Well, I suppose we are mostly likely to blame for it. I mean, honestly, we did start the chain of events that lead to the current version of Eclipse. The changing of the cooldown itself was of little significance; that change was needed as it made Eclipse worth something. On it's original cooldown, Eclipse was an utterly worthless talent. The problem was that we steered Blizzard away from the original values.

All of the values were originally 15%. This was fine, but, for Starfire, it was far too RNG heavy. Although 15% additional Crit is a lot, it just wasn't making the talent all that worthwhile since, at that time with gearing factors we knew about, you could very easily get RNG screwed with no gain from Eclipse. In fact, I recall plenty of times in Beta where I went an entire Lunar proc without a single Starfire Crit.

So we made them buff Starfire to 30%. This, of course, ended up unbalancing the Wrath portion to the point that, aside form the Nature's Grace factor, it was a huge loss in DPS value to get a Solar porc. So it too had to be buffed to 30% in order to equalize it. And so on it went.

Simply put, it and when Blizzard nerfs Eclipse, the Starfire effect cannot remain as a Critical Strike increase - it must be changed to something else. If not, then too low and the effect isn't noticeable enough - too high and the talent falls back into where it is today.

I think what they should do to fix eclipse is remove the cooldown and duration, and instead, make it a permanent aura that switches at a certain number of casts. Spam wrath at the start because you're sitting on solar eclipse, then it procs and swaps to lunar eclipse, so we start spamming starfire. This would maintain the increase we need to stay competitive and eliminate the problems that exist today, as well as remove the randomness of losing eclipse.

Obviously, the effects would have to be scaled down to account for the 100% uptime, which would solve the last problem of poor scaling at high gear levels.

Or possibly make the switch a random proc based on crits as it is now. That way we are still dealing with the proc mechanic to keep it interesting.

In the end, the "fix" has to be adding at least 1 (pref. 2) new single-target spells to moonin's rotation and removing Nature's Grace from the picture to make haste scale better with wrath. Eclipse on it's own isn't the real problem. The real problem is that our 4 spells don't make an interesting rotation on their own, and Eclipse was just a way of trying to make us press those 4 buttons without giving us anything in our rotation we can actually control the timing of, besides Treants.

When people say "pop your cooldowns", I just stand there with nothing to pop unless my treants are up. I have so many random procs between talents & gear that my DPS swings totally all over the place depending entirely on how much I have to move relative to when the procs go off.

basically, Eclipse is a symptom of a much bigger problem for moonkin, and it just doesn't quite work on it's own.

I find it a little amusing how often I hear that, Liss. I mean, I agree with the statement, but, honestly, how many other classes use as many buttons as we do? Arcane Mages use two, Fire Mages use three, maybe four, Destruction Warlocks use four, Shadow Priests use four - five if you count the one application of SW: P - Elemental Shaman use three to four depending on Chain Lightning. We really are no different than any other class out there. Very, very few classes use a wide plethora of abilities.

We need a new spell because, well, we haven't actually gotten one that wasn't a long cooldown button in....ever.

I wrote this post to highlight the real problems with Eclipse. In no way do I think Eclipse is the only problem in the moonkin spec at the moment. I completely agree that Nature's Grace is broken, and Starfire and Wrath are to similar. However, I wrote this post to focus on Eclipse.

On another topic, I want to disagree with Tyler/Murmurs for a second (big surprise. :P). I don't think we are to blame for the current state of Eclipse. Talents are not valued in binary terms. They are not "good" or "bad". There is tons of gray in the middle. When Eclipse was first seen in the Alpha it was a horrible talent. You, I, and several other people did the math to show that it was true. They revised it several times and we eventually got to a talent that was acceptable at the start of WotLK. Blizzard could have stopped there, but they didn't.

I don't remember any prominent theorycrafter calling for them to buff Eclipse in 3.2. There were a lot of people calling for buffs, but I don't think anyone wanted them to happen to Eclipse. In 3.3, we needed a buff again, but both you an I called for something other than an Eclipse buff. This issue is all Blizzards. They didn't want to do anything to risky or boring to buff us so they kept going to the well that they new a lot about. Now that well is dry.

Yes, but - Blizzard wants us using a lot of buttons and wouldn't let us just starfire spam all day to happiness. If they want us to push more buttons, the best way to do that is to give us buttons to push. :)

To 3.2 I agree with, but we are at fault for the 3.1 change which boosted Wrath to 30%. There were many complaints that the Solar portion of Eclipse wasn't strong enough, and since nerfing Lunar was out of the question, Solar was buffed as the only logical choice. In that respects, we are at fault.

The 3.2 change to allow us to alternate Eclipse procs, though, was the largest change we'd ever seen and was what solidly placed Eclipse as being one of, if not the, single most overpowered talent in the game. The massive amount of DPS that Eclipse accounts for is absurd, and to that end, I do agree that I don't think we ever - at least not of any serious note - made suggestions to support that change. By that point I think most people were already on the 'nerf/destroy Eclipse' wagon.

And, of course, the 3.3 change was an expected icing on the cake.

It's my fault because every time I complain about Eclipse, it gets buffed instead of "fixed". We can just blame me.

Actually, if it gets buffed again after this post, I blame Graylo.