As the minutes grew closer, more and more people, myself included, were waiting in Orgrimmar to buy Azerothian Navigation, new profession skill caps and start the race for level 85. I myself had just planned to stay up for an hour and then go to bed.

Midnight arrived. Chaos unfolded. Something went wrong. Maybe it was the devious plans of Deathwing. Maybe a secret cult working to stop those who wish to save the world.

Or maybe it was because Blizzard told 5 million Europeans to relog at the same time…

All in all, I’d say we’ve done a pretty good job! Now we can all finally go home and OH MY GOD what happened to Azeroth?!

In the last days before Cataclysm is officially released, people are working furiously to get everything in order, ready to level, ready to explore, ready to save the world once again, and I wanted to write a little post about my own plans for Cataclysm.

I’m ready. I’ve cleaned out the bank (multiple times), I’ve sold all the stuff I had lying around, I’ve tidied up my Rock Collection (I have three) and I’ve made my plans for how I want to level. I even have enough materials in my bank to powerlevel my enchanting at least 20 skill points. I need this, because running with two crafting professions is quite costly. I plan on getting enchanting up really fast, and then sell all excess materials I find, in order to fund the pricy leveling of my engineering.

I plan to log out right next to the flight trainer in Orgrimmar, so that I can learn how to fly in absolutely normal weather conditions. I say “log out”, because I generally don’t expect to be around for the turning point at midnight, mainly because I have to get up at 6 am and be at work at 7.50. I could probably do a little instance, or watch how Orgrimmar gets deserted in a matter of minutes, but other than that, I am going to be a fairly small player in the initial hype. Which is fine, because then I probably won’t have to battle that many people as I level up.

Leveling strategy

I am obviously not going to run for any realm first achievements. There are people far more dedicated to that than I, and I wouldn’t think to intrude on their plans. And even more so, I doubt that I will be super focused on getting to level 85 fast. I mean, I want to get there, but I really have all the time in the world.

My plans for leveling is simple. Start in Hyjal (most likely) and work through the quests. Once in a while I’ll queue up for the dungeons relevant to my level, mostly with my guild mates if they are available. I don’t want to farm instances, out of fear that they will become boring and trivial too quickly, and I want to take my time to enjoy the stories that Blizzard worked so hard on making. I expect a lot from Cataclysm, so it wouldn’t be fair if I just rushed through everything.

Gearing up

I was planning to do a pre-raid best-in-slot list, but ultimately decided to push it for a later time. I feel that anyone that comes through this site should at least have the necessary knowledge to put on their own clothes, and if not, they can find the general stat values in the moonkin guide. Then again, I might just add something along the road.

Personally, I’ll be going for max spell power to begin with. It will probably be a few levels before I can actually swap out any items, but once some green quest item has more intellect than my own gear, I’ll probably swap that out. I won’t really bother with reforging until I reach level 85, and when I do, I’ll still go for the highest ilevel gear to max out my intellect and then reforge to meet my hit cap. Thankfully, hit isn’t a massive blunder in Cataclysm, and it has around the same value as intellect, so I will end up in a good state in the end.

If I can’t reforge my stats to spirit (or if I reach my hit cap at level 85), Ill just reforge to haste or crit. Simple!

Raiding

I am obviously going to raid in Cataclysm, and I plan on continuing the high-end raiding as well. My guild plans on beginning to raid in just about three weeks. That’s three weeks from this Tuesday. I will probably be at level 85 after the first week, maybe the second, and then spend the weeks after that on heroics. But even if I miss the first week or two, it wont take long to get back into the game.

We are still going to raid three days a week, but we are also running 10 man groups once a week for alts or people with member status in the guild, who would like to join. Other than that, everything will just be the same old routine – the way I like it.

In other news…

I changed the theme on the blog! I didn’t like that my previous theme couldn’t handle having anything as a logo, and I saw this WordPress theme on another blog and decided to steal it. I might still tweak a few things; I am considering if I should keep the white menu as it is, or cut it off so it doesn’t extend indefinately. Or maybe change the colors of it. What do you think?

What are your plans for Cataclysm?

- QQ

While Orgrimmar and the rest of the world was devoured by a dragon who had been hibernating for years, Qieth slept soundly in a hut in Moonglade. Don’t ask me why I logged out there, it just seemed fitting. When he woke up, he was a troll!

Trollin’

I was pretty excited about being able to switch to troll, and the days before The Shattering was an emotional roller coaster, for we all simply assumed that when we got the new class combinations, we could immediately switch to them. Tauren paladin, undead hunter and so on, and of course, troll druids.

But then they turn around and say that the new class combinations wont be available right off the bat. They added a note that “This decision could change at any time”, so I somewhat felt like they were testing the waters. I don’t know if there was a lot of whimpering on the forums about it, but in any case, they changed their minds. Before I left work on Wednesday, I initiated the race change, and when I got home, I logged in as a troll.

It was quite exciting. It took quite a while to settle on being bald, which was time wasted, because I ended up in the barber shop to instantly grow long, orange, braided dreadlocks.

The new druid forms was obviously exciting. The color schemes of bears looks silly, cat form looks pretty neat, and I am obviously loving the black and red moonkin form. And even though I had to settle with the fact that I now have antlers – I mean, seriously, antlers?! – I think it’s absolutely awesome to run around looking like a bad ass.

In other news…

I’m going to just sort of throw this out here, and maybe some of you knows a solution to this problem. As you have probably noticed, my site has had some seriously bad load times recently, and I haven’t been able to fix it. It annoys me greatly. And when I was randomly clicking things – usually my first solution for fixing problems – I disabled my logo, the beautiful sun-and-moon logo that Immamoonkin made, and everything was suddenly fine. It’s a big logo, but it’s not that big. I certainly have a larger doze of image files on my blog than just that one logo.

I tried uploading a random 22 kb .jpg, and it caused the same problem – 10-15 seconds of load times. So, until I find out what causes the logo to make the site stall, I’m stuck with the boring text at the top of my blog.

If you have any ideas why this is happening, feel free to drop a note on that!

Lastly…

I found this. I think it’s awesome. It deserves some sharing!

This caused quite a lot of uproar. It didn’t take more than a few hours on MMO-Champion before a good measure of threads were created, filled with people expressing their… distress, all of them in a clear, calm and productive way. Well, maybe not everybody. Let’s just say that some people didn’t take it too well.

Now, the way that people react to this, I suppose, depends on how they read the answer, or how they assume that Blizzard responds to it. Some people saw this as a dark omen that we will forever be stuck in our age-old moonkin forms, and that Blizzard has no intention of ever updating them.

I choose to believe that Blizzard’s “Final!” can be extended to “We’re not going to do more about them for the release of Cataclysm”. Blizzard did say, months ago, that they plan on updating moonkin forms, but they never ever said that they would get it out in time for Cataclysm.

I do believe that we will eventually get new moonkin forms. Even if Blizzard doesn’t plan on doing it anytime soon, experience tells me that they will do it sooner or later, and that the community will make sure to punk them until they do. And while I would really like an updated form, I am not too fussed about it if they can’t get them out in time for Cataclysm.

I understand how moonkins feel left out – after all, trolls and worgens got completely new bear, cat and flight forms. But I can also imagine that Blizzard has a lot easier time redesigning these forms, as they were made much more recently, and can simply be readjusted. I don’t think this is the case with moonkin forms. They would have to be redesigned from the bottom, and that will inevitably take a lot more time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard’s graphics team have been under a lot of stress lately. I’d much rather run around in the amazing new zones, cities and dungeons, and then wait for an update to moonkin form later on. While some people are disappointed, it is often because they choose to read too much into the blues comments. When Ghostcrawler sais “We will add new a moonkin form sometime in Cataclysm”, people read it as “We got a new one ready yesterday!”.

And to be honest, I’m fine with waiting a bit longer. My moonkin form isn’t going to ruin my game experience, it is not going to make the game any less fun to play. If this is the case for you, if you can’t enjoy the game while looking at an old, old creature model, then it is simply a matter of creating a new class. That sounds a bit harsh, but that is the reality. And personally, I think the red and black troll moonkin form looks absolutely awesome!

We still raid a few days a week, to clear ICC and Ruby Sanctum, but most of us are doing it for the novelty of raiding, the few bits and bobs we need and, for some, a few special mounts. We are looking at only a couple more Invincible’s and we clear Ulduar and Yogg 0 in a little over an hour just for Mimiron’s Flying Head. But apart from that, there’s nothing left to do!

I am wrapping up things on Qieth. I’m trying to finish the quest for the Un’Goro raptor mount, and I am just about to disenchant all of my restoration gear, leaving only what I need for leveling around. Other than that, there’s nothing left to do!

News are slim. There has been some minor updates on druids, but nothing to write home about. The troll fight form is.. special, to say the least, but I’ll leave that for another time, probably for when we get to see the final version of the troll and worgen moonkin forms.

So while I am excited about Cataclysm, WoW doesn’t really hold that much interest for me until the 7th of december. And in the meantime, I try to keep myself entertained in other places – You might have seen some of the many Minecraft videos I’ve put up on Youtube. Most recently, though, I started a series of Let’s Play on my Youtube account, going through a game, commentating as I go along. But this is no ordinary game. This is one of the most terrifying games that has ever been made, dubbed by many to be “freaky”, “insane” or simply “all out mental”. I am playing through Amnesia – The Dark Descent, and I am shaking in my pants while doing it.

But, since people seem to find some sort of humor in my whimpering, girlish screams, I thought I would post the playlist of the videos here. We’re up to 150 minutes of pure terror, and more episodes will get come out whenever I can man up to actually play the game. You have no idea how terrified I am. I am hoping that I can actually finish the game before Cataclysm comes out. I know that Cataclysm will take all of my gaming time once it comes, and if I don’t complete Amnesia before that, it will haunt me for the rest of my days.

Check the playlist below, and use the arrows to more from one video to the next. If you want to keep up with the series, or whatever else I might be posting on there, go to my channel and subscribe (;)). The videos feature quite a lot of my… manly roars of courage.

I started Qieth’s Quips on November 3rd last year. If you ever read the introduction post, you’ll remember how I started the blog to sort of have an archive of the past, a place where I could put my thoughts without forgetting them and where they wouldn’t sink away and be forgotten on the internet.

365 days later, and Qieth’s Quips is so much more to me. As it turns out, it has been an awesome way for me to express myself, get rid of some of all that creativity bottled up inside me. It is more than a hobby to do whenever I have spare time, it is the giant basin of words that I fill with.. nah, I can’t really finish that metaphor. I’m loving what the blog does for me, and oddly enough, I always sleep really well after finishing a good post.

When I started QQ, I didn’t really plan on it going anywhere. Well, I hoped that it would get some followers, but I didn’t plan on the thousands upon thousands of visitors coming in each month. It is still, by all standards, a young blog, as there are many more sites out there who are much better known, bloggers that’s been going at it for years with an entourage following in their steps. But I am quite amazed at how well it’s going.

I am a total stats whore, and while I don’t really blog to get followers, I do love seeing how more and more people come through the site. I love it when I see a couple of clicks coming from a random guild forum that I can’t see. I love it when the site tells me that someone googled “Moonkin guide 4.0″ and it comes out on top. I am exstatic whenever someone posts a comment!

And I really like it when the readers – you guys – post comments on the blog. It perks my mind, and a lot of my posts has been inspired by what has been written on the blog. Even more, I love it when you guys tell me your stories and your troubles as a moonkin, how we can work together on fixing the odd thing here and there, and how we can get really great results.

One guy – and I won’t name him here, he knows who he is – wrote me with some guild difficulties. We talked a bit about what one could expect from a guild, what a guild should expect from a member, how to improve and how to perform, and as it turns out, he is now enjoying himself in an awesome guild, doing great. I definately did the least of the work, but it is absolutely awesome to know that once in a while, a post really hit the spot and offered help, or simply perspective.

Over the past 12 months, I have spewed out some 118 posts. Those posts contains no less than 108.729 words, averaging out at 921 words per post. Some are long, some a short, but it usually all comes out to be just right. A year has passed, and hopefully many more will come and go.

Cataclysm is coming in a month, and while I expect november to be a rather slow month for news and topics, things are really going to pick up quickly once Deathwing flies the skies. I have tons of ideas for topics, for guides, for ways I would and could take the blog. Let’s just hope there is time enough to cover it all!

And as for you – yeah, you! – thanks for following the blog. You are awesome, and your awesomeness keep me going, and I hope you will keep enjoying the posts, comment on the stuff, share it with your friends and tell me your stories.

Keep being awesome!

Patch 4.0 is right around the corner, and with it comes a whole lot of changes to our class. For some reason, I thought I had plenty of time before I needed to re-write the Moonkin guide, failing to realise the abundance of questions that are bound to come when 4.0 hits the live servers.

So I buckled up and started typing. Obviously, some things are still the same. Professions and enchants hasn’t been changed on the PTR, so I won’t meddle with them in the guide before the changes are active. I assume that most enchants such as +81 spell power will be changed to +81 intellect, but until they do, I’ll keep those sections as they are.

Rest assured that I will keep updating this as 4.0 comes out, and naturally throughout Cataclysm as well. I’ll add this guide to the button at the top once 4.0 hits the live servers. I’ll also post this guide out to MMO-champion and the like when 4.0 comes around – you get to read it now, because you are here

Table of contents

1.0 Disclaimer – The 4.0 moonkin guide (new)
2.0 How to get help
3.0 Stats n’ caps (new)
4.0 Gems (new)
5.0 Talents (new)
6.0 Glyphs (new)
7.0 Enchants
8.0 Professions (slightly new)
9.0 Consumables
10.0 Rotation (new)
11.0 Eclipse (new)
12.0 Tips and tricks (new)
13.0 Useful addons (new)
14.0 Other moonkin guides (new)
15.0 Things to check (new)
16.0 Contributors (new)

1.0 Disclaimer – The 4.0 moonkin guide

Welcome to the 4.0 moonkin guide. Before proceeding to read this guide, I need you to read this paragraph very carefully. There are two things that you must keep in mind:

• This guide is for a level 80 character playing patch 4.0. What this means is that this guide is current for what is on the live servers, and not on the beta servers. As new patches are released, the guide will be updated.
• Information changes all the time, and we are still working hard on figuring out the finer points. Some of the information in this guide will be based on the research of others, while other parts are merely my own interpretation. I strongly encourage everybody to discuss and give feedback in this thread.

2.0 How to get help

If you have a moonkin related question, feel free to post a reply to this topic, and the community will attack it like hungry piranhas. However, to make it easier on yourself – and on everybody else – follow these tips first:

1. Read the guide. Most basics are covered here.
2. Identify your problem. Are you asking about gearing up, gems, enchants, rotation, addons, how to get girls or something else?
3. Check the guide again – maybe you missed something that answered your question!
4. Post as much detailed, relevant information as you can; Armory link, maybe a raid log, and an explanation of what your issue is.
5. Are you sure it’s not in the guide? It goes a lot faster if you just read the guide, rather than you waiting for us to repeat what is written here.

We love to help, but many times the information is readily available, and you can save a lot of time by scrolling down to whatever area might give you problems. If that doesn’t help, or something in this guide isn’t clear, don’t hesitate to post in this topic, and we’ll help you out!

3.0 Stats n’ caps

You should always attempt to only use leather gear. Wearing only leather items will increase your intellect by 5%. Equipping just a single piece of cloth gear will remove this bonus, and that is a massive hit to your intellect, and thus spell power and critical strike chance.

To best equip your moonkin for what’s ahead, you must have a basic knowledge of how each stat affects it. Here is a rundown of the stats and their caps:

Hit rating: Hit is an important stat for every single class. Thankfully, it is fairly easy for us to attain hit, so this should always be your first priority. Each ~26,32 hit rating gives you 1% chance to hit. Additionally, each point of spirit gives you 1 point of hit rating, meaning that 26,32 spirit increases your chance to hit by 1%. Because of this, we can simply assume that spirit = hit, and treat them both as the same.

You will need 17% hit (446 hit rating) to never miss a spell. You can also hover your mouse over your spell hit rating to see your chance to miss against mobs of equal level, or boss level monsters.

Intellect: Intellect is our strongest stat after hit rating. This is obviously something you want a whole lot of. Intellect gives you the following:

• More mana
• Additional spell power. One point of intellect gives you 1 spell power.
• Higher chance to score a critical strike with spells. One point of intellect gives you 0,006% crit chance. In other words, you need 166,667 intellect for 1% chance to crit.

Haste rating: Haste is a very powerful stat for us, as a lot of our spells have been changed in 4.0 to benefit greatly from it. Haste will affect the following:

• Reduces the global cooldown of your spells.
• Reduces cast time of your starfire, wrath and starsurge.
• Increases the frequency of your moonfire, sunfire, insect swarm and hurricane ticks.

Crit: We are no longer as addicted to crit as we have previously been. The most noticable change to crit is that we are no longer dependant on it to proc Eclipse or Nature’s Grace, and crit has become more easy to understand. Crit will affect the following:

• Increases your chance to do double damage with direct nukes.
• Increases the chance that each tick of your DOTs will do double damage.

Please note that critical strikes from hurricane only do 50% more damage.

Mastery: Mastery is a new stat introduced for patch 4.0 and Cataclysm. Once learned from your trainer, mastery will increase the potency of our “Mastery: Total Eclipse”, which is visible under the summary of our talent trees.

Total eclipse initially increases the bonus from Eclipse by 12%. Each point of mastery increases this bonus by 1.5%. In other words, a point of mastery increases Total Eclipse to 13.5%, making your Eclipse increase the damage of your spells by up to 38.5%.

For one point of mastery at level 80, you need 46 points of mastery rating.

Crit versus mastery: Prelimenary theorycrafting show that crit and mastery rating, at level 80, are fairly close to each other, but not as strong as haste is. There are arguments for both stats:

46 crit rating increases your crit chance by 1%. 46 mastery rating increases your mastery by 1,5%, but your mastery is only active for about 60% of the time. This puts crit rating at a very slight advantage over mastery rating, but this might very well change as we level to 85.

Reforging:

Reforging allows you to change 40% of one stat on an item into another. You can only swap between spirit, haste, crit and mastery, and you can only change one stat into another stat that isn’t already on the item. This means that if you have an item with haste and crit, you cannot turn 40% of the crit into more haste, but you can turn it into mastery rating if you are so inclined.

When reforging, you should work from these principles:

• If you are below the hit cap, convert some crit or mastery into spirit or hit. Either stat is fine, although spirit would give you a bit more mana regen outside of combat. If you are above the hit cap, try and reforge some spirit into more useful stats. Just make sure that you stay above your hit cap, rather than below it.
• If your items has no haste on it, you could reforge some crit or mastery into haste, as haste is generally stronger than crit and mastery.
• As crit and mastery are generally very close at the moment, either one is fine. If you want to play around with a lot of mastery or a lot of crit, then knock yourself out.

4.0 Gems

Gemming is fairly straight forward for moonkins.

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 an Intellect/spirit gem and a Nightmare Tear. Preferably in blue slots only.
Red: Red slots should always, always, always be pure intellect gems.
Yellow: Intellect/haste should be your current preference

5.0 Talents

Your talent spec should largely be decided by one factor: Your mana. If you do a lot of damage, but run out of mana after 2 minutes, then your overall damage is going to suffer. On the other hand, if you can keep casting forever and never run out of mana, you can probably spare a few points in damage talents.

We are no longer the manakins we were in Wrath of the Lich King, but at level 80 in patch 4.0 you should still be fine. You will need to find a balance between damage and mana talents, though. At best you should be able to end a boss fight with 10% mana. If you have less, you will run out of mana, and if you have more, then you can try reducing your mana regen through talents.

From the talents currently available to us, we can produce two talent specs: Focus on mana and focus on damage.

As you will notice, these specs are very similar.The only real difference between the two is that you are moving points from Moonglow and Furor into Owlkin Frenzy and Blessing of the Grove. The impact of mana-to-damage changes will be a lot more significant at level 85 where you will be able to grab Master Shapeshifter and ditch talents like Dreamstate in favor for Gale Winds. Even so, apart from Master Shapeshifter, the other damage choices are fairly slim.

You can freely choose to spend the single point in Typhoon in Solar Beam or similar talents if you are so inclined.

6.0 Glyphs

Glyphs are fairly straight forward. With the addition of Prime Glyphs, it’s pretty hard to go wrong. Some combinations are slightly stronger than others, however.

For Prime Glyphs, you have the choice between two sets:

Insect Swarm/Starsurge/Starfire:
This setup gives you slightly more damage than the one below. However, it has a major “but” tied too it. Glyph of Starfire is a suprisingly strong glyph, even if it only does increase moonfire. However, as soon as you start clipping your extended moonfire, this glyph combination loses its advantage. Glyph of Starfire does theoretically increase the duration of sunfire, but you would never cast starfire while sunfire is up, because that would always be during lunar eclipse.

What this means is that, if you have enough haste to cast your moonfire at the beginning of an eclipse, and can reach the other end of the meter where you have to cast sunfire, before the moonfire gets to run out, you will not gain anything from this setup.

Insect Swarm/Starsurge/Moonfire:
This combination of Glyphs generally gives you the strongest damage increase if you have a lot of haste. If you are clipping the extended moonfire with the combination above, you can with confidence swap out Glyph of Starfire to Glyph of Moonfire. This is assuming that Glyph of Moonfire affects sunfire.

For major glyphs, Glyph of Starfall is the obvious choice. The remaining two glyphs is a free choice. You can go for Glyph of Focus, but then you have to be aware of your range. The limitations on your movement might be too much to sacrifice – I would personally not give up half of my range on spells, just for a 10% increase to starfall.

All other glyphs can be choosen based on your preferences and the encounter you are doing.

7.0 Enchants – nothing changed here so far

Enchants are usually pretty straight forward. Here is what you should generally go for:

Head: 30 spellpower/20 crit, or 30 spellpower/20 spirit if you are low on hit – 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: Tuskarr’s Vitality (for the speed increase)
Weapon: Black Magic for 1-handed weapons, 82 spell power for 2-handed weapons.

But what about…?

An alternative to Tuskarr’s Vitality is to get 12 crit/12 hit on boots. However, it is generally accepted that the 8% run speed increase from Tuskarr’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.

8.0 Professions – nothing changed here so far

The short answer to which profession you should choose is “Whatever you like”. Professions generally give you roughly the same bonus. Two crafting professions will give you double the bonus, but is obviously more costly. The general difference between most professions turn out to be nothing more than ~8 DPS. There are two professions that are largely giving a higher bonus.

From each profession, you can expect to gain:

• Alchemy: +47 spellpower
• Blacksmithing: +46 spellpower
• Engineering: -1 spellpower, -23 haste, + Hyperspeed Accelerators *
• Enchanting: +46 spellpower
• Inscription: +46 spellpower.
• Jewelcrafting: +48 spellpower
• Leatherworking: +46 spellpower
• Tailoring: Lightweave Embroidery **
• Skinning: +40 crit rating

** Tailoring comes out slightly stronger than other professions due to the the Lightweave Embroidery you can put on your cloak. It will generally turn out to be a 55-70 spell power increase.

* The biggest winner when it comes to professions, however, is Engineering. While you sacrifice a little bit of spell power and haste, you gain access to the Hyperspeed Accelerators. Using these during a Lunar Eclipse will greatly increase your DPS, much more so than what other professions can offer. You should use the Hyperspeed Accelerators primarily as you start a solar eclipse, as the haste buff can increase both your wrath, insect swarm and moonfire. Should it be available during a lunar eclipse, however, feel free to cast it. Waiting 10 seconds to get to solar eclipse reduces the benefit from it by 1/6.

You can use the following macro to automaticly cast your Hyperspeed Accelerators whenever they are ready, and you are casting an Insect Swarm:

TL;DR: The biggest DPS increase from professions would obviously be Engineering and Tailoring. But to be fair, if you enjoy being a Blacksmithing Inscriptor, then just go with that.

9.0 Consumables – nothing changed here so far

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.

10.0 Rotation

Our rotation is fairly simple on paper. Getting used to it is a whole different matter. I suggest that you spend a while on target dummies to get used to your new rotation. It is one thing to do a rotation as you are standing still, hurting a poor dummy, but it’s entirely different once you are in a PvE setting. Practice is key.

Our rotation works from three principles:

• Cast wrath until you proc lunar eclipse. Cast starfire until you proc solar eclipse.
• Keep both DOTs up and cast them when you have just procced eclipse. Cast Insect Swarm before sunfire/moonfire, to allow your moonfire time to morph into sunfire before you cast it.
• Use starsurge whenever it is off cooldown, and always when Shooting Stars proc.

If you can anticipate it, try to be inside an eclipse when you have to move. Throw up both of your DOTs and spam your moonfire/sunfire. The damage from Lunar Shower, and eclipse if you have it up, will provide a decent amount of damage even while moving. Make sure that your Insect Swarm is up as well, for a higher chance of proccing Shooting Stars on the run.

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, which will allow for all 20 stars to fall. 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 lot of 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 fairly decent to use if there is more than a handful of targets. You can glyph it to remove the knockback, and cause a lot of damage to trash packs or during encounters that spawn adds that needs to die. Typhoon is particulary strong if you are under the effects of solar eclipse, and have a handful of mobs to fire at.

11.0 Eclipse

Eclipse benefits almost all of our spells. Keeping this in mind allows you to gain a higher benefit from some spells. Don’t go out of your way to delay a spell on a cooldown, but if you are 3 seconds away from a lunar eclipse when starfall is ready, you might want to hold back a bit.

Lunar eclipse increases the damage of:

• Starfire
• Moonfire
• Starfall
• Starsurge

Solar eclipse increases the damage of:

• Wrath
• Insect Swarm
• Sunfire
• Typhoon
• Starsurge
• Hurricane

Please note that our two AOE spells, starfall and hurricane, are arcane and nature damage respectively. If you are doing AOE damage, a solar eclipse would be a bigger increase, but if you are caught in lunar eclipse for an AOE pack, it is not the end of the world.

If you are in solar eclipse, and your starfall is ready, you should still cast it, even if it doesn’t gain the bonus from eclipse. Delaying it for too long would, at best, make you come out even, but it will delay your cooldown significantly.

Eclipse doesn’t decay. This allows you to stay inside an eclipse indefinately. So if you are eating through those ICC trash packs, put yourself under a solar eclipse and fire away that hurricane.

12.0 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 need 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.

You can use your Thorns as a mini-misdirection. On a boss swinging at your tank every 2nd second, the base damage adds around 21.000 damage. The damage scales with your targets spell power or AP, whichever is highest. The damage done by your thorns will be credited to your target. Thorns is very powerful on AOE packs, if you want to give your tank a bit of a boost. You can have your tank as a focus target, and use the macro “/cast [@focus] Thorns” to quickly cast thorns on him or her.

If you are casting your starfall inside a lunar eclipse, cast it before you cast any DOTs. It doesn’t benefit from haste, so if you cast your DOTs before starfall, you lose a GCD on a non-hasted spell.

13.0 Useful addons

There are plenty of addons to choose from, and most are 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:

• Balance Power Tracker: A highly configurable mod designed to track Lunar and Solar energy for Balance Druids in 4.0.
• 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. If you need suggestions for customizing Power Aura’s, check out Jamara’s post here.

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 literally 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.

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.

14.0 Other moonkin guides

Graylo’s Moonkin guide for 4.0.1
Elitist Jerks moonkin discussion

15.0 Things to check

Problems I have either noticed myself, or which has been pointed out by other players. This all needs to be tested a bit more thoroughly as 4.0 comes live.

• DOTs doesn’t tick faster if your haste is changed after they are cast, even though the tooltip sais so.
• That moonfire/sunfire isn’t affected by Nature’s Grace.
• Sunfire isn’t affected by haste at all (verified on PTR)

16.0 Contributors

Thanks for these people for comments, suggestions and corrections that turned into actual changes to the 4.0 moonkin guide. Sorry, all of those commenting before 4.0 isn’t listed. Names are not necessarily MMO-Champion user names, but the user names from the source or site where people have posted it.

Psynister, Emilios, Tilgare, Luna, Sunfyre, and that “ghost” in a dream I had. Yes, really.

A lot of people have cried out that we haven’t quite gotten the same attention as other classes. “Many more classes has gotten a lot more reviews than us”. Well, in my world, a lot of reviews of our talents doesn’t nessecarely mean that the result in the end is any better. If a system is tried and tested, and deemed worthless – as it is with some classes – then it’s just a waste of time. Our talent trees have finally been pimped out, and I’m quite fine with that.

With the latest changes to our talents, I feel that we are much closer to a final version of the new talent trees. Sure, we still need a lot of tweaks, but when they are beginning to simply alter the numbers on the spells, I feel like we are getting progessively faster towards the end result. After all, once we know the concept of the talent trees, the numbers can follow just fine.

This is by no means a final call on how talents should be. I expect that we can toss a few ideas around on how to spec, and I welcome your comments on the talent specs I will present below. It all really depends on how life will be past level 80, and the troubles we run into.

When I am trying to figure out how to spec in Cataclysm, I first make the ultimate damage spec. This is from the assumption that mana is not a problem, that we have everything we need, and that we only really care about straight up PvE damage. The talent spec I came up with for this is as follows: http://wowtal.com/#k=15ildWRR.a0o.druid

This spec grabs every single damage increasing talent. You’ll notice that I actually took Gale Winds, because it gives damage, and I skipped talents such as Solar Beam because it doesn’t – although we have two points to spare, so you would probably grab Solar Beam as well.

But I seriously doub that we can start off the expansion without any sort of mana regen talents. Heck, I think we will probably carry those around with us for a long time, probably for all of Cataclysm. This means that we need to move some points from DPS talents into mana talents. To do this, we need to identify some of the weaker talents:

• Gale Winds is a talent that is only really useful if we use Typhoon and Hurricane a lot. Hurricane is usually reserved for trash packs and specific encounters with a lot of adds, and so is Typhoon. It would probably be one of the first talents I would let go.
• Unless Blizzard does something to the proc chance of Owlkin Frenzy, I would probably leave it out for a mana talent for a pure PvE spec – Owlkin Frenzy might come in handy for grinding, as you will undoubedly get hit while leveling up. I am not so sure it will do us much more good in PvE than it does now.
• Blessing of the Grove is a rather weak talent point. It is awesome on fights with a lot of movement, because of the added damage to moonfire, and I am guessing that the bonus spills over into Sunfire as well. But a 6% increase to one (well, two) spell(s) is a relatively weak talent.

Some might call out for Genesis to be on this list, but with the addition of Shooting Stars, and the big role that our DOTs will play in our rotation, I consider it a fairly strong talent. 2-3 more ticks on our two DOTs (three, counting Sunfire) seems fairly potent, especially because we want our DOTs up as much as possible.

With this in mind, we can take a look at our mana talents:

• Dreamstate seems like a very powerful mana talent. I am counting on the fact that we need to use our innervates on ourselves, and a whooping 50% mana back every 3 minutes seems like the real deal.
• Furor seems to be the next big thing. 15% more mana means 15% more casts before we run dry, and it has the added bonus of buffing Dreamstate with another 7,5% mana back per innervate.
• Moonglow seems fairly straight forward. It will basicly allow us to cast 9% more spells before we run out of mana. It is not quite as strong as Furor, unless my mathless brain is completely oblivious to something. It would probably be the first mana talent to let go of.

With this in mind, we can start crafting a mana heavy build with the best damage talents available afterwards. I came up with the following spec: http://wowtal.com/#k=v-JZOfmF.a0o.druid

This spec gives up on Owlkin Frenzy, Gale Winds and one point in Blessing of the Grove. To be fair, we might just use that point for Solar Beam, because it’s a very, very awesome spell – but if we deem that it is generally not needed for PvE, we can ditch Solar Beam altogether.

At this point, we have a spec that gives the biggest damage increase, and the spec that gives the best mana regen while still maintaining the highest possible damage. As our gear progress, we will want to remove the weakest mana talents (Moonglow, then Furor, then Dreamstate) and put them into the “best of the weakest” DPS talents.

The big question would be “when to move mana talents to damage talents?”. In my case, I would start raiding with the mana regen spec, and see how it turns out – I should be able to go through a whole fight with what I have available. When I notice that I have mana to spare, or that I am not keeping my innervate on cooldown for the duration of the fight, I will use my dual spec and try moving some talents. I might purge moonglow completely, and see how it turns out, and if that is too much, I’ll put a few points back into it. Using dual spec, I expect to be able to quickly go back to the previous spec if I took the new spec too far, without having to teleport back to Moonglade to respec.

Keep in mind that you might find yourself being comfortable on mana at the end of the tier 11 content – because your group is better geared and bosses die faster – only to be needing the mana regen talents at tier 12, as you are progressing through the encounters. You might also be forced to spec for mana talents for a number of other reasons; Healers might need your innervates, which means you can’t get that 50% mana each minute. You might need some talents for mass roots, more AOE or Solar Beam. Or there might simply be fights that requires you to swap out of moonkin form, or which drains your mana.

All in all, I think that our current Cataclysm talent trees offer us a nice possibility for progression. Not only will our gear be better, but we will be able to increase our damage when we become less dependant on mana talents. But if Blizzard does this correctly, we shouldn’t be able to just waltz into the first raid instance we see, and never worry about mana.

- QQ

For a while now, I have had this nagging worry that Blizzard would somehow swing around and pull “a resto” on us, and remove moonkin form from our spellbooks. Or make it a use ability like they are doing with restoration druids. Thankfully, Ghostcrawler mentioned the other day that they stand firm in the belief that balance druids are defined by their moonkin form.

There is a lot of grapejuice going around these days about moonkin form being useless in its current state. One argument is about the buffs it brings. We are already sharing all of our buffs with several other classes. So is everyone else. That it continues in Cataclysm is just fine, that’s really how it should be. Every buff should be covered by many classes – it has been Blizzard’s philosophy since Wrath of the Lich King came out, and people seem to think themselves useless if other people can provide the same buffs as them. For the rest of us, we are brought as another buff insurance and the damage we bring.

Sure, 5% haste is provided by other classes in Cataclysm, and there is merit to that argument. In its current state, it would actually allow us to do whatever we like when it comes to being in moonkin form. It would seem really pointless to have a form if we could simply decide to ditch it when were in a raid group. But that is probably going to change. We will get something that buffs us, like moonkin form buffs our intellect and mana regeneration on the live servers.

What would be fun could be further modifiers to our abilities, or if it had a chance to empower us with “Spirit of the Owlbeast”. How about SotO being a proc that empowers the next ability to increase the damage of the next spell by x% or which will automaticly cast the next spell on every enemy within 15 yards of your target. Imagine the AOE we could whip up with that?

I don’t know what Blizzard will do about moonkin form. I am confident that they will make us something spiffy, something that will keep us in moonkin form. And as for the talents, I’m hoping that they will give us some focus soon, much like the lines of the focus we’ve seen them give paladins and the like.

It’s still beta. Everything will be fine.

CHILL!

Already, a lot of angry and confused posts are popping up around the web, from people who think these are the final verions of our talents. It’s not. It’s probably not. Chances are, we are most likely going to see many more changes – maybe. We are still in beta, and there is plenty of time for Blizzard to tweak the trees.

It would appear that my previous assumptions on the talent tree changes were correct. Most, if not all, passive talents have been stripped away, and we will get these as we spec into balance no problem there. No new talents were introduced, although some of the ones we did see was chanegd slightly. Lets take a look at the current status.

Build-a-spec

It is fairly simply to make a balance spec out of these talents. In fact, you can grab everything you want from balance with 31 points in balance, 5 points in resto and then you have 5 points to spend on Lunar Justice, Gale Winds and Owlkin Frenzy. You wanted customization? Well there you have it.

Should I really build a spec, the obvious choice for a PvE setting would be this: Wowtal.com. I would probably spend the last five on Gale Winds and Owlkin Frenzy for PvE, and maybe Lunar Justice for leveling.

I don’t know if Lunar Justice will ever be worth anything in PvE unless it automaticly generates the buff on you, or if it spawns the lunar beam on targets that you have helped kill but didn’t get the killing blow on. Everything else seems to be pretty straight forward choices, and in the current setup, even if you do take the wrong talents, you are not that far off.

Work in progress

I say “Chill”, because I know that people will be very quick to jump to conclutions. But if we take a closer look at some of the talents, you will notice that the tree is still far off from being done.

Nature’s Grace has gotten a spot at the top of the tree. But it is still marked with TBR – To Be Reworked / To Be Removed. In reality, they could keep the current implementation of Nature’s Grace, because with the increased cast time on Wrath, the haste cap seems far, far away. But alas, it will probably undergo some changes, and thats not all that bad either.

Blizzard also let it slip what we will be getting at level 10 when we spec into balance. Starsurge is on this list, yet it is still in the talent trees, which is a clear indicator that something needs to change.

A currious note was the full release from Blizzard, which reads:

Can take on the form of a powerful Moonkin, balancing the power of Arcane and Nature magic to destroy enemies at a distance.

• Starsurge
• Balance Druid (pushback reduction on balance spells)

Now, for some classes, namely those with tanking specs, their mastery is mentioned here. Ours isn’t. There could be several reasons for that. It immediately struck me that the wording they use for moonkin form is very similar to what they have written for restoration druids:

Uses heal-over-time Nature spells to keep allies alive, taking on the form of a tree when the need is most urgent.

• Restoration Druid (pushback reduction on healing spells)

Does this mean that we will have moonkin form as a pushback reducing ability, and not a permanent form, much like restoration druids tree being a use ability on a cooldown? Does it mean that we will get a permanent moonkin form which just has the ability (passive or active) to reduce pushback on spells? Or does this mean that Blizzard simply hasn’t decided yet?

I have previously stated – if not on this blog, then some forum – that I am actually fine with staying in caster form for the majority of the time, if my moonkin form is then worth using. The more special cooldowns we have, the better we can control our DPS together with Bloodlust, haste potions and the like. At the same time, though, I notice that Furor in the restoration tree still mentions Moonkin Form in its list, so this leads me to believe that we are probably still going to be perma-moonkin’ed, and that this is just a matter of wording.

There is no mention of when we will be getting the eclipse meter or the eclipse mastery. I would still venture to say that we will receive the eclipse meter at level 10, but that it just hasn’t made the list, and that we will probably be getting the mastery as we level up. For us 80′ers, it won’t make a difference, really. And for new moonkins, well, you are still much better off now than you were a year ago.

Notice that Omen of Clarity is not on the list at all. And if it were, we surely couldn’t reach it with only 10 points to spare. Omen of Clarity will probably be a trainable skill, which is fine. All druids like this spell. But even if its not, then that doesn’t mean its the end of the world. I mean, all it does is to serve as a mana regen talent, and if mana is covered elsewhere, it’s hardly a gamebreaker.

What I want

Now obviously, we still have to sit tight and wait for the trees to be tweaked. But I can still express my expectations – or demands, if you will – in the hopes that these will become reality:

• More info: This will come.
• More customization: I want to be given choices, even with only 41 point talents. I don’t want to just have to decide between Lunar Justice, Gale Winds and Owlkin Frenzy. I want some other talents that may or may not help me out in different settings, so that I can make a few decisions. Pie versus cake, you know?
• More creativity: Tied together with the bullet above, I really want a reason to spend my extra talent points in feral. Not because I want anything in feral, but because there should be something allowing me to, if I wish to do so. This could be PvP oriented talents for a balance druid for all I care. I am just tired of restoration being the only other tree to sink stuff into, when Feral could have some more “toughness” talents thrown into it, that would benefit a moonkin. I’m not saying I would want this for PvE, but there might be a lot of people that would want it for PvP.

In the end, there is not much news. We still have a ways to go before things are sorted out, and the trees still need a lot of love. So to recite my earlier statement: Chill!

- QQ