Some hotfixes went out today for Cataclysm Classic that are focused exclusively around Balance Druids. The developers felt that players were spending more time in Eclipse (Solar) than was intended to be optimal. To disincentivize this, they implemented a change that will cause Eclipse to reset when pulling a boss so you can’t snapshot Mastery ahead of the pull anymore.
To compensate so that Balance Druids don’t see an overall loss to their damage from this change, they have also changed Insect Swarm to deal Spellstorm damage, meaning a combination of Nature and Arcane, so it can benefit equally from Eclipse (Lunar).
Linxy – (Source)
June 12, 2024
Cataclysm Classic
- Druid
- Balance
- Developer’s note: We noticed that Balance druid gameplay was seeing a trend towards sitting in Solar and trying not to leave it, especially in Multi-DoT situations. Not engaging with a decent chunk of your core rotation to stay in Solar Eclipse is not a playstyle that we nor the original developers had intended, so we released a change last week that was aimed at preventing mastery snapshotting pre-pull by resetting Eclipse when engaging a boss.
We understand this could be a damage reduction in many scenarios and to address this, Insect Swarm now deals Spellstorm (Arcane/Nature) damage so it can now benefit from Lunar Eclipse. This means that when you end up in Lunar Eclipse, you will still be buffing your two core DoTs. We estimate this change to be about a 15% damage increase to Insect Swarm, which is typically a Balance Druid’s second most damaging ability on non-single target encounters. There may still be situations where staying in Solar Eclipse is ideal, and that’s totally fine, we just don’t think it’s healthy for that to be every situation and on every pull. - Starting a boss encounter resets Eclipse energy to 0.
- Insect Swarm is now considered both an Arcane and a Nature spell, causing it to benefit from both Eclipses. The tooltip will be updated in a future update.
- Developer’s note: We noticed that Balance druid gameplay was seeing a trend towards sitting in Solar and trying not to leave it, especially in Multi-DoT situations. Not engaging with a decent chunk of your core rotation to stay in Solar Eclipse is not a playstyle that we nor the original developers had intended, so we released a change last week that was aimed at preventing mastery snapshotting pre-pull by resetting Eclipse when engaging a boss.
- Balance
About the Author
Luxrah
I've been playing World of Warcraft on and off since vanilla, usually as a healer or caster and often as a guild leader. I play both retail and classic. I also love RPGs, sandboxes, and sims.