Our damage is dependent on two talents. Sure, we spend over 50 points in the tree, but the biggest increase to our damage comes from just two talents: Eclipse and Nature’s grace. The rest of the talents are just static increases – these two is the direct and biggest buff to over 80% of our total damage. When most of our damage is dependant on two talents – talents which, as i mentioned in my previous blog, are facing some massive obstacles – it hurts us when these talents are restricted.
I find it strange that our bread and butter comes from these talents in particular. Most other classes have single point talents at every second tier that plays a major role in a characters rotation, but ours are a bit lacking – especially at the bottom of the talent tree.
Be it Living Bomb, Feral Spirit, Divine Storm, Metamorphosis, Blade Storm or another 51 point talent, they are all very central to the playstyle of the spec. But all we have is long cooldown abilities like Treants and Starfall, which are talents we gain very little for compared to our Eclipse and Nature’s Grace. And don’t even get me started on Typhoon!
While we do have Nature’s Grace, Insect Swarm and Moonkin Form, it sort of lacks the special feeling of having an awesome ability we use that defines our playstyle. Nature’s Grace is just a buff that comes along once in a while, insect swarm is 10% of our damage at best, and moonkin form is just a more or less static buff that we have to bring us in line with other classes.
So why don’t we have some special ability? We have four spells in a standard rotation, and 3 of them are baseline spells. Every 90 or 180 seconds we use an ability that could have been central to our rotation, but that really only is a very small percentage of our total damage. Sure, they do increase our damage, but only slightly, and not nearly as much as the key talents the other classes are enjoying. You are not in serious trouble if you forget to cast your treants or starfall.
It leaves a dark hole in my heart, a longing for something interesting to play with. A spell to include in our rotation. Something that would increase the value of haste again. Something channeled, perhaps, on a cooldown but still something that would be used frequently throughout our rotation. Something that would matter…
I have some ideas for what I would like to see, ofcourse. I have my own wild fantasies and theories on how we could offer moonkins are more diverse playstyle, but I will leave that for another blog.
