I apologize in advance if this has been covered before, but I searched and didn't find any topics discussing this.

Basically, I'm wondering what most raid leaders think of bringing a moonchicken to 25 mans. The aura is great for DPS casters and they can be a good support class and have pretty decent DPS provided they are well geared for it.
Moonkins have always been a sort of running joke among our guild. But currently one of our druids is thinking about going balance and I'm wondering if it's worth it.

The cons of a moonkin as I see it:
1. There are usually several (3-4) healing and tanking druids already in the average raid - bringing in an extra druid can sometimes disrupt class balance issues.

2. Moonkins are very gear dependent in order to maintain high DPS without running OOM. IMO, most of the time it is probably just better to bring a mage or warlock as pure DPS/AoE, or a shammy or shadowpriest as support/DPS.. or am I dead wrong?

3. They must be able to manage their aggro well as they have no aggro reduction abilities (that I know of?)

Now with all of these things combined it seems to me a moonkin is probably not even worth the raid spot most of the time. As most moonkin I have personally witnessed, don't really know what the hell they are doing.. they will either pull aggro and die early on, or run OOM and be crap DPS, waste innervates on themselves, etc..

Now I know a skilled moonkin that has maximized gear (+spell damage and MP5?) and spec, can be a valuable support class in raids.

The question is how viable? Do any of the top guilds run with a moonkin regularly? Wouldn't it just be better to bring another mage or warlock or shaman instead of a moonchicken most of the time? Seems to me a Spriest or shaman is better in a group of casters than a moonkin, especially on mana intensive fights.
Granted, that extra innervate and combat rez and moonkin aura is always nice, but is it worth the raid spot?

(My guild is currently 3 bosses into SSC and 2 into TK)

My guild is far from high end, but we do have experience with a raiding moonkin; and yes he is pretty much a waste of a raid slot. In a mix of blues and kara epics (about 840 nature damage) he consistently pulls around 450 DPS. Whether that's a function of the player or class, I don't know. But I have yet to ever be impressed by any moonkin I've grouped with.

Also, here's a moonkin thread on the second page of this forum: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t11582-d...s_spreadsheet/

He should be able to put out more than that just by spamming Wrath.

Our moonkin is in blues and already pulling 450 DPS -- regardless of whether or not it's a good 25 man spec, your moonkin could be working a bit harder.

My guild certainly isn't 'High End' We're 3/5 in SSC (No Hydross), and of course Lootreaver.

We run a group that consists of myself (Ele Shaman), Boomkin, Destro Lock, Mage, Mage.

Basically, the Lock and 2 Mages can adjust their gear to the fact that they get 4% to hit from me. Plus we're handing them 8% crit as a bonus. Our Boomkin is almost always top 4-5 DPS, and on fights that are especially un-melee-friendly he wins quite often. He manages his aggor and mana pool like a champ despite the fact that we lack a shadow priest. (Only one in the guild and the healers get it...we've done most of our guild firsts with no Shadow Priest including FLK...)

So for us, he clearly is viable. Not only is he providing 5% crit, and swarm of insects and all that, but his DPS is great.

Maybe every last caster in our guild is terrible and he shouldn't be on top, but from my experience Boomkins are great.

Replace the moonkin with a shadowpriest, hell replace anyone in that group with a shadowpriest and you'll get much much bigger numbers from your casters.

This is a big one. If you have 4 druids and you regularly run with all 4, having one go moonkin can be a blessing (esp if you're healer heavy). However, if you're thinking about *adding* a druid slot, I would think long and hard before taking a moonkin in that slot.

Shaman > Moonkin. However, if you have 3 shamans already ... there's an option there. Some guilds (like mine) run with few druids -- if one of them, who already has a raid slots, goes Moonkin, there are benefits.

It's fairly trivial to go 15 points in Restoration and gain a 20% threat reducer. It's not enough, but it does help (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft).

It takes a truly skilled player to make a moonkin work well. And if you are pre-BT (like 99% of us), the only gear available for such a player is either cloth, or T4/T5. It's easy enough to hit 1000 nature damage : the question is then what to do with it. The theorycraft says that a moonkin should be able to perform approximately on the level of a fire mage, *assuming* the fire mage gets no synergistic buffs. Unfortunately, this will never be the case -- fire mages get CoE and Imp Scorch stacks; Moonkins get neither. It's a very similar build : one spams Fireball, the other spams Starfire (and Scorch/IS are similar in terms of mixing the cycles).

But done properly, it's much *much* easier to do high dps as a fire mage than a moonkin.

We have a moonkin in our guild. The 3% hit buff does help. But realistically, she's never topped 600 dps in a raid setting. On Dr. Boom she's able to hit about 850, but somehow in the stress of combat, it never works out that way. We're tolerating it for now, and hoping that with a bit more gear and practice, she'll push her numbers higher.

For SSC/TK, I'd be perfectly happy with 700 dps. If she could do that on every fight, I'd take her along. 5% crit as an aura is powerful for both paladins and the dps casters (mages, locks, ele shaman), and the 3% hit debuff is amazingly powerful. Even if you just consider it as bringing your tanks up to their hit cap, that's a LOT of threat headroom you just handed to your raid.

We have druid who can't decide on roles and with crafted gear (+750dmg or something), some blues and Karahazan epics, he can easily sustain 600-700dps on bosses (with me, a spriest in his Karahazan group that is).

I view him as a mage with different extra utility next to dps.

Benefits in a group of all casters from Shadow Priest >> benefits from Moonkin. But that completely ignores the benefit of Imp Faerie Fire.

It's very similar to the arguments about bringing a Ret Paladin. People focus the argument *only* on the group buffs (+2% aura, +5% crit aura), and ignore the raid-wide buffs (mostly because they're very very hard to quantify).

Unfortunately, JoW/JoL/JotC > Imp Faerie Fire, so you actually have more of a case in the ret case than the moonkin case.

[As a side note: we typically will stack shadow priest + 3 mages + moonkin *or* shadow priest + destruction warlock x2 + moonkin + fire mage as a group composition.]

Clearly we'd love to have a shadow priest. We don't and we can't get one. Trust me we're trying. We have a priest that was going to be shadow but we simply can't find enough decent healers. As it is our one SPriest sits with 4 healers.

That's another thing I had forgotten to mention. Another Battle Rez is always nice to have. Granted the cost of the rez+shifting back to oomkin costs about 2k mana and could potentiall cripple the boomkin into an oomkin.

Also, on most fights I start with Tranquil air down. When it comes time to re-drop totems I look at the gap between the MT and the boomkin. If it's big enough, I swap to Wrath of Air. Later at the next re-drop I check again. Basically adding Tranquil either some or all of the time is a benefit to oomkin DPS.

You could argue that dropping Wrath would benefit the other casters more but seeing as how he's winning DPS for us alot I don't see why I should not continue to help his threat. On most fights I drop totems at least 5 times and if 2-4 mintues of the 10 are tranquil, and the rest wrath I don't see it hindering anybody that much either.