The Resto arena thread for TBC seemed to be full of excellent advice, but it was mostly aimed at 8/11/42 and variations. A week into the new season seems like a good time to start collecting information for the new expansion and a more aggressive spec.

I've tooled around some 2s in my pve gear with a pve spec playing with a Ret Paladin in pve gear. We started horrifically since he had never stepped foot into an arena before and since all my arena experience was as resto. I noticed quickly that Starfall and Force of Nature are both amazing for double dps 2s. Add in Moonfire and Insect Swarm and you can immediately apply pressure without even opening yourself for interrupts. Most of our successful games involved me opening with a Cyclone on one target and Force of Nature, Starfall, Moonfire, Insect Swarm on the other. Granted, this is all around 1500.

What are other druids and other comps seeing be successful?

I'm thinking you have two major choices for MK atm, which assuredly depends on your partner(s) and brackets: burst or survivability. This is basically a variant of the feral/resto build I put in the resto thread. For balance you have to give up a fair amount of offensive power (and most notably, starfall) but do see huge survivability gains.

Whenever Comcast decides to stop making it impossible to play WoW, I'm probably going to run some moonkin 3s and 5s and see how much I get trained to see if offense or survivability is more useful. Has anyone gotten some good first week experience on the matter?

Higher in the ratings we see more moonkins with arcane mages, because of the insane burst potential and their excellent peeling skills. Be aware that you are currently "squishier" than your partner, even as moonkin. CC before DPS, always, and let your mage / ret / whomever get their CC off.

Does Starfall avoid CCed targets?

I am very curious to see what becomes of this thread.

I have decided to go Moonkin for Season 5 and I am going to stick with it. I am sick and tired of playing Resto as it has become beyond monotonous. (Even though it has snagged me a Gladiator title)

I played on some more comps over the weekend and last night. I did some 3s Saturday with a DK and Arcane Mage. Every team that correctly switched to me when I came out of cat stood a good chance of winning. Double melees were literally killing me inside 3 seconds. TBC conditioned me to save my trinket for the KS or the Blind, but at this point it looks like it's better to pop it immediately unless you get an instant BoP. We clearly need better coordination on poly and death grip, but I was definitely the punching bag here.

Last night I did some 3s with an enhance shaman and a rogue. The enhance was the clear target. Hunters were annihilating him before he ever managed to engage. Ret paladins were trouble, but he finally starting blowing every timer before running in and was able to force a bubble and live long enough for the rogue and I to kill the teammates. Our conclusion after 18 games was resto or bust.

I did some 2s with the arcane mage from 3s. We started 6-0, got screwed by the LoS in Sewers and then played terribly against double feral (yes, I'm ashamed) and stopped at 8-2 with 7 min queues. Rogues would open on me and unless they immediately blew cloak we'd just kill them. Any class without immunity or major timers was dead very, very quickly. The only class that really felt dangerous was a rogue.

Starfall is still amazing. I'm really not sure if it was breaking poly. I don't think it was, but we weren't actually using poly that much and frequently when we were it was after I had cast starfall and presumably the poly glyph removed the DoT. I also switched to using IS and MF glyphs and I can deal significant damage without ever using a spell with a cast timer. Dotting three people with starfall and treants lead to people asking "what happened to X" when someone in addition to the main target died at the same time as the main target.

When you say "resto or bust" are you referring to the Enhance shaman, or your druid roll in the same team? I'm in a Rsham, moonkin, Dk 3s and I've given consideration to switching myself to enhance and the druid to resto. That may just be my daydreaming and a poor idea, but I bring it up so you can ellaborate your point and tell me if I'm crazy.

When playing with your arcane mage in 2s, did you fight DK / Ret? It is looking to be the cheese fotm for 2s right now, and I am curious to hear what it is like from the other potential cheese setup (Moonkin / Arcane).

Rogues aren't as dangerous in 2s as they are in 3s, they need that second DPS partner to get through the defenses of several classes, especially paladins. Rogue and Shadow Priest would likely be a good comp too.

What we've seen:
-The arcane / moonkin setups that we have been fighting have been sheeping first, and leaving the Druid stealthed, because Arcane mages + Ice Block make them hilariously frustrating for anything but a rogue to kill, and the rogue will either be looking for you, or will get cycloned off of the Mage.

-You shift out somewhere sneaky, apply 3+ hots to your frozen mage, go Crit-chicken, re-cyclone and cook up a starfire if you can, it will likely be the only chance you get of basically 2shotting some-one. With co-ordination, you can take paladins from 100 to 0 with ap/blast into pom/pyro, plus a starfire.

- If two people are still alive after you have done that, then you start the instant cast cheese, imo. But see how far opening up with Starfall and treants gets you and let me know, I haven't seen it in the 1700s area yet.

The shaman. He just got focused down immediately. I'm sure they would have happily killed me, but I have the advantage of starting in stealth. Any shaman is a high priority to kill just because they have no outs. Shamanwall is a joke in the face of the dps currently in game. I'm not sure that with a full complement of arena gear and good CC you wouldn't win plenty of games, but I think you'd be much better served as resto right now.

You don't need a paladin. Rogues and mages both offer more control and better peels. Playing with a Ret was fun, even if we were less successful due to inexperience.

I think we faced one. We burst the paladin and made him bubble while the DK was CCed and then killed him after the bubble. I died as the Ret died and the mage finished off a wounded DK. No idea about the quality of the opposing players, but I know we were making plenty of exploitable mistakes.

Can DKs be Cycloned while Anti-magic shell is up?

No. It provides immunity to negative magic effects.

Also hope that he doesnt see you doing it, because I tend to grip the first cyclone, and Strangulate, in to chains of Ice (5 second silence and snare). That tends to lead to dead druids. Also, I am unsure if Anti-magic zone provides similar protections, but either way it can shut down a great deal of burst from your setup, so I'd avoid casting into it, and go for a match "reset". by backing off if you get caught with both opponents under the zone.

I'm curious to what gear setups you guys are using. I've bounced through 7-8 teams of various different makeups doing about 60 games on each. Trying to find something that works. I notice that once I'm out of stealth I die 5-8seconds just enough time for 2-3 casts and maybe a hot or two on my partner in my death throes. So my two thoughts on it were stack hp/res and lose tons of spell damage to maybe live longer and be more useful or just go full out pve gear and try to do as much in those 2-3 casts before i die as possible.

PVP gear is 18k hp 1300 sp, 600 resilience ( I can switch that to abotu 17k hp 1300 spell and maybe 780 resilience but dont know how much more effective it would be? ) And PVE is 1850 spell, 27% crit, 15k hp. Any thoughts? Anyone with higher resilience want to speak to its benefit or against it maybe? I'd appreciate it

Absolutely not, so communication is pretty key. Ideally, you want to wait for the Poly DR to build up before you pop it.

I will say that the Focus glyph coming soon has me pondering the uses. On the one hand, the extra damage is quite a bit, and it would allow you to manage CC more easily. On the other hand, part of the appeal is those lovely Starfire Stuns and by reducing the range to about 18 yards you really limit how many targets are vulnerable to it.

EDIT: Amera, wouldn't it make more sense to get Primal Precision and just drop one in Strikes as filler? It'd help Bash/Maim.

Amera, no I didn't try that hybrid spec. I'm just too reliant on Starfall and trees, every match we do win is almost always during the point when both of those cooldowns are doin their thing.

I'm startin to think dk/moonkin just doesn't complement each other well enough in practice as well as i thought it should in theory. After about 2-300 games we still get beat back down once we approach 1700. Barkskin doesnt have a big enough affect to save me.

Survivability is a huge issue, hopefully that changes as our defensive stats go up. I literally die, when focused in 2v2, within a few seconds. Because of this, I have respeced to a 58/0/013 spec which offers a bit more DPS at the cost of no regen.

A couple issues with BM hunter and Boomkin. First, since most of the teams we face have 1 or more stealth, I have to position myself on top of the hunter (ontop of the trap and flare). At the same time, I feel this combo's strength increase when you put distance between each other (up to 30 to 40 yards of course). Because of this conflicting dynamic, I find the start very important. It has been hard for my partner to do this, but I usually have him avoid starting to fight for a bit because while stealthed, it takes a few more secs for me to get out in position. If we are against stealthers, we will stack. Otherwise, my partner will rush in first. I like to open with my treanents, shift to boomkin form, Starfall, and moonfire, insect swarm, then try to CC the other if possible. Sometimes it does help to start with a roots on the target, especially against a priest or mage who is trying to dismount after his partner has engaged us. Usually by the time I start CCing I am close to being dead. This strat seems to work the best as you really cannot be counter spelled (nothing but instant casts) and along side a BM hunter, it forces the other teams target to go defensive (priests and warriors seem to use their fear right away with trenants).

Any else find a great opening sequence? The above seems to work for me and I have tried a TON of different series of abilities.

I am currently preparing my gear for arena but I got a little catch there - is it better to focus on crit or taking few haste items might be a good idea? (mainly wondering about neck and cape)

As a main-spec resto druid, I've been really eager to look for good strategies for 2v2 as a boomkin. I think both my partner and I have enough PvE gear that we can give up the resilience and go pure-burst, or "blow them up".

This is all in theory of course, but I'm more worried about double stealth teams than any other comp out there.

Do you think it's important for me to grind for Wyrmhide Gladiators?

After a very first rough 2 weeks of playing Moonkin (truly it was painful) I'm now sitting just over 600 resilience and it makes a hell of a difference. Your still open the RNG potential of being gibbed by certain combos but once you start actually surviving those on a regular basis, that's it, you've won. It also depends on whatever your team/partner is doing to help increase your survivability with those moments.

For 2's I was running resto/rogue to begin with in week 1 but it was a total joke with no resilience, my HOT's just didn't cut it with the very high likeliness of you or a team member going from 100%-0% within 5secs of being targeted. Both the rogue and I where wearing a mix of heroic/S4/crafted stuff and that in general just didn't work. After changing to moonkin and getting a few savage and battleground pieces my survivability greatly began to increase and we where able to start dictating and controlling the outcome of fights on a more regular basis. No spectacular ratings just mid 1600's and this week we are 16-4 so far with one loss coming from falling through the lift in Orgrimmar arena before the gates opened resulting in me getting disconnected!

3v3 is the same, drastic increase in win ratio due to everyone sporting more resilience and dropping the shiny Naxx gear. We run with a resto shaman there, take a target out of the game with the array of CC we have available and force a trinket into another CC, pop bloodlust and nail something hard and fast (getting the treant's out just before bloodlust as they also benefit from it greatly). 16-3 so far this week and mid 1600's as with the 2's, probably should of pushed on for more but we quit whilst we where ahead

Feels a whole lot better now than the first 2 weeks and hopefully will start to play more games during the week (raids and time permitting) and try and push onto 1800.

Whelp.

From MMO-Champ



That will certainly change things, if it goes through. The only way I was seemingly able to kill a large number of classes was through that particular cheese, so I'm not entirely sure where that will leave Moonkins now. It was admittedly up there with the old 'mace stun' in terms of bullshit though.

./Sigh

Ok so it's was a mace stun whirlwind for a few seconds, but at least the spell did something. Now it's some weird mediocre area of effect spell, oh that can be crowd controlled.
I hope this leads them to reinventing it to have a purpose of some kind, it's a shame, the graphics were pretty...

To be honest they should buff Starfall to compensate. A suitable change would be to remove the 20 star limit, so it always lasts its full duration.. That would improve on the Starfall glyph's current uselessness as well.

I still don't get the point of Starfall. It's already useless in PvE and after the patch, in PvP too. It's the worst 51pt talent atm. It could use a damage increase atleast, or a complete revamp.. Atleast something defensive for PvP would be nice.

I think every owl that tried to do some serious PvP is sad about this change. I kinda still hope that maybe it won't go live yet ... at least not until we get something other to compesate for the loss.

With this up I have a question to more experienced PvP owls. Do you see any place for an owl in arena after this goes live? Currently I feel pretty nice in 5v5 but my place there is justified mostly by the chaos factor I bring at the start of the fight and even tho it was a 100% win on lower raitings, higher the survivability problems of a moonkin start to become a problem. With this change it might become even more painfull.

Also, could you maybe share your experience of how to deal with the heavy melee nuke? I just can't figure out if there is anything more I can do than sit in form, cast barkskin and hope my healer can keep me up. Or when it's 2 melee only BoP can save me even tho I managed to get +750 resi. Nature's grasp proc is only minor help since usually melee trinket out of it, or its dispelled or I am stunned/slowed anyway so can't run away. So either moonkin is really so waek against melee or I am missing something.