So as I was wallowing in self pity over my man-flu – which, as everybody knows, is a lot more deadly than the regular flu’s women get – I have been browsing the forums quite a bit. I haven’t really had the energy to write much, but reading takes little energy.

And I feel that there is an issue that I must adress: Beta changes, and the way we react to them.

The whines

It started out with starsurge, when its knockdown was removed. This caused quite an outcry, because we suddenly lost a stun. It was a 2 second stun with a travel time, but it was still a stun. But without the stun, what was starsurge really? Nothing – except, ofcourse, the massive amounts of damage it could produce, and the awesome instant casts we can get.

Then, there was solar beam. It got it’s radius reduced. No longer did it cover a 20 diameter area as the only ranged AOE silence ability. Now it was “only” 10 yards diameter (or 5 yards from the center). Oh my god, what will we do with solar beam when it is just the only a 5 yard radius, 40 yard range AOE spell? Thank god they didn’t remove the ability to glyph it back up to 10.

And lastly, Blizzard removed Overgroth, the talent that lets us mass root everybody within 8 yards of our target. I guess we will simply have to make due with instant roots, and we must just accept that we can no longer keep a pack of 20 whatevers rooted indefinately.

Trust in Blizzard

There is no doub that we would have been better off if the abilities above didn’t get a nerf. But I don’t think that we are that much worse off than before.

But throughout the expansion, there are some people who has cried fire whenever they didn’t feel that something was right from their perspective. That’s probably fine, but I think it’s important to look at the broader picture. Some people have spent the expansion crying over how underpowered we were – even in the later tiers – where other people have had no problem performing their roles.

I have come to expect that Blizzard’s plans for our class will turn out well in the end. They are getting pretty good at balancing classes, at least to a reasonable degree. There might be one class that does more damage than you. There migth be another class that has more protective measures than you. There migth even be a few more classes that has more crowd controls than you.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I think Blizzard has done an outstanding job at correcting our issues. A whole new eclipse system, more power to our core abilities, better scaling, new and powerful nukes and a lot of small changes that will allow us to perform better than we do with our current setup.

From that perspective, Blizzard has done an outstanding job so far. We have certainly been changed in the major areas that we wanted them to focus on, and playing a moonkin will be a whole new experience.

Beta, beta, beta…

What really jeeves me is when people see the changes made on the beta realms as a personal affront to them. As if they can go “Blizzard gave us this, and now they took it away again, so they must hate us”. I think thats bull. As far as I’m concerned, if you haven’t had it on the live servers, then you haven’t had it at all.

This is the beta. This is where new ideas are tried and tested, and if they seem reasonable, they get to stay. If not, then they get the boot, and you will simply have to live with that.

My biggest issue is that, when people are crying NERF, it’s not really contructive feedback. “OHMAGAD, THEY NERFED THIS ONE THING” is the worst kind of reaction anybody can have. What happened to “I feel that this change might be a bit over the top, because…”. Isn’t that the excact reason why people are IN the beta in the first place – to give contructive feedback? What the hell are you even doing on the beta, if you can’t express your views in a proper manner – you’re certainly not helping Blizzard, and you are not being a proper representative of your class.

Do you really feel that a massive, instant starsurge hit with a knockback is very balanced? Do you think that a 15 yard radius on a glyphed solar beam is fair? I think its more than fine. If you disagree, thats fine, but express yourself with words, not grunts and moaning.

Everybody is acting like the beta ends tomorrow. It doesn’t. We are still weeks, probably months off a release, and even then, everything is balanced around level 85. You might feel underpowered on the beta servers at level 85 right now, but it’s beta for crying out loud – things can and will change, either to you, or to everybody else. If you believe that Blizzard has some notion of how to run their game after 6 years, then calm the fuck down, and see what happens

Oh, also..

Was I the only one that caught Bibi’s little string of thoughts that maybe, just maybe, some of these things (talking Overgrowth here) might simply be for the PTR release, and is simply planned to go out when Cataclysm ships? I certainly think that instant AOE roots would be way too powerful for the current state of the game. Imagine having instant, AOE roots on fights like Deathwhisper, Saurfang, Dreamwalker or Lich King. That one ability could negate core elements of these fights.

If Bibi is right, you will still get your instant AOE roots, but you’ll have to wait until Cataclysm. If not, then you can probably live without them.

I’d like to apologize for any lingering anger in this post. I blame it on my man-flu. Being this close to death surely brings out my emotional side

So, I wanted to talk a bit about Glyphs. There will probably still be glyph changes around, but for now, I want to talk to what is available and what we have in store.

Playing on the PTR, I’ve been working hard on trying to settle in with a new rotation. I’ll admit, it’s not easy to get used to. I had to concentrate quite a lot on not forgetting starfall, which is odd, since I am usually spot on with that. Starsurge feels odd to get into our rotation as well, but I guess its just a matter of getting used to it. When I started out as a moonkin, my rotation was so messy, so having to learn something new probably isn’t that bad.

But now it is time to see how our glyphs might affect our gameplay. Lets theorycraft!

To begin with, I stood at the dummy for some 10 minutes, casting away, trying to keep a proper rotation. I just wanted a relatively stable log to analyze. Please refer to the screenshot for approximate numbers. The lag was pretty bad, so my 13.000 DPS isn’t excactly a superb representation, but then again, the lag is equal for all spells, so I am fine with this initially.

Not all glyphs are available, so my approach to this was actually to remove all of them. Well, I did keep Glyph of Starfall, because I am fairly confident that I will keep that anyways. Just keep in mind that the numbers above – except for starfall – are all unglyphed.

These are supposed to be easy choices for DPS increases. Blizzard wants you – thats right, YOU – to be able to take the right glyphs without having to go to third party sites for tips. But “supposed” doesn’t really work very well, when the actual DPS increases are sort of hard to gauge, and I’ve changed my mind repeatedly over the last few days myself.

Prime Glyphs

Insect Swarm – Increases the damage of your Insect Swarm ability by 30%.

Insect Swarm has a massively huge DPET, somewhere around 35-40k damage in a single GCD in my current gear. So I figured it would be an obvious choice to pick. Insect Swarm was 17,7% of my total damage. With a 30% increase to that number, I would get another 5,31% more damage overall.

Moonfire – Increases the periodic damage of your Moonfire ability by 20%.

Moonfire’s DPET was somewhere around 25.000 damage each cast, and with moonfire being 8,4% of my total damage, the glyph would increase my overall damage by 1,68%.

EDIT: I forgot to take into account that Glyph of Moonfire should affect Sunfire as well. That would double the bonus from this glyph.

Starfire – Your Starfire ability increases the duration of your Moonfire effect on the target by 3 sec, up to a maximum of 9 additional seconds.

I got to tell you, I am not a huge fan of this glyph. Moonfire’s DPET is around 25.000, which puts its DPS at 1388,89. 9 more seconds would increase the duration of moonfire by 9 seconds, giving it a DPET of 37.500 – the DPS stays the same. It is a 50% increase in the damage done by moonfire, which does increase my total damage by 4,2%.

At first glace, if we bump this together with Glyph of Moonfire, we are looking at a 5,88% DPS increase from both glyphs in total. However, I was often clipping my moonfires, because I had to put up Sunfire whenever I procced a new eclipse. That cuts away a lot of the extra damage. This is fine at low levels of haste, but once we get a lot of haste, the Glyph becomes less useful.

Glyph of Starfire does increase the duration of sunfire. But I don’t really see any argument for casting starfire while sunfire is up, because this would be either in solar eclipse, or when we are rushing to proc our next lunar eclipse.

Starsurge – When your Starsurge deals damage, the cooldown remaining on your Starfall is reduced by 5 sec.

This is really hard to calculate, because the number of starsurges we cast is really random. I am going to disregard Shooting Stars completely for now, because we could either proc it just before Starsurge would be off cooldown anyways, or just after – it is a huge difference in damage.

Without shooting stars, we get 4/6 starsurges off between each starfall. This reduces the cooldown by 20/30 seconds, which means it effectively increases starfalls damage by 33%. This doesn’t really change whether starfall is glyphed or not glyphed. Any procs of Shooting Stars will just increase the bonus.

Using this number, and assuming that starfall (see below) is either 6,6667% of my damage (unglyphed) or 10% of my damage (glyphed), the total damage increase from Shooting Stars would be 2,22% or 3,333%.

Wrath – Your Wrath does 10% additional damage to targets afflicted by your Insect Swarm.

This is pretty straight forward. Wrath was 24,8% of my total damage. 10% more to this number is a 2,48% DPS increase.

So where do we stand? The top damage increases are:

• Glyph of Insect Swarm: 5,31% more overall damage.
• Glyph of moonfire: 3,36%, assuming it affects Sunfire as well.
• Glyph of Starsurge: 2,22% to 3,33% (unglyphed/glyphed starfall) – plus even more whenever Shooting Stars proc.
• Glyph of Starfire: 4,2% – however, we lose 1/9th of this bonus for each second of moonfire we clip. If I clip 3 seconds, the bonus is down to 2,8%, which is why I place it here.
• Glyph of wrath: 2,48%

From this, I can conclude that glyphs of IS, Starsurge and Moonfire gives me a total increase of 12% more damage. Glyphs of IS, Starsurge and Starfire gives me a total inscrease of 12,84% more damage, but this drops very quickly if I happen to clip a DOT. It might prove very potent when we are just in level 85, and if we realise that we are still a long way from lunar eclipse when moonfire falls off, but we need only to clip an extended moonfire by 2 seconds before this bonus falls below the IS/Surge/MF combination.

We will have to see how our haste looks at level 85. Ofcourse, with less haste, it will also take less time to reach the other side of, so it may very well be that IS/Surge/SF is more beneficial at first, and that we then transition into IS/Surge/MF.

Major Glyphs

Focus – Increases the damage done by Starfall by 10%, but decreases its radius by 50%.

Definately not a fan of this. Starfall is powerful, but I don’t like to limit my range of movement to 20%. However, there aren’t really that many choices for major glyphs at the moment.

Monsoon – Reduces the cooldown of your Typhoon spell by 3 sec.

Unless Blizzard does something radical to Typhoon, it will continue to be a relatively weak spell for PvE. But alas, what else is there to take?

Starfall – Reduces the cooldown of Starfall by 30 sec.

In my parse, starfall did 88.900 damage. This was with the dummies around, so I would have gotten 20 stars off. Assuming a single target fight, the damage per starfall would be 44.450. I didn’t always cast it during lunar eclipse, mind you.

Using reverse math, as if I wasn’t glyphed for starfall, we can cut off 33% of its damage. In other words, my total damage would have been 3,3333% less. In my world, and with my stupid math, that puts the Glyph of Starfall at a 3,3333% DPS increase, give or take.

Definately the strongest of the current major glyphs. There is no competition here.

Glyphs of Entangling Roots, Hurricane, Rebirth, Solar Beam and Thorns might all be very nice, but they are situational at best. You can probably swap these for Glyph of Monsoon if you’d like, because you’re probably not going to be using Typhoon very often. Heck, you might even pick one more for funsies, and put it in instead of Glyph of Focus. Starfall takes a hit, but at least you don’t have to be sure that you are within 20 yards of your target. I think this is a great discouragement to Glyph of Focus.

So the choices for major glyphs are really dim at the moment. Your optimal damage setup is Starfall/Focus/Monsoon. I think I could live without focus and monsoon, though.

Minor glyphs

lol

What needs to change?

This was a lot of text. And I’m sure that Blizzard will have changed all of this tomorrow, making this huge post redundant. But through my stupid-math, I have estimated what glyphs I want to use, if they stay as they are. But that doesn’t mean that I am quite satisfied with them yet.

I’d like to see a Glyph of Treants. Let’s have a pet, eh, that would be kind of fun. I’d love Glyph of Starfire to be changed, because it doesn’t have a lot of transparancy. Glyph of Moonfire could probably need a buff, maybe making it 40% so it comes closer to Insect Swarm. Glyph of Wrath seems dull in general. I feel like these prime glyphs should probably all be very close to each other, so it is more of a choice of playing style where the DPS differences are marginal.

Major Glyphs are lacking badly. We have two glyphs for Starfall, one that cuts our range in half. The last one reduces the cooldown of a spell that is always off cooldown because we never use it. The rest of them are major changes to situational spells, which is fine. We might just be swapping glyphs often enough, but on a large scale of boss fights, not one of them are common enough to be “standard”. I’m hoping we’ll see more glyphs here.

What is to come? I don’t know. The glyphs are fun, but not very transparent, and they definately still need some work. I just hope they don’t change it too much – this post took like two hours to write.

- QQ

• Wild Mushroom changed, only 3 mushrooms can be placed at one time (Down from 5).
• Cyclone cast time increased to 2 sec. Up from 1.5 sec.
• Faerie Fire now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Insect Swarm now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Starfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Entangling Roots now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Thorns now lasts 20 sec, down from 10 minutes. Damage increased by 1400% (Deals 447 damage instead of 32)
• Moonfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Wrath now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
• Moonkin Form now increases Nature and Arcane spell damage by 10%.
• Starlight Wrath now reduces cast time by 0.15/0.25/0.5 sec. (Up from 0.1/0.2/0.3 sec)

First off, props to the creative way to make us want to stay in moonkin form. Ah well, we don’t really need anything fancy to do that, the “you get more damage here” sign will do the trick.

A lot of our spells have gotten increased range. In our case, it seems like a generic 40 yard range, but this is not the case for all classes! It would seem like some spells, for all classes, are capped at 30 yards where others have a 40 yard range. This is interesting because it means I can nuke a warlock from 40 yards range, but he would have to walk 10 yards to be close enough to cast a fear. Not a bad way to force people to make the decision between nuking, healing or CCing.

Starligth Wrath was buffed, which makes sense, while Wild Mushroom was nerfed to 3 shrooms at any one time. Lets take a moment to write up a long blog post about Shrooms being nerfed, so that we.. wait, nevermind. We don’t know the amount of damage it does, how it plays into our rotation, what glyphs it will have and so on. I guess we’ll just wait and see instead.

Lastly, a very interesting change to thorns: It is now a defensive spell. Defensive in the way of saying “If you touch me, you’re going to hurt!”. It is a fine way to do some extra damage, especially if you are either AOE grinding, tanking a bunch of mobs, or if you are being ganked by a rogue. It is no longer a weak retribution aura, but an offensive defense spell, which should give us a bit of fun.

- QQ

So lets take a look at the current moonkin glyphs, and talk about which benefit us the most, and when to pick one over the other. This is, ofcourse, purely from a PvE perspective. Things are a whole lot different when it comes to battlegrounds or arena, and I will not cover them from fear of giving out some seriously bad advice.

There are 11 glyphs that we could possibly ever consider to use. These are Glyph of Barkskin, Entangling Roots, Focus, Hurricane, Innervate, Insect Swarm, Monsoon, Moonfire, Starfall, Starfire and Wrath. The list is actually quite long, but most of them have no real place in a PvE setting.

Lets look at them in order of usefulness.

Glyph of Moonfire

Since most of us will be in tier 9, or will be soon now that we are swimming in triumph badges, I would venture that Glyph of Moonfire is one of our strongest glyphs – heck, it even is without the 2pt9 bonus. Couped with talents such as Nature’s Splendor, we benefit greatly from the dot from moonfire, and this should be in every single moonkin spec.

Glyph of Starfire

Alongside with Glyph of Moonfire, this is a very nice addition. Up to 9 more seconds on a very powerful dot is just too much to pass up on, and this will ensure a good, long life on your moonfire. Not only that, the glyph also allows you to cast starfire even if moonfire is just about to run out, and as long as you get it in a second before moonfire runs out, you will keep the dot ticking for another 9 seconds, increasing your critical strike chance on starfire. This is a must have.

Glyph of Insect Swarm

Much focus has been on IS vs Starfall, so I recently set out to find out which one would actually give the biggest benefit. I did some quick calculations on MMO-Champion and found that a glyphed, raidbuffed, target debuffed insect swarm with 3400 spell power does about 9203,285 damage. Thats a lot for a 1 GCD spell. This is more powerful than an eclipsed starfire, which crits for 15.000+, but takes two GCD’s to cast. It does fall short of an eclipsed wrath that doesn’t crit, but it’s safe to say that if you have your insect swarm glyphed, its worth putting it up whenever it falls off.

Glyph of Starfall

Insect Swarms big contender. While starfall does more damage than insect swarm per second spent casting (both 1 second), with starfall doing over 20.000 damage on a single target and more if it can splash on to others, it’s breaking point is the long cooldown. In the time you can cast one glyphed starfall, you will have cast four insect swarms, but you will also have been through about two solar eclipses, given a great 3% buff to your wraths. Thats not to say that you shouldn’t take the ability for starfall, because it is still a great way to spend a global cooldown – in fact, its only beat by Force of Nature, which does anywhere from 30-40.000 damage on a single global cooldown, but I don’t think its worth glyphing for unless you are going into a AOE specific fight. Even then, you have to consider how often you can benefit from the glyph, and Anub’Arak heroic is a prime example of that. Some guilds AOE down the adds whenever they come, and this means that even with a 1 minute cooldown, starfall probably wont be up for the second group. My guild, however, hold the second pack of adds until Anub has burrowed, and this allows me to use starfall on every add pack up until phase 3. For this fight, I benefit from it, but I only include this in my AOE spec.

Glyph of Innervate

If you are just starting out, Glyph of Innervate can be a good help. It can give you a boost if you use Innervate on other classes, and an even bigger boost if you use your innervate on yourself. But as your gear progresses, you will drop more and more mana talents, and even innervate will be sitting untouched on your action bars on most fights. With no mana talents other than a single point in Moonglow, and the pitiful mana regeneration I get from my two filler points in Owlkin Frenzy, I hardly ever drop below 80% mana in a raid, so suffice to say, Glyph of Innervate would be a wasted slot for me.

Glyph of Focus

It might seem like a nice boost to get 20% more damage on starfall, but this loses its edge as starfall will still be on a 1,5 minute cooldown. It adds up to about 4000 more damage on a single target fight, but it only adds about 40 more DPS over the 90 seconds you wait until you cast the next. I’m not even sure I would take this if I had a fourth slot for my major glyphs, and I don’t think you should either. Another hinge for Glyph of Focus, is that you generally don’t want to be so close to a boss. 15 yards is just too close for comfort.

Glyph of Hurricane

This is beneficial on very few fights. Heck, the only time I have ever used this is on the new Saurfang encounter in Icecrown, where we we’re low on hunters and thus needed a way to slow the adds. As long as you have hunters or shamans to slow the blood beasts, you wouldn’t want to use hurricane, because while it does slow them down, they take very little damage from AOE. Your DPS will take a hit, and even though you are helping your raid get through the fight, it would be much more beneficial to slow them some other way if it allows you to single target them down.

Glyph of Barkskin, Entangling Roots, Monsoon and Wrath

No.

- QQ