New Moon, Half Moon and Full Moon, the Moon spells, the artifact ability or my personal preference: Moon Moon, has been a core part of the Legion Balance Druid rotation. Not only does it provide a significant amount of Astral Power, greatly reducing the amount of unempowered Solar Wraths we have to cast, it also adds an extra button to our otherwise rather boring base rotation of Solar Wrath spam with the occasional Starsurge into Lunar Strike. I would really like and expect that it in some form remains in Battle for Azeroth. Personally I would like to see it become base, possibly in a slightly simplified version.
The Bugs
There is a couple of bugs with switching between the Moons that can be very disruptive to the flow of the rotation. When chain casting the spells it is sometimes not possible to queue the next spell (presumably because it is not yet available), and sometimes when you do succeed in chain casting them it will display the wrong spell on the cast bar. There is also an issue with Radiant Moonlight where it sometimes simply does not trigger the legendary effect the first time you cast Full Moon during a boss encounter. Simplifying the spell to not rotate between three different spells but simply being a single spell, let’s say, Full Moon, would fix those issues. The downside to a simplified Full Moon is that it would take up less time in our rotation, resulting in more Solar Wrath spam, so I would greatly prefer the bugs being fixed.
The Added Flexibility of a Baseline Moon Moon
If Moon Moon was baseline it would allow talents and azerite traits to modify it like we saw with Radiant Moonlight in Legion. “Why is this so important?” you might ask. Well, currently it is pretty hard to modify anything in our base toolkit without messing with the balance between Starfall and Starsurge. It is important to keep them balanced so that Starsurge is always the default Single target spender, without being so far ahead that AOEing, by spending Astral Power on Starfall, significantly handicaps our single target damage. Since Starsurge empowers Solar Wrath and Lunar Strike and Starfall empowers Moonfire and Sunfire, buffing any of those spells would also tip the balance in one direction or the other. Essentially, without Moon Moon being baseline, the only way to have talents and traits that does not favour one or the other is through new spells.
The BOOM Factor and Mastery Scaling
A big issue I have with Full Moon currently is that it barely hits harder than a Starsurge. It does not feel right that a 3 second cast on a 45 second cooldown should hit for less than an instant cast spell that I cast 10+ times a minute. The reason this has become the case is that Full Moons damage does not scale with mastery. It does not help that Mastery is currently our best stat and thus what we usually have the most of on our gear. So should Moon Moon scale with mastery? The potential issue with that would be that it leaves very few spells that does not scale with our mastery. Moon Moon is currently such a small percentage of our total damage that I do not think it would be a problem. Alternatively it could get a substantial buff every tier to ensure that it stays ahead of Starsurge.
Owl Stuff with Gebuz 