Warning: This guide is now outdated! Check out the new moonkin guide at the top of the page!!
It has been a long time since I decided that I wanted to write a moonkin guide, but I finally sat down and just bashed the hell out of my keyboard. I think this covers most of what you need to know to get going. Chances are, you don’t need it, but it would seem weird not to share this on my blog after all this work.
I will also add this guide to the menu at the top, split up in niffy little bullets. Please feel free to share this if you deem it worthy. I cannot stress how much my fingers hurt!
Disclaimer – What is a moonkin?
“If I wanted to be a caster, I could just have rolled a mage!”. There are many reasons why we spec into moonkins. Some are resto druids looking for a damage spec they can easely transition to. Some are feral druids who want to explore different types of gameplay without having to level a whole new character. Others relish in the sheer awesomeness of being a giant chicken who can command the entire universe to shift around, with a mere thought.
Why would you roll a moonkin? Moonkins have a variety of very different spells and abilities in their arsenal, and cover a great deal of raid buffs. With two dots, two main nukes and some potentially devistating cooldowns, moonkins can adapt to many situations. A single moonkin in the raid brings a number of raid buffs that you would need to cover on several other classes: 3% spell haste, 3% hit, 5% crit, 13% more spell damage, minor armor reduction, rebirth and more. To cover all of these buffs, you would need 5 other different classes.
We are hybrids. But while we are not dominating the damage meters, we are in a very comfortable position, with great potential to secure our spot in a raid. A well played moonkin would and should do just as much DPS as the core of your raid group, while offering your raid the support needed to succeed.
Stats n’ caps
To best equip your moonkin for whats ahead, you must have a basic knowledge of how each stat affects it. Here is a rundown of the stats and their caps:
Hit: The most important stat for any moonkin is hit. Each ~26,32 hit rating gives you 1% chance to hit. It is possible to get 100% chance to hit, ensuring that you never miss with a spell. This is the most important stat you can get, and should be your first priority. For alliance, you need 9% hit* (237 hit rating) to be capped, and for horde you will need 10% hit (263 hit rating). This is assuming you have both Balance of Power and Improved Faerie Fire.
*Alliance players require 9% hit rating only if they have a draenei in their party. Be mindful that this racial has a limited range, and you may find yourself out of range in encounters with a lot of room to move. Because of that, it doesn’t hurt to hover around 9-10% hit, or even just aim for 10%.
Spell power: Spell power is the greatest stat after hit rating, unless you are not soft haste capped, but it is difficult to really “stack” spell power. It sort of just comes along as you upgrade your gear, and you can only affect this by gemming and enchanting. Point for point, it adds more damage than crit, haste and spirit.
Haste rating: Haste rating is a very nice stat, often worth more than crit. Assuming that you have full raid buffs, your soft haste cap is 401 haste rating. At this point, your wraths will have a 1 second cast with Nature’s Grace up. Haste is still beneficial after 401, as it is a great damage increase to your starfire, and your Nature’s Grace does not have a 100% uptime. Everytime you move, your Nature’s Grace might probably fall off, and even while standing still casting, you might inevitably feel some non-crit streaks. You should aim on getting your haste to 401 after you have reached your soft hit cap. More on haste a little bit below.
Crit: Crit serves three purposes: More damage through bigger spell hits, to proc eclipse, and to regen mana. The mana regen from Moonkin Form is usually over 70% of your total mana regen, and once you get a comfortable amount of crit, you will never run out of mana. Crit as damage works towards – well, giving us more damage, and it aids several of our tier bonuses, most noticably our 4-piece tier 10 bonus. Crit is your direct route to faster eclipse procs, and eclipse is our main damage increase.
Once you are hard hit capped and soft haste capped, crit becomes more valuable than haste, until you reach your soft crit cap. After this point, haste and crit are worth more or less the same, with a slight favor to haste. To calculate your soft crit cap, use the following formula: 1575.5 – Int/3
Int is the value of your intellect as you view it in the armory, assuming you do not have Focus Magic, but does have all talents and raid buffs. Another way to determine if you are crit capped, is to look at your character sheet in midfight, with everything rolling. If your character sheet reads 42% chance to crit, and you have all buffs and debuffs as well as the correct talents, you will be soft crit capped, meaning every starfire during lunar eclipse will be a crit.
Spirit: Spirit is not a stat we would want to go for, but it is a perfectly fine substitute if we happen to get some. Most items have upwards of 80-100 spirit, and 30% of this gets converted into spell power.
Crit versus haste: It is important that you realize what happens with your crit and haste once they reach their soft caps. Additional haste will largely only benefit starfire, and additional crit will largely only benefit wrath. But haste does still benefit wrath after the soft haste cap, as your Nature’s Grace does not have a 100% uptime. At the same time, haste helps you proc eclipse faster. Likewise, crit does benefit your starfire outside of lunar eclipse, and also helps you proc eclipse faster. For the most part, the rule of thumb is that haste is equal to crit after both soft caps, but there is a slight favor towards haste. You would want to increase both stats as you go along.
TL;DR: Your stat focus should follow the following priority:
- Hit cap, 237 for alliance, 263 for horde.
- Soft haste cap (401 haste rating)
- Soft crit cap (42% in-fight crit rating on your character sheet)
- After soft caps, Haste = Crit, but a slight favor to haste
- Spirit
- Intellect, stamina.
In other words: Hit rating (to cap) >> Haste rating (below GCD cap) = Spellpower > Crit rating (below Lunar cap) > Haste rating (above GCD cap) >= Crit rating (above Lunar cap) >> Intellect > Spirit.
Gems
Gemming is fairly straight forward for moonkins. Gems are usually dictated by your current stats and the color of the gem socket.
Meta: Always use the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond.
Blue: You will want to only use two blue gems to activate your meta. You should be using SP/spirit gems, and preferably in blue slots only.
Red: Red slots should always, always, always be pure spell power gems.
Yellow slots: Yellows change a bit depending on your caps. If you are not hit capped, a SP/hit, or even a pure hit gem, will be the best to equip. If you are not haste capped, then haste is what you should focus on. After your soft haste cap, which is very easy to reach these days, you should gem yellow slots with SP/crit, if the socket bonus gives you +5 spell power or more. Once you have covered your soft crit cap, because of the slight favor to haste, SP/haste gems becomes the better choice in yellow slots.
Talents
The very basic moonkin spec is as follows: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?druid#P9NEYfIHoaPPg,FU8OH,11723. This spec will give you the most damage, and leaves two talent points to use where you feel they might give you the most benefit. In this section, we will cover some of the talents – and ignore the obvious ones like Starlight Wrath – hopefully giving you the knowledge to make an educated decision when choosing talents.
Genesis: While Genesis might seem like a good talent to get, it is in fact a very small DPS increase. At late to endgame raiding, our DOTs will be around 10% of our total damage. Increasing this damage by 5% to 10,5 (not 15%) is a very small increase; 0,1% more damage per talent point. Genesis should therefore only be seen as a filler point, and should not be maxed out in a serious PvE build.
Moonglow, Dreamstate, and Intensity (restoration): Mana talents are, for the most part, a thing of the past. As your gear becomes better, you find yourself lying awake at night less, as you get more nonchelant about your mana regen. It is simply not a concern anymore. But if you find, as you are gearing up your moonkin, that you are struggling to keep your mana up with innervates, you can put points into mana regeneration talents.
Nature’s Reach: This is an important talent, as it provides mobility and survivability. Moonkins have no threat reduction, other than this very talent, so a 30% reduction for two talent points is welcomed. But also the range component will aid you a lot, as it allows you to be further away from your target, and offers you more mobility.
Imp. Insect Swarm: Do not disregard this talent too fast. This talent does two things: It makes our DOTs viable, and it lowers your soft crit cap. Without this, your soft crit cap would be 3% higher, and IS and the damage bonus it gives to wrath, would not be enough to warrant casting them. But you have to cast your DOTs anyways, in order to stack up your trinket, so best make the most use out of the talent. In any case, there is hardly anything else you can put points into. Imp. IS gives you roughly a 3% damage increase, 1% per point.
Balance of Power: An important talent for all raiding moonkins, making it easier to become hit capped. Missing a spell is much more devistating to our DPS than having 20 less spell power, as it not only reduces damage done, but might cripple your rotation. Should you find yourself with excess hit, you can remove a point from Balance of Power for every 53 hit rating you have over the cap, but it aids you better to reduce this hit to a more comfortable level, and increase other stats. Balance of Power is a very powerful talent, and you should aim to get the most out of it.
Improved Moonkin form: No matter how much you like or dislike it, you are going to get some spirit. Converting this spirit into spell power, to get the most out of it, is very desirable, and adding the 3% haste to your raid is a great buff.
Imp. Faerie Fire: An all too classic argument for not taking Imp. Faerie Fire is that “I always raid with a shadow priest anyways, so we have the hit buff”. This is a mistake. Our faerie fire lasts a full five minutes, and is up all the time. Furthermore, this talent gives you 3% crit, even if it is not your own faerie fire on the target. If you have both a shadow priest in your group, and another druid casting faerie fire, you don’t have to cast your own faerie fire to benefit from the bonus.
Owlkin Frenzy: At first glance, Owlkin Frenzy seem like an awesome talent. Unfortunately, its procs are very sporatic, and much lower than one would expect. On average, you can expect around a 0,5% DPS increase per point, making Owlkin Frenzy nothing more than a filler. There are other things you might want to use this on.
Typhoon: Typhoon is, largely, a PvP talent, but it does have some uses in endgame raiding. You wont use it for most fights, but there are some fighs where it absolutely shines. If you feel that you have a use for it, and have the talent point to spare, grab it just in case.
Gale Winds: Gale Winds is a bit of a wild card. It does increase the damage of your typhoon, but typhoon doesn’t do all that much damage to begin with. And while it is a very strong buff to hurricane, we only really use hurricane on trash. There are some fights where hurricane is very strong – such as heroic Anub’Arak – but for the most part, Gale Winds will just be another filler.
Omen of Clarity: In early raiding, OOC is a great mana restoring talent – in the sense that you don’t spend the mana when it procs. As you get your hands on some tier 10, your OOC becomes a central part of your DPS as it is required to proc your 2-piece tier 10 bonus.
Glyphs
We have a number of glyphs to choose from. To give you the TL;DR version ahead of time, you will want to use Glyph of Starfire, Moonfire and Starfall.
Glyph of Moonfire: This glyphs turns your moonfire into more of a DOT ability. While it decreases the intial hit of moonfire, the damage increase to the DOT component makes the spell stronger overall.
Glyph of Starfire: GoStarfire increases the length of your moonfire by up to 9 seconds, or three ticks. Coupled with GoMoonfire, this glyph is quite powerful.
Glyph of Starfall: Starfall is, by far, the strongest spell spell in our arsenal. Reducing the cooldown to 60 seconds rather than 90 seconds is a massive damage increase.
Glyph of Insect Swarm: With GoIS, your IS becomes very powerful. Unfortunately, this glyph does not really hold its water after 3.3.3, and is not desirable to use. Glyph of Insect Swarm also removes the 3% hit debuff on enemies with IS.
Glyph of Focus: While it seems like a good idea to increase your strongest spell by 10%, it does cut the range of your starfall down quite a lot, meaning you have to move closer to your target to benefit from starfall. It is a bigger damage increase, but only slightly, and it is generally accepted that the less mobility is more of a hinderence than a help.
Glyph of Hurricane: Generally not a glyph you would want. Hurricane is usually only used on trash mobs, and it costs a lot of mana. If mobs need to be slowed, other raid members can do this much more efficiently.
Glyph of Innervate: Since you should never really have any man problems, GoInnervate should not be nessecary.
Glyph of Monsoon: Typhoon is such a small part of our raiding abilities, and using a major glyph on this is a great waste of potential damage.
Glyph of Wrath: Pushback is never fun, but GoWrath is generally considered a PvP glyph, if any, and as such it is not desirable to use this glyph.
Enchants
Enchants are usually pretty straight forward. Here is what you should generally go for:
Head: 30 spellpower/20 crit – obtained from Kirin Tor at revered reputation
Shoulders: 24 spellpower/15 crit obtained from Sons of Hodir at exalted reputation
Back: 23 haste
Chest: 10 stats
Wrists: 30 spellpower
Gloves: 28 spellpower
Leggings – 50 spellpower/20 spirit
Boots: Tuskaar’s Vitality (for the speed increase)
Weapon: 63 spell power for 1-handed weapons, 82 spell power for 2-handed weapons.
But what about…?
An alternative to Tuskars Vitality is to get 12 crit/12 hit on boots. However, it is generally accepted that the 8% run speed increase from Tuskaar’s Vitality is a bigger increase in damage, as it allows you to move from A to B faster, giving you more time to stand still and nuke.
Effects such as Black Magic, which adds a haste proc, is not very desirable for a moonkin, as it is hard to control. If it procs during solar eclipse, it will largely be wasted, whereas a pure spell power enchant will increase the damage on all of your spells.
Consumables
Flask of the Frost Wyrm is by far the best choice over elixirs. For food, grab a fish feast or a bite of Firecracker Salmon.
To boost your damage in an encounter, use Potion of Speed. Keep it ready for a lunar eclipse when you know that you can stand still for the full 15 seconds, and use it as soon as you are showered in blue moonlight.
Rotation
I am going to break our rotation down into three sectinos: General, DOTs and cooldowns.
General: Strap yourself in, this is very difficult to get your head around: Wrath until lunar eclipse. Starfire until solar eclipse. Repeat.
DOTs: Your DOTs does not do enough damage on their own to warrant having them up all the time. There are a few exceptions to this though: If you are using 2-piece tier 9, you would always want to have your moonfire up, and if your raid needs the 3% hit debuff on the boss, you could focus on keeping (unglyphed) Insect Swarm up all the time. It is a slight loss in damage, but it adds survivability to the tank.
While DOTs aren’t worth keeping up all the time, they are worth casting together with the direct damage spell they are tied to. Starfire and moonfire goes hand in hand, as does wrath and insect swarm. Insect Swarm is a weak spell, but with the extra damage it adds to wrath, it is worth having up during solar eclipse. Likewise, moonfire on its own is not worth having up constantly, but if it is extended by starfire, it becomes strong enough to be worth the cast.
To best get around this, cast your Insect Swarm as you are proccing solar eclipse, which will ensure that Insect Swarm is usually up for most of your solar eclipse. At the same time, cast Moonfire as you are trying to proc Lunar Eclipse, and as long as you get those extra 9 seconds on it, it has been worth the cast.
Cooldowns: Cooldowns are great for burst, and your benefit from them is increased depending on when you use them. We only have three spells with a noticable cooldowns, so there are just a few pointers to remember.
- Starfall is the most powerful spell in our arsenal. Against single targets, you can get 10 stars off at your target. If you know that more targets will spawn soon, you can hold it off as long as you are not in danger of pulling aggro. Don’t hold back too much though, as you would want to cast starfall as much throughout a fight as you can.
- Treants is a flat 25.000-30.000 damage in one global cooldown, if they can stay alive for the duration. Usually you can cast these as you run in, and then 3 minutes later when they are off cooldown. If you know that a bloodlust is coming, try to spawn them just before the bloodlust to give them the haste benefit as well.
- Typhoon is generally not something we use. I just mention it here because people would point it out if I didn’t.
TL;DR: Wrath until lunar eclipse. Starfire until solar eclipse. Cast moonfire before lunar eclipse, and IS before solar eclipse. Use cooldowns when they are ready.
Eclipse
Eclipse is the central point of our damage. The better use we have of eclipse, the more damage we do. High movement fights or dry periods without eclipse will hurt your DPS. As your haste and crit increases, so does the uptime of eclipse, and you will usually find that eclipse procs rather quickly after the previous one ended. The best way to keep your rotation smooth and get the most out of your eclipse is by applying a bit of clairvoyance – and a bit of luck.
The most common way to handle going from one eclipse to the next is by landing one spell outside of eclipse, and immediately follow up with the next dot you are going to use. The one second you spend on casting the dot gives you time to see if eclipse procced. For example, if you are casting starfire during a lunar eclipse, make sure one starfire lands after eclipse has ended, cast an Insect Swarm and see if solar eclipse procced. If it did, you can start casting wrath immediately, and if it didn’t, well, too bad. If you did not do this, you would continue to cast starfire, notice solar eclipse proccing, follow up with an insect swarm and then begin casting wrath. You can save a few more seconds on eclipse by seeing if eclipse might proc on the first cast after the previous eclipse.
Likewise, as you are coming out of solar eclipse, cast one or two more wraths and follow up with a moonfire. Because of the travel time on wrath, it doesn’t hurt to do more than one, and then use the moonfire to see if eclipse procced.
Should eclipse proc in the middle of a cast, don’t stop casting. Just follow through and alter your rotation accordingly. You don’t want to stop a spell cast halfway through.
Tips and tricks
Practice, practice, practice. Target Dummies are generally not that great for comparing damage, but spending some time there to get really comfortable with your rotation is golden. Focus on being able to cast your rotation perfectly. Then try to distract yourself by moving around, looking at something off screen or drop hot tea down into your lap.
The aim is to teach your rotation to your muscles. Thats right, this is a full-blown finger workout! Your hands needs to be able to click starfire without you really thinking of where the button is, and your brain must be used to adapt itself as you go through your eclipses.
The purpose of this is to prepare you for high paced raid encounters. Once you are so adapt to your rotation that you can follow it with little thought, it frees up your eyes to look away from your action bars. Instead, you can be staring at the damage meter, your character sheet or – if you are so inclined – look out for any hazardous events happening in the fight. Tunnel vision is not very good for your health, and if you are able to do the damage you have to do, while looking out for Malable Goo’s, you will increase your survival rate, and thus your contribution to the raid.
Know the fight and plan ahead. If you know that you must move soon, be ready for it. If spores are coming up on Festergut within a few seconds, don’t cast your starfall now – do it when you are on the run. If you have three seconds left on eclipse when the spores are spawned, stand still and nuke until you judge that you have to move to reach the spore. If you move with eclipse up, have it run out as you move, and stand still for five seconds waiting for the spore to pop, you will lose damage.
Above all, try to refresh your DOTs as you run, even if you don’t need that DOT for what is next in your rotation. Keep special focus on moonfire, and cast a moonfire – even if a new one was just up – just as you are about to stop running. Moonfire has a high chance to crit, which procs Nature’s Grace, giving you the 20% cast speed as soon as you stand still and cast again.
Useful addons
There are plenty of addons to choose from, and most is merely a question of preference. You don’t need all of these, but here is a list of common addons you could and should consider using:
Proc tracking:
- Squawk and Awe: Useful for tracking eclipse, eclipse cooldowns, DOTs, trinkets and the like.
- ClassTimer and ClassTimer Eclipse: Offers the same as Squawk and Awe, in a different layout.
- Power Aura’s: My personal favorite, Power Aura’s allows you to add visual notifications to practically everything. Eclipse procs, DOTs with timers, debuffs on a specific fight and so on. It does take a bit of time to set up, but it is an awesome addon that allows for much customization. Big visual effects when eclipse procs allow you to notice an eclipse out of the corner of your eye, and helps you get an overview of your buffs.
General raid addons:
- Omen Threat Meter: Nearly invaluable in a raid setting, allows you to avoid pulling aggro.
- Deadly Boss Mods: Adds alerts and countdown bars to litteraly every encounter in the game, from 5 mans to raid bosses. This is such an old, stable addon, and is so useful in any raid setting. DBM has been around the block for a long, long time.
- Recount or Skada: Damage meters. Recount is the most popular, but I prefer Skada as it requires a lot less system memory. It doesn’t have fancy graphs, but it does include a lot of interesting features, such as segment saving and looking up raid members damage to a specific target.
- AVR and AVR Encounters: AVR is a fairly new addon. While I don’t like relying too much on addons (and admittedly, there are bugs with AVR), it does help you on a number of fights. AVR adds visual markers around the map from which area a Malable Goo will hit to how far away you have to be from an Ice Block on Sindragosa to not be trapped.
Miscellaneous:
- Unit frames such as Grid, VuhDo and the like, gives a great overview of your raid allows for quick decurses, innervates, rebirths and so on.
- Gearscore: lol
- Quartz: A well used cast bar for tracking casts, cast times, DOTs and HOTs on various targets and so on.
- ForteXorcist: A fun little addon that adds a bar showing you the time before your cooldowns are ready to use. This addon is very customizable and gives you a good overview of cooldowns, debuffs and so forth.
Resources
Moonkin guide on Elitist Jerks
WrathCalcs.xls version 100402.
Nice guide, very simple yet you cover all the bases, i guess it doesn’t hurt to say, yet again, know the fights, when you need to move, where you need to move, and obviously, the best route to get where you need to be, learning how to move will greatly increase your DPS
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Now i have where to send my fellow Moonkins when they ask questions
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Regarding gems, a lot of times it makes sense to add a third blue gem when it’s possible that future gear changes from drops could cause you to de-equip a piece that currently has a blue gem socketed.
Just a way to save a bit of gold by avoiding constantly regemming. IMO gemming rules should not be followed 100% strictly in cases where minor upgrades would cause a chain reaction in your gemming situation requiring 3+ new gems. I don’t mind a 12sp10spi gem instead of 23sp if it means my I don’t need to regem when I replace my necklace once Putricide gets around to dropping his much better necklace. This has really been an issue for me every content patch, as the first few upgrades you get often determine how the rest of your gear choices pan out (e.g. what tier pieces to buy first, what cratfables you want, etc). I’ve been bitten before by having to regem everything to meet the meta requirement and it’s just much easier to always gem blue when it makes sense– I’ll do it for +5 spell power even though its a slight downgrade in dps, but I would NOT do it for a +spirit socket bonus. Then, once all your gear is of the ilvl of the current tier (i.e. you’re not getting upgrades often anymore), you can choose which blues to replace with +23sp.
Also, not moonkin specific, but a lot of people don’t realize that when you’re gearing up, it’s perfectly reasonable to use rare or even uncommon quality gems instead of epic quality gems. A rule of thumb for me is that I will only stick an epic gem in an item that is ilvl 251 or better if I am currently working on icc10 (which drops 251).
I think epic gems are fairly easy to get a hold of, and in a *serious* raiding envrioment, epic gems shouldn’t be used. I must admit, I have never run into gemming issues as you describe here. I have more blue slots than I need, but generally only go for slots that I know that will last me for a while.
And even if you swap out one item, two dreadstones are 20 emblems or 20.000 honor – or 200g for that matter. There is probably still plenty of blue slots around to use, and then its just a matter of overwriting these. I can’t see why you would need to regem more than 2 slots (and the sockets in your new items).
Getting a bit off-topic here, but if your rule of thumb is to socket just 251+ with Epic gems, are you serious?, getting Epic gems is so easy, you should enchant and gem properly ANYTHING 232 or over, gold is pretty easy to come by, and gems and enchant are dirty cheap this days, hell, i even take care of my fourth-spec gear (feral cat) every now and then.
Well, I can understand if some people don’t have much time to gather the gold or emblems needed. I can totally symphasise with that. But at the same time, it seems like double the work to first get uncommon gems and then epic gems. Then again, I don’t usually roll on items that I know I’m going to replace soon.
I also have the benefit of being in a guild that offers 125g in repairs every day (even from jumping off Dalaran 20 times!), brings fish feasts and free speed potions and enchants, so I suppose I’m not really spending money on anything except for gems and flasks. And since I’m dominating the AH gem market (well, not really, just 6-7 gem cuts), I rarely have a shortage of gems – or gold.
Oh, thats really nice from your guild i must say, but for making some gold you dont require much time really, unless you’re in all the wrong professions, you can make 100-200g a day by using your Cooldown and posting it on the AH, a couple of minutes at most.
With 200g you need to cover expenses as well. I think I’m making 5-10.000g each week on jewelcrafting and 7 epic gem cuts, although it depends on the current price on titanium ore.
But yeah, the guild covers nearly all expenses, but with all the stuff we can sell, it really should go to the guild members. All money made for the guild (on, say, epic patterns) was because of the work people put in. And there is no point in having 200.000g sitting in the gbank for nothing
I suppose my only real expense is 80g for 4 flasks, 10g for reagents and gems when I get a new item. And with the amounts of gold dropping from bosses nearly covet that as well ^^
Let me explain myself.. I raid 7 hours a week. I’m on probably 45-90 minutes per week outside of raids. I use that time to make sure I have reagents/flasks, and do a daily/weekly/voa run.
I don’t have the ability to make constant cash, and when new content hits and I start to replace gear quickly I tend to be very frugal with my gold.
I still have one ilvl 232 piece of gear that I haven’t been able to upgrade yet, and I have put an epic gem in it, but only because I’ve used it for a long time.
When I do my mining circuit in between dailies I generally gather enough ore to prospect to be able to easily cut the rare/uncommon gems I don’t need.
Even if I was playing more and trying to increase my gold, I still wouldn’t be spending gold needlessly on gems.
Certainly the dps benefit you get from gemming 23sp instead of a 12sp10spi with a 5sp socket bonus is very minor. Like, even if you gemmed purified dreadstone over runed cardinal 3 times, it’d only amount to 9 spell power.
That’s not going to be more than .01% of my dps. So while there is certainly a mathematically provable “best gem,” it’s important to know exactly how much extra it costs you to get the “best gem” vs. “good enough” and determine if it actually makes a difference. For me, I’ve only really had 10 man gear available to me since ICC came out, and that means the order I got my drops really made a drastic difference in subsequent gearing decisions. With my play time being what it is, it’s just not worth it, and it’s certainly not going to be anywhere near the top of the list in terms of what might be causing someone to underperform with their moonkin.
I’ve meet Moonkins that way outgear me and leave me in the recount dust during trash pulls, but the role reverses when the boss fight starts and they have no clue how to minimize their movement and maximize their spell uptime.
It’s all about what’s the biggest thing holding your dps back– the difference between the runed cardinal and the purified dreadstone when you get a decent socket bonus is really a pittance. Likewise, the difference in stats of ilvl 232 gear vs 251 is much larger than rare gems vs. epic.
This is an awesome Moonkin guide it covers everything ive learned in the last few months pouring over forums again and again >< but side question? professions at the moment i only have leatherworking and skinning …. but i am wondering if it is worth it to pick up another profession like jewelcrafting or tailoring? for the self buffs like spellthread or the jewelcrafting only gems?
As far as i know, Jewelcrafting and Tailoring are the two bests (i might be lying about Tailor), i personally prefer JWC/Alchemy due to the awesome 2hr flasks
, the difference is still pretty minimal, so i would stick with LW if i was you.
Duskstorm > Ah, but why not use uncommon gems then? Lets look at it in a different light:
You use rare gems. The difference between a Runed Scarlet Ruby and a Runed Cardinal Ruby might be (6 spell power, 12 DPS). Imagine you do this in all sockets, and lets say you have 10. Thats 120 DPS difference. Still not a big deal, right? Imagine then, that 17 DPS in a 25 man raid group does the same. Suddenly, thats a 2040 DPS loss. Over a six minute fight (think Festergut for example), thats 734.400 damage. That could easely be the difference between a 1% wipe and a kill.
Firunne > Yep, many people go for two crafting professions. I had mining/jewelcrafting as I started in WOTLK, and then dropped mining to level up enchanting. The reward is double the spell power from professions. However, be wary of the cost; if you don’t have alts that can farm mats for you, you need to buy stuff from the AH. And when Cataclysm comes, you need to be content with spending some money on getting both professions up. My plan is simple, though: Level up enchanting and sell mats. Use gold to buy mats for jewelcrafting
I prefer enchanting as a side profession, because it doesn’t require any gathering skill to keep going.
@Qieth, I don’t think anyone should step in to a progression raid without epic gems. But if I were gearing a new moonkin today, I wouldn’t start to put epic gems on him until I started seeing drops from Icecrown.
Besides, 1% wipes are more rare than they seem– when it happens, it gets everyone excited. We remember them. I know we got BQL to like <100K health before we finally downed her. But the dps you needed to defeat the boss can almost certainly come from several other sources– if fewer dps takes needless damage, that might help the healers keep the tanks alive for just 15 secs longer. Or, dps could move out of the fire *quicker.* There are many, many aspects of the game to optimize, and gems is certainly an important one, but I can think of several others that are honestly much more important. The truth is, though, in progression, you don't want to miss out on ANY possible advantage (since the fights are tuned around you having them anyways).
I never suggested you shouldn't be going after LK or doing hardmodes with rare or uncommon gems, anyways. I just said it's pointless to use epic gems on cheapie pre-progression epics. I wouldn't let someone in my raid that put rare quality gems in a perfectly good piece of gear that you know they won't need to upgrade for a while. Conversely, if we have 9/12 bosses in ICC on farm, and you don't put epic gems on a piece of gear for which there are several upgrades from those 9 bosses, then I don't care if you don't have epic gems in them.
When is the last time you got a boss to 1%, AND you hit the enrage timer? E.g. the tanks and healers stayed up long enough, but the DPS just wasn't good enough.
Hey Qieth!
Longtime follower of your blog, first time poster.
Great guide, i really like the way you explained haste VS crit. Ive been searching the usual sites, but this is the best explanation i have found.
I was wondering if you could give your view on a rotation during BL/Hero?
Ive heard:
Keep up normal rotation
Spam Starfire, ignore everything else.
Spam starifre+keep up dots (What im doing atm)
What do you think is the best solution?
Kind regards a fellow chicken.
p.s rødgrød med fløde
p.p.s i like your youtube channel, you have a nice attitude.
@Duskstorm, I’ve had plenty of 1% wipes, especially on hardmodes. This was also back with a mere 5% DPS increase, and I know that other guilds are still struggling to get through ICC. The thing is, fights usually get more hectic after 30% (think Rotface or Sindragosa), people stress out more, and you eventually lose some people. Our biggest hurdle was Putricide hard mode, where we had sooo many 1, 2 or 3% wipes, because the damage to the raid and the tanks is very hard to manage. We usually oneshot him now – on heroic (which really boggles my mind) – but from all the progression raiding I’ve done, the 1% haunts me often.
Whatever else might be killing your DPS, if the raid group was using blue gems instead of epic gems, and they wipe at 1%, they could still have avoided that with epic gems. Enrage timers are usually not a problem. If you can kill LK, you have enough gear to reach the hard enrage timers. Its the SOFT enrage timers thats a problem: Adds on Deathwhisper, Marks on Saurfang, Ooze panic on Rotface, that stacking debuff on Putricide (and the plague!), adds on Dreamwalker (although with +15% healing, she’s not really a problem) and Bad Unstable Magic’s on Sindragosa (ei, the longer you take to kill her, the higher chances there are of a bad combination of UMs). This is obviously from a heroic perspective, but when going through normal even, we did hit enrage timers quite a lot – especially on Festergut, BQL or Dreamwalker.
But it depends on what kind of raiding you want to do. As you say, sure, if you are gearing up a new toon, blue gems might suffice. But I’ve usually stuck to just one character for each expansion, so only the best for them
@Spacechicken, Welcome! I looooveeee comments from people
I have yet to decide completely on bloodlust. The thing is, there must be a point where your non-eclipsed starfires during bloodlust are fast enough to be equal to that of eclipsed wraths. I mean, lets say your starfires during bloodlust was 1 second, then they would obviously be better than eclipsed wraths. But they are not.
I’ve been trying to come up with some math for where the treshhold might be, but nothing is 100% yet – I suck at math, and there might be a million factors I forgot. This was just a draft. Please don’t take this as a holy bible, because its not. And if your haste is nowhere near 800+, then I can definately say that you should just stick to your normal rotation. Ill make a blog post about it in detail once I brood a bit more on it.
Spam incoming:
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Using the numbers I find in Wrath Cals, my wrath during eclipse and IS has an average DPET of 11.848. Starfire WITHOUT eclipse has a DPET of 9244. It would help if i could remember my normal starfire cast time (probably around 1,8 seconds for sure), but I don’t, so we will have to make some pretty wide guesses.
During bloodlust, my starfires are 1,37 second. If we just allow ourselves to assume that wrath does 5000 damage and starfire does 10000 damage, that means that solar wrath does 7000 damage. I am about 7% crit over the soft crit cap, but for ease of numbers lets put a 65% chance to crit with wrath or starfire. Lets also just put crits at 2x the damage for now.
If I spam 1000 solar wraths, 65% of them would crit, giving me an average of 11550 damage per wrath.
If I spam 500 non eclipsed starfires for 10.000 damage, 65% of them would crit, giving me an average of 16500 damage per starfire.
Remember, the differences here is because wrath has +40% damage, starfire does not have the crit increase.
Now that we have the average damage from starfire and solar wrath, we can calculate the DPS. At 400 haste, the DPS of either is 11.550 and 8250 respectively. With 1,8 second starfires, their DPS is 9166. At 1,43 second starfires, their DPS is 11538,46, putting them on par with solar wraths.
So from this, to come out even, you need 1,43 second starfires during bloodlust for it to be worth to keep casting starfire during solar eclipse.
My starfires during bloodlust are 1,37 seconds, putting them at 12043 DPS, so a good 500 DPS more than solar wraths.
But but but, I can’t completely confirm this math. This is very theoretical. Wrath might have a difference crit percentage, but there might also be latency that favors starfire over wrath. But from *this* model, and my stupid-math, if your starfires are below 1,4 seconds during bloodlust, it would be worth to cast starfire during solar eclipse.
Mind you, that is 500 DPS in the example I gave above – this was assuming wrath did 5000 damage and starfire did 10.000
It’s just there to illustrate the difference.
@Qieth
I think I absolutely agree with everything you said. I personally have never been in a guild that was so good that you could count on every single other dps’er taking their toon to the max.
Normal modes are achievable for groups with fairly mediocre performance IMO, I can’t wait to get into hard modes. I put epic gems in every slot on my raiding toon, and I use the blue gems sparingly. I’ll be in hard modes soon enough, so I may likely be singing a different tune.
Honestly, I just feel that the best gems are only really useful on the best gear.
That, and, I’ve seen more Moonkins in pugs that have geared, enchanted, and gemmed perfectly that do terrible DPS than I have seen truly gifted players that maximize their rotation and movement to the fullest who could stand to upgrade their gems.
To me, many “mathy” theorycrafters ignore how HUGELY important personal skill level really is. Most Moonkins (myself included) can look back at any boss attempt and squeeze out another 1% dps if they could slow the game down 10x and think about exactly where to be, what to do and when, etc.
Great guide! I keep playing with the idea of rolling a druid – but I haven’t quite decided on the spec I’d play. In fact I might start out as tank simply because it’s so much quicker getting into groups if I want to do some dungeons. But this is awesome information for when/if I eventually want to go Boomkin
Howyd. Relevart has an awesome setup for power auras on his blog. All you have to do is cut and pate it then tweak it to your liking.
http://druidreliquary.blogspot.com/search/label/PowerAuras
Good guide.
thanks,
Interloper of Trollbane
Typing is hard.
/facepalm
I tried them out, but I wasn’t a huge fan of them, but I use ForteXorcist to track my Eclipse CD’s
Personal preference, I suppose.
i tried ForteXorcist and it is waaaay to much setting up when Squawke and Awe is simple and easy to use
I hardly had any setup time in Forte, once I realised how you edit specific pieces of addons:
- Kill all the warlock specific addons.
- Move the addon to desired position.
- Right click on the bar twice, which brings up the bar settings.
- Choose the time periods shown on it. I have set my bar to range from 3 minutes, I don’t need to know that there is still 7 minutes left on my rebirth.
- Whenever you see a buff you don’t want to see on it, right click and hide it. Done!
Sure, its more than SAA, but I like the visuals of Forte.
@Qieth
I think I absolutely agree with everything you said. I personally have never been in a guild that was so good that you could count on every single other dps’er taking their toon to the max.
Normal modes are achievable for groups with fairly mediocre performance IMO, I can’t wait to get into hard modes. I put epic gems in every slot on my raiding toon, and I use the blue gems sparingly. I’ll be in hard modes soon enough, so I may likely be singing a different tune.
Honestly, I just feel that the best gems are only really useful on the best gear.
That, and, I’ve seen more Moonkins in pugs that have geared, enchanted, and gemmed perfectly that do terrible DPS than I have seen truly gifted players that maximize their rotation and movement to the fullest who could stand to upgrade their gems.
To me, many “mathy” theorycrafters ignore how HUGELY important personal skill level really is. Most Moonkins (myself included) can look back at any boss attempt and squeeze out another 1% dps if they could slow the game down 10x and think about exactly where to be, what to do and when, etc.
well would love to see what you see in it but every attempt made at using it lately only gets me “dependency missing” in my addon box
… sorry i know this isnt the place for addon questions/forums lol
I don’t know, mate – it works perfectly fine here
Bruce: For some reason, the automated system marked your comment as spam. Probably because of the link you put in, it looked like a spam post, rather than something.. err, not spam.
It’s true, theorycrafters cant account for skill, but no theory can ever do that. Thats the whole point. In theory, if you mix Chemical A with Chemical B, you get C. But if you mix up the proportions, then you might end up with a different result. The theories are just that, to show an average under the best conditions. If you follow that, and still screw up, well, then you’d still be doing better than if you didn’t follow the theories
@Quieth, it looks like Bruce pasted my earlier response.
My point was that if you’re going to assess why someone’s dps is unreasonably low, it’s probably not the gems. Gems just have the luxury of being something you can look at and EASILY tell how to see an improvement. But it’s almost never the biggest cause of dps loss.
Hey Quieth. I have recently added a large amount to haste to my gear. I have looked for sites with suggestions for crit/haste over the caps, but have foiund nothing. My crit is 1037 and haste is 931, and my dps seems to have dropped by about 1.5k. Is there any major change to rotation that you would suggest?
Jikiri > It’s actually *IN* the guide. Look at the section called Stats n’ caps, especially “Crit versus haste”, “TL;DR” and “In other words”.
Also, look under “Rotation”. When you get upgrades, your damage shouldn’t drop. Sounds like you might be using an incorrect rotation.