You can find the full list of glyphs by clicking on this link. (the list was so long that I made a separate page on this site that I can keep updated instead of embedding them in this post).

They have been split into prime, major, & minor glyphs. Note that this list probably isn’t final.

Some Prime  highlights are: The Wrath glyph (Your wrath does 10% more damage to targets afflicted by insect swarm), and starsurge (when starsurge deals damage, it reduces the cooldown on starfall by 5 sec). Lifebloom glyph now increases it’s crit chance by 20%.

The winner for most confusing prime: Regrowth glyph (Regrowth HOT will automatically refresh it’s duration on targets at or below 25% health). I’m not even really sure what that means.

Major glyph highlights: Thorns reduces it’s cooldown by 20%, Roots (reduces the cast time of roots by 100%) go moonkin PvP!, and healing touch (each HT reduces the cooldown on Nature’s Swiftness by 5 sec)

So, go see the full list now. I’ve marked which ones haven’t changed with the word (unchanged), but I still kept a brief description of the effect so you could remember what it does now.

Also, regarding the new glyph system: there are 3 prime, 3 major, and 3 minor glyph slots total at max level. The UI looks like this:

Also, it was brought to my attention that bears actually don’t have prime glyphs for tanking (with only 2 prime glyphs even being useable in bear form, 1 of which is mangle’s DPS increase glyph). They obviously need to add in more glyphs in some places, so this is really just a first pass at them.

So, now we have 4 different races to choose from when leveling a new druid, which gives us 4 starter zones: Night Elf & Worgen for the Alliance, and Tauren & Troll for the Horde. Trolls even have a new level 1 to 5 starter experience that I tried out a couple times and have had a lot of fun with.

The new talent trees are actually better for people who are new to the game and starting out leveling, since it will be harder to make the wrong decision (like going and putting 10 points in each talent tree at the start), as there should be fewer bad talent traps for people to fall in.

The biggest improvement for druids, however, is the level at which we get early abilities in the 1 to 20 level range.

Leveling 1 to 20 as feral in Cataclysm:

• You still have to caster level from 1 to 8, which shouldn’t be that bad, given the staring area questing improvements and having pretty much unlimited mana.
• At level 8, you get: Cat form, claw, Rake, & Ferocious Bite.
• At level 10, you get mangle
• At level 15, you get: bear form, maul, growl, & demo roar (engough tanking abilities to start tanking).

Leveling 1 t0 20 as balance:

• From 1 to 8, you pick up: wrath, moonfire, thorns, roots & starfire.
• At level 10, you get Starsurge from the talent tree.
• At level 20, you get insect swarm.

So, both feral & balance druids have enough spells & abilities to level fairly quickly up to 20 and beyond!

For feral, getting cat form at level 8 is a HUGE quality of life improvement, and you still get bear form at the level where the random dungeon system opens up and you can start tanking. I have had a lot of fun leveling a lowbie troll kitty druid up to the mid/late 30′s just because cat form has been so much fun for leveling through all the new & improved quest zones.

Balance druid leveling hasn’t been changed that much, with the biggest improvement for leveling coming from having starsurge as our level 10 balance spell. The knockdown effect helps with survivability, since it reduces the damage you take. As a cooldown ability, starsurge has higher burst damage and will help to break up rotations so that they feel less spammy. They also gave us starfire earlier. In addition, insect swarm is trainable now, rather than a talent, which means you actually get Insect Swarm earlier now than you used to, as well.

They seem to be front-loading a lot of our damage abilities so that we have access to more buttons sooner for feral & balance. An earlier cat form means that feral druids can now actually be feral druids sooner, and overall the changes to leveling design will make druids actually fun to level from 1 to 20, rather than the first 20 levels being what you wanted to get past so that the fun could start.

So, at the very least, I’m excited to start my new worgen druid when Cataclysm comes out in a few months. I’ve even avoided doing alliance leveling quests from level 15 to 60, so that I could have some fun surprises in store for me when I started on my leveling adventure. This is the one thing I am really excited about.

Eclipse –

• Eclipse has a new UI graphic that I previewed earlier that seems really nice.
• Eclipse overall seems to be working okay overall. I like how it feels now on Beta compared to live. I’ve mostly gotten used to the mechanic.
• SUGGESTION: The decay of Eclipse power is too fast when you are out of combat, making Eclipse not that useful when you are soloing and such. They should slow the decay a little bit more to make it less frustrating in shorter fights.
• BUG: It looks like starsurge crits aren’t applying Eclipse power correctly, which may sometimes require you to cast an extra spell even when the Eclipse bar says you should be at 100 Eclipse power.

OOMKIN:

• Right now, I run OOM super fast, and other druids have commented on it, too. Only getting mana back from Eclipse procs & from innervate doesn’t seem to be enough to sustain us, especially if we have to shift out to heal while soloing. Moonkin in instances have reported more severe mana problems compared to other classes.
• BUG: Right now, Dreamstate is missing from the bonuses you get when choosing the tree. This is likely a bug oversight, as this seems to randomly come & go between different builds. In builds where we have a functional dreamstate, our mana problems aren’t bad.

Starsurge:

• Starsurge hits pretty hard, and the knockdown effect is great while soloing (and PvP).
• BUG: Starsurge got a new graphic, but the orbs that are supposed to be in your hands are instead floating around your shoulders.

Moonfire & insect swarm:

• Moonfire & insect swarm seem a little boring as part of our normal PvE rotation, since it doesn’t really interact with any of our other spells at all. Casting them should be a DPS increase over not casting them, but you are casting them mostly just because they are a DPS increase and you don’t have to put that much thought into when to cast them overall.
• Lunar Shower got another buff this patch, which should make moonfire worthwhile to spam while moving. I honestly would have preferred a buff to moonfire’s direct damage base rather than having to make Lunar Shower on the verge of feeling overpowered due to being a HUGE damage difference for moonfire with & without 3 stacks of it.
• SUGGESTION: I still feel like the balance talent tree needs a talent that makes our DOTs better interact with our stand-still rotation in some better way. Since our glyphs aren’t supposed to change our rotations, but talents are, then the DOT/Direct Damage interaction should come through talents to help spice up our rotation.

AOE spells:

• Our AOE spells got a buff this patch.
• I’m using typhoon a lot while soloing for the knockback/slow to help reduce the damage I’m taking.
• Hurricane & starfall feel a little more powerful than they were before, though I’m not using them much while soloing because I’m having a hard time taking on more than 2 mobs at a time while soloing in Uldum & higher level zones, since everything is hitting super hard. I’m not sure how they compare to other AOE’s, but starfall isn’t the “I win” button on Beta that it is now on live (which should be fine).

Wild Mushroom:

• Wild mushroom is the new level 85 ability. After seeing them in action, I can tell that the 70% slow we’re getting from Fungal growth is pretty awesome.
• Wild mushrooms have to be cast while standing still, but you can detonate on the move.
• As of now, you can’t target the shroom to kill it, BUT you can target & kill a fungal growth.
• They seem like a great PvP tool, but I don’t see much use for them as part of a PvE rotation, other than when we need to slow things (like the Valks on Lich King).
• The graphic for shooms is also super underwhelming, but that may be an advantage in PvP where your opponent probably won’t even see it. It’s also possible that the graphic is a placeholder.
• For PvP overall, shrooms with fungal growth give us a ton of control over a person: Typhoon them back, starsurge knockdown, and then fungal growth them in place so they can’t catch back up with you.
• BUG: Mushrooms aren’t dealing their full amount of damage. They are only hitting for about 300 damage right now, even though the tooltip says they should be doing like 3,000 damage.

Talents overall:

• Our talent tree overall feels boring and like there aren’t enough talents in the tree to choose from. The choices that we get to make don’t feel interesting from a PvE perspective.
• SUGGESTION: I think one more talent in tier 3 of the tree (especially if it is something that makes our DOTs interact with our rotation better) would be enough to really make the talent tree feel like it has more choice, so that we won’t have to just pick up everything in the talent tree, whether it’s good or not.

Here’s a picture of 3 wild mushrooms that Direwulf cast. Yes, they are that small.

The new bar looks more night & day themed, and one side glows light after you get the Eclipse proc. The graphic is really neat. Even your spells on the bar are highlighted (Lunar Eclipse has moonfire & starfire light up on your bar. Solar Eclipse has wrath & insect swarm light up).

I think it really looks good. Here’s some pictures! (click on each one to see it full size).

So, now it looks less deadly. I still have to convince people in instances that standing in it is good, but that’s going to be a problem for all the class’ effects that are ground-targeted.

In terms of the spell mechanics, the healing it is doing is about 400 to 500 per tick at level 83, which actually makes it sorta average in terms of power, which I think is probably fine since it’s a talented bonus to regrowth, and NOT it’s own spell. Keeping effloresence from being overpowered is really important, because it would be a shame if we were encouraged to spam our flash heal (regrowth) until OOM as our primary healing strategy.

However, a 4 yard radius is really too small, because most of the time, the AOE heal effect is only going to hit one person. I think an 8 yard radius would be better.

In the current build (12803), regrowth’s crit rate is 60%  from talents, before gear. This feels like a talent bug to me because it really makes regrowth overpowered as a spell compared to other class’ flash heals, and compared to the other healing tools we have available. Either that 60% crit rate is supposed to be on people below 25% health, OR they need to have a lower (maybe around 20%) bonus crit rate that we have all the time. Leaving it at 60% before raid buffs or gear means that it will devalue crit as a stat, because it gives you a pretty low soft-cap for crit before it does nothing for Regrowth (and that is really what Blizzard has been trying to avoid by removing all the crit & haste bonuses from the various class’ talent trees).

So, in conclusion, effloresence in the current beta build has:

• Okay graphic
• Okay amount of healing done
• Too small of a radius
• too high of a regrowth crit rate

If they increased the radius & fixed the regrowth crit rate bug, it would be easier to evaluate the talent. As it is, I’m already spending too much time focusing on one of our many talents. However, having Effloresence be good without being overpowered will go a long way towards us being able to have our actual problems addressed, rather than just having regrowth + effloresence carry us through being a 1-button spammer through Cata.

However, in Cataclysm, they have moved to a system where there is going to be positional healing, and you’ll have to stand inside of “good” ground-covering effects. However, Effloresence’s graphic is a little bit over-done, so now it looks like a slime puddle, especially if you have more than one stacked on top of each other.

Also, Effloresence is down to a 4 yard radius, which looks big, except that it’s really not.  So, the beta forums have reports of tanks & DPS moving out of the effloresence procs, because they didn’t know what it was, and it looks more like green lava or Putricide’s slime pools than something beneficial.

The instant-cast regrowth is working in tree form now, which is why some of my pictures are in tree form.

So, please don’t move out of effloresence, or it won’t heal you. /sad face

Personally, I think the graphic may need to get toned down a bit, so it looks less like something designed to kill you (especially when you stack up a couple procs in the same place, like I did for the last picture). Just about anything else in the game I’ve seen resembling effloresence is something that’s going to kill you if you stand in it. I’m not sure they want to train people to sand in green lava, and then move out of the other green lava that has a larger effect (slime pools in ICC and such).

They could also make the radius larger than the graphic, so that when people move out of it, they will still benefit from the heal.

I would discuss the other actual problems with the talent, but it’s hard to figure out what is intended versus a bug in the latest patch, so I’m avoiding making a blog post about it for now…

Overall, the moonkin playstyle is starting to feel good. We aren’t quite there yet, but things are really starting to come together.

So, lets start with moonkin form. The current beta build makes moonkin form do 10% more damage when you are in form. This is fine, as we really didn’t need a creative damage increase. Sometimes, passive bonuses on things like shapeshift forms becomes the right way to get the form to be useful, and that’s fine with me. This actually partially makes up for the fact that the int increase from Furor is active outside of moonkin form now. So, moonkin form is essentially fine at this point, in terms of conceptual design.

Next, lets look at Eclipse & our direct damage spells:

Eclipse now requires us to move along a slider from -100 to +100 Eclipse power. When you reach -100, your Lunar Eclipse gives you a bonus to arcane damage. When you reach zero power, your Eclipse proc goes away. When you reach +100 power, you gain a Solar Eclipse proc, and that increases nature damage. It actually is a fun mechanic, except that you have to cast a lot of wraths or starfires to go from one end to the other, so it feels a little spammy. However, it has a neat interaction with Starsurge, since Starsurge will increase how long your Eclipse proc stays up, by moving you away from the mid-point when Eclipse is active (and pushes you closer to an Eclipse proc when Eclipse isn’t active).

So, wrath, starfire, & starsurge have a really great interaction with Eclipse that ends up being pretty fun. We also don’t have to worry about movement as much, since we get more time to use the Eclipse proc than it takes to actually use it. Moonfire & insect swarm do benefit from the damage increase from the proc, which is nice. Starsurge also works pretty well as a burst damage ability, and the cooldown is short enough that you get to use it pretty often.

Changes to Thorns: Has changed to a 20 second duration, 45 second cooldown ability. Only does damage when something hits you. Shifts you out of bear & cat form. Appears to only work as a resto or moonkin PvP ability at the moment.

At level 80, with 2557 spell power (in moonkin form, with moonkin talents), thorns hit for 620 per tick. However, thorns requires something to hit you. So, the current version really has a narrow range of use. At the very least, it’s not something that feral druids or PvE druids of any type will find useful at all in the current beta form.

DOTs (insect swarm & moonfire):

Insect swarm is currently something that packs a lot of punch, but it has no more utility (the -hit debuff is gone). It also has no real interaction with our rotation or talents, other than benefiting from Lunar Eclipse.

Moonfire is currently the weakest link. I’ve spent a lot of time & effort over the course of beta talking about moonfire. At this point, the direct damage portion of moonfire is less than a tick of the DOT portion of the spell. Even with all the talents to boost the direct damage, it still doesn’t pack enough of a punch. It’s not a huge deal, but it makes me feel like those talent points aren’t worthwhile. Basically, my insect swarm ticks for about the same (or more) than the direct damage over moonfire even if I have 3 stacks of Lunar Shower up.

At this point, I’d still like to see moonfire become a stacking DOT (where more of the damage is tied to the direct damage portion, and then the DOT is weak at one stack, but does a respectable amount when it stacks up 3 times). Another option is to leave the DOT as-is, and just boost the direct damage portion so it hits a little bit more respectably (but that balancing can always be done at 85, I suppose).

Not enough talent points in the balance tree:

Just about every other beta, I’ve complained about “bloat” (having too many talent points). However, we currently don’t have enough talent points to make anything resembling interesting choices in the talent trees. Tiers 3 has five points, tier 4 has six points, and tier 5 has 4 points.

I don’t really feel like I get to make interesting choices much at all. I think that one more talent, worth 2 or 3 points – in either tier 3 or 5 would have a huge impact on the ability to choose what talents I really want. Since we’re badly in need of something making our DOTs more interesting, I would suggest putting a DOT-related talent in Tier 3 or 5, to give us the option to better spice things up a bit (something that isn’t just a flat damage increase, but adds some of the interesting synergy back into the trees).

Waiting for glyphs:

One big unknown is what glyphs will look like. They are supposed to impact our rotations in interesting ways and allow for choice (and most of the existing moonkin glyphs won’t work that well in the Cata rotations). Glyphs could be where our DOTs are better tied into the rotations (I hope!).

Conclusions:

The design of the current Eclipse is fine. How our direct damage spells work is fine. Our DOTs need a little more attention & need to be better tied into the overall playstyle to make it a little more fun. We have a lot of good elements that just need more glue to hold it all together. Eclipse is fun, but it’s going to be either predictable or frustrating. I’d rather have something in addition to Eclipse to watch for that adds a little more spice.