Patch 3.3: Relics

This will be a short post, but after looking at the latest info MMO-Champion there are a couple of things I want to comment on.

T10 Balance Druid Relic - The periodic damage from your Insect Swarm and Moonfire spells grants 44 critical strike rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

At first glance I was pretty unimpressed due to it's similarity to the T9 idol. Lets take a quick look at it for comparison.

[Idol of Lunar Fury] - Each time your Moonfire spell deals periodic damage, you have a chance to gain 200 critical strike rating for 12 sec.

The two idols buff your crit chance by a similar amount and both are based upon a DoT you put up. So, my first reaction was "Don't I already have this idol?" My second reaction a little more honest. While these two idols are very similar it is important to note the differences.

The first difference is obvious. The T9 idol grants 200 Crit Rating. The T10 idol grants 220 Crit Rating when fully stacked. If you assume a 100% uptime of both idols then this is a 10% buff to the idol slot. That's not that bad of a buff going from one tier to the next.

The second difference is something a lot of people will ignore.The T10 idol will have a higher buff uptime. The T9 idol buff has a 70%-90% proc chance and a 12 second duration. It's so high that most players and theorycrafters assume that it has 100% uptime. That's not a bad assumption, but in real life the idol's uptime will be less.

Since the buff is proc based there is always the possibility that bad luck will strike and it doesn't proc for an extended period of time. Also, there are times when casting DoTs is not in your best interest. At these times your giving the buff an opportunity to slip off.

The T10 idol on other hand is not proc based and has a 15 second duration. If you cast both DoTs the buff should be fully stacked within 8 seconds. Since Moonfire has at least a 15 second duration, as long as your cast a DoT every 27 seconds the stack will be maintained.

TL:DR - The T10 idol is not sexy and it isn't something your going to see a bunch of moonkin going nuts over. However, the buff is a little bit bigger then the T9 idol and it will be easier to maintain the buff. Therefore, this is a clear upgrade, despite my first reaction.

Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Great chance. If you've read my blog for along time you may remember that I thought that the Rebirth cooldown should have been reduced to 15minutes instead of 20 back in the early days of BC. Reducing it to 10 minutes is even better then my suggestion.

The big problem with the 20 minute cooldown is that if you use it in one attempt you don't have it for the next 2 or 3. Hopefully, with this change it will now be up for almost every attempt. This does make me wonder about soul stone though. They should reduce it's cooldown also.

UI Change: Any party member may mark raid targets.

Oh god, please don't let this go through. I can see the advantages for this change. The leader of the party is not always the best person to mark targets. This is especially true in 5mans when you can't make someone an assistant. I see the issue, but I also see the headache this could cause.

First, Addons like DBM and Big Wiggs like to use the icons to mark people that get buffs or debuffs. Most of the time that is fine and it doesn't matter that 25 different mods are trying to mark those people. However, there have been times in my raids were those marks were distracting and we want to turn them off. If you've ever tried to get 25 people to PvP flag in an instance, I think you'll understand how hard it will be to get 25 people to turn off a part of DBM so that the targets aren't marked.

Second, you always have to worry about people getting silly and changing the marks as a joke or on accident. There are some responsibilities that should be left up to the leader of a group. I think this is one of them.