If you are a raid leader or class leader of a guild, chances are that you have been given this link by someone who thinks you would benefit to get up to speed when it comes to moonkins. Or maybe you are out searcing for information yourself, to help a fellow guildie to improve his performance. In any case, kudos to you, this is excactly where you need to be.

I am beginning to lose count of how many times I have been contacted by chickens in distress. “My guild sais I’m doing too little damage”, “they say my gear is bad”, “Tya want’s to sacrifice me to the Gods of the Kill”. They ask for help, and many times it is not nessecarely the moonkin that is the problem. The major cause for this is that, with so few moonkins around, its not always easy for other classes to understand how we function. Its easier in guilds where you have three rogues and a handful of mages that can keep each other up to date – most guilds only emply one, maybe two, moonkins, and it is not always certain that these moonkins has the tools they need. Except for guilds that has a caster class master who has actually played moonkins, I get the feeling that very few guilds have any real sort of knowledge about moonkins. I opt to change that!

Why moonkins?

If you have little – or bad – experience with moonkins in your raid, you may argue that you don’t need a moonkin. Well, maybe you don’t. Or maybe you do not know what a moonkin can bring to your raid. A moonkin is first and foremost a support class. We are a freaking buff battery. With just a single moonkin in the raid, you will get:

• +3% hit on spells
• +3% haste
• +5% spell crit
• +13% spell damage
• Minor armor debuff
• And all the other things that a druid can bring!

Here follows another common argument: “Why would I bring a moonkin when I can get these buffs from other classes?”. I’d like to turn that around with “Why would you bring all the other classes when a moonkin can bring them all?”. Fact of the matter is, apart from buffs like Kings and such, most buffs are covered in one way or another by another class. Moonkins have the benefit gathering a lot of support spells for melee and casters alike, and most of the time these buffs and debuffs will be up by default. A moonkin will always ensure that there is a faerie fire on the target, because it increases his hit and crit. He will add the spell damage debuff just by attacking, and the crit and haste comes from just being in moonin form

“So what about damage?”. Short answer is, moonkin damage is fine. The longer answer is a complicated story to get you aquanted with some of the issues a modern moonkin will face. First off, RNG is a bitch, there’s no way around it. Our damage is dependant on a high uptime of eclipse, and with the current eclipse system, there will be times where we are purely out of luck. Even in high end gear, I can experience going a full minute or more without an eclipse proc, and it will hurt my DPS a lot. Eclipse is roughly a 40% damage increase, and the longer we go without, the less DPS we do. For the most time, a new eclipse will go up 3-5 seconds after the last one ended, but there are times when goodwill is all you have to get you going, and it will just not be enough.

Movement is also a big issue. When we move, we lose our 20% personal haste buff, and we also lose the time we should have taken advantage of an eclipse – and it usually takes longer to proc eclipse after you have stopped moving, because you lack the aforementioned haste buff.

All in all, however, moonkins can compete. They will rarely be at the very top of the meters, but then again, neither is 24 other members of the raid. As long as your moonkin is equal to the core of your raid group, everything is fine. Gear, tactics, random events on a fight can all affect your DPS, and it is the same for moonkins.

The applicant

So you got a moonkin application to join your guild, but you have no idea what to look out for. You heard something about caps, but you really have no clue if this moonkin is doing what he’s supposed to. Here is a quick checklist to see if your moonkin has geared correctly. I have added little instance markers so you know which level of raiding this becomes attainable, so you can see if your moonkin is ready – or just about ready – for the kind of raiding you do.

• Pre-Naxx: 263 hit. This is the most important thing for a moonkin.
• Naxx-Ulduar: 401 haste rating. This is the moonkins soft haste cap.
• TOTGC-ICC: 42% crit rating mid combat, the soft crit cap. Unbuffed, this occurs around 32%+ crit, but it differs a bit depending on the intellect/crit rating ratio.

This also translates directly into we prioritize our stats. We aim to be hit capped, ofcourse. Next, we need to reach our soft haste cap, easely obtainable at the end of Naxx, and a must for every single moonkin. Following that, we prioritize crit over haste – if you have a moonkin with 800 haste but 23% crit, something is very wrong, and he needs to be on the lookout for new gear. Once both the soft haste cap and the soft crit cap has been reached, haste and crit is more or less equal, but there is a slight favor to haste.

Check his gems! His gemming should reflect the state of his caps. If he is below the hit cap and the haste cap, he should be using SP/hitorhaste in yellow slots. If he is above the soft haste cap, he should be using SP/crit gems, and when he is above both caps, he should be back at SP/haste gems. Red gem slots should always be pure spell power gems, and he needs two SP/spi gems to activate his meta.

When it comes to talents and glyphs, there is really only one choice: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#0tMbuiIscdIVhouZbxczb:uir. You will notice that there are two talent points left out – there is really nothing much he can do with these, other than fillers, but most people put them into Typhoon “just to have it” and then Owlkin Frenzy or Gale Winds. Genesis and Brambles are not really worth anything, and no moonkin since Ulduar has ever had mana problems.

The weakest link

If your guildie moonkin seems to be falling behind, take a moment to consider if there is anything about a particular fight that might cause him to drop behind other DPS. A common mistake is to just look at all DPS for a full fight, and see where he places on the list. This can be a major mistake if there are elements on the fight that offers a lot of splash damage to other classes. Our starfall will splash as well, but it does not compare to that of other classes. Many damage meters will show damage done to a specific source, say, The Lich King, and root out all the useless splash damage done to the ghouls, and this will give a much clearer picture of where the moonkin is. Consider the amount of movement, and leave room for RNG, and you will be off to a good start.

Second, being 12th on the damage meters is not nessecarely bad. You need to look at how he compares to the rest of the raid. Usually, a raid group will have one or two people well ahead of everybody else – the shadowmourne wielders, the rogues trick’ing each other and so on. Being 12th on the meters is not bad, if the raid members from 5-14 is relatively close to each other. This goes for all classes in an equal setting, I suppose. Consider also the level of gear, and what you have them do during a fight – if you have him removing curses and poisons, you will obviously take him away from doing damage.

All in all, a well played, equal geared moonkin does competative damage, certainly enough to warrent them a spot, heck, you can even bring two if they know what to do. They can compare, and even beat, most other casters; Mages, hunters, priests and shamans, although from personal experience, warlocks are slightly ahead – of all ranged classes, though.
If you want to get really “down and dirty” with the kill log, take a look at the damage distribution. Usually, wrath and starfire will be very close, often taking account for 40% of the moonkins total damage each. This leaves around 10% for starfall, and 5% for each of his DOTs. His DOTs will – should – never have a 100% uptime, as he only uses one at a time in a stand still rotation, and the DOTs is mainly only there to buff his wrath and starfire respectively.

Moonkin loot

Your moonkin want’s loot as well. Usually, there is an acceptable leather piece for every slot, but as moonkins share loot with restoration druids, most of them will have spirit and then either crit or haste. While we do get spell power from spirit, it is a very weak stat for us, and we would much rather want items with both haste and crit on them – most of the time, these items are cloth, so if you can spare it, it wont hurt to throw those cloth boots at your moonkin. The leather version of an equal item level is usually 20% less strong than the cloth version, but moonkins generally know that they wont get first dibs at cloth items. This is a problem that occurs in Wrath of the Lich King, but it will promptly evaporate when Cataclysm comes.

Conclution

You should now have the tools you need to ensure that your moonkin has the tools he needs. If you want to dig in deeper, or if you feel that he should have something to read up on, please feel free to point him towards my moonkin guide, which can be found at the top of my site. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

- QQ

And what about your, Mr. Warlock? You can create fire too? Newsflash, Mage is already doing it! Oh, you have curses? What are you going to do to me, give me a cold? Don’t bother me with your voodoo mumbo jumbo!

And don’t get me started on you, Priest! You can’t even cast a spell without asking for help from your invisible friend or sell your soul! Who do you think you are, anyways? Who am I?

I am a giant chicken. I AM A GIANT CHICKEN!

And yet, with little effort, I can command the very world you walk upon. With a flick of my wrist, I can summon forth an orb of pure, earthen power, or call down a pillar of the brightest starfire! I can command the stars of the sky to decend upon you, or summon the woods around you to turn on you!

And with little effort, in just a matter of seconds, I can realign the entire universe! At my will, I move the very planet we live upon to shadow the moon, or command the moon in front of the sun!

So have fun with with your fire making and your voodoo curses. Go pray to your invisible friend for help, or sell your soul to those in the shadow. Run along, weaklings!

I am a moonkin! BO-OORK!

I am obviously a bit of a Twitter fanatic, and I like it when Blizzard takes time to sit down and talk to their customers about upcoming ideas – especially because they take time to talk directly to us, rather than through a half-cryptic magazine interview somewhere. It feels more casual. Its nice.

Bornakk and Zarhym did an excellent job at answering the many questions, ranging from masteries to archeology, from raids to PvP and was very willing to give out their thoughts on class changes and hints to things we don’t yet know of – and I think that there is a lot that we still haven’t been told.

I would suggest that you all take a look at it, because it tells you a lot about Blizzard’s mindset for Cataclysm. One answer did spike a “Oh hello?” moment, when the following question was asked about druids:

Q. What change are you most excited about?
A. Some of the new Balance talents for druids, like Solar Beam, which works like Freya’s spell where it instantly silences a target and they have to move out of the beam to get rid of the debuff.

“Oh hello” awesome new silence ability, with a graphic to let everybody know that the person standing in the beam is virtually defenceless. Even if this is mostly for PvP, it does look like a nice tool to our arsenal.

Go read the full list of questions and answers on MMO-champion!

- QQ

EDIT – I do not normally care about ranks and races. We are much more like a casual raiding guild with our 3 raid nights per week, so the focus is not on speed, but performance. Despite this, I was just looking at Wow Progress and realized that we still managed to come out with a world rank of 386 after killing Putricide.

And we are probably one of the only guilds to complete GOTIR on 25 man before we do it on 10 man, being the 98th guild in the world to complete the 25-man meta. Awesome.

- QQ

Surely, these seem like rather interesting and creative changes. We can only muse about how they will play out once Cataclysm goes live, so in the meantime, lets take an in depth look at the changes.

Please refer to my previous post for a list of all changes.

Eclipse

This is a very interesting change. Right off the bat, it means that we will not suffer nearly as much from moving as we do currently. This mechanic is very similar to the stacking suggestion I made somewhere: When you cast a nature spell, you gain a stack of lunar eclipse and vice versa.

The easiest way to look at this is to consider Starfire and Wrath a 100% damage spell. If you cast a starfire, the next will do, say, 90% damage, the next 80%, 70% and so on. At some point you decide that you do not want to cast starfire anymore – probably when your moonfire runs out – and you switch to wrath. Your first wrath will be buffed to do, say, 150% more damage. The next will do 145% damage, then 140% and so on. I am going to assume that it takes roughly two wraths to move the meter the same distance as one starfire does.

If you are just spamming these abilities, the net damage will be the same over any length of fight – much like an mage that does nothing but spam Arcane Missiles. Thats fine, because the spells will probably be normalized, where we right now need eclipse to be up to do comparable damage, but now we will do it right off the bat. Where this system can really shine is when you are able to plan ahead. How can we use this to our benefit?

You know that bloodlust is coming in 10 seconds. You spam a lot of wraths, making your starfires really powerful. When bloodlust comes, you can throw some very fast, very big starfires. I am not sure how this will effect the meter – it would obviously deplete the meter faster, but I would think that Blizzard has a way around this. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that our spells cannot go below 100% damage – so once your meter is at the middle, your starfires will still do 100%, but the wrath buff will stack up. This allows you to still take full advantage of bloodlust, with a big burst at the beginning, and then spamming normal damage starfire for the remaining duration. This also means that we end each bloodlust with a very powerful wrath, which we then switch over to afterwards. If Blizzard DOES allow our starfire/wrath to go below 100%, then they will need to find a way to compensate for this.

When you have to move, you can spam instant cast spells to stack up whatever eclipse type you prefer. It will give you a lot of control when you get to know a fight. This change actually makes movement much less of a trouble than before, because we are compensated for the movement by getting more powerful spells when we stand still.

Eclipse Mastery

How Eclipse Mastery will play out is very hard to tell. The simplest way to implement this is to simply make the additional bonus stronger. It might make the eclipse meter longer, so we are able to stack it further to one side if we wish, although that would make us switch spells less. It might stack up the buff faster, but that would probably mean that our current buff depletes faster. I am probably going to have to go with the first suggestion made, and assume that spells can be buffed, say, 50% in either direction, and the more mastery we have, the higher will this scale go. If it takes 10 starfires to buff wrath to 150% damage, then more mastery could make 10 starfires buff wrath to 175% damage.

Nature’s Torrent

I am not sure what to think of this. It will probably be a big hitting spell, although I am not sure if it is instant or not. It will do a different type of damage depending on how your eclipse meter is looking, and it is probably something we will want to use everytime it is off cooldown. If it didn’t do very much damage, it would have to be instant, so we could quickly move the meter, but my money is on a big hitter that we use once we are done casting one type of spell, do a large amount of damage, and then switch to the other nuke.

From this, our rotation would probably look something like this:
Moonfire, Starfire until full solar eclipse, Nature’s Torrent, Insect Swarm, wrath until full lunar eclipse, Nature’s Torrent, Moonfire, repeat.

Wild Mushroom

This is a very currious ability. I am not sure what to make of it. It seems like Blizzard wants to give us more options to do AOE damage. But for some reason, Blizzard thinks that it is fine to do on a single target fight as well, probably when it is buffed by eclipse. I think of it somewhat like warlock’s Seed of Corruption, although it doesn’t require damage to explode.

We can probably only have one mushroom up at the same time. Casting it again will probably simply detonate it ahead of time, which is the only reason I can come up with to why we have the ability to explode it at will. If we simply plant it in a pack of mobs, or near the boss, it probably wont explode before it turns invisible, but if we detonate before it turns invisible, it might blow up right away. But if we can simply detonate it right when we spawn it, the damage would have to be comparable to starfire and wrath, because otherwise we wouldn’t use it on a single target unless we are moving around. It is probably nature damage, and would affect our eclipse meter as well.

I must be honest, this ability confuses me a little bit, but once we get more information on it, and are able to brood over the posibilities more, a way of using this will probably arise. In any case, it sounds like a fun little “proximity mine”, and I am sure that PvP’ers will love to set up traps in BG’s and arenas.

What about DOTs?

Unfortately, it doesn’t appear from the preview that our DOTs will be affected by crit and haste, is other classes are. HOTs are surely affected, but it may be that Blizzard hasn’t decided on it yet. I still think that DOTs will be part of our rotation, and we will probably cast them with a fully charged eclipse meter to get the most out of them. The way they scale with spell power will just have to be corrected a bit.

Stampeding Roar

I sort of feel like I should mention this ability. There is nothing stopping us from switching into bear or cat form to cast this on our raid members, or we could even use it if we have to move a long distance, like if you are far away from the spore meeting point on Festergut, or if Sindragosa pulls you in for a Blistering Cold just before you wanted to reset your stack. As always, I am sure that we will find a way to use this ability, at least in some fights.

Unanswered Questions

There are a lot of “What about”‘s and “What If”‘s hanging in the air, but we must keep in mind that this is probably not every change that is coming with Cataclysm. Preview is preview, one might say, and there are still months before we will actually see Cataclysm. Some of the things I wonder about are:

• Starfall – Will each star hitting the target count as one cast, or will the stars have a set damage depending on the eclipse meter when they were cast? They are obviously arcane, so they would favor a full lunar eclipse meter.
• Treants – Are they nature? Will their damage depend on the state of the eclipse meter?
• Typhoon – Assuming that this is a nature spell, is this just going to be a weak version of Nature’s Torrent that we use when we move about?
• Hurricane – Much like Starfall, will this count as one movement on the eclipse meter, or will each hit change it? That could make AOE look something like Hurricane > Mushroom > Hurricane > Mushroom. Although, Hurricane is nature as well, isn’t it?
• Eclipse – A guildie of mine mentioned that the change to Eclipse sounds a bit like a meter that Goblin Shamans have in Warhammer Online. But in this version, you can supposively stack the meter up to five, and the next cast resets the meter completely. I wouldn’t like this idea very much. I would much rather have it that spells could not go below 100% damage, and that the Eclipse meter works as a scale that moves in one direction or the other.
• Will there be a change to Nature’s Grace or Wrath, to allow Wrath to scale better with haste? Obviously, we will need more haste, because we will get less haste per haste rating, but we seem to get a lot of haste just by spending talents in the balance tree.

Lots of information, lots of answers, lots of things to theorycraft about. It is currently 4:30 AM. I have pneumonia, I am very tired, and my head is buzzing with ideas. Give it some time to settle in, and lets see what the future brings.

What do you think about the changes?

- QQ

As it happens, I believe I have found a rather comfortable place to call my home. The guild is social, most people are outgoing, and there are some very skilled people amung us – or rather, there is not one member that gives me the sort of feeling that they are dragging us behind, and are only coming along because we need the class.

So I wanted to go through with you a classic raid night, aimed mostly on farm bosses and having a lot of fun.

This raid is from this thursday. As you may know, we only raid three nights each week, which means we really only have 12 hours to progress and meet our goals. Around 19.40, sometimes even before, raid invites start going out. You can get sorted while waiting for the raid to start, but most people are ready, inside the instance 10 minutes before the raid is supposed to start. I have been in guilds where invites would go out 15 minutes before the raid is supposed to start, but due to waiting around and general problems, pulls weren’t starting until 15 minutes past raid start. We pull the first mob at 20.00 at the latest, and more often than not, we are on the go from 19.50.

EPGP

At this stage, it would probably be prudent to explain how items are handled in our guild. We use a system called EPGP, not unlike DKP, but different in a way that offers fairness to a point that I haven’t seen in any other loot distribution system. To boil it down, EPGP consists of three thigns:

EP – Effort points: Raiding, meeting goals, being on time and more will accumilate EP. This basicly shows how much effort you have put into the guild, and through this, you are rewarded. People on backup recieve EP as well, although they are required to check in once an hour, and obviously be available to come to a raid if the need arises.

GP – Gear points: As you recieve gear, you get gear points depending on the value of an item. A 2 hander costs more than a 1 hander, and tier tokens are worth more than an offhand. Items have a set value, and this is all added automaticly as loot is being distributed.

PR – Priority: Take your EP and devide it with your GP and you have your PR. This basicly tells you what priority you have on any given item. If I have 22.000 EP, and 2.000 GP, my PR would be 11. This number is calculated for all members of the guild automaticly. When an item comes along that you want to roll on, you go ahead and press “main spec” in EPGP’s fancy loot box, and the item goes to the person with most PR. Through the item, he gains more GP, which in turn lowers his PR.

The great thing about this system is that it balances itself. It is very difficult to save your PR, as these numbers decay by 10% every week. Your PR stays the same, but you can’t gain an endless amount of EP to ensure that you get the next 10 items that drop. It is also a fair distribution as even new people to the guild will start recieving items within a week or two, regardles of rank. I know, it might be a bit hard to follow, but the system is rather nice.

The pull

At 19.50, we get “on time EP” – those who bothered to be there at this time get a little extra EP, and usually, we start pulling. I realise that this is a clever trick on the guild managements part, so we get that extra 10 minutes into the raid time, but none of us are really bothered by it. If you can’t join the trash clearing, all you lose is the extra EP, and most of us seem content with the system.

We move along, clear the trash, laugh at the people who die to overaggro. As a moonkin, I giggle on every AOE pack where starfall is up, and I cry when i die to overaggro. Ahem. We reach Marrowgar (heroic) and he goes down with few casualties. On Lady Deathwhisper, one of our main tanks has to go AFK, which removes our chances of doing her heroic, so we quickly dispatch of her normal mode. We move on to Gunship (heroic), which goes down rather uneventful – isn’t it strange that the easiest encounter in the game was nerfed?

As we stand before Saurfang (heroic), a member runs into the instance. The following conversation occurs:

- Uhm guys? If you send Hellscream away, is there any way to get the buff back?
- No, I don’t think there is. Why?
- I thought he was the repair guy and I *muffled sound*.

Puff, the 10% buff is gone. Now, we have obviously killed him with less, and our gear is better than before. We do a few tries on him, which sadly didn’t work out due to, you know, the general things that wipe a raid. A beast getting through, a heal that landed on the wrong target, the things that can go wrong. While we probably don’t need the buff on Saurfang, it would speed up the general pace of the raid after Saurfang.

We decide to do a soft reset, the only way to get the buff back (thankfully!). In the 30 minutes we spend outside the instance, we go to Wintergrasp to fish. Most members bring their poles, and we gather a ton of fish for our Fish Feasts. We have had these “events” before, and when we’re done, we have usually filled a couple of guild tabs with fish.

30 minutes fly past, and we go back to Saurfang, relieved that the buff has returned. Wham, bang, pow, Saurfang is dead. It is an unwritten rule that Conquoror tokens never drop for us; Both Vanquisher and Protector tokens are going to offspec, while we have a lot of people still waiting for their Conquoror tokens. No dice guys, Saurfang didn’t drop one today either.

We move on to the Blood Council (heroic), which goes down in the first try – a rarity, because while DPS is not really a big concern on this fight, positioning and orb control is. I found myself on the top of the stairs, being blocked most of the time by two other players, unable to reach the bosses for the majority of the fight. It’s not their fault, I wasn’t supposed to be there, but my position got changed in the last minute, and they had nowhere else to move.

Tactics

[singlepic id=32 w=320 h=240 float=right]Position, you say? Whats that about? Well, before every raid, assignments are posted on the forums. This is to reduce the time we spend standing around before a boss, and avoid any confusion. Our mighty raid leader posts these little diagrams for most fights that require some coordination, so everybody knows where they are and what they are supposed to do. The ranged, melee and healer master will usually post some pointers as well, so I know that I’m on the right side adds on Deathwhisper, or that I am typhooning the adds on Saurfang.

I have seen from other guilds that you can quickly waste a lot of time trying to coordinate a fight over ventrilo. This system allows us to know beforehand what to do, where to do it, and if something goes wrong, we usually know who to point fingers at and laugh. Personally, I really like the effort being put into making these high quality graphical diagrams, as it really just speeds things along.

Moving on

As we clear the trash up towards Blood Queen Lanathel (heroic), a mob falls through the floor. No biggie, he will come back up, right? Right, but he decided to take the stairs up that we didn’t clear, and he pulls along the other packs. With amazing luck, we clear the double packs with few casualties. We engage BQL, and things are going great, until we lose one of our vampires halfway through the fight. Losing one vampire is bad enough, but losing the vampires he would have made is too much of a cripple, and we wipe at around 15%. We run back, and gather up again for another shot.

Now, since the buff to starfall, my burst has been quite respectable. On the pull, I battle against our new feral druid Esul for the top of the meters (although the bite goes out according to unmodified threat), but sadly the kitty wins. I hold my ground at the top 2-3 on our meters for quite a long time in the fight, but because our raid is very melee heavy this night, the first couple of bites go out to melee. Halfway through the fight, I am still “next in line” if we are biting according to meters, pulling off amazing numbers, throwing starfires to and fro. Then, ofcourse, I get a Pact. Then I get Swarming Shadows. Then I get pact again. Then I’m at 11th on the meters.

Ah well, no biggie really, as long as she dies, and she surely did.

Despite having to take a 30+ minute break in the middle of the raid, we suddenly find outselfes having completed our goals for the day – except for Deathwhisper heroic. We still have time, so we stroll over to The Plagueworks, clear the trash, and oneshot Rotface (heroic) and Festergut (heroic). We decide to do Professor Putricide on normal, practicing for the heroic mode, and he obviously goes down with little problem. With 20 minutes left of the raid, we bolt to The Frostwing Halls, clear the trash there, have a nasty looking wipe on Dreamwalker (heroic), run back and finish the raid with her death just a few minutes past midnight.

This leaves just Sindragosa and The Lich King for the last two raids of the week. We got Sindragosa (heroic) down to 25% last week, but were crippled by server problems on one of our raid nights, and lost a good two hours on her. This week, we have nearly two full raid nights on her, so the only thing that can really stop us from progressing on her would be if too many of our people are away on easter.

All in all, a good night. 10 bosses down, 8 of them on heroic, in just over 3 hours of raiding. I think I’m in love with this guild!

If you wan’t to see the WOL from the raid, click here!

- QQ

For the last few weeks, I have been playing another major MMO. And with my enthusiasm for World of Warcraft dwiddling, I feel myself compelled to spend more of my gametime on this new, exciting adventure opening up in this other universe.

So it is with much sadness that I announce that I will be focusing completely on this other MMO. The excitement it brings is exhrillerating, the world is rich with adventure and is seeping with history. It is a game that draws you in completely, and makes it hard – nay, impossible – to let go. And quite frankly, World of Warcraft is getting in the way. Who knows, perhaps I will see some of you guys, once you get your eyes open to the wonders of this game.

[singlepic id=54 float=center]
In Hello Kitty Online, I – the adventurous hero – am helping Hello Kitty and her friends wake up from their eternal slumber and defeat a “mysterious and malevolent power”. I, and thousands of other players and NPCs, play around in a wonderful virtual world full of cuteness and kawaii. HKO provides a refreshing new experience in gaming in a way I have never seen before.

Several different locales in Hello Kitty Online are based on, and named after, cities such as Beijing, Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York are present as well wholly original and explorable areas. Everyone are represented by colorful human avatars. I can customize my character by gender, hairstyle, eyes, skin tone, face and even blood type!

[singlepic id=53 w=320 h=240 float=right]Combat, though not the primary focus of the game, is still relevant. Weapons take the form of various blunt implements such as brooms, flyswatters and microphone stands. Players enter combat by right-clicking on a nearby monster, at which point the avatar and the monster will begin to exchange blows. Monsters don’t die in HKO, but when their health bar is fully depleted they become dizzy, pass out and are defeated, allowing players to loot them.

I expect that Hello Kitty Online will take most – if not all – of my time for the future, and I hope that you will join me in my quest to defeat the mysterious evil creeping over the land!

- QQ

Watching this will waste 16 minutes of your time!

Part 1:

Part 2:

We were so disheartened that we simply released and ended the raid.

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Lets talk about that fight for a bit…

So, Arthas is a really, really fun fight. Lots of things happening, very little room for error, and a constant pressure to maximise your damage, perfect your rotation and… well, not fail. I went to look at World of Logs after it was updated, because as with everything else, I want to see where I do wrong and where I can improve. On overall damage, I placed 13th on the meters. But lets not start an outcry for buffs just yet – I want to take a closer look at it.

There is a lot of potential for splash damage on this fight and sadly, we don’t have that much of it. Throughout phase 1 half of the raid will be able to do splash damage on several targets. In phase 2, you can spread splash damage on the valkyrs, if the raid controls them correctly. Phase three is a haven for anyone who can AOE the vile spirits in the air. We are resigned to an occasional starfall and typhoon in phase 3. We should also keep in mind that this was the first kill, so things will probably change for the better once we get a little bit more comfortable with the fight.

What I like to do, is to look at how my DPS compared to the general raid – this is really where you find your standing against the rest of the group. I have taken a screenshot of my DPS (orange) versus the average raid DPS (less-orange-more-yellowy).

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1. General phase 1 nukage. It is expected that a moonkin would be lower on this phase, as we only really have starfall to do some splash damage on the adds.
2. Phase transition, general nukage, doing just fine.
3. Start of phase 2, being grabbed by a valkyr. Only dots ticking here. After this, a long period with limited movement from defiles and nuking down valkyrs. There is a small drop shortly after, which I think was the a-bit-too-big defile that had us moving around a little bit.
4. Fondled by Valkyrs again. The blue marking shows bloodlust during the second phase transition.
5. Really quite baffled by this drop. I’ll have to wait for the fraps to see why my DPS dropped that low in this segment.
6. Another unexplained drop. Could be me looking at Vile Spirits, waiting for them to start moving down, unable to DPS the Lich King if he was behind me at that point.

Generally, I don’t think this is bad. On average, my DPS goes up and down in accordence to average raid DPS, and with our minimal splash damage, I would expect that while we are relatively low on the meters, our contribution is just the same as most other DPS classes.

Also – and I’ll have to wait for World of Logs to update – I think I placed as the 50th highest moonkin damage on Arthas. Fun stuff.

TL;DR: Moonkin damage is fine!

- QQ

Ahead of everybody else is Paragon from Lightnings Blade EU, and I hooked up with their very own moonkin Lappé for a little chat.

- First off, can you tell us your name, how old you are, and how long you have been playing WoW?
My real name is Niko Lappeteläinen – now you can try to pronounce it properly! I am 18 years old and I have been playing World of Warcraft since the summer of ’06, although I did have a break before The Burning Crusade.

- Have you always been playing moonkin/druid?
My main has always been a druid. In The Burning Crusade I was “forced” to play as restoration if I wanted raid spots. When Wrath of the Lich King came, I was able to switch to moonkin.

- What is it that makes you play a moonkin? Why not another caster class?
I’ve always loved to play moonkin, as long as I can get raid spots with that spec. In case I get bored, I have a few alts that I can play. I haven’t really considered rolling a mage or a warlock as a serious main, cause I don’t believe there is nothing a mage can do that a moonkin can’t – except, perhaps, for proper PVP!

- Looking at the grand scale of things, how do you feel moonkins have progressed through the expansions?
I stopped playing around level 57 before The Burning Crusade, so I really can’t remember much of those times, and back in The Burning Crusade, I mainly played as restoration. It was easier to get a raid spot as a moonkin in WOTLK because of our raid buffs.

- How do you think moonkins compare to other DPS classes?
In regards to damage, we’ve always been a bit behind other classes, but never too much. Even if I hate the RNG part of eclipse, I still love it when I get the best possible RNG and top our other casters! Ofcourse, we will have to wait and see what happens once we all begin to wear heroic loot. We might fall a bit behind because of our scaling with soft haste and crit caps.

- What kind of difficulties have you noted with the bosses in Icecrown Citadel?
Actually, there is nothing that has really bugged me in Icecrown Citadel. I think we are quite strong and usefull for every fight. Sindragosa, for example, is a real badass, but that is the same for every caster. For all fights, you just have to figure out how to maximize your DPS without dying, but theres nothing we can’t handle.

- What do you think about the difficulty of the instances and the “casual catering” that people have been complaining about?
Icecrown Citadel on normal is okay for casuals, but the hardmodes are pretty well tuned right now. I’d just wish they would have removed limited attempts earlier and come up with something really hard for the heroic modes that would actually last for couple of weeks.

- What kind of changes would you like to see being made to moonkins?
Short answer would be “More DPS, less RNG”. I’d like to see a change to Nature’s Grace and Eclipse to make them something less dependable on crit.

- If you could take one talent from another class, what would it be?
That would be the old ignite for mages for sure. It would keep stacking up as long as you can keep up your crit streak, so if we add that to eclipse we would be able to reach huge numbers. Languish is similar, but it won’t refresh its duration completely if you lose a crit.

With the old ignite, you could have a tick followed by a crit, and it would retain the full effect, stacking it up to 100.000+ damage ignites! At least, that’s how I think it worked.

Once (and if) they remove eclipse my decision would probably be different, though.

- Are you going to be playing in Cataclysm, and what are you looking forward to?
I will try to play as much as I can, but I am scheduled to go to the army this summer. I am definitely looking forward to seeing what Cataclysm brings to druids.

- Are you going to change to troll in Cataclysm?
If it’s a huge DPS benefit, then I probably will, but I would rather not. We will have to see what kind of changes they bring with the new tauren racials as well, if they follow through with that.

- How does hardcore raiding effect your real life?
It’s not really “hardcore” raiding. It’s hardcore for just a few weeks, until we beat the content, but it’s not really that hard. Once we beat the encounters, it doesn’t take that long to clear the instances, and we go back to a much more casual raiding schedule.

- What is your favourite dungeon of all times?
I always prefer the one that holds the hardest difficulty level – so right now, I enjoy ICC the most. I don’t hold any favourites with all of the old stuff – if someone asks me to join, I’ll probably go!

- Finally, if Mumins were a playable class, would you switch to it?
Definitely – they’ll probably get better racials than taurens!

To catch up on Paragon’s progression in Icecrown Citadel, check out http://www.paragon-wow.com!