Moonkin Advice.

[Caeora]

First off I have abit of a talent issue atm, For lack of a better option, Ive been putting 3 talents in Eclipse, However After some testing and reading on here its not really worth it, as Moonfire and Starfire spam seems to be higher dps overall. So my Question is this, Where should I put those 3 talents.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...h=111900040506

Is what I'm going with right now, Minus 3 points.

Now I havn't started raiding but done a few heroics, almost hit capped (need an enchant or a gem) and with my new Mace, around 1400 spellpower, horrible crit but meh, Anyway. I have 3 choices that I cant really decide on.

First is brambles worth it? Would the extra dps from Ents be a nice boost? or in a raid do the die easily?

Second, Gale winds, and typhoon, Do I need the extra AOE power?

Third, Owlkin frenzy, Now I must admit, Ive actually only tried this talent once, and liked it but seemed to be a pvp thing, however if by taking into account heroics, where quite a few bosses do aoe and i'm actually getting hit alot, Does this talent proc on spells, or any kind of dmg or is it just melee, whatever the case would it be worth it?

My Second big question.

What glyph should I take? Ive been using IS but.. again i don’t think I’m going to be using it, what would be a better alterative, Innervate is the only one that seems ok to me but what do you guys use?

Ps, My other Glyphs are ofc, Moonfire and Starfire :P

[Sholva]

Well i would use innervate and prolly forget that improved swarm. i had it at last raid and now i would spec like this:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...h=111906000000

i think it even dropped my dps to cast it there. Before i did't have dreamstate but now i took it after i decide to test eclipse

so i would skip that swarm totally and get innervate glyph

[Stewy08]

Insect Swarm is around 330 dps
Starfire is around 1600 Dps
Both these numbers are with the glyph and with 1500 spell dmg.
Although imp insct swarm does add 3% crit to starfire.

I raid as moonkin and my guild has 2 server first clears, and the build I raid on doesnt have gale winds NOR does it have typhoon. The build also doesnt have owlkin frenzy. And it even doesnt have starfall. The only real talents I took were treants which are slightly useful if you have enough spell dmg. Although even taking the treants I skipped the brambles talent.

On a side note, I do use the eclipse talent rotation but im finding without enough crit it isnt very useful, bcause your sitting ther spamming wrath for 30 sec trying to get a crit. My crit is now 22% and its getting easier to do.

[Ashaera]

I raid as moonkin and my guild has 2 server first clears

Ill bet 500g that you are on a deserted server (or very good friends with whoever is recruiting).

For 25mans mana is not an issue (Kel'thuzad / Sartharion with 2+ adds alive), so imo the optimal glyphs are Moonfire, Starfire & Insect Swarm.

Insect Swarm does enough damage to justify casting it (If u have the glyph).
On aoe talents -> Any moonkin without Gale Winds needs to stop & think for a sec --- "Do you want to top the damagemeter on Patchwerk, or do you want to clear Naxxramas as fast as possible?"
If you want as smooth raids as possible then you spec into Gale Winds (& enjoy being the best aoe class in game!).

Eclipse is very well worth it for the good player -- With the crazy amount of crit % buffs that a 25man offers you can safely choose only to go 2/3 Eclipse for a massive dps increase.

----
Speccing boils down to choosing how many mana talents you want.
Omen of Clarity > Intensity > Dreamstate > Moonglow -> For my needs I find OOC+3/3 Intensity to be more than enough.

Then you need to figure out if 3/3 imp Faerie Fire is needed or not.

What aoetalents do you want?
Imo 2/2 Gale Winds is a must, typhoon & starfall can be argued.

[Degrador]

Insect Swarm is around 330 dps
Starfire is around 1600 Dps
Both these numbers are with the glyph and with 1500 spell dmg.
Although imp insct swarm does add 3% crit to starfire.

That's very misleading. Yes, Insect Swarm isn't very high DPS. However that's not what matters. What matters is DPSC (Damage per second cast). In this case, the total dmg of Insect Swarm is about 2000 DPSC (~3000 total damage for one GCD). Starfire is about 1700 DPSC (~5000 dmg average for 3 second cast time). These are very rough numbers, but it does show that Insect Swarm is not to be so easily dismissed as a bad spell for DPS.

[Degrador]

Conclusion: With 2k SP, at 50% crit (including every talent and raidbuff and everything) SF will surpass IS in terms of the ROI on the used GCD. The higher SP or crit go, the earlier this will happen. (For SP because SF scales better, for crit because NG will lower the average castingtime of SF.)

50% crit is quite a lot to ask though, even including every talents buff and everything else available. If you then include glyphed IS then that increases its damage by 30% it quite easily makes for better DPSC than SF.

it is widely the conscense among theorycrafting owls that IS isn't worth it. It always was clear that IS scaled poorly and becomes worse the better your gear gets, but I am sceptical if I didn't do some major mistakes in my calculations here...

I have also seen this consensus on forums but I still disagree with it - my spreadsheet agrees with me as well, glyphed IS is definitely worth casting IMO.

Maybe it were rotation issues leading to counter IS's small benefit to become a dps dampener. I could imaginge keeping IS up among MF and (and this is the important part) making still full use of Eclipse could be quite stressfull. Proccyproccyowl =)

I don't think Eclipse is worth it to be honest. And I think this is also something a lot of people are coming to agree with on forums.

I think the best rotation will be something like: IS, MF, SF, SF, SF, SF, IS, SF, SF, SF, SF, SF. Including a bit of haste that should lead to IS & MF being up pretty much the whole time, with very little if any overlap or lack of DoTs. I wish I could test this out but I'm left as Resto spec for the moment :/

[Degrador]

IS is a worthless talent for anything besides PvP. It is that simple. IDC how you try to sugar coat it, the numbers never lie. The overall dmg never gets high enough to counter the 1.5 sec GCD that is tagged on it. I have done the math before and posted it in on, a single wrath has more merit then a fully buffed IS.

Then please show us this math, or find where my math above is flawed? A single Wrath does ~2k non-crit 4k crit. Even with 50% crit (very unlikely IMO) that's about 3k average for 1.25s cast (ignoring haste, despite that haste is useless for a Wrath crit). Glyphed IS does 4k for 1.5s cast.

[Aleiga]

I don't know how much of this occurs in raiding now, but wouldn't IS be worth it considering in some boss fights you need to move around or get silenced or something and its nice to have the DPS ticking over?

[Degrador]

I don't know how much of this occurs in raiding now, but wouldn't IS be worth it considering in some boss fights you need to move around or get silenced or something and its nice to have the DPS ticking over?

Yes, it certainly would help when moving. People also ignore the 3% hit reduction chance when unglyphed which is quite a significant boost for the tanks. Yes, hunters can provide this, but it hurts their DPS more than it hurts ours (if it in fact does which I'm not convinced on, even unglyphed).

[Degrador]

@Degrador: I think you got me a little wrong here. I ment I was quite surprised that IS doesn't look that awfull when compared this way

Yeah I realised that, was just adding more comments to the convo

Also, I was one of those who saw that Eclipse always was a loss of DPS no matter what, but the last buff Blizzard made to it actually resulted in it being a rough 100-200 DPS gain (at current raid levels and properly used). I still do not like the mechanic at all, but I do consider using it if it makes me help doing my job. It keeps being a burden though. Should have been charges from the start :-\

I think that the DPS gain from Eclipse is only noticable in simulators though. I think that in the game latencies and dealing with NG procs for Wrath just make it too difficult to get the full benefit from it. A standard IS / MF / SF spam rotation is so much simpler and far harder to get wrong / miss casts. But then, maybe you're skills are better than mine (or just that the latency from Aus sucks balls)

I am hesitant to sacrifice this utility for having to care more about my rotation and an overall medicore boost that still does not really scale with two of my stats (haste+crit). I'd rather use the Innervate glyph instead.

Yeah, fair enough - it really does have to come down to how you and your guild interact with eachother and whatever is going to work best. All suggestions should be taken critically by everyone I reckon - do what's best for you even if it isn't what others consider best.