My Suggestion about making Boomkin less monotonous

[Deleted]

• First of all: I've never ever played any Druid at any level at all, which means that i could see things from a "new" view of perspective, or just talking plain dumb bullshit.

• Second of all: I'm not a native english speaker. I'm obviously capable enough of that language to order a pizza if i have to, but my grammar and/or general syntax could be a mess, but i think you'll get the point of what i'm talking about in 99% of the case. Please bear with me.

• Third of all: This is probably going to be a huge wall of text of doom (I guess so, dont know exactly, cause im writing now, lol) so i will add a TL;DR Section down below, for those who have little time or those specific users whose brains hurt much, if they have to read to much sentences in a short time. Additionally, my suggestion can be broken down to, technically, 1 sentence, so thats the other reason.

General Background
I'm used to be a ranged dps player since i started mmo-gaming with Lord of the Rings Online. Not that i cannot play melees, because i'm dumb or otherwise handicapped, i just dont like it.
Since i started WoW in mid-tbc, i've played 3 classes the most as my main: Warlock, Hunter and Mage. I wanted to play pure dps classes, because i wanted to do "pure" dps. In every expansion, i mained one of these three without exception, for atleast 3 months (Yeah, you guess right, the 3 months was WoD). So the logical step to me would be to pick one of those again for legion, right? No.

• Warlock: I've played it in tbc and the start of wotlk. I liked it, i played it well. But if i look today at this class, i dont recognize it anymore.
  If at all, the only specc i'm interested in is destruction. But if i understand it correctly, your main purpose as destrolock is to spam chaosbolts and maximising havoc uptime to cleave the shit outta the boss' adds all night long. Thanks, but no thanks.

• Hunter: Played it through cata and MoP. I enjoyed the movement aspect, the talent choices and of course the dmg. Now i just wanna puke.
  The ranged speccs are so plain dumb and mind-numbing, that i seriously fell asleep while leveling through the dungeonbrowser, that my group kicked me, because they thought i were afk, (well, technically, i was) and woke up later, after i got killed by a random mob and with the dungeon leaver debuff at ~12 min.
  The melee hunter .....well .....it's a melee, right? What else should i point out? In my ~9 years of, more or less, frequent wow play, i've never ever heard any raidlead saying the following: "Uhm, well, yeah, i think we could need a few more melee dd."

• Mage: This is the class, besides Hunter in cata, i played the most. I didnt played it because i liked it. I didnt played it because i was forced to. I played it because i was a dumb little kid, that liked crits, big numbers and jerking off to recount screenshots. Later on, i just continued to play it because i didnt know it better and/or was to lazy to switch. In the end, it was nothing more than a bad habit i couldnt get rid of.
  Now I'm old enough that i dont need a dmg meter anymore, that tells me that I'm good at what I'm doing. I just dont give a shit anymore about being Top 3 all night long for the sake of a rockhard boner and a wet dream.
  
  What i noticed the most, over the years Blizzard mutated all mage speccs to completely procc whores. I'm a fan of proccs, which is the subject of this thread (spoiler, lulz) but with the mage its just going to be absurd. Especially with fire, your complete talent/skill setup is completely construed to maximise procc uptime, even your artifact skill, because proccs are your main dmg source, and that is something i cant stand at all. If this is the course of the mage for now and through everything, i dont even twink one.

My Boomkin Experience
You're still reading? I mean, seriously? Are you a masochist? There's a TL;DR Section further down, you know? No? Ok.
If i could travel back in time like, lets say, a half of year, to tell my past Me that i seriously consider to play a hybrid dps for legion, i would've laughed myself right into the face.
My first look took me to the shaman forums, because i enjoy ele shaman gameplay very much, even more than boomkin. But after reading through about ~200 pages of constant unexplained nerfs, posts about ele shaman gets battered since ever, and that even the artifact traits opposing each other, i buried my plans of making one for legion, and swung over to the last 2 ranged speccs that were left over: Shadow and Boomkin. I flipped a coin, and it landed on Boomkin, so i got there first.
After reading through ~200 pages there as well, i noticed that boomkin has some issues also, like almost every class. Espacially in terms of AoE Burst and ramp-up time. But at least most things are working together and there is synergy. So i created my very first dudu and began leveling.

• 1 - 9: God, i hate melee :>

• 10: PEWPEW LAZAHGUNZ

• 11+: After getting all my 6 dmg spells, i quickly noticed that the priority list is pretty straight forward: Maintain both dots, spam fillers, push a spender, repeat. I like it. Its fluid, but not "that" fluid like ele shaman, because one, crucial thing is missing.

The Actual Suggestion
You're still alive? No bleeding eyes? You can still count to 10? Ok. You're almost through.
During leveling, i noticed that i sometimes cast a SW or LS instant. First, i thought i had a lag in that moment, and just didnt saw the cast bar. Later on, i had several situations where i was definitively sure that there was no lag involved. So i searched for the source of those instants. Then i noticed a buff called Owlkin Frenzy. After reading the buffs tooltip, i found the culprit, and 20 mins later, i found out that this is a proc tied to the moonkin form.
I was a little surprised. Because usually, all procs that do let you do something "active", Blizzard makes a graphic around your char for it, so you can see it properly. Owlkin Frenzy has not, whats the reason why i didnt noticed it at all for ages. I very like this passive proc. It adds totally the "fluid" feeling that boomkin is lacking right now. Other classes/speccs are literally drowning in procs, like mages, dk, hunter, even feral has 2, while others didnt even get a single one.

During leveling, you get hit in the face a lot, so you have quite a good amount of instant casts, but in the endgame (Raid/Dungeons) if you get hard-hit by anything, the tanks are obviously doing something wrong, which means you just lose that superb proc in 99% of cases for no logical reasons. They just could disable it at max lvl, it wouldnt matter. So, heres what i'm thinking of:

Rip Owlkin Frenzy away from Moonkin Form and make it a passive of its own.

That way, Blizzard would give Boomkins a more reactive gameplay, instead of stubborn grinding down the prio list at every encounter in any situation. Sure, it wouldnt change anything drastic, but it would be more fluid and fun (from my perspective)

I thought about something like this:
[(What i does right now) + your Moonfire and Sunfire DoT effects have also a 5% chance to make your next damaging ability an instant cast. Lasts 10 Seconds]
On top of that you put an internal 5 sec cd, to prevent this passive from going crazy if you can sunfire cleave like 10+ mobs that will live long enough.

Et voila, you just make Boomkin better, Blizzard. Such a passive is also easy to balance, because its just a single percentage to manage. It would help with our ramp-up time in AoE fights to push out a few instant LS to generate AP. Also our burst on Single Target would benefit from it if 2 - 3 adds are dotted to proc it.

I'm surely no theorycrafter, nor a top raiding player, so i have no clue if this is a good idea or just plain bullshit. Just my thoughts by leveling my new main class.

Thanks for reading all the way down. I'm bored and in the mood to write. A terrible combination.
You're free to post this thread where ever you like.

TL;DR
Boomkin needs a proc like Ferals Omen of Clarity to be more fluid and reactive.

[Deleted]

the new moon mechanic is fun.

[Cyous]

Encounters break the monotony. Leveling from 1-100 is pretty awful, though.

[thedeisel]

Moonkin isn’t alone in having no baseline procs that impact button-pushing in an immediate way. It is alone in not even having a choice to have procs in its rotation.

Specs with a core mechanic that is proc based:

Beast Mastery: Wild Call, chance to reset Kill Command.
MM: Hunter’s Mark (or at least Marked Shot with Sidewinders).
Arcane: Arcane Missiles
Frost: Fingers of Frost
Fire: Heating Up/Pyro
Elemental: Lava Surge
Affliction: Shards through Agony
Destro: Shards through dot ticks, double chance with crit
(Demo does have a chance to generate shards with Demonwrath but that’s not really a core mechanic of the spec)

Specs with no procs baseline but talent choices:
Demo: Can spec into Demonic Calling (shard cost reduction) and Soul Conduit (random shard regeneration)
Shadow: Shadowy Insight (SW:Pain has a chance to reset CD on Mind Blast and make it instant). Can also spec into Auspicious spirits for a shooting stars like mechanic.

The closest Moonkin can get to having a proc is spec’ing into Shooting Stars. Even then, the proc isn’t something immediately reactive like the things listed above.

Of those specs, Demo is the closest, i’d say to Moonkin proclessness and uniformity of play on a pull to pull basis. Though we can’t spec into anything like their two proc responsive abilities.

Not saying it’s good or bad either way but it does seem to be the niche of moonkin among ranged classes that it is the completely and fully predictable spec.

I can’t say I find the claim that encounters break the monotony rather than procs to the point in this discussion because, of course, all specs and classes play the encounters. The question is a comparative one. Moonkin is unique in its predictability. We don’t even have something like extra resource gen on crits or something like that to cause your play to vary from pull to pull. Obviously there’s plenty of merit in a perfectly predictable class. But it does open Moonkin to greater monotony than other classes on a pull to pull basis.

It would be nice if we had a talent choice somewhere in there so that anyone who wants that kind of play could get a little of it (as you can with every other ranged spec). That might give us something reactive to play to. For example, instead of WoE we could have something like the initial artifact passive that gave us random OKF procs. It could be a stackable to 2 kind of buff with a 2rppm mechanic or something like that.

Choices aren't bad things and a little play style mix up is exactly the kind of thing a talent is useful for.

[Tyze]

Haven't played beta, waiting for 110 to change my views on Balance. But I think Moon spells will do nicely to the rotation.