Grynn - WWS
The Armory (Logged out in healing gear)

Balance/Resto druid wants to pewpew while maintaining ability to heal when needed. His spec reflects that, though I may ask he move to something like this ( Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft ), which doesn't sacrifice a lot in healing ability for a good bit more damage on wrath and starfire. He has ~12% to hit with talents, and is trying to get that up to the hit cap. About 800-900ish spell damage, if I remember correctly.

Any advice? His damage in Gruul is improving (Along with the rest of the raid, we'll get Gruul someday), but I think he could be doing better. He's a good player, and a good raider, and I'd love to help him up in terms of damage.

Get her to download the Moonkin DPS spreadsheet from these forums... it has helped me out a lot!

Looking at her WWS, it looks like she is just casting random spells.... Get her to try out: Insects, Moonfire, 3 Starfires.. and repeat. If theres a spout coming, I always back off into the water and fire off another starfire... you don't take much damage sitting in the water for an extra couple seconds.

Wow Web Stats

My DPS for our last lurker kill. Ill post the mag one as soon as they are uploaded...

I found your WWS very illuminating, Kerri. Basically, I compared your #s to our boomkin's on our best Lurker kill to date, and here was the results:

You cast 77 starfires.
She cast 55 starfires.

You crit 29 starfires (37%)
She crit 14 starfires (25%)

You did 258k dmg with Starfire.
She did 166k dmg with Starfire.

Here's my question for you: how did you avoid running out of mana? I've run some tests with our boomkin (Dr Boom, ironically), and she can definitely put out some nice numbers with each individual starfire ... but she goes oom so so quickly.

Also, how did you get 37% crit while still (basically) reaching your hit cap? I didn't think it was possible to push it quite so high, even in cloth gear. [you logged out in your pvp gear, so I'll check back later to see if you're updated to raid gear]

I would say Kerri did pretty well, of course you can't say everything just based on WWS, but compared to rest of the raid this is what I expect balance druid dps to look like (though I would expect higher at hydross).

For people who posted WWS earlier, doing 300-400 dps when top dps is around 800 is unacceptable. I don't want to offend anyone and maybe people are trying out

1. first of all to improve right dps, look spreadsheets, add your gear there and see what rotation is best for you.
2. Start using stopcasting (use search function to find out how it works)

I can't say that I know everything about balance druid dps, but I know lot about dps overall and where people should land on if they play well and are with similar gear to rest of the raid.

Got a new WWS for our guild first lurker kill. WWS

Unfortunately we only had one warlock, and it was decided we'd use CoE instead of CoS =/
I flasked up for this one, but then forgot to use wizard oil >_<
I feel pretty good about my damage considering I threw out a rez, had no curse, and was missing 42 spell dmg.


Don't forget that while comparing # of casts, the more raid DPSthere is, the shorter the fight, and you may not be able to get out as many casts as others with a slower DPS raid.

I've been Raiding SSC and TK lately (joined a new Guild) and well.. dps is fine. I get no shadowpriest, no elemental shaman and i normally dish out arround 750-850 dps on a bossfight, including movement.

Biggest downside i see is the 3 Second casttime of Starfire. If you have to move alot, you have to switch to wrath/moonfire while keeping IS on the mob.. Wrath/mf = bad for manapool. You can still use insect swarm and sometimes moonfire but that's also quite demanding for the manapool balance.

Warlocks have dots. Mages can use Scorch and keep DPS going with a fast spell and without getting into mana troubles. I see Mages as the biggest Raidslot competitor for Moonkins. Warlocks are out of question because of dps+survivability and Elemental Shamans because of way better group support.

People say that Moonkin is the easy choice of Druid gameplay because we basically only use Starfire and IS. Mages push 3 keys, we push 2. But as soon as you have a bossfight where you have to move like Void Reaver (which is very simple boss), it'S getting hard to keep on dpsing while not going out of mana. A combatres is like 2k mana cost and mostly a shadowpriest or somebody else needs the innervate and here the mana management of the player, and of course gear, comes in.

A bad moonkin will keep on spamming starfire/is/wrath/moonfire/funny bubbles, drink at like "oh 5k mana left", will innervate without a willpower-weapon. A good Moonkin will use little breaks in the bossfight to regen mana. Will innervate on dps breaks and so or will probably downrank starfire for half a minute to manage manapool (and take more advantage from seal of wisdom) till the pott cooldown is ready.

Innervate timing is also quite important. Many Moonkins use it like pott -> pott -> -> oom -> innvate -> oom -> pott -> oom and so on (till next innervate). It's better to use pott -> innvate -> pott -> pott -> pott -> innervate -> pott ...

Well at some point the gear will be good enough so that the Moonkin can keep on dpsing all the time... but Doom Lord Kazzak anyone?

I don't see any complaint for that fight. We kill him in about 1:20 and I'm nowhere near the point of using a potion by then. I even use IS/MF/Wx6 on him. I know I'm fairly well geared, but you just have to drop an innervate right at the 40 second mark to make sure you never have a problem during Kazzak.

Edit: To clarify, and not just sound like some douche coming out of the woodwork, I'm 3/5 T5, no T4 for regen, don't get a shadow priest, but do have dreamstate and intensity.

For that fight, they stole my shadow priest too. But I did get a elemental shaman for the first time ever (he just joined the guild). I used 5 mana pots and 2 innervates. I usually use 1 potion around 70%~, then when I hit 65% I use a innervate. On a long fight like that its nice to pop it early since you will be able to use it again, esp if you have the 4pc bonus.

We also had a good 10+ seconds of downtime after killing the island adds.

Self buffed: 901 Spell Damage, 21.6% crit 13.05% hit. I have no idea why my crit rate was so high on that fight. Shaman totem gives 3% hit and crit..... so I was over the hit cap forsure.

Dr Boom, last time I was up there I was doing around 900~ (Ill have to go try it again today). But I would go oom in in 100~ seconds with a innervate.

Try giving your moonkin group a shadow priest, and a elemental shaman if you can. Even just the shadow priest will make a huge difference. Our last gruuls attempt, I had no shadow priest or shaman, and I didn't get a salv on top of that. I didn't enjoy that fight :P.

I'll try to keep my pve gear on today .

What is this DR Boom you all speak of?

DR boom is an evil goblin enemy NPC in netherstorm, just north of area 52. Casters can stand on the rocks, and nuke him to test your dps... He has a huge amount of hp. Just setup SWS to keep track of your active dps. I use a seperate damage meter to track my time .

Sure but if you wear a Willpower staff while innervate runs, you loose alot of spelldmg. That means spells getting very inefficient. I prefer to keep dpsing and wait with innervate till the boss does some stupid thing that makes me stop dpsing. Like shatter at gruul and to some extend sproud from lurker (ok you can hop into water and keep dpsing)

Sure it's a quick fight. I just wanted to give an example that mana management is important in some fights, no matter how well geared somebody is. I don't have any piece of T4 or T5. No Druid token drops since .. since.. uhm. Well for ages. No chance to improve my equipment lately.

Good job I really wish to see how equally geared druid (to me) would do aka some BT/hyjal items. If anyone has WWS of that, I would love to see it.

Oh wow, nice work Khalanis. But wouldn't having IS and MF in your cycle increase your dps? Every Dr Boom test Ive done, that cycle always blew away a pure starfire cycle.

Ya, it looks like throwing in a moonfire could help, and I'm going to have to get used to doing it for t5 set bonus eventually I suppose. I think I'll start using more of a structured casting cycle rotation from now on, rather than just starfire+whatever. I'm ging to aim for SFx3-->MF-->SFx3-->IS. This way I can keep up a debuff for the tier 5 4piece(once I get it) and still allow the dots to tick fully.

I wonder if my gear is just lacking? That lurker wws I posted I had a almost perfect casting cycle throughout the fight... And I somehow finished with 37% starfire crits (my crit is at 20% unbuffed in moonkin). And you only used starfire and pulled out 220~ more dps :P. Im jellous!

Also, our wws doesnt include my pet damage.... I'll have to get them to fix that!

Lurker seems to be a bit strange. Our boomkin was reporting some very strange 50% resists yesterday (starfire hits for 2500, 1250 resisted). And you got 37% crit rate on your Starfires, which is so far past your raid-buffed 21-24% that it's very curious.

Anyone else experience things with Lurker that make them wonder about nature spells?

Yeah Kerri, I'm in the same thought as you. I try to check out as many moonkin WWS as possible to see how they do as gear improves. But in general I can't for the life of me seem to figure out why they totally blow me away when they are slightly above me in gear.

And on the topic of bad luck, Ive had some serious streaks of bad luck on fights before. But I think its just pure bad luck cause it hasn't happened for a while since. I run 20% crit unbuffed in moonkin and on a mag fight the WWS put me at a 9% crit rate. I was shocked.

I remember a recent Gruul's kill where I had 15% miss rate on starfires, when I was at +7% hit from gear and the default +4 from talents. I was rather disappointed I remember when I was casting, ever time I saw a resist I was cursing myself, as there was so many of them. It was definitely a bad streak, I normally only have ~6% miss or so.. which I still need to fix.

How many of the top 100 guilds actually has a active (above 90% of raids) raiding boomkin?. Out of them, how many were aksed to spec improved faerie fire?
Out of them, how many actually did.

Citing void reaver as an example of how in a raid 3% to hit doesn't really make that big of a DPS increase, was about the single worst example you could possibly pick for why it wasn't that big of a help. On void reaver, nearly every single damager should be riding the threat cap to stay under the tanks. Unless your tanks are specifically geared out for hit, Imp FF is a strait 3% increase in their threat. That pretty much means the moonkin is upping your raid's damage by 3%, his party's damage by 5%, rezzing the first noob that couldn't move away from the orbs, and potentially innervating a healer. I'd say that's pretty solid raid utility.

How does that differ from any other druid? The only thing a boomkin druid differs from a feral or resto druid, is that 3% hit for physical dps, and the dps that is easily replaceable by a warlock or mage. More often than not, I see that innervate go on themselves, instead of a healer. So that is actually one less utility. So we'll count that as half a utility.

I don't think any would argue that you *can* replace a boomkin with a warlock or a mage. You could also add shadow priest to that list.

The question really comes: if you can find a boomkin who is *competitive* dps with a mage or warlock, except lacking in AE (Hurricane doesn't really count, sorry), would you take them along to a raid?

- 3% hit buff for all melee in the raid (esp. for tanks, this is nice -- even if you SAY you wouldn't use it, ask your tanks if they would. Or ask your rogues if they'd like to drop 3% hit from their gear and replace it with AP/crit)
- +2% chance to be missed for the tanks is nice
- BRez is nice
- assume innervate goes to the boomkin
- 5% crit aura for party

If I have a player who can do mage-level dps, while providing a combat rez, 3% hit for all my melee, and 2% dodge (effectively) for my tank ... why wouldn't I take them to a raid? The mages bring AE and counterspell, plus spellsteal for gimmick fights. Those are easily matched by the raid buffs a single boomkin brings.

Yes, a feral druid or a resto druid *also* provide those buffs. That's entirely beside the point. We all assume you bring at least 3 druids to a raid, and also assume you bring 3 mages to the raid.

Assume you have 2 main mages. If you get to take one more caster, would you take a druid or a mage, assuming they can do exactly equal dps, equal skill, etc?

I'd take the druid. I can stack warlocks for AE - I'd rather have the utility of the boomkin to go alongside the mage. Assuming the boomkin can match the mage in dps, I haven't lost ANYTHING.