Thousand

We just recruited a moonkin, and I can say for a fact our dps as a raid has definitely gone up, and he himself does respectable dps. However, there are some fights where we do have the class balance issues and sometimes I can see them not inviting him.

As a rogue I definitely enjoy that 3% hit.

 

Jeru

My experience with Moonkins so far was that the +crit is really nice, but almost all the times I had one in the party, they would shift out to heal after 50% because of aggro issues, dropping the aura. Plus the range is too short for fights with lots of running around, like Gruul and Void Reaver.

 

Lambach

Same range as frost mage, better range then shadow priest. Your comment isnt valid. And I very very rarely pull off our tank and I'm running 1450 talented fully buffed spell dmg. If your moonkin is pulling a normal agro raid boss off your tank your tank needs some serious work.

 

Shawn

I think he is referring to the aura's range. And that is actually somewhat of another downside compared to the LotP-aura which Ferals provide: Melees will always be in melee-range thus will benefit from the aura all the time.

I like "my" Moonkin and he's doing really decent on the Damagemeters though the benefit a Feral offers to the raid is a lot bigger.

 

Lambach

Thank you shawn that makes much more sense. Although i see his point now, its the same range as untalented totems and lotp, you cant expect miracle buffs.

 

berg

Our guild is very open to hybrid builds but we have no experience with raiding moonkin, mostly due to lack of interest from our druids. But as someone who spends too much time thinking about group composition there are problems that make adding a moonkin seem somewhat more trouble than maybe it is worth.

I'll list the problems that I perceive moonkin having and it would be interesting to see if any of these notions are actually false.

1) From a group composition standpoint it seems difficult to have an elemental shaman and a moonkin without dropping to 2 mages. Having 3 mages is often very beneficial for trash clears and it is somewhat tacky to have someone clear trash then sit. I would be curious to see some successful raid makeups that incorporate an elemental shaman a moonkin and 3 mages.

2) Moonkin seem to compare poorly to elemental shaman. The dps between the 2 seems pretty similar but the elemental shaman is free to patch heal, cure and blood lust at his leisure. The moonkin is forced to shapeshift to do anything which hurts them. The moonkin buffs are great but bloodlust + cooldowns is just an amazing dps gain so it is not clear to me that the moonkin even wins in that department. This overall comparison is what leads me to believe that moonkin really need to be buffed in some way.

3) This opinion is kind of removed from this particular topic but a raid has to squeeze as much dps as they can out of the ~15 dps players. It is proving very easy to create powerful 'cookie cutter' melee and hunter groups. Casters though have so many cross-class dependencies that it can seem like more trouble than it is worth to try to truly min/max these groups. Shadow Priest, CoS, CoE, Shaman totems, moonkin buffs etc. At some point a raid needs to decide what approach to take and, if the encounter allows for it, focusing on melee/hunter dps seems like an easier approach to raiding right now.

 

Lambach

I completely agree that elemental shaman are better group buffers then moonkin. However, sometimes you cant get one. Doesnt make moonkin not viable.

We usually run our caster group:

Elemental
Moonkin
Mage x2
Demo lock

The synergy works out really well, and the 3 nonbuffing casters gain great dps output from it.
I can outdps most mages on top of being able to add a group buff. If I saw mages consistently above me in dps I'd agree, but its just not happening(really long fights however do put a strain on my pot cooldowns).

 

Torrential

Group 1
Prot Warrior
Bear Tank
Pally
Aff Lock
Survival Hunter

Group 2
Rogue
Rogue
Arms Warrior
Cat/Bear Drood
Resto Shaman

Group 3
Swing Lock (This is the guy that respecs for things like when we thought illhoof required nether prot, and he's soul link for leo, all that stuff)
Destro Lock (Possibly swapped into group 4)
Mage
Resto Shaman
Mage (This could be alot of things, BM Hunter for example, my guild just happens to be mage heavy)

Group 4
Shadow Priest
Boomkin
Ele Shaman
Mage (Possibly swapped for that destro lock in 3)
Mage

Group 5
Pally
Priest
Priest/Pally
Resto Drood
Shadow Priest

Edit:
Our boomkin has gear that puts him at the hit cap with me, and gear for without me. It's a safe bet as we both sit at pretty much 100% attendance and I'm an officer/raid leader. The shadow priest in our group needs a whopping 2% to hit from gear to be capped because of the 4% I give.

To fully take advantage of group symetry you need to gear accordingly, I think.

 

berg

That raid Torrential goes back to my point # 3 a couple posts up. It is a raid heavily focused on maximizing caster dps but with no hunter group and a melee group with no enhance shaman.

I guess in the end it just seems harder to maximize caster dps versus having 2 stand alone cookie cutter melee groups that are both completely optimized and independant like these.

Rogue
Rogue
Enh Shaman
War
War/Rogue

and

Hunter
Hunter
Resto Shaman
Shadow Priest
Feral Druid (bear or cat irrelevant)

I guess part of my confusion is that we have taken the easy road and focused on maxing physical dps since it is relatively simple to do so.

 

• Efejel

Just to throw this out there, moonkin aura is 30 yards, LotP is 45. *sigh*

 

MooKin

To the OP,

In my experience, Moonkins are not really raid viable atm due to the following issues:

1. Sub par dps even with competitive gear and fully potted/supported group setup.
2. Huge mana issues on boss fight that require massive manapot use.
3. Battlerez raid utility is marginal if you have a few feral/resto druids.
4. Resto/Feral mode brings way more benefits to raids then a moonkin.

My observations:

1. As a full balance druid with 1137dmg 22%crit 152hit rating in raidmode, I stuggle to break 800dps on most raids even with bloodlust/wrath totem. On short fights where wrath is viable I can push 900dps. Honestly I do not see a lot of upside even with a T5 4set bonus when other classes can push 1000dps pre-T5.

2. Mana usage is a major issue on 10min fights, and I have to resort to popping Dreamless Pots with Alch Stone just to keep from running out of mana. Sup mana pots are not enough most of the time. Maybe for uber guilds that kill 10min bosses in 6-7min moonkins can do better.

3. Moonkin Aura is great imo.

Overall to make a moonkin raid viable you need a moonkin that will work their ass off, potting up for all raids, bringing and using tons of mana pots and then you might have to group them with a shaman just to make them viable. But once your dps classes consistently break 1000dps on bosses, the moonkin will fall behind.

P.S. With the new /stopcasting revision Blizzard is working on, moonkins might see a major dps increase especially with wrath spamming. Will be curious to see the impact of not getting a lag penalty on a 1.5sec cast if it is ever implemented.

 

Dioneirra

Right now i still feel viable while raiding. We are a starting raid with not much progress whatsoever besides Gruul, and wildly mixed composition. We don't have resto druids, and only a single feral druid, which isn't always available. So sometimes i'm the only one who can buff and c-rez, this alone makes me wanted.

My group composition usually is Moonkin + 2x Deep Fire/Arcane Mage + Ele Shaman + Priest/Lock/Mage/Paladin (depending on who is availabe, the priest is not shadow, we don't have a shadow priest). During trash fights i can break 1K DPS with a little luck, Boss encounters usually nets about 700-750 dps, depending on how much i have to move around. That's with 1K unbuffed spelldamage and ~30% SF-crit, using /stopcast macros of course. Raidwide that puts me usually at #2 or #3, with an excellent Hunter at the top, and the Ele Shaman competeting for the second spot (has ~50% Spellcrit and a lightning capacitor, really insane numbers sometimes).

The main problems i see for the future is how few improvements are there for me. There is no Spell Leather before Black Temple (which yields a whooping 3 pieces), with Karazhan offering a single drop, that i never even considered taking. We don't have greed (so i do hope at least) between mage-classes, so that is not the main problem, but i still would like to wear leather. What are 360% Armor for, when i'm wearing cloth? That's stupid. The Tier Set's are ok, i don't like some T4 pieces (Hands and Legs seems subpar to other drops), i absolutly don't like T5 2-pcs bonus, but there's almost nothing to complete the Tier Sets besides cloth.

Mana is a problem. I have to chain chug SMP's to keep up in longer fights, while using an IS/SF rotation. Maybe a Shadow Priest would help, but we don't have one available. Usually there no JoW on the mob or boss, our paladins refuse to do so (to dangerous, as we were told). Shaman drops Mana Spring constantly, but thats not much. There is nothing in our trees besides Dreamstate and Meditation for manareg, not even a gimmicky way. Innervate is used for myself, but usually moonkin gear has not much spirit. I plan on using a automatic weapon rotation with a spellsurge enchant (saw a mod for this once, but have not come across a second weapon til now).

Threat is an issue. If the fight contains a aggro reducing component, i really have to watch what i do, thats with 3/5 subtlety. Subtlety cloak enchant is coming with 2.3, i don't have a enchanter available with the AQ recipe. All our threat reduce i passive, that's really difficult to manage sometimes. And with only cyclone as defensive mechanism, which does only works on adds, and the 20% from barkskin, i'm feeling really vulnerable sometimes.

The Balance tree is cluttered with so much talents, which are a 'must take or respec healing or feral'. Most Moonkin builds are nearly identical, but not because we all copy one another, but because we have no options to diversify. Usually it all falls back on 'Imp FF or not, Treants or not, Celestial Focus or not' and 'do i do PvP and take Nature's Grasp fully?'. And almost all talents are percentage or flat bonus based improvements of base abilities. Besides Insect Swarm, Force of Natur and Nature's Grasp, there is not a single unique Talent. Even Moonkin only changes our AC and Spellcrit value. And putting up a lovely new model, of course (i do like the owl look, although i look a little bit fat, and there is no difference between male and female forms while shifted). Nature's Grace could be redesigned, it only works with SF and sometimes healing, Wrath does not benefit at all. And so on. Unleashed gaming seems to be no longer working, otherwise i would have linked, what i suggested at the beginning of BC as response to beta testing.

Synergy is fine, but only works within the group and for meeles. Both should be buffed. Moonkin Aura (or moonkin form itself) need more than it actually provides, and Imp FF should seriously be thought over. Only one class interacts with nature damage (Enh Shaman with using Stormstrike), and thats it. There is next to none (some Rings, mid level Weapon, mail aromor pieces, if i remember right) itemization with nature only damage, very few with arcane (cloth sets for example, a low level weapon and suchlike). Leatherworking is offering a whole 1 (that means: ONE) piece of moonkin leather (a very average helm), the Tribal Spec an interesting, but subpar set of Damage/Healing Hybrid gear. There is almost no gear for us available via heroic bages (especially no helm, no nature damage OffHand, no manareg/proc gear or whatever). Well. I'm feeling that Blizz don't even recognize that we Moonkins are exist. Besides the usual 'Every ready for the next expansion? Oh, wait, those fat owls, i remember... toss them a girdle with 44 Spelldamage and 6/mp5, and write in the Patch Notes: Massive improvements in balance specced gear available, and they should be fine'. And while Spell haste is indeed very nice for SF rotation, it only makes mana problems even worse. If i look in the raiding future, i'm actually a very sad moonkin, because i not only feel no love from thge designers, but because i think, they mistake us moonkins for some gimmick like Noggenfogger "Oh, look, when did the art department improve the noggenfogger graphic effects to these owl?! They look adorable, and even have there own dance! We should make some NPCs like theese, people would love them!").

 

Torgrimm

Our raidleader is a druid, 2 weeks ago he respecced balance for the fun of it and to get 3+ druids in raid, picking up some t5/t6 balance pieces meanwhile. Moonkin worked for us pretty good as i can see, extra innervate for spriests is always good, aura and impFF is even better direct dps buff. Group consist spriest/3mages/moonkin, mages are arcane/frost i believe.

 

Verone

First of all, i am a Raidmoonkin that is doing Karazhan and Gruul so far, so nothing special. We are still at the start of the BC raidcontent.

What i've been unsure about is the choice of trinkets. I have Quagmirrians Eye, Xiris Gift, seer's gem and the Nexushorn. (also the alchimist stone and +willpower trinket from botanica). All three of them quite powerful. In Raid i have something arround 25-26% Crit displayed with Xiris+quagmirrians.
My concern is: Would it be better to use the Nexushorn instead of quagmirrians eye? I mean i loose spelldmg for some crit and i trade proc vs proc, where i think that the nexushorn proc is way more powerful then the Eye's proc. Haste is pretty easy lost to latency and it burns more mana.
I hope you understand my question, even with my poor english.

I have selfbuffed:
Spelldmg: 938
Crit: app. 23%
Hit: 10%


With all the talk about viability in Raids, i only can say that Moonkin is ver viable. You bring about 80-90% dps of a Firemage while providing way more support to the entire Raid. Innervate might look redundant, but it can safe the day for healers. Battlerezz can also be a raidsafer. I have to admit that the situations where you start to heal are very rare in 25mans, since the tradeoff if quite high. Heals are not that strong, you loose dps, but you can keep yourself at full hp if no healer is next to you. Also you bring more hp then a squishy Mage.

DPS-wise i can almost stay with Mages and normally i am in the middle, somewhere between place 3-5 in DM, well this really depends on the boss, how much you have to move and so on. Moonkin isn't a Mage, isn't pure dps. Moonkin is a supporter with high dps potential and should be played flexible in my opinion.

kind regards

Verone

 

• frmorrison

Since there is not and likely never will be a Curse of Nature, Starfire plus 4/5 Tier 5 or 6 + Curse of Shadows means that even with 1.5 cast times on Wrath, Starfire will do more damage. Plus it is easy to /stopcast a 3 second spell and the spell is more damage per mana.

 

Bitolan

Stopcasting is and will be far more effective on Starfire than Wrath. The problem with using the /stopcasting macro on wrath is that the instant you get a crit or proc a haste trinket, you get the jarring and ever annoying "spell is not ready" warning. So yeah, while it might slightly increase your dps for any non-modified cast, overall it won't be nearly as effective as using it on Starfire.

Hopefully, if blizzard implements an automatic /stopcast functionality, it will finally put to rest the claims that the GCD is anything but 1.5 seconds.

 

dogdmw

Honestly with gear stats like that, a shadow priest, and it sounds like a elemental shaman in your group, you should have almost no problem sustaining much higher dps. Even simple starfire spam should be pushing you close to 1k on a fight that you don't move much on. Your point 2 makes it sound like you don't have a shadow priest, though. My gear is quite a bit lacking compared to yours, and I was pushing 1k last night in TK even giving out a B-rez midfight. I just can't agree that the balance spec pushes out that low of dps.

 

galzohar

Quag's eye is an uber trinket... unless you're spamming wrath...
Do the math for how much it procs and how much effective haste over time it gives, and how much spell damage you need to get the same DPS increase. It's just too big of an effect for a blue (and even epic) trinket to not use it when you're casting spells that benefit from it.

 

Kiln

General rule of thumb for any spec combo:

Good player (pots, food, skilled) > compitent (doesnt mess up) > geared > class.

Most guilds are second or third string guilds on thier server. If you have dedicated player wanting to try a different spec, it is in your long term best interrests to accomidate them. If your the top guild on your server with a waiting list full of skilled players, Moonkin is simply the wrong way to go.

Specificly related to healing hybrids is the heal aspec. There are plenty of fights where swapping one healer / dps makes the fight much easier. Having a skilled player in the raid who can reasonably switch roles by gear swap is an advantage by itself. Not every guild can swap for the best class makeup. Even then, these swaps often eat up valuable raid time by making everyone wait.

 

kronchev

I'm considering forcing a resto druid to spec Dreamstate/imp FF for Gruuls tonight, reason being, I am damn sure most of our DPS hasn't gotten the hit cap yet, and those who have, are then free to wear higher DPS gear instead of their hit gear.

I don't want them throwing Wrath or any of that nonsense, I still want them healing. Is this build any good? I am extremely unknowledgeable about speccing druids.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Benefactor Bar summary:

It was a question of how the abilities of the fight are handled. I did not know the answer so I come to the place where I expect to see well formulated, concise and correct answers. Not snotty comments. - eclectic778

Vent is only necessary because of bad players. - ebbv

You gemmed straight crit, AP, AP/crit, AP/mp5, and AP/stam in several different pieces of gear. "Student of shaman theory" you are not. - Enervate

 

Torrential

Our raid make up for maximizing caster DPS is based purely on the fact that we are a caster heavy guild. We have *one* hunter, 3 rogues, 2 non Prot warriors, and 1 non-MT feral. One of the non-prot warriors actually acts as almost another prot warrior at times and when he's in he is usually in group 1. We almost always only have 2/3 rogues.

If we had 2-3 mages, 2-3 locks and 5 rogues and 3 hunters I'm sure the raid would look alot different. It's just that we have 5 mages and 3-4 locks usually.

Also, I'd love to have an enhance shaman in group 2. We might even be able to squeeze one in if we sat yet another mage/lock but...we....we just can't find one...it's like they're a myth on our server....

Edit: Here's our first Al'ar kill from last night (Pick Al'ar death instead of full report)

Wow Web Stats Clearly our boomkin is doing something right.

 

• frmorrison

While imp FF is a fair raid buff plus tank buffs, the druid with it will be missing very powerful deep Resto tools, especially Swiftmend and improved HoTs (where druid specialty in healing power is), so that large loss in healing potential for 3% hit to all melee types has to be taken into account.

 

MooKin

I wish. I have been using WWS for a while now, and I have yet to do a raid where I can even remotely approach 1,000 dps with my current gear. And I have yet to see any WWS parses on the druid boards showing any druid breaking 1,000 dps on a straight fight, where no dmg modifiers are applied during the encounter (e.g Mag). Even Sapphiron's WWS parses on the boards average 850-900dps and his gear is way better then mine.

I would really love to see a WWS parse showing what spell combos would allow you to do 1k sustained dps on a boss.

Most druids on the boards are talking about the DPS potential based on a spreadsheet, yet noone