Retardin alts..and Opness Meet+ Eclipse chatter (short)

A little offtopic from the normal Moonkin blogness I do, but I was so tickled to death about this, I had to talk about it.

I decided to transfer my paladin over to the new server since I was leveling Jcing. Yeah..shes a miner as well as a Jc'er (double dailies! More dragonseyes! WOOT!) and well, I decided to hit up Wintergrasp at level 70 to try and mine up what I could. I knew I was going to die no matter what. As long as I got a few nodes, I didn't really care.

Well, this is my paladin. I ghetto spec'd her so to speak a full 61 without picking up Imp Might. Real Ret Paladins are probably laughing at me or wanting to bust my skull in. Probably both. Her gear isn't that good either, especially since I was originally holy, then prot on her back in TBC.

Anyway, heres the story. I go to hit up Wintergrasp and the battle starts. Great..now alliance will be around..right? Amazingly I didn't really get bothered but by this one NE Warrior. He had full PVP gear on and he seemed to know what he was doing.

Of course, I had tenacity by 7 but that made us even, and I was missing half the time with little to no hit against a level 80. Yet it was amazing. He came at me and we fought it out. Being the nub ret paladin I am, I did what all paladins do when I got half health..I bubbled. 

This warrior seemed to me like he knew what he was doing because he tried his best to get out of melee range, even tried to get away from me enough to intercept me. However, I'm not that much of a pvp nub and kept within distance of him.

It was a good 5 minute battle. Healing myself every second I got with my free heal proc off Divine Storm. In the end..he got whooped by a level 70 in terribad gear. After laughing about it a bit, I ran off to hide..why? There was a large group of alliance coming after me now (Yeah, he brought friends)

Needless to say, We lost WG that time but I got out of there with 5 stacks of Saronite :D

Now for the Moonkin part of this blog. A topic arose on the Moonkin Repository questioning which Eclipse proc is better. Solar or Lunar?

Solar increases your wrath damage (which with Imp IS, 2pc, and Glyph is very awesome)

Lunar increases your chance to crit with starfire

Looking at these, first thing for those who may be new to moonkining might think that Solar is the way to go. This is where we bring up the points.

Solar requires wrath spam. The problem with that is, If you have any haste..any whatsoever or are spec'd into Nature's Grace (0.5 second taken off your next cast) then you will be clipping the Global Cooldown. That isn't a good thing. Wrath also doesn't scale that well on its own with spelldamage. Also, wrath can be very mana inefficent thus making you require replenishers as well as mana regen talents. 

Starfire scales with its spelldamage and works great with haste. It works point for point with haste. It also cannot clip the Global Cooldown. Its also very mana effiecent. (short and sweet, I know)

Even though with all the buffs to Wrath you can get, Starfire still pulls ahead. Though we are always testing this theory as theorycrafters so this could change down the road. You never know!

Responses: I pretty much stand corrected, while Badegg is correct and I should have worded myself better.

Wrath does scale very well with spell power, but its scaling with haste and crit is awkward due to GCD clipping, the Lunar eclipse does minimize the amount this happens. But in any case the spellpower coefficient itself of Wrath is actually a bit better than Starfire, although not enough to make the Solar eclipse better.

--Badeggplant

He is correct. Wrath does scale  but due to the gcd clipping, its a pain in the arse to even try and use.  Thank you for the correction. :)

Starfall..Wait, I mean Starfail

Yup, that's the new name of it... Starfail! Say it with me! Starfail.....Has a nice ring to it eh? Well, this is what it has become. While people who play druids don't spec balance may not see an issue (let alone the rogues crying about it) we do. Starfall was our last real ability at getting melee away from us.

Sure, we have typhoon, that does damage and a knock back. A rogue can easily sprint back to us, shadow step, vanish and start up a very long and annoying chain stun or others. Warriors can intercept us as soon as it happens. Hunters are long range for it to happen so unless you are knocking them off cliffs..it doesn't happen much.

Then we have Death Knights who just use their silence on us when they are close for a free few hits. Let alone, if we try to cast thorns, we can get Mind Frozen as another silence to our Nature Spell section (out of 2). There are many more things that happens to us that Starfall was used for.

What is Starfall? Well, heres the tooltip of Starfall.

You summon a flurry of stars from the sky on all targets within 30 yards of the caster, each dealing 111 to 129 Arcane damage. Also causes 20 Arcane damage to all other enemies within 5 yards of the enemy target. Maximum 20 stars. Lasts 10 sec.
39% of base mana, 30 yd range, Instant cast, 3 min cooldown

Sounds all and good when you first look at it..right? You think it will be excellent to use. Both in PVE and PVP. However..this talent doesn't scale with Spelldamage. It does the same damage if you have 1500 spelldamage or 3000. Also, the splash damage only occured to mobs near the hitbox of the moonkin. Never near the stars making it a waste in that sense. (Ghostcrawler has confirmed this will be fixed)

Now, 39% base mana..its not to bad, but for a 3 minute cooldown..its terrible.

Now comes the PVP side of it, which is getting this talent nerfed! Before I go on however, lets look at what Starfall used to do!

IN PVP:

You could pop Starfall and run around as a Cat/Cheetah/Bear and keep the buff up
You could be stunned or CC'd and the spell will still occur for those 10 seconds
Random Stun proc which helped to remove melee off you for a second to cast Typhoon/roots

IN PVE:
None really..but it was good for a bit of extra damage..thats all it was


Whats going on with Starfall now?
Glad you asked! Starfall has already had some nerfs to it. Now if you get CC'd/Stuned, you keep the buff up, wasting its 10 seconds of free damage..however it doesn't go off. So its a wasted cooldown.

Random stun proc is being removed come patch. Ghostcrawler claimed that they wished to get rid of the RNG stun issue. Ok..So then that means Celestical Focus gets changed right? To what? Also, this leaves us with no stun in moonkin form (unless you are tauren)..meaning we have to waste mana..shifting into a bear to bash, then shifting again to continue on. Kinda a waste but its all we got now.

In PVE, this spell has been closely monitored by BadEggPlant over at the Moonkin Repository. She has been reporting in on it to state the damage it has been doing. She has also made several threads with suggestions on what to do with Starfall. Buffing the damage seems to be the major thing.

Here are some of the stats from Bad's findings

Starfall was 1.15% of my damage this week. I THINK I popped it on the Heroism.

Unbuffed stats for this week:
Spellpower: 1896
Crit: 18.26%
Haste: 493

PATCHWERK TOTAL DAMAGE: 857,209 (4684 DPS over 3'07")
STARFALL DAMAGE STATS:
Total done: 9,915
Crits: 5
Hits: 5

This was the first post. So..even with bloodlust Starfall was pretty much only 1% of the total damage done. Also keep in mind, if you use Starfall while you cast and pick up a crit to spark Nature's Grace...It will eat it during the final seconds of your cast. If you are a little confused, here is an explaination..

We'll go with Starfire being 3 second cast

You Cast Starfall
You begin to cast Starfire
Starfall Crits
You gain Nature's Grace
Starfire Cast finishes its normal (full 3 second cast)
You lose Nature's Grace


Yup..that is how its working right now if you want to use it in PVE. I have it for the little extra damage, but at this point with it barely even breaking 2% or being close, I figure I will drop it and pick up Typhoon so I can have some fun in Wintergrasp without respecing or finishing off my Owlkin Frenzy.

Either way, Starfall is getting nerfs and the random stun is all it had going for it in PVP. Now..it will be useless in PVE and PVP. Thoughts..Concerns? Wanting to look into more information?

If you would like to join the Moonkin Mafia in their search on Starfall answers, you are welcomed to check us out at The Moonkin Repository.com. You can also join us on the World of Warcraft forums!