Shifting Perspectives: The sun and the moon, page 2
by Tyler Caraway 
Aug 27th 2010 at 5:00PM
If you've been following anything about Cataclysm, then you know that Blizzard has introduced a new stat for the upcoming expansion called mastery. This stat merely increases the effect of your mastery ability, which for us is an increase to the Eclipse damage bonus. Each point of mastery increases the damage bonus of Eclipse by 1.5 percent. The obvious concern about the mastery stat would be how it functions in limited quantities. Clearly, each item with mastery on it won't be worth a full point of mastery -- think of mastery as you would expertise, which takes a specific amount of rating to get a full value point -- so this begs the question of how partial mastery influences Eclipse.
Obviously, given that a full point of mastery gives a fractional damage increase for Eclipse, one would assume that various points of mastery would result in similar fractional gains. How minute these gains can become is a bit of an unknown. Would, say, 64 mastery increase Eclipse by 0.67 percent? Or would it increase it by 0.6789 percent? How far does it go?
This isn't a particular part of the system that we know a whole lot about. I've been trying to experiment a bit in order to get better readings on the effect of the mastery stat, but it's currently proving to be quite difficult without access to more traditional resources. Remember, there are no add-ons in beta, so everything must be parsed by hand through the combat log -- furthermore, combat text isn't currently working either; damage numbers have to be shifted through manually. The combat log itself can get quite ... messy at times, with various procs, debuffs, buffs, and other such things filtering through. A single crit on Wrath will generate a solid 5 or so lines of text: the damage, Earth and Moon, Eclipse gain, Euphoria's Eclipse gain and Nature's Grace -- and that doesn't count the possibility of Omen of Clarity proccing, either. I absolutely have to remove my tier gear and trinkets; otherwise, those too are parses either on crit (Languish procs) or every single spell cast (Mauradin's Spyglass.) Luckily, I've mostly been just going off of base tooltips for spells, as tooltips now display damage based upon active modifiers, but that hasn't been entirely reliable either. I've been checking up on EJ and the beta forums, but I haven't yet found any solid data on the matter; if anyone does happen to have some, I'd certainly love to see it.
Half our abilities, some of the time
All of that aside, there are other factors about the mastery stat that need to be addressed. Mastery as a stat only impacts us when Eclipse is active, a function that is completely different from every other class in the game. Take note that I am not stating this as a negative, merely as the fact that it is. So far, as I've seen -- and I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong -- every single other mastery bonus in the game is some form of passive effect that benefits the character 100 percent of the time. The only two specs whose masteries might fall close to the way balance druids's mastery interacts with Eclipse would be fury warriors (whose mastery increases the effect of abilities which enrage them or consume enrage effects) and frost mages (for whom frostbolt causes a target to take additional damage from all other spells.) This puts us in a bit of a predicament as far as the mastery stat is concerned; haste benefits all of our abilities, crit benefits all of our abilities, but mastery only benefits half of our abilities some of the time. It's a precarious situation; mastery must scale enough for us to make it good enough to compare to our other stats in order for us to want it.
Erdluf did some work on Eclipse uptime over on EJ in order to predict how our spells benefit from the ability. According to Erdluf's work, approximately 64 percent of our spell casts will benefit from Eclipse one proc or another within a given rotation. I have to admit, that I find his estimates to be a bit on the optimistic side. His prediction is that it will take approximately 10 seconds in order to proc Eclipse -- which would be moving from the 0 point to the 100 or -100 point. At level 83 with my current gear, Wrath has a cast time of 1.61seconds and Starfire has a cast time of 2.42 seconds while in Moonkin Form with a critical strike chance of 17.11 percent, which would be 21.11 percent after considering Nature's Majesty. Given that, here's what we'd theoretically expect for Eclipse generation:
Wrath
13 + (4 * 0.2111) = 13.844 average Eclipse gain
1.61 / (1 + (.15 * (1 - (1 - .2111)^2)) = 1.5237 average cast time
100 / 13.844 = 7.22 Wrath casts to proc (must be rounded up to the nearest whole number)
8 * 1.5237 = 12.1896 seconds to proc Eclipse
Starfire
20 + (8 * 0.2111) = 21.688 average Eclipse gain
2.42 / (1 + (.15 * (1 - (1 - .2111)^2)) = 2.2903 average cast time
100 / 21.688 = 4.61 Starfire casts to proc (must be rounded up to the nearest whole number)
5 * 2.2903 = 11.4515 seconds to proc Eclipse
The assumption of 10 seconds in order to proc Eclipse is relatively close to what one would expect -- probably closer than what is calculated out here, given there would be a higher critical strike rate and you wouldn't always be going from the 0 mark upon dropping Eclipse -- so while this shows a slightly different value, I would imagine that 10 seconds is rather accurate in a standard setting. During a straight, wall-to-wall Eclipse cycle -- meaning that you never cast a non-Eclipsed spell in order to extend the Eclipse buff beyond Starsurge -- each cycle lasts for 116 energy of Eclipse and 100 energy without Eclipse, plus the additional benefit of having Starsurge benefit from Eclipse.
The reason that I find Erdluf's calculations to be slightly optimistic is due to the fact that 16 additional Eclipse to burn through is rather meaningless in most cases. In the above example, it takes Starfire an average of five casts to burn through 100 energy, and it would take Starfire an average of six casts to burn through 116 energy. That is merely an average; a single additional crit during a Lunar Eclipse proc would reduce that back down to the exact same five casts to burn through the 116 energy. Wrath is in pretty much the same situation, although it can get up to two additional casts due to the extension on Starsurge. The Starsurge extension of Eclipse is predominately the crux of the issue, however.
Within a standard Lunar Eclipse proc, you'll get five, possibly six Starfires that benefit from Eclipse, one Starsurge and potentially two Moonfires (although that would require an early refresh that clips the last two or three DoT ticks in order to pull off and may or may not be a DPS gain -- if the current Glyph of Starfire remains and we still use it, then you would not refresh Moonfire at this point). Therefore, in total, you cast seven to eight (nine, if you choose to refresh Moonfire early) spells benefiting from Eclipse while casting five spells that don't benefit from Eclipse. That would only be a 58.333 percent or 66.666 percent "usage" time on Eclipse. While close to the 64 percent predicted by Erdluf, I'm more so concerned about the range of the effect and the possibility of scaling crit causing a negative impact on Eclipse usage time, which is essentially the trade-off that Euphoria gives us. Due to Euphoria, you may get to an Eclipse proc faster, but in doing so, only 58 percent of your spells will end up benefiting per proc, or it might take you a tad bit longer to reach an Eclipse proc, but 66 percent of your spells will benefit from Eclipse.
The relationship between crit and mastery
That's a frightening concept to me, having the value of our stats and talents scale in relation to one another. The concept itself isn't all that new; after all, it is inherently baked into the system itself. Gaining additional spellpower increases the value of haste and critical strike, while gaining additional haste and critical strike increases the value of spellpower. Never have I ever seen a negative correlation between stats before; that is to say, I've never seen an instance where increase your critical strike chance would lower the value of haste on your gear -- yet that is exactly what we are faced with. Under the conditions of the current Euphoria, our critical strike chance has a direct impact on how well mastery from gear scales for us, and not always in a positive way. Without Euphoria, you would always see a 66 percent benefit from Eclipse on your entire rotation; with Euphoria, you would see a range between 58 and 66 percent, essentially leaving us in a position where critical strike rating can lower the value of mastery rating. That is not good.
Before it gets mentioned (as I'm sure it will be), I do realize that I only parsed through the Lunar side of the rotation and did not bring in the Solar side, but that makes no difference to the concept at hand. The two sides would not equal each other out; in fact, Wrath should have a larger value spread than Starfire, given that Starfire can only have a spell variance of one while it is possible for Wrath to have a spell variance of two (meaning that you can lose up to two Wrath casts benefiting from Eclipse due to critical strikes). This goes back to Euphoria's needing to be changed to a "smart" Eclipse system rather than how we see it now. As a "smart" system, you never have to worry about losing spell casts as a result of crit RNG, which can cause a reduction in the value of mastery. Instead, crit would have a direct positive correlation with mastery, as increasing your critical strike chance would create a higher chance of further extending the duration of each Eclipse buff, in turn allowing you to gain a larger benefit from mastery.
That's a frightening concept to me, having the value of our stats and talents scale in relation to one another. The concept itself isn't all that new; after all, it is inherently baked into the system itself. Gaining additional spellpower increases the value of haste and critical strike, while gaining additional haste and critical strike increases the value of spellpower. Never have I ever seen a negative correlation between stats before; that is to say, I've never seen an instance where increase your critical strike chance would lower the value of haste on your gear -- yet that is exactly what we are faced with. Under the conditions of the current Euphoria, our critical strike chance has a direct impact on how well mastery from gear scales for us, and not always in a positive way. Without Euphoria, you would always see a 66 percent benefit from Eclipse on your entire rotation; with Euphoria, you would see a range between 58 and 66 percent, essentially leaving us in a position where critical strike rating can lower the value of mastery rating. That is not good.
Before it gets mentioned (as I'm sure it will be), I do realize that I only parsed through the Lunar side of the rotation and did not bring in the Solar side, but that makes no difference to the concept at hand. The two sides would not equal each other out; in fact, Wrath should have a larger value spread than Starfire, given that Starfire can only have a spell variance of one while it is possible for Wrath to have a spell variance of two (meaning that you can lose up to two Wrath casts benefiting from Eclipse due to critical strikes). This goes back to Euphoria's needing to be changed to a "smart" Eclipse system rather than how we see it now. As a "smart" system, you never have to worry about losing spell casts as a result of crit RNG, which can cause a reduction in the value of mastery. Instead, crit would have a direct positive correlation with mastery, as increasing your critical strike chance would create a higher chance of further extending the duration of each Eclipse buff, in turn allowing you to gain a larger benefit from mastery.
