Thursday, February 26, 2009

Blue Post: A PvP Response

Lissanna, probably the most well known Moonkin Beta tester, wrote up a good post that listed some of the core issues facing Moonkin PvP. Well her efforts were rewarded with a blue post from Ghostcrawler.

We are looking at Typhoon.
This is welcome news. Even PvP moonkin have had issues with this spell since beta. While the damage is decent for an AoE and an instant cast, the knockback is very underwhelming in terms of added survivability.

I believe we fixed the Starfall coefficient already.
Erdluf posted a good post regarding the Starfall Coefficients in the same thread. The coefficients were increased by about 150%, but I don't know if that is enough. Really Starfall has got to be tough to balance. its not really a single target spell. It's not really an AoE spell either. So what do you compare it to.

While I am not sure about the damage aspect of Starfall, I am sure about one thing. The current Starfall tool tip says "Any effect which causes you to lose control of your character will suppress the starfall effect." This needs to be removed. Starfall has a 3 minute cooldown. It shouldn't be so easily countered.

We will probably just leave the Owlkin Frenzy talent as is on live rather than risk the PvP nerf. If druids want to stand in the fire with the paladins in PvE, we'll live. Take it up with your healers. :)
Good news. Yes, we could get a buff in this way but I'm glad Blizzard could see that it comes at a cost.

We are also looking at (sigh) Eclipse yet again to make sure the Wrath part of the equation holds up.
It will be interesting to see what they can come up with. The Wrath buff is definitely not as good as the Starfire buff, but I'm Ok with that to some extent. Currently, Starfire needs something special to make it desirable. That something special is Eclipse and the SF idol. However this may change if mana becomes a bigger issue in 3.1.

We discussed looking at Insect Swarm. It's been a long day, and I can't recall what we decided. :(
Interesting. I hadn't really considered buffing IS to be a priority or even on the radar. What is unclear is if he means giving IS more PvP utility or taking a look at is as a whole since the original post was very PvP oriented.

All that said a good point was brought up on the forums. It is kind of sad that one of our Talented Spells has to be glyphed and have a set bonus to be useful. It would be great if they could make it more interesting in some way.

One final note:

It is very nice that we've gotten the attention we have over the past couple of days with the new patch. It really sucked back during BC when content patch after content patch was released with little or no attention paid to moonkin.

That said, I am disappointed that no attention has been paid to Faerie Fire so far. There needs to be a way to increase its duration. Adding a minor glyph to do so is a great solution. On top of that Blizzard has proven that they can offer differing durations for PvE and PvP with the new design for Vampiric Embrace. Something needs to be done here.

On top of that, why does Sting overwrite Faerie Fire? I understand that they are both minor armor debuffs, but FF has other utilities that the raid may want or need.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In total agreement on Faerie Fire. Regarding Starfall - saw a note on MMO-Champion about the change to the starfall glyph in 3.1 - 90 second reduction in cooldown (not sure if that's accurate, but the ability to pop it twice as often is intriguing to say the least). I'm currently running with StFire/MF/IS glyphs, but would consider switching the IS out for the revised Starfall. Based on my own WWS stats, and casual math, I should be able to eek out a little more damage from 2x the starfalls than I'm currently getting from the IS dmg bonus, and in the process would get the IS chance to hit reduction back for the good of the raid... But you're much better at analyzing these things, curious if you had looked at the numbers yourself

Tsunamee - Firetree/US

Trismegistus said...

Thanks for mentioning Sting overwrites FF, that is helpful info. To be honest, some of this homogenization is actually making game play worse and they need to keep some class functions unique or we will all be playing Mages, Hunters or Rogues in the end.

Anonymous said...

If Sting over-rides FF, then won't this affect our dps as well, since most of us do spec improved FF for the additional crit.