Balance Druids – The Moonkin Guide

[Irmeli]

I'm just putting my armory here and hope some more intelligent moonkin druids could speculate my gear + stats.

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...re+Co&n=Irmeli

Thanks for the help.

[mentalitet]

Hey guys, is the 6% hit from talents included in your 'hit rating' on character sheet? And how much % hit do you need at a boss? 18?

PS: Hai Qieth, i remember u from Doomhammer when you played a hunter and from saints&sinners !!

[qft]

its 7 from talents (sorry for being unclear here. its 4 from BoP and 3 from iFF). hit cap is 17.
no its not shown on character list. just remove your gear. you will see.
try reading first post, it helps

I'm just putting my armory here and hope some more intelligent moonkin druids could speculate my gear + stats.
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...re+Co&n=Irmeli
Thanks for the help.

gemming for hit while you are overcapped? ugly trinket, buy heroic badge one. change idol (triumph badge one)
get tuskar's vitality. your crit is UBER low. get more crit (trinket+idol is a place to start)
no iss, no fon? holycow. 3\3 moonglow\dreamstate\intensity + ooc. is someone mana burning you in pve? lol
+i'd change thorn symbol for motw one. in case you have to rebuff someone after CR.
get jewelcrafting.

[Deleted]

Hey guys, is the 6% hit from talents included in your 'hit rating' on character sheet? And how much % hit do you need at a boss? 18?

PS: Hai Qieth, i remember u from Doomhammer when you played a hunter and from saints&sinners !!

My hunter was a long time ago, in Inevitable. I took over Saints & Sinners though, and made it into <And Friends> - the guild stopped a few months ago :'(

Actually, we get 7% hit from talents - balance of power and imp. FF. But, as QFT was trying to hint at, the balance of power only adds +4% chance to hit.

[Boomkindance]

qft could you please post your armory link. Not trolling, I just want to see what gear is giving you those stats, as im in very high level gear, and come nowhere close to that unbuffed.

[Deleted]

I asked him the same, and i saw his armory. Ill give it my "It's cool" stamp, his stats checks up

In any case, i was looking through recount for the dots question. My moonfire was consistantly 10-11% of my total DPS, and IS was much, much lower (because these days i only really pop IS on the move or if i am trying to proc solar eclipse). So at the moment, my dots are 15% of my damage at best - half of what you claim for yours. Do you refresh dots mid-eclipse? If you put up IS and MF every single time they fall off, even in eclipse, then i can imagine why they have a higher share of yuour damage (and i can also see that it could cripple your DPS a bit).

[qft]

actually, ye. i refresh dots all the time (i will do a research next raid and wont do it mid eclipse). thats why the numbers are that big. on static fight yesterday (we did jaraxx 25 nm, i only had to switch once, and run once) my dots were a lot lower. breakdown:

wrath: 42% of my dmg, (i still cant figure out why wrath is more % of my dmg then starfire), ~46% crit.
starfire: 40% of my dmg, 85% crit (i lold).
moonfire: 9% of my dmg, ~50% crit, 82% uptime.
insect swarm: 7% of my dmg, 79% uptime.

weird thing that my dps is lower (wth?) then on mimiron i posted. 6.3 this time only. holycrap -..-
i heard there's an addon that cancels solar eclispe when lunar eclipse internal cd is finished. is it working\worth it? i'm having some strange feeling i'm doing something wrong, because my gear improved a lot and (as far as a see) my dps didn't. so any help appriciated.

btw, i've regemmed almost everything with pure SP, so i lost like, .5% crit and a bit of haste here and there. lets see if it helps.

[Deleted]

Yeah, those numbers are a lot closer to mine. I only refresh moonfire during eclipse, and only if it runs out in the beginning. I only put up IS if im trying to proc solar eclipse. We had a ton of tries on Beasts 25 heroic last night, and on the static part against Gorlok i was on a steady 6+ DPS, only nuking him. Your dots should not be a bigger part of your damage than that.

[Deleted]

i heard there's an addon that cancels solar eclispe when lunar eclipse internal cd is finished. is it working\worth it?

WiseEclipse, it works and is worth it (~100-200 dps increase).

I didn't test it much yet, heard of it when catching up on the EJ threads beginning of september but was healing most of the time so i hadn't bothered until yesterday. The way it works (i'm a bit fuzzy on where the server client latency plays a role and how much because of the big time gap during which this actually works, but it should at least give you an idea) :
- at the end of lunar, you cast a last SF which will hit within ~2s of the lunar Eclipse's end. Solar would usually be off CD because it's rare to have Solar going instantly into lunar
- the addon cancels the buff/aura
- the SF lands with the server considering that you still have the lunar Eclipse buff (ie garanteed crit or almost)
- the client considers that lunar isn't active anymore when it recieves the SF crit and since lunar isn't active and solar iCD has ended, the crit procs solar

The aura cancelation probably happens at a client_spell_cast_success event. It's being triggered after spell success so the server will still have the aura when computing the spells results, but the client will have lost the aura when the crit message comes back, allowing for the Eclipse to trigger.
The only thing that could make it fail is going from solar to lunar instantly so that the solar icd would still be up at the end of lunar.

What it achieves is 2-fold : you switch instantly from lunar to solar without any downtime between the two (less eclipse downtime, higher dps). And since the switch is garanteed, you can queue up a wrath directly therefore maximizing the number of wrath casts during the solar buff (usually you have a last SF after the one that procs solar).
To achieve that, you simply need the addon and a last SF cast hitting in the last 2s of Lunar.

I did test it yesterday on dummies (only 2 runs of 1 mana bar each, so not very statitically significative especially with some random 4T8 procs and such) and had a difference of 200 dps (which is higher than procs and such would account for i think). The EJ thread mentionned about the same, ie 100-200 dps increase.
Was also able to test it a bit in real situation, but wasn't yet used to it and did fire off some unneeded SF's when being suprised by eclipse switch.
It's certainly going to help you, though it doesn't explain the lack of scaling.

--
Regarding dots refreshing, one of the border effect of this addon is that you don't have "free" time anymore between lunar and solar to refresh them. Refreshing dots as they fall off really seems to be the best strategy now. It is quite obvious for MF, i'm somewhat less sure about IS but from what i read, glyphed IS's DPET is still better than any of the eclipsed nukes.
(in my case i still have 4T8 as i'm waiting for my first trophy, so IS is naturally of higher priority in my rotation).

[qft]

oh god, i'm a bit lost... so how do you guys handle those 2 dots? i've been keeping mf up like mad lately, and refreshing is occasionaly. does this work for you? or?

thx Dje. i'll test it out.

[Deleted]

Well, at the moment i'm mostly healing So i haven't been really able to test things out with the new rotation and stuff. (it's my double spec i use to help the raid when we lack healers, but i've basically been healing 9 raids out of 10 lately)

That being said, i will mostly try to refresh dots asap at the moment, except right at the end of lunar (for WiseEclipse, you want a last SF to hit with <2s left on lunar). Anyway, the difference between dot refreshing during eclipse and at the end already existed before 3.2 and the dps difference between both was quite small ~20-50 dps at the very most, so that it was mostly a question of playstyle rather than a large performance difference.

With the idol and 2T9, the gains on MF uptime are probably big enough that max uptime now has the upper hand by a large enough margin.
IS is still in the same questionnable state (ie not much of a difference whatever you chose anyway, with a small advantage to refresh i think). (though i'd try to get a validation by a simulation before taking this at face value)

[qft]

ok, i grabbed "wise eclipse" and "squawk and awe" yesterday.

6.5k dps, beasts 25 hm (i believe very competitive dps)
wrath - 47% of dmg done, ~50% crit, 11.5k avg crit. almost 200 casts.
starfire - 30% of dmg done, ~95% crit (wise eclipse totally owns), 15k avg crit. 70 casts only.
moonfire - 12% of dmg done, ~50% crit, uptime - 85%
insect swarm - 9% of dmg done, uptime - 65%

still a bit odd that wrath >> starfire (a lot this time, thx to wise eclipse).

pps. as far as i can see, owlkin frenzy is not worth it. althou sometimes it procs of weird things uptime is << 10%. seems like genesis to me (point wise). gonna be respeccing out of it.

[Deleted]

Well, with WE you basically only ever cast SF during lunar (as shown by your crit rate) and with 2 wraths while entering lunar eating part of it, whereas you cast wrath during both solar and pre-lunar, while not having any SF's eating solar time. Though i do agree that i would have thought the difference a bit lower.

[Deleted]

I downloaded Wise Eclipse to check it out, even though im not a huge fan of addons like this. Then again, i could do the same with a simple /cancelaura macro, but the addon does it for me.

If i recall correctly, last time i tried out my rotation on the target dummies (before the addon), i did about 4600-4700 DPS, using treants, dots and whatnot. This is, ofcourse, an averege damage taken from several tries. I dont remember if my gear was different back then, though, but i don't think it was vastly different.

So, with the addon, i managed to pull 5300+ DPS just using moonfire, starfire and wrath. I didn't pop treants, and i never used IS. My rotation was simple: Moonfire, wrath spam. If moonfire runs out, refresh it. If i proc Lunar eclipse and i dont have time to cast a SF fast enough to extend my moonfire, i refresh it in the beginning. Spamming starfall until the last SF that will hit within eclipse, and then i queue up a wrath right off the bat. Most of the time the SF critted, and i was straight into solar eclipse with a wrath on its way. I keep spamming wrath, but whenever moonfire falls off, i refresh it, even during the wrath eclipse. This way, my 2pt9 moonfire keeps running, i spam wrath, and moonfire will probably still be up when i get around to the next lunar eclipse.

In the runs i did, i never used insect swarm, even though it would be 3% more damage on wrath. Its probably still worth doing, but i didn't in this situation. I will try, whenever i get the chance, to do some more runs on a target dummy including IS.

In any case, assuming my memory serves me correct, the addon increased my DPS by 600-800 DPS - on a dummy. Lets just say that i did get upgrades since last time i was on it - im looking at AT LEAST a 300 DPS increase.

Last night on Beasts 25 HM, i was often in the 6,5k DPS category (my gear is slightly behind QFT's), but i did top 7k DPS at one point - RNG still applies

All in all, the addon helps, to great effect

[FourofaKind]

That addon is fucking amazing, <3 dje, im hoping it will still work post /castrandom death. (Especially since things like Healbot are being rumored to die) any addon that can increase your dps by ~6% is made of win.

Quick question however... just for fun I decided to fuck around with insane amounts of crit and haste to see their effect on damage and I noticed something very strage.

As we all know, 46crit rating = 1% crit chance... however what I had noticed is around 1100 crit rating I hit some sort of "cap"

While at ~1100 critrating, I drank a PoWM giving me anouther 200 crit rating (or what should have been 4.3% crit) however my character sheet only gave me a 2.12% increase ( 40.36 to 42.48)

Has anyone ever have a similar issue occur?

[Deleted]

Diminishing returns

[qft]

"i managed to pull 5300+ DPS just using moonfire, starfire and wrath."
dont think i'm trolling or something, i'm managing almost 6k on doll with that addon. was 5.8 pre addon.

btw, does haste diminish also?

[Deleted]

You are ahead of me in stats, QFT - havent had new loot in ages

I was, in reality, at around 5500 DPS on one try, pretty stable, but subsequent tries diffenciated between 5300-5500, thats why i took the safe number. The percentage in the DPS increase is nothing to scoff at, though. Could simply be that your rotation and playstyle often got you into situations where you were doing what the addon is doing - i have often seen starfire go off, eclipse fall of a fraction of a second later, have it crit and continue with solar eclipse. You'd be casting another starfire just in case, though, but if that crits, there really isn't much of a difference.

Haste doesn't diminish - it doesn't have to. It hits the cap when the spell itself reaches GCD - it doesn't diminish, it just stops doing anything. Then again, there is no feasable way to get enough haste to reduce starfire to 1 sec - and even if you did, you'd be running with a crappy crit rate :P

[qft]

well, reality is... i wont be getting anyloot now.. since we'r only killin 3\5 in 25hm. so i will\can get only boots\bracer\trinket. oh well. waiting for tribute back, if we will ever get it

[FourofaKind]

Interesting to learn that Crit has diminishing returns. My one question is, are the drs cumulative with my buffs (if so which ones/all?) or with crit rating as a whole? (I.E. Crit rating suffers DR on stacking buffs, Base 800 +200 potoin + 200 trinket +5% aura +etc or Crit rating suffers DR on any critrating > 1100, assuming you could somehow get your base crit rating @ 1200+)