Comparing possible Moonkin builds (spreadsheet)

[Medium9]

Because analysing DPS by looking at formulas is a really tough job when taking everything into account (GCD, DoT-timing, procs, resists, GoN-procs etc.), I developed a stand-alone boss simulator for moonkins, to generate a huge sampleset of empirical data without the struggle to actually fight a boss.
This program takes any possible mechanic into account (excluding partial resists) and gives the possibility to simulate hundrets of hours of nuking within one minute. Mana is not yet implemented, but also not important for what I was looking for. The goal of the spreadsheet I made was to look at the sheer dmg potential of different talents and builds.

The testing was done without taking any buffs into account, except for the 5% crit and 3% haste from the moonkins impr. aura. E&M is also left out even when skilled, because it is a flat modifier that has no impact on percentages when comparing the builds. (Haste has because of the GCD.)

I would be VERY gratefull if anyone could post this in the US betaforums, mostly because it shows the underwhelming performance of Eclipse and the impact of (aparantly mandatory) manareg-talents versus more dps talents in hard numbers!

The Builds and any other presumptions that are important are in the excel sheet, as well as my remarks of which I will post some as a teaser :
- Starfirespam is not far behind Wrathspam (mostly because of the Glyphs).
- Builds with 3/3 Eclipse and perfect use of it are roughly in a range of 2-3% DPS increase to pure Wrathspam using a just slightly different build. IMHO not worth the struggle you have keeping track of the buff all the time, thus having less eyes on the fight itself.

The spreadsheet can be downloaded here: http://rapidshare.com/files/14579351...uilds.xls.html (Yes, it is clean and anything. Not using fancy makros anyway.)

[Medium9]

/carefullypushing

I would give away finest choclate cookies for all if someone could paste the above (minus the bold part) into this thread. It fits well there. And when doing this, you could also throw in some "full ack" to Madrocks who recently mooed wise there.
It is such a burden to play on EU and not getting a key when you are so eager about getting this spec fixed once and for all, and willing to,and capable of doing all the math

[Khimura]

I copied your post over, as well as provided a link to the original.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...2&sid=2000#181

Thanks for taking the time to do this sort of analysis.

[Medium9]

*takes the first load of cookies out of the oven* Be carefull, they're still hot!

[Khimura]

I realized I didn't state your name for credit in the post, that has now been fixed with a thanks to Madrocks.

[Medium9]

Just got the second load out Thank you!

[joshzoladz]

Builds with 3/3 Eclipse and perfect use of it are roughly in a range of 2-3% DPS increase to pure Wrathspam using a just slightly different build. IMHO not worth the struggle you have keeping track of the buff all the time, thus having less eyes on the fight itself.

i dont understand how this would be just slightly more dps? all ya need is 2 crits with starfire... and then all of your wraths hit for 10% more damage for 30 sec.. then ya do it again..... and with no more mana pot chugging, you wont be spamming wrath all the time or you will be putting the OOM in Boomkin.

seems to me a chance to regen some mana and get a 10% damage buff.. am i missing something?

[Medium9]

The confusing thing about that talent is, that it is a chance on a chance. In my case the all Naxx-25 gear i chose was pretty crit heavy, and still did not much more than about 20% crit WITH the aura and Nature's Majesty. Fully specced you will then have a 60%*20% chance, which is as low as a 12% chance per cast. This means you'd have to cast roughly 8 times SF (8.333, but 8 is good to account for some haste and GoN) in average to gain the buff, and 8 times 3sec makes a total of 24sec. Now consider that you'd have to recast IS two times within this, and maybe MF if you have not equipped the glyph or bad luck with hit, and you're at 27sec minimum in average that it takes to cast the lower-DPS and additionally un-eclipsed spell. Even wrath buffed by 10% for 30sec is hardly capable of making up for the damage loss in the 27sec before.
On the other hand, casting wrath to gain the buff will take about just 12sec with the unbuffed spell, and then you can go cast a starfire that is on par with the 10% crit, gaining more GoN procs that won't be GCD-capped, resulting in a slightly higher overall DPS than pure Wrath spam.

It is one of my points why Eclipse is badly designed: At first glance you would conclude just the wrong thing. It happened to me as well before I did these tests, and a talent that has to be researched this intensively to reveal how to actually use it to not make your DPS lower than without will result in many many Moonkins that just do it wrong, and can't even be blamed for it. Not to mention that 3 points that deep in the tree should be WAY more effective, especially if you look at what a huge amount of management is neccessary to gain the whole benefit. It is just ridiculous.

It is very hard to explain the precise effects that come into play because of a Moonkin's "proccy" nature. There is no fixed rotation one can talk about, and because of GoN and haste and eclipse and anything, everything gets scrambled up and is shifted against each other over time, that it becomes close to impossible to grasp a complete fight with all the talents in just a few words. That is the main reason why I programmed a simulator. You cannot look at talents or spells isolated at all, it all has to play together to actually get a realistic big picture.

[Medium9]

I have to beg again for someone posting the text below to the off. US beta forums, into this thread please. Cookies are out for now, but I made some great chillie con carne today which I'd be willing to share =) Thanks in advance!

8<-------------------(snip)-------------------->8

The recent changes sound really nice, except that I had bad suspicions about the Eclipse change from the beginning. I changed my simulator to adapt to the changes and ran some new tests. The outcomes are in short:

- The spirit conversion provides roughly 100 DPS increase with all-Naxx25 leather gear. Very welcome, because it'll scale with gear.
- The changes to Nature's Splendor now make this better than impr. Moonfire, despite the better chance to gain some mana with imp. MF. (It is about two times more effective expressed in percentages.) This is also true if the MF-Glyphs are equipped.
- Eclipse, finally, is completely worthless. I can't find words for HOW worthless it is now. It now gives a whopping 0.1%(!!!) increase in DPS if used PERFECTLY. The best way to use it, is casting Wrath until SF-Eclipse is up, casting SF for that time and then switch back to Wrath. Perfect use means now, that you instantly recognize when the buff procced, which is impossible because you're already half through casting the next Wrath when the former hits and procs.
Anything you do other than the rotation I just explained will LOWER your DPS to be under that of pure Wrath spam and keeping the DoTs up. If you go that far to invert the rotation (what is what most people will belive would be the better way to use it anyways), you lose up to 3% DPS, even if you time perfectly. This means that you actually are doing nothing wrong, and spent 3 talent points to lower your DPS. Add the amount of awareness you have to direct to buff-and-CD-watching, and therefore away from the actual fight, and you finally can say that this talent will always make you play worse. Always. Get rid of it. This isn't even remotely funny anymore.

The whole concept of Eclipse needs to be changed, and there are hunderts of really nice and non-overpowered ideas in all official forums including this one. But IF you change Eclipse to something worthwhile, please remember that you your selves have announced to take care of the bloat in balance. Right now it becomes very hard to skill properly, and with one talent more it'll become downright impossible.

For reference to my former testing, and some words on what "my simulator" means, please look here (2nd posting on that page): http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...2000&pageNo=10

I did not investigate the impact of IFF for now, but I did some testing how much percent of DPS you lose when recasting it every 40sec some time ago. It cost about 5% of our total DPS. So if we assume a SPriest in our raid (which is quite likely), the 3% crit will not make up for the loss you have casting it. With gear getting better (=more hit) the hitbuff will additionaly be obsolete in later instances, leaving the 3% crit the only effect in any circumstances when raiding gets to a point where minmaxing becomes much more important.
This change, combined with the impossibilty to take this talent thanks to bloat, won't make it desireable anytime.

[Dje]

Regarding Faerie Fire, i take the tooltip to mean that you get the 3% also if a feral druid has put up the faerie fire for the armor reduction part. (ie you would gain 3% crit without going out of your way to have it up)
Problem being to pay attention to wether some other armor reduction debuffs would overwrite it or not.

[Medium9]

I strongly belive that the crit is linked to the improved FF. It would not even be hard do discriminate between a talented and untalented debuff. If it gives X% hit, make it give X% crit as well, and you're done. Even if what you suspect is true, the 3 points can be spent on more effective talents. 3% crit unfortunatly do not always give 3% DPS, if not hit-capped never. Better keep 2 points in MSS, skill E&M 5/5 or get Celestial Focus along imp. IS. All these would be better places for these 3 points.

[pvtglass]

Well I ran 4 days of dps testing on the dummies in Darnassus on the PTR with 5 different builds. All of them essentialy showed me the same result, at least a 100dps increase if I "start" with starfire instead of wrath to proc celestrial focus and on the proc pop my hex trinket and wrath spam (keeping mf up), rinse and repeat but on the next rotation use a 2nd useable trinket. When your starfire crits however make sure that you instantly use typhoon as your using your trinket (i have my trinkets bound to side-mouse buttons so its ez for me). And if your using your shatt halls idol that will give starfire an advantage over wrath so keep that in mind =).

Here are some screenshots to give you an idea of the dps I was running with wrath of air (even though the nub didnt have it up very long), a priest buffed me with prayer of spirit, and I used crit food with sup. wiz oil.

http://img528.imageshack.us/my.php?i...2300dpssf4.jpg <--make sure to read the party chat recount post here.
http://img528.imageshack.us/my.php?i...8103835tm7.jpg <--wrath dmg/crits
http://img528.imageshack.us/my.php?i...8103828cl9.jpg <--starfire dmg/crits

Not to mention wrath is scaling a bit better with haste now that haste effects the gcd (I think). But now that they nerfed eclipse I doubt this rotation will work at all =(. Plz give me your thoughts or correct me if im wrong on any of this. I have no idea how things are scaling at 80 but these are my views on the ptr.

[Medium9]

Well, for one, recount doesn't look too convincing in this version - glancing casts?

The problem with "live" testing is, that the RNG'ness renders any sampleset below some several thousand casts more or less useless. When simulating with my program, I still get variances of about 10 DPS even after simulating 50 hours of constant and perfect nuke. It is too, not so good to incorparate trinkets and idols when aiming to rate the effectiveness of talents.

I however can imagine, that when popping trinkets with a max. 30s runtime while the former form of Eclipse was up could do the trick to change the SF->Eclpised-Wrath rotation to be the better one, but I wonder what would be if you used the trinket outside of Eclipse to buff the un-eclipsed cast. Especially now, where every trinket will run longer than Eclipse lasts.

But the main problem is still the very limited sampleset from live testing. To make reliable observations, you almost have only just two choices: Make formulas, or if like in this case that can get really ugly and close to impossible, get a much greater sampleset.

[gonewild]

I don't think the current situation between wrath and starfire will stay long. All casters to date have a long cast spell as their main nuke, I don't think wrath will be an exception. It is also very unreasonable to make a main nuke capped by gcd.

[Medium9]

I just wanted to remind you, that my (now cold...) chillie is waiting for someone who could post the feedback above (the one with a blue header) to the US beta forums. (Yes, it is kinda important to me )

[Darknemisis]

So. any of this testing give any clue on how moonkin's will COMPARE to the other caster dps classes. I'm mainly concerned on how I'd do in a raid. Though i don't expect moonkins to be at the top, I'd like to hope moonkin will be around 2 - 5 on the dps charts for a 25 man raid.

[Medium9]

This topic has been discussed by far enough on these forums, and the answer is still: Blizzard states to aim at roughly the same DPS for all damage classes/specs, they are at the beginning of doing this kind of tuning right now, and it is not done at all. This is the very reason why I concentrated only on comparisons within the moonkin spec itself.
Anything beyond one class/spec itself is not reasonable at this point, until Blizzard states that they just have gotten out a global "DPS correcting" patch. I don't expect this to happen within the next 2-3 weeks, or at least I hope that, because once you finetune the coefficients and little knobs, the big picture (= talent trees) should be mostly set in stone. That would not be too good for moonkins right now