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.

To begin with, I changed the theme of the blog and added the changing gallery at the top of the front page to let people in on what the site was about. That was all fine and dandy, but it wasn’t enough. I set out to find something bigger…

It was apparent to me that I needed some moonkin on my site, something that would catch the eye of visitors. And as you can see now, I have certainly made some changes. After searching through dozens of artists making World of Warcraft fan art (and there are a lot, let me tell you that), I stumbled upon one who’s pen strokes spoke to me. At the very least, this seemed to be the person I could work with towards what I wanted. As it turned out, what I wanted wasn’t nearly as good as what I got!

So first, we made the logo. So far, it has just been some English Old Text font with some shading effects. My artist, Ginny “Immamoonkin” Higerd suggested a logo where we incorporated moons and eclipses into the logo, the result of which you see at the top of the page. I thought it was a brilliant idea, and a very moonkin-y one at that. I am probably going to tweak the colors of it a bit to make it sit better on the page, but the overall image is absolutely gorgeous.

I had an idea to have a background feature some moonkins. Then Ginny was all like “Well, what if we have a moonkin write a book?”. This quickly turned out to become one of the most freaking awesome pieces of WoW graphics I have ever seen: Myself, sitting by the fire, writing in a huge book!

I cannot find the words about how pleased I am with how it turned out. It looks absolutely nerdgasmic. And as such, the site has been updated, moonkinyfied and is now looking more spiffy than ever! There are a few easter eggs hidden around on the background, so if you are ever bored, try and see if you can spot them.

If you like what you see, you should definitely check out Ginny’s page on magicalmelonball.com, which redirects to her Devian Art page. It has a ton of cool images she has drawn, and if you fancy yourself a little image, I’m sure she can work something out for you.

If you want to take a look at the background, click below for the full size image!

[singlepic id=102 h=500 float=center]

I totally “get” the idea. It would be strange if Blizzard runs three major games and don’t offer some way to communicate between them. I can chat with my friend while he flies around in Starcraft 2, and my guild master can see if I’m skipping a raid to play Diablo 3.

Of course, people can’t see you like this unless they know your Battle.net e-mail. You have to share that e-mail with your friends before they can add you, and you have to approve new friends as they send a request – online the current friend system ingame that just lets people add you without your knowledge. They get more information on you, after all, so that is fitting.

Check out my new post on Real ID – real names on public forums!

Incidently, my Battle.net e-mail is also my personal e-mail. An e-mail that many people have, that many people can find via Facebook and forums, so I worry just how many requests I might get. Unwanted requests, that is. The Facebook tool is slightly annoying – only slightly. A quick way to avoid this whole Facebook thing would be to hide your e-mail from friends, making the tool unable to see your e-mail and unable to check if it is tied to a Battle.net account. Or, you could simply change the e-mail on your Bnet account – although that seems like a bit of a hassle.

I guess it would be a bit too paranoid to think that random business contacts were to look me up just to see if I was a gamer, and even if they did, they would be marked as nerdy little gamers too. However, it is free to create a Battle.net account, so the question really is if its possible to create a Bnet account with no games at all, and add people to it.

So is it actually useful? Yes, I suppose it is for some people. Personally, there are very few people I would add, if any. I have a very good friend who is likely to play a lot of Starcraft 2 – but we can chat over MSN or the like anyways. Then there are some old friends from previous guilds that would be fun to talk to – but I have those on MSN as well, and with the luxury of no less than three monitors, I don’t think I’m going to miss room for an MSN chat box. It would be cool to talk to alliance players on my server, but I don’t know any, but I suppose it could be fun to add other druids who are active in the community, and have a chat with them once in a while.

To be fair, I don’t have that many friends… who plays Blizzard games. I mean, real life friends… who plays Blizzard games. I can count them on one hand. Oh sure, there are probably more, but we don’t really talk WoW or anything. I consider many of my guild mates my friends as well, but there is no need for them to have my Real ID when all of my alts are on the same server and in the same guild. And if I’m not ingame, I am usually on Ventrilo.

But I may just be a special case. It might just be me, so saturated with other programs and so snoppy about this new initiative that I won’t really find a use for it. It is a good idea, and I’m sure that there are tons of people who will benefit a lot from it. I just don’t think I would use it for more than just a few people, if any.

How about you? Will you be a Real ID fanatic?

Check out my new post on Real ID – real names on public forums!