Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Change 2 to Eclipse

Last Friday Blizzard held another dev chat on Twitter and one of the questions answered was regarding the current beta implementation of Eclipse.  I blogged earlier in the month what I still saw as the short falls about the current implementation but Lissana and Graylo went further and spoke a little more eloquently than I on the matter.  Luckily for us Blizzard seems amiable to making changes reflected at the criticisms lobbed at Eclipse.  The next iteration of Eclipse will see a 45-second effect window that certainly answers the movement problem but I don't know enough yet about the linear casting problem yet.  I'm still hoping for a random "charges" system that keeps some of the randomness of our casting routine now.  I can live with a linear casting system like we had in BC but if at all possible I'd like to keep more of what we have now than what we had in BC.
Q: Moonkin: What are your plans for Eclipse, and why does it infect so many of our talents? What are your plans to make Moonkin fun?
A. The model we are trying now lets Solar and Lunar Eclipse procs last for about 45 seconds, and each spell of the appropriate type that you cast moves the bar back closer to the middle again. The buff is canceled by reaching the middle. This should let Moonkin "hold" the buff for short periods of time when they need to move or get out of the fire.
Lissana has a lengthy post on the announced changes, which my question about the randomness is based on.  When she talks about 10 or 5 casts she's surmising but that's the point.  We haven't seen any information (yet) that Blizzard intends to introduce a random element to how much power each cast might use so I'm left to believe we'll have a strict linear system.