A Treatise On Moondancer

Tyrobag

So I was looking at the Moondancer gear set, evaluating how good it was compared to other sets because I was thinking that it would be fun and cool to use. I decided to post my findings, and my recommendation to ZoS here.

For those who don't know Moondancer drops in the Maw of Lorkhaj trial, it's buffs are as follows:
(2pc) Max Magicka
(3pc) Minor Slayer
(4pc) Spell Damage
(5pc) When you activate a synergy, you gain a shadow blessing that increases your Spell Damage by 432 or a lunar blessing that increases your Magicka Recovery by 432 for 30 seconds. You can only have one blessing at a time.

At first glance the set seems fairly decent, akin to BSW. Not as powerful as Sioria's, but potentially more flexible. Unfortunately, in reality, this is not the case.

The big issue with this set comes down to this: it's highly unreliable. Each time you hit a synergy it will re roll the 50/50 chance on which buff you get. This means that if you already have the shadow blessing you may keep it, or you may get the lunar blessing. If you are trying for one particular blessing you will have to just keep popping synergies and hope that you get lucky.

I think this set would see much more use (while still not exceeding other similar sets) if one simple change was made. If you already have a blessing up when you pop a synergy, rather than re rolling the buff, it should flip to the buff that you do not currently have. For example if you already have the shadow blessing, it will give you the lunar blessing, and vice versa. This would instantly make the set more interesting, fun, and strategic. You still can't get 100% uptime on the shadow blessing, but it would feel like you have much more choice, and it would make you use the set more strategically (rather than eating up every synergy you see in hopes of getting a particular blessing). A skilled player in a good group would be able to make sure that they have high uptime on the blessing they need most at any particular time, but unlike most sets you would have to be active in your use of the set.

Being a trial set, I think that Moondancer should be a good and competitive set. I also believe that simply making the buffs flip rather than re-randomizing would be an easy way to do this without causing it to become OP, or changing what makes the set unique. I hope his is something that will be considered in future updates.

@ZOS_Wrobel

Runefang

Personally would rather hit 2 birds with one stone. Give us more synergies! So few abilities provide what is one of the more unique combat functions in ESO.

A small heal synergy from Strife, a small weapon/spell power boost synergy from whip, a speed boost from birds etc.

Elwendryll

With too much synergies, wouldn't it be a mess with the priorities? How would you activate the synergy you really want reliably?

About Moondancer, I never used it, I was expecting it to already work like you're suggesting, it was probably because of the "dancer" part.

VilniusNastavnik

It was bis for mag sets before staves gave 2 set bonus as you used it for the 2 and 3 piece. Now IA out performs in Ha builds and siroria on static fights.

Narvuntien

I think over all RNG on sets is mostly bad and there is too much already and so less is better...so yeah I agree

I much prefer control over if and when you get buffs in this game.

Now BSW actually works and is an RNG set because it is statistically significant uptime just by running through your rotation I actually think it would be pretty simple to calculate what a RNG buff of this kind would produce for some classes generic rotation then adjust the buff given so that it gives you good damage numbers (you can use BSW for reference and normalise around it). But I get the feeling ZoS just doesn't put enough resources into this.