Patch Notes: 3.1

We all know about the big things coming in patch 3.1. Obviously Ulduar is what I find most exciting since I am a raider. It will also be interesting to play around with Dual Specs and the in game outfitter should make life a little easier.

However, with all content patches we see small (and some not so small) tweeks to class balances and such. There isn't a hole lot of changes that affect moonkin directly in the patch notes but there are some interesting things I would like to discuss.

Balance: Owlkin Frenzy is now properly considered an Enrage effect. Now also does not trigger from spell hits, only physical ranged and melee attacks.

This is a straight up nerf that PvE moonkin won't care about, but PvP moonkin will probably horrible. It is now also dispellable by a hunter using Traq Shot. From my PvE perspective this isn't a big deal. This change firmly plants this talent in the PvP category, but very few moonkin picked it up now anyway. Owlkin Frenzy might have become valuable in higher levels of raiding but you can't miss what you didn't have.

Resto: Improved Mark of the Wild: Now also increases all of your total attributes by 1/2%.

For a little while now I've been debating if I should put two points in Improved Mark of the Wild or Nature's Focus. With a resto in raid there was no need for Imp MotW, but my 10mans don't always have one and the benefit of Nature's Focus is small. So I've kept Imp MotW for utility. This change reinforces that choice, but it is a minor benefit at best. In moonkin form it means I will have a about 20 to 25 more Int and Stam, and even less spirit. This is not a big deal.

Shadow Priest: Vampiric Embrace duration increased to 5 minutes, up from 1 minute. PvP duration is now 60 seconds. Cooldown removed.

I bring this one up to focus on the mechanic. The argument given for not increasing the duration of Faerei Fire is that the preventing stealth portion of it would be to overpowered with a longer duration. This change now indicates that it is possible to change the duration for PvE and PvP. So why not implement this for Faerie Fire? I still wouldn't be opposed to adding a minor Glyph that extended the duration of FF but removed the stealth prevention, but a change needs to be made some way. Now Blizzard has no excuse not to.

Shadow Priest: Shadowform: Bonus damage from critical strike chance removed and replaced by the ability of those periodic damage spells to generate critical strikes.

Affliction Lock: Pandemic: This talent has been reduced to a 1-point talent, now grants your Corruption and Unstable Affliction the capability to critically hit.

If there DoTs can crit why not ours? I don't think Moonkin are far behind in DPS, but I would love to have a talent similar to this.

Shaman: Bloodlust/Heroism: Cooldown reduced to 5 minutes, but Sated and Exhausted now last 10 minutes.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this appears to be the dumbest change I've seen Blizzard make for a while. I could understand increasing Exhaustion to 10 minutes, I could understand reducing the cooldown to 5 minutes, but combining the two makes no sense at all. Blizzard has said repeatedly that they don't want raids switching players in and out of raids between bosses and that is the only way this change could be useful.

However there is a way that they could change this to make it awesome. Have Exhaustion last 10 minutes or until you leave combat. I can't calculate how much time has been wasted in my raids waiting for the Heroism cooldown to come back up when we are attempting Sarth3D or 6min Malygos. If they changed Exhaustion in this way then Blizzard wouldn't have to worry about guilds chaining Heroism, and guilds could have it available for every encounter and attempt.

Affliction Lock: Eradication re-designed: Eradication: When you deal damage with Corruption, you have a 2/4/6% chance to gain the Eradication effect. The Eradication effect increases the critical strike chance of your Shadow Bolt spell by 30%. Each critical strike reduces the critical strike bonus by 10%. Lasts 30 sec.

I flip flop on my opinion of Eclipse's randomness. I love when the RNG gods favor me but hate when the ignore me. That said if Blizzard did decide to reduce some of the randomness this is definitely a possible way to do it. However, I worry that it would nerf our DPS to much.

Enchanting: Added a recipe for enchanting staves with spell power.

Interesting. I don't use staves so I haven't tried putting a SP enchant on one lately, but I assume that the current 50 SP and 63 SP enchants can be applied to two handed weapons. If my assumption is correct then we can assume that the new Staff SP enchant would give more SP then the enchants currently available.

Caster DPS has long favored MH/OH combos because they always provide more DPS stats then equivalent Staves, but this change has the potential to upset that assumption. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Edit: WoWInsider has two screenshots of the enchants (link1 , link2). They offer 19 more SP then the MH enchants. Ultimately I don't think this will change behavior much.