Monday 27 October 2014

Starfalling

After every patch the last four years, it was the same question, what is Starfall doing today?



Starfall is the Moonkin AoE spells that drops those nice stars from the sky, doing nice damage, and always associated with trash-wipes. I remember that in one of my first raids with Innovation, I pulled the boss because I accidentally hit Starfall.

Now Starfall is not a targetted spell..it just blankets a 40-yard circle-area, with the moonkin at his center with stars, but, it was not supposed to hit out-of-combat targets...  it was supposed to... So, since that incident I have been very carefull with this spell, but the last half year it seemed working perfectly.

It worked so good, that it even didn't hit CC-ed targets anymore. It still hit everything that was in combat though.. a real Healer-saver for that matter on trash, especially if an extra pack of mobs was 'butt'-pulled.



In solo-ing it was a little worse, because it does not make a difference with whom a target was in combat, hitting Starfall on the Timeless Isle was a sort of gamble, lucky there was a glyph so it would only hit targets you dotted. This was important, because Starfall was a big part of the rotation, even on single-target-fights.

I actually had Starfall glyphed for Garrosh, because the adds all aggro-ed me, for a while, until I was placed in the melee-group for Typhoon.

Now, with 6.0, Starfall seemed to be less important for our wonky rotation, you have to choose between Starfall or Starsurge, the latter increasing damage on starfire/wrath. Considering single-target fights, Starsurge is way better then some falling stars, but as I found out last week in Mythic Siege, most fights have adds somewhere, and on 3 or more, Starfall does better damage then Starsurge.

Thok-barbeque with Innovation

On Thok last night, I found another use, a filler for when you running out of range towards something. You may loose some stars, but some will hit after you are in range again.

I am liking this spell-choice between Surge and Fall more and more...but.. using it on Trash is most of the time a big No-No. Not because of the damage, but because of something irritating. Starting with 6.0, Starfall lost the 'only targets in combat'-component. And most Trash packs are closer together than 40 yards, which may result in some accidentally pulling.

Siegecrafter Blackfuse ready to kill an Innovation trash-pack


It's not even feasible on Frogs. The Timeless isle frogs, as most of you know, are now heavily farmed for charms. So, I thought nice, I stand there hit Starfall and every frog gets damaged by me, which is right..but I was most of the time not the one who tagged the frog.

Apparantly the stars in Starfall need to come from another galaxy, that long does it take to reach earth. I also heard horrostories from dungeons, where everything is even closer together. There Starfall seems to be 'press-here-to-wipe'.

I can actually not see the reason behind the removal of the 'only-in-combat' part, maybe there is some strange PvP-reason, maybe they found it to difficult to actually implement, I have no idea. But everytime I want to hit Starfall, I know have to be very carefull.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I always used Starfall on cooldown, cause it keeps falling and hitting your enemies while you can go and do anything else, including Starsurge. Even with adds, you're ok with avoiding direct attacks - cast a small healing spell and move a bit.

But with soloing, it's pretty tricky now. Cause you want to AoE your pack and suddenly all the hozen village or the virmen cave is all busy with hitting you. Surprise! Hope they fix that back.

André said...

Starfall and Starsurge have shared charges now. So just using starfall on CD can be a big dps-loss because you are limiting the amount of starsurges.