Shifting Perspectives: Building a better Insect Swarm for Mists
by Tyler Caraway 
Feb 25th 2012 at 8:00PM
Greetings, druids. Last week we talked about the new changes that had been made to the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, which held a few good changes for us. This week I want to focus in on two criticisms that I've had growing for a very long time. It's no shock to anyone that reads my column or follows me on Twitter that I abhor the new direction of Insect Swarm.
I've talked about this topic before, but I want to discuss it further.
Looking into the why
In the essence of fairness, I feel that I should go into why it is that I believe Blizzard is tweaking Insect Swarm the way that they are. To start with, Insect Swarm has been an extremely problematic spell ever since it was created. In TBC, it didn't deal enough damage in order to be worth using, the same was even true at the start of WotLK, and it nearly fell off the map again late in the expansion as well. It hasn't been until Cataclysm that Insect Swarm has finally become a sold piece of our rotation, and even now it's still the weaker of the two DoTs.
Blizzard has long struggled to get balance druids to use Insect Swarm, which seems silly when you think about it, but true. In large part this is because the ability wasn't originally designed as a damage dealing DoT, it was a debuffing DoT; the primary purpose was the -chance to hit debuff. Early Cataclysm, however, showed us the dangers when you allow for DoTs to go powerfully unchecked.
Balance druids rocked tier 11. A significant part of that was our horribly powerful tier bonus of the time, but it was also due to the type of encounters that we came across. Balance druid DoTs excelled at multi-target and AoE damage. We rocked face on Cho'gall, Halfus, Maloriak, and more because we could DoT multiple targets with very strong DoTs. This has caused us design problems that still trouble us to this day. Our single target damage has been kept down and not boosted where it needed to be because our multi-target damage is just too good.
Blizzard really wants to avoid that in the future. They don't want balance druids to gain such a large damage boost merely because there's an additional target. This is understandable, admirable even, but they are just going about it entirely the wrong way.
New problems with Insect Swarm
Having Insect Swarm do nothing but boost our damage by 25% against a single target carries a lot of design complications of it's own. The more obvious danger, and the one that I've been harping the most, is the matter of target switching. It happens all the time, there's an add that spawns which needs to be taken down quickly, or you have to switch to an off-target to burst down a shield, there's tons of rapid target switching where burst damage matters. At the end of the day, a single GCD of ramp up isn't that bad when you consider what retribution paladins go through. We could deal with that, if it were our only ramp up.
We already have significant ramp up time built into Eclipse. Yes, we can game it so that we have a full Eclipse bar waiting for when we need to burst down a target, but doing that reduces our damage against the primary target. Eclipse is Insect Swarm, which is why we don't really need a second. Just think of the potential damage swing. I said back in the Cataclysm beta that we would hit a mastery level that would make Eclipse a 40 – 50% or more buff, and, look, we did! You think MoP is going to be any different? Doubtful.
We're still going to hit the same 40 – 50% Eclipse level that we are now, and add on top of that the potential to swing another 25% damage. That's right, if Eclipse and Insect Swarm are both down, you can expect that we'll do 65 – 75% less damage. Oh, but why wouldn't Insect Swarm be up! Perhaps it was dispelled in PvP, perhaps you're attempting to do a quick target switch, maybe you're off soloing and don't want to bother using Insect Swarm on every single mob you pull. Can you imagine that while leveling? How annoying.
Suggestions for improvement
As I said, I understand what it is that Blizzard wants to do, but there are far better ways of doing that than turning Insect Swarm into the most bland ability ever -- not to mention how OP it is. Seriously, a spell that just increases your damage by 25% on a target? It's too simple, too boring. Look, we want to restrict balance's access to multi-target damage, I get it, let's look at some better ways to do that instead.
Bringing back my favorite
Every since we got the ability from a tier bonus back in ICC, I have been infatuated with the notion of Languish. When it was shown that our critical strike scaling in Cataclysm was so pitifully low, I pushed to try and get Languish added in as a talent to help boost our want for crit. What is Languish? Oh it was a neat little perk that caused a target to take 7% of Starfire's or Wrath's damage after suffering a critical strike. Essentially, it was our weak version of Ignite. Is it blatant copying? Probably, but I really don't care.
Languish was an amazingly cool tier bonus, and it would be an amazingly cool perk to add into Insect Swarm. Keep the minute duration, keep the single target restriction, give it a modest amount of damage, say half per tick of what it does today, but allow for Starfire, Wrath, and Starsurge crits to cause the target to take an additional 10 – 20% damage. Heck, if you don't want for it to clone Ignite too much, then have the damage be instant instead of being a DoT.
With this solution, you have multiple perks. It reduces Insect Swarm's damage –- it'd be worth it on multiple targets because of the minute duration, but that's why you restrict it to a single target -– and it boosts our critical strike scaling. Changing Shooting Stars to only proc off DoT ticks was a nice incentive to gear for crit, but it wasn't nearly enough. Crit would still be miles behind our other secondary stats just as it is today.
Working with what you have
Don't want the Ignite clone? Fair enough! That's not the only choice that you have in the matter. You could have Insect Swarm act as its own form of mini-Eclipse. Once again, cut the damage of the DoT down, but make up for else where. Every Wrath that lands on a target with Insect Swarm increase Starfire/Starsurge damage by 2%, stacks to 10%, then the reverse for Starfire.
The problem that Blizzard has is they don't want Insect Swarm's damage to be viable against more than a single target. They want moonkin to focus on single target damage and not multi-target damage. This way they can better balance single target and AoE. Mean as it sounds, but their solution is clunky, uninspired, and flawed. There's far better ways to achieve their goal. Why aren't they looking at them?
Every week, Shifting Perspectives: Balance brings you druidic truth, beauty and insight ... from a moonkin's perspective. We'll help you level your brand new balance druid, tweak your UI and your endgame gear, analyze balance racials and abilities, and even walk you through PVP as a balance druid.
Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives, Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
zackwbrandon Feb 25th 2012 9:28PM
The fact is that it works fine as is. If Blizzard wants Balance to do less damage to multiple targets, then have them reduce the inital damage of the spells, or have them rely less on huge add-fests, or continue with the route of Spine of Deathwing - give the adds too little in the way of HP to waste it on DoTs.
If they are sold on using this damageless version of the spell for Mists, at least make it something fun to choose in combat instead of a necessity that is boring because it is a static increase: make it hit every second or so, each tick applies a stack of new Languishing, up to five stacks. At five stacks it becomes Languish (with a time of 30 seconds) which causes all Nature spells to crit and all Arcane spells to refresh the duration of Languish up to a maximum of a minute.
Or have it be that Insect Swarm does damage in ticks for 15 seconds, weaker than it is today, but if the target dies while Insect Swarm is up it spreads to the nearest three targets that are aggroed to the caster (only spreads once) - then slap a cooldown of 45 seconds onto the spell.
Or make Insect Swarm into a buff for the player that spreads to the first four enemies that strike the player and then applies the DoT (thus limiting the targets that the spell can hit - admittedly this is too much like Thorns and would be too useful in PvP).
Or, and this one is my favorite, make the new weaker Insect Swarm 'ignite' into "Fireflies" when hit with Starfire or Wrath increasing the damage of the DoT to its current level (or perhaps even higher).
As Ghostcrawler repeatedly says: static increases are boring. Give us a mechanic to really sink our teeth into. Just don't be lazy in an effort to make something 'over powered' fit better.
muffin_of_chaos Feb 25th 2012 9:41PM
Tyler, you are entirely too picky.
Lissanna Feb 25th 2012 9:50PM
What do you mean by that? I wrote about how the new IS was a bad idea a while back on my blog. It just doesn't work. Having both Eclipse & IS to manage in MoP is going to make us end up not being viable at all for PvP where you will have a high probability of having target switches and not having Eclipse up reliably. Insect swarm would be okay for PvE, but it really doesn't work in any way for PvP and leaves us not viable at all for PvP given that our actual damage toolset is somewhat limited in that environment.
Twill Feb 25th 2012 9:45PM
Insect Swarm should work like the affliction Curse/Bane that increases shadow resistance or something.
What it SHOULD do:
Insect Swarm
Magical Debuff, 1 minute duration.
The target and all other enemies of the caster within 100 yards of the target take an increased 25% damage from Wrath, Starfire, Starfall (which is currently a single target ability), and all other non-AoE spells. If dispelled, all targets affected are given Sunfire and Moonfire for 3 ticks worth.
Boom. Doesn't help AoE, but doesn't mess up target swaps, and is still a great tool. Also make it hard to dispel please...
Imnick Feb 25th 2012 9:49PM
What if Insect Swarm was a low-ticking DOT with a target cap of 1 target that pulsed AOE?
Dimmak Feb 25th 2012 10:03PM
Perhaps they need to look at what the spell is all together. Here is how I would change it:
Insect Swarm: Places a strong damaging dot on the target. Enemies within 5 yards of the target take half this damage. The target is also debuffed to hit 1% less frequently. Only one insect swarm can be active at a time. Your treants prefer to attack the target of insect swarm.
This quickly creates a strong dot for single target encounters. In an AOE situation it is very similar to DK diseases in that they do less damage to the secondary targets without becoming too powerful. By making it only 1 target at a time you eliminate multi-dotting. Finally it provides a focus for those pesky tree pets. The 1% miss chance is just be flavor and could easily be dropped.
Meatball Feb 25th 2012 10:17PM
Balance isn't the only spec losing a DoT. Shadow is losing Devouring Plague, Demo is losing Immolate, Destro is losing Corruption and Bane of Doom. The exception is Affliction which is retaining all its DoTs, which makes sense since it is the the mother of all "DOT specs."
It seems to me that Blizzard is getting rid of redundant abilities that don't really add much to the rotation.
themightysven Feb 25th 2012 11:59PM
I like spells that have a secondary, utility effect, so here's my idea, make it an AoE (like, you know, a swarm would be) that does light AoE level damage, AND increases the GCD on abilities. Make it set-it-and-forget-it like Earthquake or Ring of Frost, and bam, you have an ability that's useful for PvE, useful for PvP, not too overpowered, but in skillful wing-paws, can be used to awesome effect.
Drad Feb 26th 2012 12:19AM
Just a quick thought about Insect Swarm:
Keep IS as a damage debuff but change it drastically. Have Insect Swarm take an amount of damage you deal by your direct damage attacks as a buff on yourself. The amount you take from your spells is determined by your crit chance.
Whenever you're outside of eclipse your direct damage attacks spend the energy stored within the buff, the same amount as you stored while within Eclipse.
Now the fun part. Whenever you actually crit the benefit of Insect Swarm does not use any stored energy. But you can also expend all the energy you have whenever you cast Insect Swarm, but this burst damage would not benefit from Eclipse.
This version of IS would also have a unique synergy with the 2 damage cooldowns in our talents because it would mean that we store more energy than we can expend, making an IS strike all the more powerful and frequent.
I find that this could be pretty balanced, in the sense that you have a constant damage increase outside of eclipse, balancing (hint hint) the huge damage increase while inside of Eclipse while adding more favour to Balance, something that i find is still partially lacking because Eclipse is so mechanical and flat.
Drad Feb 26th 2012 12:26AM
Just a quick thought about Insect Swarm:
Keep IS as a damage debuff but change it drastically. Have Insect Swarm take an amount of damage you deal by your direct damage attacks as a buff on yourself. The amount you take from your spells is determined by your crit chance.
Whenever you're outside of eclipse your direct damage attacks spend the energy stored within the buff, the same amount as you stored while within Eclipse.
Now the fun part. Whenever you actually crit the benefit of Insect Swarm does not use any stored energy. But you can also expend all the energy you have whenever you cast Insect Swarm, but this burst damage would not benefit from Eclipse.
This version of IS would also have a unique synergy with the 2 damage cooldowns in our talents because it would mean that we store more energy than we can expend, making an IS strike all the more powerful and frequent.
I find that this could be pretty balanced, in the sense that you have a constant damage increase outside of eclipse, balancing (hint hint) the huge damage increase while inside of Eclipse while adding more favour to Balance, something that i find is still partially lacking because Eclipse is so mechanical and flat.
Drad Feb 26th 2012 4:01AM
A tooltip would (I think) look like:
Insect Swarm xy% base mana
40 yards
Send a swarm of insects to onto your target
to energize you whenever you deal direct
damage to your target depending on your
critical chance, while in Eclipse.
Stored energy is released by dealing direct
damage while outside of Eclipse or by casting
Insect Swarm again. Criticals outside of Eclipse
use no stored energy. Damage is not modified
by Eclipse.
An example would be you deal 10 000 damage to a target normally. Add in a 15% crit chance and IS and 40% additional damage in Eclipse, you would start to store 2 100 points of damage per, say Wrath, every time you hit your target that had insect swarm. once you hop on out of Eclipse, your Wrath will start to deal 2 100 extra points of damage. So now instead of 10 000 damage Wraths outside Eclipse, and 14 000 damage Wraths inside Eclipse, you have 12 100 and 14 000 respectively. so 40% difference to a 15.7% difference. And that is just napkin math for the flat increase portion of the spell, the rest probably requires a more complicated formula to truly see its potential or a increase in crit scaling and/or strength.
numbers can always be tuned to keep mastery and crit equal with this kind of spell.
Jaeken Feb 26th 2012 1:09PM
My issue with Boomkin is that Blizz apparently needs to have a Nature *and* Arcane spell for every purpose. Insect Swarm vs Moonfire, Wrath vs Starfire, etc. Imagine if Elemental Shaman had a Fire, Frost, and Nature version of Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, etc. At least the Shocks have very different effects.
Kendro Feb 26th 2012 1:55PM
Blizzard's solutions ever since Cata started on how to solve boomkin problems have been clunky in total, and very wrong.
Anyone remember what they did to try and kill solar cleave arena teams? Take a fairly heavy nerf bat to one of the most loved talents in the balance talent tree! They didn't even do a normal nerf, no they gave it a nerf that was so bad that it made the talent nerf you if you took it. The mechanic that it changed to was so absurd and complexly worded that I'm amazed it actually made it out of internal testing, let alone to the test and live servers.
The insect swarm change is wrong, there are many different ways to fix the multidot issue without the insect swarm change. I'd like to point out something very important though. Even in WotLK once you had the 2t9 set bonus, multidotting was very strong for moonkins, and decently noticable without the bonus. The mistake Blizzard made in Cata was that they made dots too strong period. Then to further inflate that problem, they put too much power behind eclipse while it was up.
There are three things that need to be done in MoP, first off, another eclipse adjustment. You always have an eclipse buff, either solar or lunar. That make it far easier to balance boomkin damage and also takes away most of the incentives to game eclipse. How would this work, well quite simple. Remember when you get an eclipse buff, and then once you pass the middle of the eclipse bar and that buff falls off, it simply doesn't. You keep each eclipse buff until you reach the other side of the eclipse bar. This keeps the core concept of moving the bar back and forth, but gets rid of the insane highs and lows from gaining and losing the buff.
Second, dots need to be dialed back, and insect swarm needs to do arcanestorm damage, or w/e they call it, basically switch between nature and arcane depending on whichever would do more damage.
Third, starfall needs to be reworked. Concept is this, in solar for aoe you use mushrooms and hurricane. In lunar you use starfall and hurricane for aoe. So starfall gets a cooldown reset and cooldown reduction while you're in lunar or something, and starfall also needs to go back to its WotLK version, not the wimpy Cata version. Either this change goes through or mushrooms also have to do arcanestorm damage, or solar is always going to be the preferred eclipse to be in and eclipse gaming (which blizzard apparently hates) will continue. I feel like doing the starfall change is better simply because making everything deal arcanestorm damage starts to make the spec kinda bland and stale. Having two different AoE rotations and switching out nukes for single target would be fun.
Those are my thoughts in the matter, having played a druid since vanilla's closed beta I really hate how the class was treated in this expansion. This was the only expansion where we started off in a good spot, and then a handful of knee jerk reactions and poorly constructed "solutions" severely hurt the class for the rest of the expansion.
Orrine Feb 26th 2012 3:13PM
Also Insect Swarm could deal good damage if casted on target that has no Insect Swarm. This effect may be on 6-8 seconds cooldown
Estal Feb 26th 2012 8:04PM
Kind of off topic but....
Since they keep changing the visuals for Hurricane, I would SO love it if they added a visual to IS. It would be so awesome to have little bugs swarming around Azshara and other mob's heads. hee hee....
seas Feb 27th 2012 3:42PM
Boomkins are like packers fans ya'll CRAZY!!!!
Shepherd57 Feb 28th 2012 8:27AM
Eclipse either needs to me a cooldown like tree of life. The cooldown can be used twice in a row and the same eclipse state (lunar/solar) cannot occur back to back. This would mean outside of the cooldown druids would either wrath or starfire spam, but if we are overhauling the eclipse state then we could overhaul the spells.
or
Eclipse needs to be a permanant aura. It only effects wrath, starfire, moonfire/sunfire, starfall, and hurricane. Make IS a damage buff for ramp up time. Eclipse would work as follows: Eclipse gives empowers your spells (nature/arcane). While under the effect of solar eclipse your nature spells deal increased damage and your direct nature damage attacks (wrath/sunfire first hit) have a chance to proc Lunar Eclipse. While Under the effect of Lunar eclipse, your arcane spells deal increased damage and your direct damage abilities (starfire/moonfire first hit) have a chance to proc Solar Eclipse.
We still get a since of randomness from the never knowing when eclipse will change, we still have alternating periods of wrath spam / starfire spam. This lets IS become a single GCD ramp time on damage. However, I sorta like the idea of making IS an only one target AOE swarm like suggested above.