Upcoming Nerfs and Moonkin Survivability

It had to happen.  I have been waiting for the nerf bat to be swung mightily in my direction and aimed directly at my Starsurge for a while now.  I guess the first clue might have been when I hit a Warrior in Tol Barad for 87k.  So what exactly are they doing to it?  The patch notes can be found here.

Ok, so a 20% reduction in my Starsurge is not going to be game breaking for me in PvP.  The only thing that it might shrink other than the sexy big numbers is the size of my epeen and that still will be enormous with or without the big numbers.  But seriously, I’m a Moonkin, I’ve been through nerfs before.  I’ll still kick ass, take names, and make the Horde cry.

The nerfs that are going to be affecting me the most are not Balance specific.  These will be affecting all Druids and I believe are meant to be pointed at other specs and for PvE oriented characters.  Sadly, it will really hurt the survivability of us PvP Moonkin in a big way.

First, let’s talk about this nerf: Cyclone duration has been reduced to 5 seconds, down from 6. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s a huge deal especially since they took out the glyph to make our roots instant, and nerfed our Thorns (due to melee classes that should have been licking the windows of short buses as opposed to PvPing).  Now, the one thing I have left to try and either give me enough time to get away to ranged distance or just GTFO in general, will disappear even faster.  This is will leave me extremely vulnerable.

The next nerf is supposed to be balancing things out between healers but it really affects me since most of my healing has already been nerfed to the point that I might as well not even roll a hot.  Lifebloom‘s bloom effect has been reduced by 20%. In addition, it now costs 11% of base mana, up from 7%.  While this might not seem like a lot, this is the only heal that was able to give me that extra survivability as I was running away like a scared little schoolgirl.  The mana increase will hurt Restoration Druids more than me, and I don’t think that PvE Moonkin will worry about this much at all.  It’s the bloom effect that will sting.

I know that these nerfs were needed in some capacity but Blizzard needs to look at the big picture.  It seems that when they make these changes, they are tunnel visioning PvE or PvP, one spec, or one issue.  They seem to forget that not everyone PvEs (or PvPs for that matter, because some nerfs have been brought on by PvP issues and completely gimped PvE focused specs.)

Qieth has an excellent post on his blog that brings to light another nerf that will most certainly affect those who are inclined to slay more dragons than I do.  What he highlights will affect me but not to the extreme that it will him.

Honestly, I’m not going to get my feathers into a ruffle, because it is early in the patch testing phase and hopefully things will be adjusted or evened out before it goes live.  I just hate to see that for the first time in a long time, being a PvP Moonkin was viable and now it seems that piece by piece I am being pushed back to the bad old days.