Glyph of Focus (Patch 3.0.8)

Welcome to the buggy patch of 3.0.8! Starfail has been nerfed and everyone around the world is dropping it! New Moonfire animation! (PEWPEWZ LAZER BEAMS) and everything is buggy or just not working!

What a wonderful day of Warcraft! Wouldn't you agree? Anyway, the patch has been out for a few days now. When the patch first came out, there was an issue with Wintersgrasp crashing the server. Each time the game was won, it sent out an infinite buff to everyone, causing the server to overload and crash (every server in the game mind you)..when the servers would come back up, the game was reset and people would try to take it again.

Honor farmers enjoyed this time while people in Northrend couldn't stop dcing from the for hours on end. It was terrible. Raiders were afraid to wipe and had soulstones and everything ready at hand for wipe recovery.

Malygos learned to fart so he was killing people behind him, let alone they added a larger range to his arcane breath..which apparently was chaining off hunter pets and ghouls, causing raid wipes. He also has targeting issues in phase 2 where you couldn't target him and he'd just melee you after a vortex. There is also no more stacking of sparks to dps him from 50%-0 with a bloodlust. Sparks now have a timer which is shared with their pools when they die and give us the buff.

Anyway, to the point at hand. With this patch came a new Glyph..Glyph of Focusing! This glyph increased your Starfail damage by 20% but decreased its range by 50%. This glyph however is a major glyph and not something worth picking up. Why do you say? With the 50% decrease, you only get 18 yards to use it with. Pretty much you will need to stand on the boss and pewpew. Which is a bad thing.

Closer to the boss means more agroo, let alone if that boss has a cleave, breath, tailwhip or anything like that, you'd be screwed. Anyway..for sheer curiousity we was quick to look into the numbers it would give.

Here are the numbers given by Wisprunner after I pointed the topic out. He did a 50% increase of damage and a 20% increase.

ok 20% increase.

600 average hit. 20% of that is 120, so 720 a hit for 15 hits is 10,800

1324 average crit. 20% of that is 265 (rounded up. 264.8 is the actual number), so 1589 per average crit for a total of 7945 with the 5 crits from my parse.

combine all that to get 18,745 so it's not even a 3 dps increase if I did that conversion right (which I don't think I did, I never remember that conversion, someone correct me if I'm wrong) over what my starfall did for me on the fight.

standing on the boss for 3 dps...umm...no thanks.

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Here is the 50% increase numbers

Take the last time you used Starfail on a single target mob (patchwerk, Instructor etc.) from a wws report, and just take the average hit, take 50% of that, add it, and that's what the hit would have done. take the total number of hits you had on that mob, and do simple addition from there.

That's how much glyphed starfail would have done.

For instance, the last time I did patchwerk25 and had starfail the average hit of my starfail was ~600 (rounded up for ease of math) 50% of that is another 300. so 900 a hit. 900 a hit for 15 hits is 13,500.

average crit was 1324, 50% of that is 662, add that on and we get 1986, 1986 average crit at 5 crits total makes 9,930

Grand total 23,400 compared to the 15,541 that the parse had. That was on two uses as well since the kill was a laughable 3:27.

23,400 would still have been half of what IS (next lowest total damage ability) was. so starfall would have added roughly 30 dps to my total of 3857 (hooray 30% wrath crit) instead of the 23ish I got that night.

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Though from his personal point of few, his numbers still show what type of increase you would see. 3 or 7 dps..doesn't matter..for 1 talent point isn't going to make this talent, but break it really. You could put that talent point anywhere else you like. Even pick up IMP Moonfire..or something. Me..I dropped it. I won't lie. I picked up 2/2 Gale Winds and put 1 point in Owlkin frenzy since I really have nothing else to do with my points. I have no mana regen talents or anything and I'm never oom in fights.

If you have no issues with mana you can always make your tree to your liking..always remember that. The 55/0/16 spec is just a basic spec for raiding if you have mana issues. Anyway, enough rambling from me. I hope this post will help people still confused on the glyph if they wish to take it or not.

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!

Ok, so now what?

For those who have been following, I have been on a mission to prove with IFF worked with FFF. Ghostcrawler probably has gotten tired of me, but I was on a mission and now, my mission is complete!

I went ahead and looked at this in game, and I am happy to report that I was wrong. Any Faerie Fire should allow you to get the 3% crit, even if you didn't cast it. So the tooltip should probably read: Your Faerie Fire and Feral Faerie Fire spells also increase the chance the target will be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increase the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by [anyone's] Faerie Fire or Feral Faerie Fire. I don't always have the game right in front of me when I am reading forums (most often I am on a painfully topical beach sipping mai tais) so I try not to guess unless I am pretty sure about something. I was pretty sure about this, but I was wrong. It happens. There are like 15,000 spells in the game.

So, there you have it. At this moment all of our testing has come to a close on if it works or not. Ghostcrawler has now stated it works after his two other posts. As long as he says it, people will stop bugging me about it now.

Behind the Scene:

Yes, there was stuff going on during these tests. Our 'friendly' neighborhood Wisprunner didn't believe that IFF worked with FFF. He was a nay sayer to it all and even when I gave him tests it was still a yes or no to him, even with it pointing to yes. So, for several months we had gone back and forth on this, on and off, always trying to prove eachother wrong.

So for the record...

I WIN WISP

Ok, that felt better. For those who don't know us personally, we have no grudges with eachother, it was more or less a friendly challenge and I won. Yes, I will keep saying it Wisp because I know you read this blog! I win, I win, I win! :)

He already stated he owes me big for this, there are so many things he could do. But I rather not limit him. So if you are a reader and would love to suggest something, just leave a message in a comment. This way we can give him a list of what all he could do for the repay.

Back to the issue at hand however, now what? GC originally stated that the talent shouldn't work and if it does..its a bug. However, people think otherwise. With it working and now proven by a blue ( which everyone and their mother wanted to see ) will it get fixed? Why should it? Its only 3% and its not like we're topping the damage charts as number one over pure dps classes are we? What are your thoughts? Don't be afraid to leave them in a comment..I'd love to answer them as they come!

Well, thats it for now, but I would love to mention I made Graylo's blog...GO ME! :D