonna have to see how the rotation works out. since both eclipses buff starfall and fury of elune its gonna be interesting to see how the aoe rotation goes. sunfire is a great aoe dot and is buffed by solar eclipse. moonfire takes more globals to get out but is buffed by lunar eclipse along with starfire. idk how the aoe rotation is gonna go but i dont think its only going to be a matter of dots and thenwrath till lunar eclipse and then starfire.
This. We are going to have to Sunfire, spam moonfires, spam wrath fishing for an eclipse proc, followed by Starfall and Starfire’s… So much buildup
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i think this is going to be depend on how long the mobs are going lo live. short lived might just be sunfire, a few moonfires, starfall and then starfire. longer lived might be ok with more ramp up time. i don’t see us morphing into a bursty aoe spec suddenly. last time i can remember that being a thing was when starfall has splash damage and aoe was starfall and hurricane. maybe it was a thing at some point after that but i dont recall
Yuuup. Downtime in between packs/encounters eating away at an eclipse buff that’s randomly activated is gonna leave a bad taste.
What are the downsides to the current system again?
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Is it just a class flavor thing that our ST ability procs our AOE ability empowerment and vice versa? Wouldn’t more control over which proc we want for the given situation be more impactful? So your AOE ability could proc the empowerment of your AOE ability.
well i think starfall is going to figure a lot more prominently into our aoe damage going forward. starfire (lunar strike) wasn’t always an aoe spell, they gave it a cleave effect, iirc, in legion. so until then it wasnt that we used a ST ability to proc an aoe ability its that we used a nature (solar) ability to proc a buff to arcane and vice versa. they gave wrath an aoe cleave effect under empowerment later on to help our aoe when using solar empowerment. the easy fix for this if it becomes an actual problem is to give solar eclipse a similar effect on wrath
They just need to remove the AOE/Single target aspect of lunar/solar empowerments. Reward proper swapping back and forth no matter what the combat situation and make it so we do just as much aoe and or single target no matter which eclipse is active.
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Ya… this is my main concern with this system. It seems neat, but I can already see myself raging at the screen begging for a proc… I get that we can influence the procs, but still… I also can see myself getting really annoyed trying to delay a proc to get it to align with a specific fight mechanic… then really raging when I try to proc it at the right time… and it doesn’t proc.
I don’t know about this. It could be fun, but I’d rather have a bit more control over it.
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For pvp…is it playable at all? Is it possible to use those ecplipses in arenas or will the interupts/cc make this unplayable? As in losing out massivly on dmg due to not being able to line up those eclipses in the fastpaced smallscale pvp whith cc/interupts/LOS-games. OR will the newly gained cc make up for it?
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The problem I have with it is that solar eclipse, which is procced by starfire, boosts single target damage by making wrath better, while lunar eclipse, which is procced by wrath, boosts aoe damage by making starfall better.
This means that in order to get our aoe boost, we have to single target, and in order to get our single target boost, we have to aoe. It’s bass-ackwards, makes no sense, and convolutes our rotation. So what if we flipped it and changed it from RNG to a more reliable proc system?
Like:
Casting 3 wraths in a row procs solar eclipse, boosting your nature damage and single target abilities.
Casting 3 starfires in a row procs lunar eclipse, boosting your arcane damage and aoe abilities.
And then they could even add in a third benefit where, if you DONT cast subsequent wraths/starfires, you get a whole different boost, so that rotating between the two abilities has a payoff as well. Such as:
Celestial Cycle: Each time you follow a wrath cast with starfire, or a starfire cast with wrath, you gain a stack of celestial cycle, increasing the astral power generation of your abilities by 10%, stacking up to 10 times. All stacks are lost if you cast two wraths or two starfires back to back.
We should be able to determine the playstyle and what boost we need based on the rotation we’re doing.
iv played the spec off and on through the years sometimes maining it and honestly iv never enjoyed it when they have gone to eclipse systems, they have almost always felt bad to play even when they sometimes performed well. I wont be touching my druid as a whole this xpac it seems. my wife who has mained a boomkin for years is actually switching to Ret pally largly because of not wanting to deal with this play style again. current boomkin is prob as good and fun as its ever been, its sad to see it go. hope blizz rethinks this.
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Yup, well said. It’s a non-issue now because empowered wraths deal AoE damage and empowered lunar strikes deal more single target damage than unempowered wraths.
The system we have now feels fine, more or less. We maybe just gain charges too quickly to spend them in some situations because a certain azerite trait procs lunar empowerment randomly and starfall seldom has a place in the rotation, causing us to default to starsurge too often which we know generates one charge of each.
That’s a very easy thing to fix without overhauling the system and making it both worse and less enjoyable.
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this is actually sorts false. according to cyouskin solar eclipse is actually slightly better for aoe due to sunfire being a superior aoe dot and solar eclipse buffs sunfire.
also both eclipses buff starfall since starfall is astral damage and is buffed by anything that buffs either nature or arcane.