The Moonkin Repository

new talent calculator...ok, lots to discuss...

before i get to the newly revamped talent tree, lets take a look at the spells. i'm only listing the things that are different or new, not things we already have that aren't changing...


Spells for Boomies in MoP as of 2-15-2012
-Eclipse (passive. gained at Lvl 10): this spell has changed from what we currently have. They are adding that when you are in Solar Eclipse that Wrath will refresh Sunfire on the target, this is pretty nice. Also added, when in Lunar Eclipe, Starfall cooldown is instantly refreshed and Hurricane turns into Astral Storm, and Starfire refreshes Moonfire on the target. Very nice changes!

-Natural Insight (passive, gained at Lvl 10): this is a new ability that increases mana pool by 400%...ummm, whuh? i wonder if they're going to reduce our base intellect because of this? seems weird, too good to be true. maybe they expect us to shapeshift alot and make it cost lots of mana? we'll have to keep a close eye out on this!

-Celestial Focus (passive, gained at Lvl 14); reduces pushaback on Wrath, Starfire, Entangling Roots, Hurricane, Astral Storm, Hibernate, Cyclone, Typhoon, and Starfall by 70%. Nice quality of life stuff.

-Inscect Swarm (gained at Lvl 18): instant cast on enemy target and lasts for 1 minute, increasing spell damage done to the target by 25%, on target limit at a time. definitely different, this spell change was announced a while ago. looks like this basically is a bait and switch because Earth and Moon is gone and and they turned it into Insect Swarm although much beefier. I like the increase to 25% but i really hate that it lasts one minute and has to be recast every minute. not sure im so happy about this. id like it better if it lasted indefinitely on the target until dead, or just lasted until you cast it on another target. i hope they change this.

-Killer Instinct (passive, gained at Lvl 34): this is a new spell that increases agility by 100% of intellect while in bear or cat form. this is pretty nice and in tempting to learn how to kitty and bear and actually be kind of decent at it. i see lots of pvp utility, and possibly pve for certain boss fights. very nice, but increases overall learning curve for playing druid. we'll see if this means anything to moonkin when MoP comes out.

-Owlkin Frezny (passive, gained at LVl 48): YAY, only reason I'm mentioning this here is that it's now a passive ability. really like this. although, i still think it's weak cuz it's just the same as it was before. i'd like to see it buffed. instead of 10% damage increase, how about 25%? and instead of 15% chance to proc, how about 20%?

-Celestial Alignment (gained at Lvl 68): this is a new spell...Instant Cast, Lasts 15 seconds, 3 Minute cooldown, gain both benefits of Lunar and Solar Ecplise at the same time, gain 20% increase to all Nature and Arcane spells, casting Moonfire also simultenously applies Sunfire as well. Casting this reduces all L/S energy to Zero and no energy can be gained for the duration....Ok folks, here we finally get a real DPS cooldown. all i can say is it's about time. i love it.

-Starfall (gained at Lvl 76): same spell as before basically but now the cooldown is reset when you hit a Lunar Ecplise, love that.

-Total Eclipse (passive, gained at Lvl 80): same as before, but now mastery is worth an additional 2.5% damage, up from 2.0 as it is now. maybe this will make mastery more imortant for moonkins in MoP? could it rival haste possibly? we'll see...

-Lunar Shower (passive, gained at Lvl 82): ok, this has become passive now. and they removed its energy generation, which is pretty nice. good quality of life change for us boomies. but not that big of a deal either. meh...i'll take it.

-Wild Mushroom and Wild Mushroom:Detonate (gained at Lvl 84): ok, not much of a change here, they simply rolled in Fungal Growth, which is cool, but even more interesting, they added some text that says something about other mushroom effects? could it be we'll get other things like (imagination running wild) Wild Mushroom:Healing Blast that could heal allies in your group or raid or maybe Wild Mushroom:SporeCloud that would apply a bleeding DoT for pvp situation or something like that where we'll have multiple ways to trigger it and get different uses out of it? i'm very interested to see what happens with this!


part 2 will be looking at the talents, coming soon...

Hurricane: Looks like they want hurricane to be our aoe. Makes me wonder what they want to do with shrooms. Also, I really wish they'ld make planting them abit less dreadfull. A solution where you hit the key bind then just click out 3 of them (probably still would trigger gcd for each mouse click).

Celestial Alignment: Would be nice if it went back to 2 mins. All our cds except starfall seem to be 3 minutes now and would be nice with some shoter.

Total Eclipse: Buffing master is not really good imo. It just makes "while in eclipse do good dps, otherwise do shit dps" scenario worse.

Wild Mushroom: The text was there before, I'm pretty sure about that.

just checked the mushroom tooltip in live game and it doesn't mention anything about other mushroom effects, i'm taking this change to believe that we are going to see other ways to pop our shrooms...

Why is having Hurricane be our AoE mutually exclusive with Mushrooms being AoE? Hurricane will just be our filler, they just want it to be a more attractive option than multi-DoT for filler.

Natural Insight, remember that mana pool will no longer increase from Intellect, that's why we're getting 400% extra mana.

Resto Druids are already getting a different mushroom detonation style, Bloom.

I mean that the mushroom tooltip hasn't changed since the tooltip was updated.
What makes me think that blizzard wants us to use hurricane over mushrooms is that they added benefit from lunar to hurricane, but not for the mushrooms.
They've must have had some plan for mushroom once, since haveing two different aoes will just make us use the better one and leave the other unused.

I must say that talents looks better now. Mainly last two tiers that needs to be made intresting now.

No, the reason for the change is to solve the problem of needing to be in Solar if you want to do any appreciable AOE. Mushrooms already get strong benefit from Solar, it's there to stop our Eclipse cycles from being so lop-sided if there are any AOE reqs for a fight.

That change will make DoT refreshing far far simpler.



It's just a compensation for the fact that Intellect will no longer grant max mana in MoP



More or less what was announced. The relevant change here is the fact that IS now affects all spells (therefore nerfing our multidotting)



Depends on the rating/stat conversion in MoP.



Most of the people wouldn't agree with me, but I miss the stack-with-movement mechanic

The additional text to Mushrooms is due to Restos getting "Wild Mushroom: Bloom" as opposed to detonate. Naturally, it's an explosion of healing.

very cool that resto is getting the healing mushroom thing, but i think blizz could go further with mushrooms. the thing i hate most about mushroom is the awkward casting time and placement. many people have suggested since they came out with cata is for us to be able to cast them more like totems, they would cast all three at the same time and on the spot we stand on. then, after we detonate them, they would regrow in the same spot unless we recast them again to be where the moonkin is standing at the moment.

I've witnessed that discussion since the begining of Cataclysm and sincerely I never agreed. Part of what makes the Wild Mushroom mechanic very interesting is the choice we have to use an aoe where we want, even if it means spawning them apart from each other. It was very useful for dealing with the spiderlings in Beth'tilac, for instance. Dropping them like totems would be nice and an economization of actions, but would destroy that purpose.

Overall speaking, these changes on our core abilities are much apreciated. What I still can't grasp is the fact that some talent tiers are completely situational, and utterly, something we could live without. Talent tier 5 (lvl 75) is a pretty good example of this: We can choose between an aoe disorient, a aoe pull mechanic and a stun. Ok, it has some pvp utility, but from a PvE point of view, although they're not completely useless, but not a must have. I'd rather have Soul of the Forest and Incarnation in diferent tiers, so I could choose between performance and utility, rather than having to sacrifice one of them...

That's precisely the kind of choices that do not belong in the new talent model. Do you need to choose between a performance talent and an utility talent? Then there's no choice, since you must take the performance-increasing one for PvE, even if you like the utility talent.

Precisely my point, Tusca.

On talent tier 4, (lvl 60), you have 3 decent talents, altough the choice will fall between Incarnation and Soul of the Forest. And on the next tier, 5, you have 3 relatively useless talents for a PVE caster such as a moonkin.

My point is: if thing were distributed more evenly you could actually pick all the three talents from tier 4, given that they're all a increase on performance.

Right now, tiers 5 and 6 are a bit "meh". You get two utility talents that may or may not be useful at all for a given encounter. I'm thinking about the current content, and on some fights, (Morchok, Ultraxion or Haggara are decent examples) neither talent is valid. You can't pull, stun or disorient any of them.

In conclusion: we have a talent tier that is completely useless on single target boss encounters.

Edit:

I Just checked a few more classes and it seems the problem is widespread. I like the fact that Blizz is trying to move away from the "must-have" talents mechanic, but I'm also not happy with the "eeny, meeny, miny, moe, which one of the the useless talents should I pick" alternative. In my opinion, we should be choosing between resoucefulness and performance. Look at tier 3 for example: we can pick either a slow, a mass snare or a knockback. On the single target boss encounter mentioned above, they're all useless. But the PvPer can also argue that he'd like to have two (or even all) of those talents, discarding some performance one.

As things are right now we have:
tier 1 - movement
tier 2 - utility/survivability
tier 3 - crowd control
tier 4 - performance
tier 5 - crowd control
tier 6 - utility/survivability

meaning:
tier 1 - tyvm, comes in handy
tier 2 - I trust my healers, no need
tier 3 - meh
tier 4 - nice
tier 5 - meh
tier 6 - I trust my raid comp, no need

zomg, second edit: WHERE THE HELL IS THE MOONKIN FORM'S PROTECTION FROM POLYMORPH?

-The Druid will select a raid or party member and cast Symbiosis on them.
-The target cannot be another Druid.
-The target gains a buff that tells them what spell they have temporarily learned, and that spell temporarily appears in their spellbook, and they can drag it to an action bar.
-The Druid’s Symbiosis button will become the ability they gained from the target class.
-The Symbiosis link is cancelled if: the Druid clicks off the Symbiosis buff, or the Druid or the target changes continents or enters or exits an instance, or the Druid or the target changes talent specializations.
-Symbiosis fails to cast if Symbiosis is already active on that target.
-Symbiosis cannot be cast in combat.
-For the non-Druid target, the icon will revert to a placeholder (uncastable) Symbiosis icon when Symbiosis ends, but will become the Symbiosis-granted ability again the next time Symbiosis is cast on that target.
-The ability gained from Symbiosis is always something chosen to match the Druid’s specialization and the target’s combat role.
-The target always gets the same spell unless they change combat roles. A Druid of a given specialization always gets the same spell from each different class. If there is a change of specs, there is a change of spell.


Here are some examples of spells gained through Symbiosis. The spells shared focus on utility, cooldowns, and survival. (Adding Fireball to a Moonkin’s rotation sounds cool on paper, but wouldn’t actually be fun in the long run.)

-Balance: Chains of Ice, Mirror Image, Mass Dispel
-Feral: Feign Death (Play Dead!), Frost Nova, Soul Swap
-Guardian: Ice Trap, Fear Ward, Consecration
-Restoration: Ice Block, Hand of Sacrifice, Leap of Faith
-Hunter: Dash
-Warlock: Rejuvenation
-Holy Paladin: Rebirth
-Arms/Fury Warrior: Enrage
Enhancement/Elemental Shaman: Solar Beam

I would argue that we already have an AoE that we can use where we want -- Hurricane. It's instant and of course has to be channeled. but we can cast it whereever we need it without having to go through 3 long cast/cd cycles. And I'd also argue that splitting the three mushrooms apart for spot AoE is definitely under the "highly situational" and also the "almost never need to use it like that" categories. And let's not forget, Starfall can spot AoE no matter where something is standing in both PvP and PvE. The only best way in my opinion that one would use casting the mushrooms apart from each other would be to maximize the area of slow effect (if one is talented in that, and what if you aren't?), but in doing so you lose the max AoE damage since they're no longer stacked on top of each other. These options aren't really that interesting. They're just highly limiting and super situational. And definitely get more use out of PvP than PvE, which is what it seems like frustrates raiders to no end, including myself.

Although, I will say I do love to PvP and I certainly appreciate where Blizz is going in that direction for moonkin, although I still think until MoP comes out, and even afterward, we'll still not be anywhere near as strong as other classes in that regard.

I definitely think that with the long cast/cd time of planting 3 mushrooms, there needs to be a much higher payoff than what we have now. It's too complicated, too klunky, and not refined enough on the game design side...it needs to be more fun, more simple, efficient and elegant.

I'd like to see more Detonate: xxxxx options for mushrooms and let all druid specs have access to them all. They would all be situational in any case, but at least we'd be able to cover more of those situations with one spell.

As far as getting into the new talents changes, I really feel like Blizz is on the right track. It would certainly seem nice to be able to get all three dps performance options split out into several tiers so you could pick them all up, but that is the way the talents are right now in Cata so what's the point in doing that? I think we should have several DPS talent options, but only be able to get one, but they should all be equally viable so that any druid spec would find them useful and not be left out. We need to make interesting, meaningful choices, not just blindly pick every dps talent in each tier with no real choice.

I definitely think Blizz has cleaned up things for the druid class as a whole, and are headed in the right direction. But I do think that last tier is just underwhelming compared to what other classes are getting. Not thinking this through and just off the top of my head, I'd like to see that last tier have 3 new forms to pick from with cool new abilities or something. They could even just add a furlbog form to Heart of the Wild, a Cenarius type form to Dream of Cenarius, and a Snake form to Disentanglement. However, even if they did this, these are underwhelming at best. Especially Disentanglement...we already can do that now, so why would that be a top tier talent in a new expansion? The extra heal is nice, but its not epic or cool or new. It seems like it should be in a lower tier. And Heart of the Wild, who cares? I mean, yes, without playing it, it might seem like meh because we dont currently play druid that way. Even if it is powerful, how many moonkin would really use that in PvE? And we'd still be much lesser powered than the other specs and it's not really a new thing that we can do, we can already do that now. I want something new! Get rid of these top tier talents and give us some new fresh interesting mechanics/talents that will blow our minds.