Starfall, and how it works.

This may be just me, but the druid 51 point talent, Starfall, has been rather confusing to me in the past. I think they even updted the tooltip to more closely reflect what it actually does, but I can still see it as confusing. I'm going to try to clear it up so you all can add it to your spell repetoir effectively should you so choose. Here is the actual spell text.

"You summon a flurry of stars from the sky on all targets within 30 yards of the caster, each dealing 433 to 503 Arcane damage. Also causes 78 Arcane damage to all other enemies within 5 yards of the enemy target. Maximum 20 stars. Lasts 10 sec. Shapeshifting into an animal form or mounting cancels the effect. Any effect which causes you to lose control of your character will supress the starfall effect."
- Wowhead

What it does it hits up to 20 targets within 30 yards with about 475 damage (modifided by spell power of course) with basicall a shrapnel grenade. By that I mean, the damage lands on its head, then shoots splash damage to any target within 5 yards of any target that gets hit. The initial hits expend one of the twenty (1/20) charges, but the splash is associated with the charge, and does not expend any charges.

If we were to assume you had greater than or equal to 20 targets around you, each target would be hit once, and your starfall buff would be terminated. The beauty of the spell is that if you have fewer targets, the effect lasts longer, to do close to the same amount of damage. Lets assume now we have 10 targets within 30 yards of us. Each of the 10 targets will be struck with a star, splash damage to nearby targets, and expend 10 total charges. Since however there are still charges 10 charges left, it will go through the sequence again, dispelling 1 charge on each target yet again, and causing splash damage. At this point, after two seconds, all 20 charges will be expended and the effect will be terminated.

You can run this idea for any amount of targets up to 20. If you have 14 targets, 14 get hit, then the game will randomly pick 6 more targets to expend the last 6 charges.

The last point is that the more targets you have clusterfucked together the more bonus the splash componant will do to each target around it. The effect becomes smaller and smaller the fewer targets, approaching no bonus when you have only 1 target. However, the spell is still useful and it will hit the single target for 20 charges of about 475 damage unbuffed. So for a single target you have almost 10,000 damage to just a single target, assuming you have 0 spell power. With 1900 spell power, i find each star does close to 1200 damage, so even with single target damage, thats still almost 12000, and it goes passively while you continue normal spell rotation.

I would strongly recommend using the ability when you have at least two adds up since you will then have it expend all the charges over the 10 seconds and also add splash damage, and the more mobs the better. But there are fights where you will only have 1 mob (usually the boss) and if its a long fight you might as well blow it early, let it cooldown, and use it again later in the fight.

One more thing I should mention (if you havn't already figured this out) is the 30 yard range around you is pretty big. Don't blow it on phase 1 of Kel'Thuzad or something or you will aggro fucking everything. Thats bad.

For my spec, I chose this over Force of Nature. Force of Nature actually does more damage over their duration, but due to the nature of boss fights, those pansy little trees usually dont survive long, and has a 3 min cooldown too. Starfall rarely gets cancelled so i find it more appealing. Thats my personal preference anyway. Hope that clears up how this spell works!