Lots of things has changed in Cataclysm, most notibly the fact that Hurricane is terrible for both damage and mana at this point in the game, but also the fact that Typhoon is actually a pretty awesome spell now.

But alas, many people seem to look down on Typhoon and on Gale Winds as a talent. I opt to change that!

Since the change to our eclipse, where we are buffing either nature or arcane spells, rather than just Starfire and Wrath, typhoon has been close to my heart. It’s been an ability that I’ve tried to use as much as possible, whenever it made sense to use it.

Obviously, Typhoon is a highly situational spell, but it’s should not be disregarded as easely anymore as we did before. As it turns out, Typhoon is worth casting instead of a Wrath when you have three targets or more. A typhoon does just around half the damage of a wrath when neither crits, so three targets would be a definite damage increase.

As an added bonus, Typhoon doesn’t generate any eclipse energy, so if you can cast it while in solar eclipse, you can dish out a lot of damage. It should be noted, however, that Typhoon does not gain as much crit % as wrath does, but three targets or more is still a good guideline.

It should be noted, of course, that it’s only worth casting Typhoon if the extra targets has to die. Sure, you can inflate your DPS, but if the adds doesn’t have to die, you are inflating your DPS on the meters, but you are doing less damage to the boss – where it matters.

But there are quite a lot of fights where Typhoon is useful. I’ll write some suggestions here, on the fights that I try to use it as much as possible, to give you a bit of inspiration:

Magmaw: Typhoon is a killer on Parasites, when you do it on normal, or for Constructs when you do it on heroic. There are usually two constructs and a giant worm up on heroic, but you are not doing your raid a favor if you are showering the Parasites if you are just going to kite them.

Omnitron: There are a few uses for the Omnitron encounter, namely when Toxitron spawns his adds. There are enough of them to do Typhoon even if you are in lunar eclipse.

Maloriak: Be it the Abbirations on normal or the Vile Slew on heroic, Typhoon is going to add a massive amount of damage.

Halfus: Do I really have to spell this out? Several dragons, especially on heroic. A ton of damage on the Whelp pack between Wild Mushroom Detonates.

Cho’Gall: The Corrupted Blood and the Tentacles are great targets for Typhoon.

In the end, there are probably a ton more uses for Typhoon. If you haven’t used it yet, now is the time. And since we are swimming in mana, once you are comfortable with your regen, you should have the points to spare for Gale Winds.

- QQ

Some of the changes to moonkins has already been announced, and they are pretty exciting to say the least. I wanted to take a moment to adress some of the more interesting changes (ei. I won’t be talking about soothe being instant!). Please note that we might still see a lot more changes on the PTR before the patch goes live.

Oh, and before I forget, I’m going to link to a page at the top of my site (way up at the top, in that little grey area, because that’s all I can do – maybe I’ll add a link in the side bar) where I’ll keep a list of PTR changes for this and future patches.

• Total Eclipse now increases bonus damage from Eclipse by 16%, up from 12%. Each point of Mastery now increases the bonus by an additional 2%, up from 1.5%.

Right off the bat, this is a nice little damage increase. We are basicly looking at 4% more damage during eclipse just by logging in, which is a 2-2,5% damage increase. More importantly, this is going to make Mastery more desirable than crit, but probably not as good as haste.

Please keep in mind, as I’ve been saying so far about mastery, this doesn’t make crit bad, it just means that you’ll get more damage from haste and mastery.

• Wild Mushroom is now instant cast, down from 0.5 seconds. In addition, the radius of detonation has been increased to 6 yards, up from 3, and damage done increased by 15%.
  Fungal Growth now has a 100 yards range, up from 30 yards.

Blizzard’s first attempts to fix Wild Mushroom. You will still have to place three shrooms manually, but you can do this while moving, or choose to move right after you target it on the ground. The range increase was greatly needed, and placing shrooms is a bit more forgiving now. The added damage will make shrooms a lot better for AOE. I am still sulking for a glyph that makes Wild Mushroom a bit more attractive in PvE, but a damage and range increase is a good start.

Just to avoid the confusion: The change to Fungal Growth is just to make sure that if you place down your treants and run away, they will still drop the snare when they die.

• Moonfire and Sunfire now costs 9% of base mana, down from 18% of base mana.

A minor correction to our mana usage. 3,3k mana for a moonfire, where insect swarm is only 1,5k mana is a bit steep.

• The Shooting Stars buff duration has been increased to 12 seconds, up from 8 seconds.

This might seem trivial, but this is actually a pretty neat change. Have you ever been in an encounter where you get frequent stuns, see Shooting Stars proc, and then disappear before you get out of the stun? This will get you back in the game fast after a stun, provided that you have your DOTs up and a little luck. It won’t break the game, but it’s a cute little change afterwards.

• Balance of Power now increases spell hit rating by an additional amount equal to 50/100% of any spirit gained from item or effects. (Old – Just 50/100% of your Spirit)

As far as I know, spirit from food and the like did not increase your hit rating. I didn’t bother to test this though.

• Typhoon now deals nature damage to target in front of the caster within 30 yards.
• Soothe is now instant cast, down from 1.5 sec cast.

So?

• Glyph of Wrath now increases damage done by Wrath by 10% and no longer requires Insect Swarm on the target.

This change is probably most interesting to PvP’ers. I don’t generally shoot many wraths without IS being up already – not to mention the fact that I’m not using Glyph of Wrath.

–

There you have it folks, the PTR changes so far. More might be on their way, but aside from Wild Mushrooms, I quite like our current situation in Cataclysm. Damage is fine, rotations are well balanced and we are not a force to be ignored.

- QQ

Wait. Sorry. I have to say this. I fall asleep at night dreaming about the day when I can stop making references back to Wrath of the Lich King. I don’t quite feel that we do Cataclysm justice by continuously comparing it to WOTLK. We need to look ahead. Work with what we’ve got. I’ll stop living in nostalgia now!

Cataclysm has changed the way we handle AOE, for better and for worse. I think its time we take a good, long look at our AOE abilities.

Hurricane

Back in Wrrrrr… The current state of hurricane is a bit of a mess. I find myself using it less and less, and whats worse, I find that I am berating myself whenever I do. Hurricane costs a metric shitton of mana, and its hard to consistantly use hurricane with moving mobs and random stuns being thrown about. And lest we forget, hurricane is now also subject to diminishing returns when there are too many mobs, something we haven’t really felt a huge impact off in.. err.. earlier times.

I am more than confident that Hurricane will be a useful spell again, as it scales with haste and becomes more powerful. But at the moment, it takes away such a huge chunk of my mana that I would often rather settle for single target nuke while everybody else AOE’s. I do suppose we are not the only ones with mana issues when it comes to AOE. I find that many casters are holding back on their AOE spells, and leave the massive damage spam to melee classes that has the resources to continue the hurt.

Wild Mushrooms

Shrooms were supposed to be our new, fancy AOE ability, but try as I might, I am constantly challenged by trying to find a place to put them. They are hard to set up before a pull, because mobs easely move away and out of range of them. Even when you have a stack of mobs in a controlled place, our shrooms might still not hit all of them.

One of the biggest issues I have with the shrooms are their cast time. A shroom for me takes 0,48 seconds to cast, but trigger a global cooldown. Already, that’s half a second wasted on each shroom. Then there is the need to detonate them, and while the detonation doesn’t trigger a cooldown, there is an actual delay before the shrooms bloom. I find it very difficult to get used to.

I would endure the torture of casting mushrooms more, if it wasn’t for the fact that their damage themselves are sort of lackluster. Mobs need to be kept tightly together for the shrooms to hit all of them, and you generally need a lot of targets for shrooms to really be worth it. And even when you do, shrooms are not sustained damage. That does 5.000 damage do on 10 mobs with half a million health, compared to all of the Fan of Knifes and Cleaves going about?

I’ve said it so many times before, and I’ll keep saying it again until some Blue walks by and decides that I’m the most brilliant person in the world: We need a Glyph of Shrooms. It needs to reduce the number of shrooms to one, and increase the damage to 20-30k damage, and the range to, say, 10 yards. It also needs to spawn on our target instead of forcing us to play 3D geometry targeting. Also, please let it kill gnomes instantly. Heck, just let them bloom by themselves, if glyphed, so we don’t have to use 7 clicks to do a tiny bit of damage to our target. Maybe then, it might begin to be fun to use!

Typhoon

I find that I am starting to have a little crush on typhoon. It’s actually not half bad. It is quickly becoming my favourite AOE ability, even if it has a somewhat long cooldown and a glitchy graphic. It’s still rather useless on single target bosses, but if you have just three targets, a typhoon will do more damage than wrath.

And we can’t ignore the fact that Typhoon is instant, so I’d actually almost settle for just hitting two mobs, and be happy with the results. And if you are staring into a roaring mass of 10 mobs, typhoon nearly makes me do my evil laugh.

The best thing about Typhoon, however, is the fact that we can now safely glyph for it with the new glyph system. It suddenly becomes much more versitile, and we have the room to glyph as we want. Knockbacks are generally not good in PvE, but I can safely glyph it away without worrying about using up room that I need for more powerful glyphs, and that makes Typhoon a fun – and useful! – spell to use.

Starfall

I have stopped seeing starfall as an AOE ability because, well, it doesn’t really do any AOE damage anymore. It is a wonderful spell to use, especially when there are many boss fights with more than one target. And the fact that it scales with lunar eclipse just makes it a wonderful little gift to bring out during a fight. Really, no complaints here. Well, maybe it could sort of ignore crowd controlled and un-engaged mobs, but hey, I’m not picky!

–

At the moment, I generally feel like I want to leave the AOE business to other classes. Let the melee have fun, or maybe the warlocks with their lifetap. It’s not like I can’t innervate myself, but 14k hurricanes that aren’t really “all that” doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve used Wild Mushrooms on a few boss fights, but they are generally sitting idly on my action bars. Our most exciting AOE abilities are on long cooldowns and are best used in a “few target setting”.

I’m sure everything will be better. Hurricane will scale with haste and shrooms will eventually be fixed. Until then, I’ll just DOT up mobs with insects and fire, and leave the rest to everybody else.

- QQ

Previously, this talent has been very lackluster for a 41-point ability. Up until Icecrown Citadel, the only fights where you would ever consider using this was A) Knockbacks on Faction Champions, and B) for AOE damage on Anub’Arak 25 heroic. But Icecrown Citadel offer us a few more places where Typhoon can be handy. Surely, it is not a major part of our class, but on those special encounters, it really does shine.

Typhoon as damage

A major reason for not using Typhoon in a regular rotation is its damage. To be completely blunt, the damage is terrible. With an average of 2.600 damage, I rarely find the motivation to use it – and this is an average considering crits and full raid buffs. This number is misleading somehow, because it is calculated by Wrath Calcs assuming full debuffs on the target. But since you would only use it for damage on several targets, it is unlikely that these targets would have full – if any – debuffs on them. But lets keep with 2.600 regardless.

Insect swarm, our very lowest damage spell these days, does a steady 8.515 damage in my gear. It also ticks very quickly, and buffs our wrath, giving it a use even at endgame raiding. But even with Insect swarm being so weak as it is, it still does more than three times the damage of Typhoon. In fact, if Insect Swarm can tick just two times, it has by itself done almost as much damage as Typhoon would do on a single target. That means that if your Insect Swarm has ticked for 6 seconds on a target, you gain more damage by clipping your dot, rather than casting Typhoon.

When you are up against several targets, you might consider using Typhoon. You may be moving around on Putricide, and be lined up in a way where you are able to hit both the Ooze and Professor. Yet this only yields you 5.200 damage, much less than if you threw a dot on either target, or stood still for a moment to cast a wrath. As above, if your Insect Swarm can tick for 10 seconds on the Ooze – which it usually can – you get more damage by putting the dot up, compared to throwing a bucket of water.

In fact, you need to be able to hit four targets before Typhoon does more damage than your dots, and there aren’t really that many occurences where you can do this. If three people in front of you are spiked on Marrowgar, and you are able to hit all three and the boss, then sure, fire away. If you are standing on the enemy gunship and are able to shoot down the line of Riflemen, fine, give them a shower. If a handful of Supressors are running towards Valithria, or if you can hit three Valkyrs and The Lich King, then by all means use it. But now, we have exhausted all the places where it may be useful to cast for its damage.

There is the argument for using it while moving. But you would always be refreshing your dots first, use starfall or treants, or pretty much every other ability before you would have a benefit from using Typhoon, and if you are moving for more than a few seconds at a time, something entirely different is wrong. I would even venture as far and say that it is better to refresh your dots again, so they are up for a longer time when you stand still and fire away wrath and starfire under eclipse, but at any rate you should generally not be moving for long distances very often. If you find that you are, consider if there are things you can change about your playstyle or tactics.

As a damage spell, Typhoon very rarely works out for us, and unless you care about your trash DPS, you should not consider it a damage spell.

Typhoon as crowd control

Say hello to my little friends: Daze and Knockback. There are few places where these come into play, but when they do, they are an absolutely wonderful tool for any raid. It is for this reason that you shouldn’t Glyph your Typhoon, for while you still retain the daze component if you use Glyph of Typhoon, you would generally want to keep the knockback anyways. You could reglyph everytime you do four or more trash mobs, but as I have stated so many times, I care little for trash and so should you.

It’s important to know how and when Typhoons crowd control components affects different targets. There are some places where you wouldn’t want to use it, because the targets could be affected by the knockback, for example on Rotworms during Dreamwalker, or the Ghouls in the first phase of the Lich King encounter. This usually knocks the targets in wild directions, and will do more harm than help. But there are other places where Typhoon’s components will be very useful.

Saurfang is a wonderful example of the prime place to use Typhoon. The spell is considered an AOE attack, so Saurfang’s Blood Beasts take little damage from it, but its ability to knock them back a good distance and daze them at the same time is worth its humidity in gold. I quickly became the knockback’er on Saurfang heroic, and coupled with a stun when they spawn, my knockback + daze takes care of most of the control on the Blood Beasts.

Valithria is another good example of an encounter where you can use Typhoon for its control component – and I’m not talking about the feeble Rotworms. As the encounter progresses, more and more mobs will swarm the room, and there is no greater feeling than slowing a pack of 3, 4, maybe 5 Supressors as they run to Dreamwalker. Its modest damage and the daze will ensure that the Supressors die faster and take longer to reach a point from where they can channel their debuff.

But there is one place where Typhoon is the most awesome spell to ever be made: The Lich King encounter. Resist the urge to want to use it during the first phase. The ghouls will usually die from incidential AOE, either cleaves, diseases or your own Starfall, or even more likely from the Necrotic Plague. DPS never have to be concentrated on the Ghouls and knocking them around could be very hazardous for the raid. Forget all notions of glyphing it for the encounter, for you will have much more use of it unglyphed later in the fight.

As you reach the second phase, the daze component comes into play. If a Valkyr runs lose, you can use Typhoon to daze it – Valkyrs does not get knocked back, but they are dimwitted enough to become slow and dull by a splash of water. It can be the difference between life and death if a stun misses or someone who was supposed to stun is grabbed. And you can still use your Typhoon for damage if you are able to hit all three Valkyrs and Arthas at the same time – even slowing them when they first grab their target gives more time for the rest of your raids DPS to spread some diseases or simply switch to them. The sooner you slow them, the closer they will be to each other, and you have more time before they separate – even if you do have them fly in the same general direction.

And then there is phase 3, where Typhoon gives you the ultimate moonkin power, control over life and death of the enemies you will be facing. As Vile Spirits swarm overhead, be ready to fire a burst of water. When you see them begin to move down towards the raid, Typhoon will not only knock them all back, but also daze them, giving your raid more time to clear them up and get them down. Use your Typhoon every single time the Vile Spirits begin to chase your friends, and you have probably given your raid another 5-10 seconds to kill the remaining spirits. And as your very soul gets pulled into Frostmourne, you no longer have to Warstomp your tauren hooves into the ground, or switch to bear form for a bash, in order to interrupt the evil spirits heal. A simple tap of Typhoon will interrupt the cast, and even keep the enemy away for a few seconds as it runs back. While people rarely gets drawn into Frostmourne more than once every few kills, Typhoon will shine when you do.

Tyhoon as a whole

I am happy that Typhoon has some sort of place on our hotbars, even if it only covers a very small niche. It has annoyed me greatly that our 41-point talents were either a 3 minute cooldown doing 25.000 damage or a weak damage spell with little viability in raids. While you wont ever need to use Typhoon on Festergut, Rotface, Blood Council and so forth, it will at the very least be very useful when you actually have a chance to use it.

It is up to you if you want to glyph Typhoon for every trash pack, but an unglyphed Typhoon is much more beneficial when there is an actual chance of using it. Don’t bother with typhoon on most fights, even for a little damage as you run, for there will rarely be times where you wouldn’t have something else to use, but be sure to send a wave of knockbacking, dazing destruction on the few encounters where you can – on these fights, it is a wonderful tool that will make your life a whole lot easier.

- QQ

So it is a bit disheartening to see the following:

• Nature’s Grasp: Now has 3 charges, up from 1.

Great for PvP I suppose. Definately not bursty, but anything helps the dueling moonkins, I suppose.

• Starfall: Te damage done by this spell has been significantly increased.

Great. In reality, it increases the initial hit by an average of 140 damage, and the splash damage by 23 damage. This gives it another 2.800 damage on a single target, or 3.260 for two targets. Not a massive buff, but a buff none the less, though it can hardly be considered a burst to do 2,8k more damage over 10 seconds.

• Typhoon: Mana cost reduced to 25%, down from 32%.

Allow me to take a moment to jump up and down. We now save 245 mana on each Typhoon. Joy.

I really hope that this is not the last thing we have seen to moonkin buffs this patch. A lot of other classes are getting some really nice buffs, and I do think we should get some love as well. Never the less, it’s not like the patch is out yet, so we might see more stuff coming soon.