It has nothing to do with wanting a spec where I dont have to think. I have no doubt I could play this system exactly how it’s meant to be played come shadowlands. The point is the eclipse system is/has always been the limiting part of this spec. Balance has never been more popular than since the removal of eclipses and to bring them back just seems like a bad decision. No matter how they try to word the tooltip you will still be controlled by the eclipses on what your casting. The only option you’ll have for the next 2 years is which eclipse you start with. Other then that your at the mercy of the eclipse cycle. Just wait til you get interrupted/stunned in pvp and waste your eclipse. Or some super high movement mythic fight where you waste your eclipse. Its gonna feel real crappy where as empowerment procs would still be waiting on you after both these scenarios played out.
Yea not sure about that.
You know you can hold 2 wraths right? This allows you to burst aoe when you need to.
Even if your doing your simple rotation going from 1 eclipse to the other you will still be able to hold eclipses without losing too much damage.
Tuning feedback is useless at this stage. We are not tuning the spec right now, and we don’t even know what all the different effects from Shadowlands will add to the spec. There is a lot more we don’t know about. As we get into Beta, then we start worrying about tuning. For now, we are trying to make the gameplay make sense. And a lot of players and internal testers are pushing for more complexity by way of Shooting Stars, and such.
To those who keep telling everyone to wait and see, I am reminded of a famous quote from Albert Einstein:
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Reports from alpha are already stating what most of us already knew. Eclipse is once again not intuitive and will not be fun for the majority of players. The only people who will like this are those same old few who want to feel special and like ice skating uphill.
This spec was great these last 2 expansions, and did not need his change at all. Eclipse has never been widely enjoyed, no matter how many times they try and shove it down our throats.
Why do people keep saying this?
You can in warlords there were FAR more percentage of players in mythic playing balance then there was in legion/Battle just by looking statistics on warcraftlogs and worldoflogs.
Those sites arent exactly the best info to base your judgement off of. warcraft logs has no info before WoD and worldoflogs has no info after legion. Even then, parse counts on warcraft logs show balance in bfa has 2 to 3 times the amount of recorded parses than other expansions. Nyalotha has 67k mythic parses for balance. no other mythic raid on the site even comes close to that representaion for balance
What makes it un-intuitive?
Blue = Lunar
Yellow = Solar
you can use Starfall and Starsurge in either Eclipse.
Can you elaborate? It seems pretty simple and sensible to me. As far as enjoyment goes, I’ll reserve my comments until I play it but I’m more optimistic now than I was when the change was first announced. I definitely won’t comment on whether or not a hypothetical majority will like it.
Meaning that alpha eclipse will feel more difficult to play than live?
I mean, I’m going to wait and see how it all feels. I’m not hardcore, haven’t been since vanilla if I even really was then. I don’t do mythic stuff and don’t care to, heroic with my guild family is the most we do. I leveled Balance in vanilla but had to heal to raid back then. Wasn’t very happy with BC’s raiding style of two different sizes so skipped most of it, but have played Balance since then, and I can say I have far enjoyed the style of alternating between spells in Legion and BfA, than in spamming the same spell in an eclipse state in pretty much every other expansion. I liked the flavor of the moon spells in Legion but didn’t bother with them in BfA because they just don’t work as a talent, to me, instead of a baseline. I would prefer to go back to Legion’s style with moons baseline with the style of Starfall of old. I much prefer alternating spells than spamming the same one, as far as playstyles go. I may be alone in that, but the amount of people that play Balance druids currently compared to before does seem to indicate a preference towards the more recent playstyle.
I’m glad there’s still changes going on, and discussion happening. I hope tuning later happens better than it currently has in BfA being so reliant on Streaking Stars. It shouldn’t be hard to see though why there’s so much worry about going back to an eclipse style system, when it’s just nearly as fun feeling to a lot of the people that have been concerned about it. Is it really more fun to keep hitting the same button over and over while eclipse it up, save for starsurge to extend hitting it more and the usual keeping your DoTs up? That’s what I’m mostly getting out of the changes, so I can see why there’s a ton of resistance in general to it, there’s a lot of people that just don’t like to keep hitting the same button for the majority of the time we’re in the eclipse state. It’s more about the fun of alternating spells rather than spamming them.
I will like the fact our “builders” will hit harder than a wet noodle again, and Starfall going back to days of yore, but I’m otherwise still not exactly thrilled with the gameplay changes on paper.
Seems to me for a spec called balance, if you wanted to be more than a builder spender class, bring back the sliding eclipse bar and use it like a scale.
Try to maintain balance in the middle or slide to one side increases the spell damage but reduces astral power generation or something to that effect.
I like your post. I just wanted to chime in as a vanilla oomkin. Crit chicken, doomkin, and boomkin. were all things we were being called in tbc as well.
We had quite a bit of crit from cloth gear in tbc and we could hit like trucks. I was getting 10-15k starfires near the end of the expansion and when you consider that end game tanks were rolling 20k hp it was easy to see why we were feared.
for anyone wanting an explanation. Most casters have telegraphed spells or at least their non telegraphed spells had cool downs. so you could get hit with a pyro /fb but you would be able to run away or towards the mage. I cant tell you how many times I was able to kill people without them even targeting me not to mention being able to stealth to advantageous positions before opening on people. People were still mocking balance in tbc but it didnt bother me because I experienced the truth. stand near a ledge. cast starfire and moonfire if someone targets you los them u ntil they come on the ledge and typhoon them off. ezpz
No cancel-casting needed and players have total control over when the eclipse timer begins. AP pooling is better rewarded and we aren’t flooded with redundant empowerment charges. I wasn’t thrilled when I first heard that eclipse was returning but this may be my new personal favorite iteration of balance.
Downsides I can think of are that the damage will still be more backloaded than it is now and you’ll have to throw some single target spells out to get the appropriate AoE eclipse and vise versa.
Thoughts?
If they made the changes that you linked here I would be very excited to play balance. If they made nature’s balance baseline they could just remove the ap generation from trees and from your two instant LS’s.
I think it would be cool for balance to have a 50% balanced resource bar.
The astral power default to 50 should absolutely be made baseline. i feel like this change is a must for pvp. warrior of elune sounds like talent we will 100% want in pvp with the way eclipses work now with the 3 casts to eclipse…but pvp without starting at 50 astral power feels awful
never thought about this really, but makes a lot of sense. it really does limit what they’ve been able to do with the spec as far as azerite powers…and would have been a limitation on any legendary or tier set bonuses
You realize at the 9 minute mark he states exactly what ive been saying. Its too controling. watch it from 9 minutes on for his opinions on the spec
The player decides exactly which eclipse activates and when. Sure, you’re locked into using one filler during the eclipse but I like the ‘extend the buff as long as you can’ game more than the ‘struggle to spend empowerments as quickly as you randomly get them’ game.
I watched the whole video. He’s entitled to his opinion and you are too.
the current general consensus is your only extending one of the buffs as long as you can, the other your trying to get over with as quickly as possible, which would gimp you even more because your holding back on starsurges which is your best dmg. Everyone has opinions on things of course. But its pretty easy to see in this situation all the bad outcomes. The one plus is u get to pick which eclipse to start with, that doesnt negate the other like 10 possible bad situational outcomes .
Yeah, it would be problematic if overcapping AP were preferable to extending an undesirable eclipse. I didn’t fully consider that. I just assumed that remaining in an eclipse was valuable enough that you’d want to maintain it regardless of which eclipse it is.
this remains to be seen. i’m going to say that it might come down to dumping astral power into starfall if you dont want to extend an eclipse…
Wrath remains the more efficient AP generator, so in theory unless you have extreme levels of haste solar eclipse should last longer on average than lunar. This is assuming: 1. you avoid overcapping AP and 2. you save as much AP as possible for solar