Saraya

Khalanis, out of curiousity, what is your ping? I was actually theorizing that people with somewhat high latency could use it to their advantage:

/cast Moonfire
/equip [noequipped:Idol of the Unseen moon]Idol of the Unseen Moon

The client would send the moonfire request off to the server, the idol would get swapped, and THEN the server would reply with the OK to cast moonfire, and then you'd cast the moonfire with idol in place!

If your ping is somewhat low, perhaps that would explain the < 50% proc rate. I sit with 500 ping, so success would practically be assured if this really does work out this way. This would mean people with high latency actually have an advantage?! This is madness!

I'll be picking up the idol some time next week because I really want those bracers first, but getting input from people with different latencies would definitely be interesting.

 

Khalanis

My ping usually shows between 170 and 250, I usually am able to pre-cast @ 0.5s remaining. I feel confidant about the swaps occuring properly(although a 50% proc rate ontop of that is hard to tell really), and that it is just that a 50% proc may not always end up being 50% in practice.
One thing to note, and especially frustrating with the idol swap macros, is that if you press it too early(only when a swap occurs that is, not during a chain cast) you will swap the idol and get an error message for the attempted spell, thus getting a GCD and finish your current spell without starting the new one then have to sit there waiting to cast again. But overall, if you just play it safe during the moonfire==>Starfire transitions the benefits of this trinket are pretty good for having no real drawbacks.

On a side note, I feel as though my ego would not be pleased with me if I didn't appologize for my poor showing in those WWSes, as I'm still waiting to replace my 12agi 3% crit dmg gem, and rarely pot up anymore.

 

Benita

Went outside shattrah, Moonfired 3 mobs down with that macro in feral gear, not 1 proc, 150ms. Either highly unlikely or simply working as intended or it has something to do with precasting. Calianes solution seems to be the best here really. MF+SF idol equip, SF SF SF SF+MF idol equip. That is what the game is allowing, the other one seems like a technical fluke.

 

Khalanis

Just went outside shatt after reading your post to do some more testing, with a ping of 80-90ms
Using this macro I found it still worked on a regular basis. I rooted the mob, switched to a different idol, waited for the GCD to be more than finished(from the idol switch), then hit the macro. Did this a few times and found it still worked as it had during my raiding experiences.

#showtooltip Moonfire
/cast Moonfire
/equip [noequipped:Idol of the Unseen Moon] Idol of the Unseen Moon

124 casts spam casting with the trinket equipped yielded 43% proc
172 casts while swapping yielded 37% proc

During these tests I also found out that 2 piece t4 will only give you 25 mana for rank1 moonfire.

 

Caliane

Yeah. These two go hand in hand with my most recent considerations on spell haste.

Haste vs crit and procs.
This is something very interesting and overlooked by the spreadsheet when showing dps values.
Icon of the silver cresent- 175 damage for 20 seconds
Idol of the unseen moon- 140 for 10s
Hex shunken head- 211 for 20 seconds.

Every spell cast under the effects of temporary buffs has a chance to crit as normal, and so crit scales with procs of this nature.
A crit may or may not occur during the buff duration, but the chance is there, and thus on average, the crit will effect that buff.
Haste however, makes you cast faster, and does NOT scale with short term buffs lke this unless it DOES give you enough haste to cast a full additional spell in this time frame.
There is no chance. It is pure breakpoint. (except nat grace haste or quagmirrians...)
20s-6 3s casts. 2 nat grace procs will get you 7 casts. It would take something like 523 spell haste to give the 1 second over the 20s and let you get that 7th cast in.
Considerign the large number of procs nowadays, this is a very important thing to consider crit vs haste.

 

Dragon

I've tested that macro above on PTR when it was still up and in Gruul's lair last night and the Idol seems to proc.
Actually last night the proc rate was 76% (35 of 46) ... I guess I was lucky because that's higher than what WoWHead lists it at (50%)

 

Saraya

I did some math and deteremined the DPS increase per badge was better for the Idol compared to the bracers, so I went ahead and got the Idol. First off: 53/100 procs. And the macro swap does indeed work. HOWEVER, you get stuck with the pre 2.3 GCD delay, so depending on your ping it might be an issue.

Example: Me, 500 ms ping.

Pre 2.3:
t=0.0 Hit moonfire key
t=0.5 Moonfire casts, GCD starts
t=2.0 GCD ends

2.3:
t=0.0 Hit moonfire key, GCD starts
t=0.5 Moonfire casts
t=1.5 GCD ends

With the macro above:
t=0.0 Hit moonfire macro, GCD starts
t=0.5 Moonfire casts with chance to proc, Idol gets swapped in, GCD restarts
t=2.0 GCD ends

So its a 0.5 second loss. For MF SFx4 rotation, that's roughly a 3.7% loss in DPS, so even though this macro works, its not worth it(for me). So Cal's method is still the best: MF, SF+SFIdol, SF, SF, SF+MFIdol. If you have less than around 120 ping, the macro(assuming it works, maybe it's a Europrean server thing?) should actually be better than the SF+MFIdol method.

For PVP, the idol is very nice indeed though.

 

galzohar

This isn't true. Pre-2.3 with instant casts is the same as 2.3 as far as I've noticed (which is at least as far as what you're posting).
anyway you can't swap a libram after an instant cast and have it affect the instant afaik... The /equip happens after the /cast thus not affecting the /cast. If you equip before the /cast you'll get a "weapon swap in combat" 1.5s GCD and have to wait before being able to do the instant cast. Someone seems to have test results that show otherwise, so I'll take this comment back although it completely doesn't make sense that it works like that and be aware that it may get fixed.

If you want to get the proc you should cast the last starfire before the moonfire with the moonfire libram so when you cast moonfire the libram is up, then either swap back the the starfire libram during (or right after you start) the starfire cast or right after the moonfire cast (result will be the same). You lose the starfire idol on 1 starfire per each moonfire but gain chance to proc the moonfire idol, which should overall be worth it if I'm not missing something.

 

Dioneirra

Sorry, but this is not true. Right now equipping the idol within the moonfire macro will result in the proc being available, even though Moonfire is an instant cast. I tested this with various pings available to me (400ms, 150ms, 50ms) and the proc percentage is usually around 50% for a given numer of tries. There also seems to be no loose due to a running GCD as mentioned before. Example from yesterdays raid:

This is while using macro-casts, which equip the suitable idol (with noequipped check) during each cast (i.e. Starfire equips the Starfire idol, Moonfire equips the Moonfire idol). I checked the time difference between the Starfire Hit and the Moonfire Hit with Pre 2.3 Logs, and it didn't change. My ping during this raid was about 200ms. As you can see, the time between the last Starfire Hit and the next one, is close to 1.5s (GCD from Moonfire) + 3s (Starfire with Nature's Grace) and my Ping, so there seems to be no additional loose to a later activation of a GCD.

 

Saraya

I understand where you're coming from galzohar, but all of us have actually been testing this in game, and it does work. Perhaps its a bug(which would kind of make this idol pretty bad), but I assure you that the macro above with the /cast followed by /equip does indeed work. Also, perhaps I'm mistaken about pre-2.3 GCDs, but I remember if I used moonfire, I'd have to wait around ping+1.5 seconds before I could cast another spell because if I tried it before that, it'd complain about the spell not being ready yet. Not that we can test it anymore so I'll just assume I was playing terribly.

T=0.000 Moonfire lands
T=0.551 Gain the proc
T=2.864 Moonfire dot
T=4.657 Starfire lands

You got a crit with Moonfire, so the Starfire should have landed at around T=4, not 4.5... Base casting time for Starfire is 3.5 seconds, but is talented to 3 seconds, and another 0.5 from Nature's Grace. I was definitely seeing my GCD getting refreshed, but perhaps it's a graphical error with quartz and bongos. I'll do some further testing, but I'm just so paranoid of getting locked out of a full GCD. Guess I'll hope someone isn't testing on Dr. Boom tonight.

Actually, is there any way to make a macro where it will only continue on with the rest of the macro if everything before it succeeded?

So like
#Showtooltip Moonfire
/cast Moonfire
???
/equip [noequipped:Idol of the Unseen Moon]Idol of the Unseen Moon

so that if you spam this macro, the idol only gets equipped when moonfire actually goes through? That'd really help with the GCD lockdown problem.

 

Dioneirra

Ah, my bad with using 3s instead of 2.5, speak about tunnel vision. But, and thats important, the times are nearly identical with Pre 2.3, so it can't be due to a new GCD behaviour for equiping idols. Here, an example from a week ago, the same fight, but not using idolswapping macros (made no sense back then):

Pre 2.3

T=0,000 Moonfire lands
T=2,884 Moonfire Dot
T=4,507 Starfire lands

After 2.3

T=0.000 Moonfire lands
T=0.551 Gain the proc
T=2.864 Moonfire dot
T=4.657 Starfire lands

The small increase after 2.3 is to low for a GCD through idol swapping, i blame it to the massive FPS loss (and therefor a worse reaction in activating spell rotations) i experience since 2.3.

 

Saraya

So I a bit more testing, and my description above of the Idol resetting the GCD even though it is proccing is accurate for me, at least. Dio, you're saying that your pre and post 2.3 cast timings are the same... which matches up with what I was saying earlier:

So we can have the same cast timing with pre 2.3 changes and gain the bonus of the Idol, OR we can take advantage of the change and start casting spells earlier than normal. And unless your ping is below 120, I think the best usage of the idol will be to swap it in the last cast of Starfire, so that you sacrifice the starfire idol use for 1 starfire in order for a chance at the proc, without losing time.

In other words, you should be able to do this now:
T=0.000 Moonfire lands (+crit)
T=2.864 Moonfire dot
T=4.123 Starfire lands

If you forgo swapping the Moonfire idol in with moonfire, you should be able to be landing spells as if you had little to no latency... if that makes any sense.

 

galzohar

Post edited according to your tests.

As for the "ability not ready" that happens (or at least happened in 2.2 but at least some things still cause it in 2.3) is that due to ping variance, you could send instnat casts in 1.5s intervals to the server (since the GCD you see is client-side) but they wouldn't actually get to the server in 1.5s intervals (again due to ping variance), so when the ping changed enough between instant casts to make the 2nd cast arrive less than 1.5s after the first, the server would still be on a GCD and send you an "ability not ready" error. Still need to test more to see how this was/wasn't changed in 2.3.
The sure thing is that at least if you're casting a single spell, your GCD on the client will start when you hit the spell, not when the server tells you you hit the spell. The reason for /stopcasting was that the castbar would only start when the server says "ok", GCD had nothing to do with it. Again still need testing if they fixed the GCD for instants and ping variance issue in 2.3 and how well.

 

Saraya

Ok, I guess I see what you're talking about... it's just my experience that I was getting penalized due to lag for instant cast spells. For spells with cast time, I could adjust to the lag with /stopcasting, but spells that were instant would take about 2 seconds for me. I just realized that I didn't have stopcasting on my instant casts, so it was probably something I could have taken care of. Oops.

In 2.3, yes, the GCD does start when you hit the spell, so I think the issue with my macro is that the spell cast and idol swap do not happen one after another... they are separated by about 500 ms... I'm seeing Quartz start ticking, then 1/3 of the way through it'll reset, and at that point I may or may not be getting the lunar grace proc from the idol.

Dr.Boom Tests:
Alternating 2 Macros: cast mf+equip mf idol, and cast sf+equip idols
Average time between moonfire landing and starfire landing:
With NG: 4.690
without: 5.351

Alternating between MF and SF
Average time between moonfire landing and starfire landing:
with NG: 4.203
without: 4.750

The theoretical times of course are
1.5+2.5=4.000 and
1.5+3.0=4.500.
Using just normal spells, even with 500 ping I get a reasonably close value to the ideal value. Using the macro with MF+equip MF, I lose ~500-600 ms, which is what my ping floats around. This is very visually explained with the Quartz GCD ticker.

If you guys run this test, keep in mind that your client sends the action requests on the "negative edge", that is when you let go of the button. If you are timing it such that you are pressing the button when you want it to execute, you'll lose ~100-200ms. It also seems like the server does give some leeway to casting now... I got a very large number of simultaneous SF and MF hits, which was especially fun if both of them crit, Lunar Grace proc, Nature's Grace proc, and Power Infusion proc.

Well, in the end, the "proper" way to use the macro still wins out for those of us with lag. As a side note, for me the proc shows up on average .581 seconds after Moonfire lands. This may explain why the macro works - the check comes after the spell is cast. This differs from all the other procs I have - Nature's grace and power infusion both occur exactly the moment the spell is cast.

 

Benita

Maybe theres something wrong with my client, but i went out again to test this and it again didnt work. My server is located in the EU btw.

The macro i used:

#showtooltip Moonfire
/cast Moonfire(Rank 1)
/equip [noequipped:Idol of the Unseen Moon] Idol of the Unseen Moon

I manually equipped the Idol of Terror after each cast and used the Macro again. I had 300ms lag with some spikes.
0 procs while killing a timber worg outside of shattrah with Moonfire Rank 1 in feral gear. Maybe its the specc, havent been moonkin yet since 2.3 was patched, but i seriously can only state that it does not work for me. It is the intended behaviour as far as i know.
I also tested the macro without swapping, the Idol behaved normally there and procced about the mentioned 30-50%.

Edit: What does work however is to cast a Starfire and while that Starfire is casting to hammer the MF macro button already. The equip gcd is covered by the Starfire cast time and the Moonfire Idol equipped when you cast the Moonfire. This would also mean you can cut out the Starfire+MF Idol equip button of the sequence.
Meaning MF Idol equipped on default, start with MF, Starfire+Starfire idol equip check, 2 more SF, 1 more SF and while that one is casting, a fast MF+MF idol equip check and after the cast finished the MF button again. Basically its trading one more button click for another hotkey. I hope people actually can get what im trying to say here.

 

Vauk

Personnally i'm thinking about having my cast sequence something like this:

I'm unsure about the reliability of doing the MF then Idol. I'd personally rather lose the SF Idol for that last SF and ensure that the Unseen Moon is equipped for every moonfire. I'll probably end up testing both way and see whats better.

 

Moginheden

I'd like to say thank you again for making this sheet. I've directed a few aspiring moonkin to look at it to try to figure out what gems/gear to use.

Now on to my comments:

1.) When I upgraded from 0.71b to 0.72b I tried to match all my data but I ended up with different theoretical dps by about 20. I set intensity to 5% in the new version so it should be identical except for innervate mana right? (and that only changed by 1 mana over my 10 minute fight so it shouldn't matter.)

I've made a google photo album of the screenshots between versions, did I miss something or is there an undocumented change I'm missing accounting for the 20 dps between versions?
screenshots


2.) In real fights I spend time hiding from ground slams, waiting for lurker to come back up, dodging orbs, etc the "time outside 5sr" box in mana regen notes it's for mana regen only not lowering your dps from not casting. How would I estimate this kind of thing or is it even posible without a monte carlo simulation? According to WWS I do about 625 dps but the spreadsheet puts me at just under 1000. That's a pretty big difference.

Shows me as Snow (VR)
Shows me as Dew (VR)
Shows me as Stratus (Hydross)
Shows me as Nimbus (Lurker/Gruul)
Shows me as Mist (Lurker/Gruul)


3.) I'd like to see an option near ping to set "use quartz" as I have a 200-300ms ping on instant casts that I can't touch due to the global cooldown but I can counteract it on starfire.
edit: I'm not seeing a timer on instant casts with quartz just a moving line, I might be wrong on this and just using 0.1 to account for human reaction time might work for this, (but not for my idea about the unseen moon idol in number 6)


4.) I'm seeing in the discussion here that the consensus is haste doesn't effect the global cooldown. Is this from testing the new haste items or just theorizing from nature's grace? I've been staring at my quartz bars when my Quag's eye procs and I'm chaining wraths and I'm pretty sure I see 1.5 without quags and 1.2 for both the cast time and the global cooldown with the proc up.

Nature's grace definitely doesn't help the GCD but I'm pretty sure heroism and haste both do, (but I haven't parsed combat logs to check just going by "feel" and time I spend staring at quartz. Would that be in the WWS I posted above? I just got my quag's eye but our other moonkin used it on the earlier fights he was in)


5.) Since there is a haste field now would it be posible to implement all of quag's eye? I think I read 1 proc per minute for it earlier in this thread and that would make it an average of 53.33 haste rating right? or am I missing something here?


6.) In the 0.72b version of the spreadsheet I'm noticing a few missing/wrong items vs in game, (all badge loot):

[Idol of the Unseen Moon] is missing. I'd like to see an "all 3" option similar to the both option for the idol drop down, or possibly a separate drop down for "swap in unseen moon: on spell before moonfire, on moonfire spell" (ideally this would remove the starfire idol from it's last cast in mf/sfx4 but not in is/mf/sfx3 or add ping to the cast time of moonfire to account for the GCD resetting.)
I'm currently estimating it at 53 +dam in the other category, does this seem right?

[Armwraps of the Kaldorei Protector] stamina is actually 19 in game

[Life-step Belt] This item is healing but it's got enough int spirit, sockets, mp5 and +25, (with 1/3 conversion) to make it a DPS upgrade for me, would be nice to see it in the sheet
stats: 20sta 23int 22spi 75heal 25 damage 6mp5, (notice the 25 dam is pure dam not heal/dam so it's 50 heal and 25 dam in the spreadsheet I think)
sockets: red blue (7heal)

[Pants of Splendid Recovery] Again this is a healing item but it's got decent dps so I'd like it added.
stats: 30sta 40int 31spi 86heal 29dam
sockets: red yellow blue, (2mp5)

[Gargon's Bracers of Peaceful Slumber] Again healing but decent dps.
stats: 12sta 25int 17spi 55heal 19dam
sockets: blue, (+4heal)

[Mask of Primal Power] spell crit is actually 30, damage is 46, mp5 is 0

[Achromic Trousers of the Naaru] again a healing item with decent dps
stats: 34sta 35int 45haste 101heal 34 dam

[Light-Blessed Bonds] again a healing item with decent dps
stats: 21sta 22int 25spi 75heal 25dam
sockets: yellow blue (7heal)

[Wristguards of Tranquil Thought]
stats: 12sta 17int 16spi 17crit 55heal 19dam
sockets: yellow (2dam)

 

Caliane

For those that dont want to work IS into your rotation to switch the idols back, you may want to consider using a wrath at the end.

/cast MF
1.5s
/cast SF
/equip [noequip]Ivory idol of the moongoddess
3/4.5
/cast SF
/equip [noequip]Ivory idol of the moongoddess
3/7.5
/cast SF
/equip [noequip]Ivory idol of the moongoddess
3/10.5
/cast wrath
/equip [noequip]Idol of the unseen moon.
1.5/12

 

galzohar

Your idol probably equips somewhat after the moonfire cast which starts the weapon swap GCD later... What I wonder is why is there an actual delay between an instant cast and equipping when it's in the same macro, and what's even more surprising is that the idol affects the moonfire even though it's equipped significantly after the moonfire cast... Or maybe you're not reporting it accurately?

 

Saraya

I had a feeling you'd be doubting me again! So I asked several hybrid types to see if their relic swaps in the moment the spell casts, and they all reported it takes a small delay for it to appear. I'm pretty sure its my massive ping that is causing these inconsistencies, since they're all in the US with sub 100 pings and say the increased GCD is there but kind of unnoticable. And I'm pulling numbers straight from /combatlog, so I'm all ears if you have a more accurate source!

So for Benita's sake, I tried testing it some more since I actually noticed the procs typically happened when my starfires landed at the same time the moonfires did in my last test... and I still get procs, but at a significantly lower rate. Maybe it's random lag spikes letting me proc it.

I'll be using Vauk's cast sequence for my raids this week since it's the "proper" way to use the idol and doesn't leave the proccing to any more chance than it needs to.

Re: Moginheden's haste question, Nature's Grace is not considered a haste effect, it simply lowers the casting time of some of our spells by a static amount. Bloodlust most definitely does lower the GCD though. Someone with quag's eye go try to chain wraths on Dr. Boom and see how fast it can go maybe?

 

Multani

I can understand if this post is a bit out of place, or possibly mentioned earlier and I ended up skipping over it, but I would really like some confirmation that Wrath spam does in fact beat Starfire spam. I'm not able to download the spreadsheets, and some quick dirty answer would suffice.

Here's the main issues I see:

Wrath takes 1 gcd to cast, starfire takes more then that. Wrath therefore gains no benefit from haste gear, or from Nature's Grace. Is haste gear simply such a irrelevant factor to moonkin?

Assuming Curse of Shadows is up, Starfire gains additional damage that Wrath does not.

Assuming Tier 5, Starfire does 10% more damage. Assuming Tier 6, 5% more crit. Wrath gains no benefit from any tier set.

Although I'm a noob theorycrafter, from what I understand the benefits of spell damage should relatively equally add to Wrath or Starfire damage. If this is the case, the 25 damage bonus to Wrath from Idol of the Avenger should be greatly outstripped by the 55 damabe bonus to Starfire. Is scaling already considered when putting values on these idols?

I would really appreciate clarification.

 

Khalanis

If curse of shadows is up, starfire spam will out DPS wrath spam. The only way wrath wins is if you have multiple enhancement shamans and no rogues to steal the Stormstrike. However, on a no-debuff mob, wrath spam is generally higher DPS(although I think there is a point where SF outpaces due to scaling).


On the idol note...I was going to make a post on the blizzard forums trying to get some clarification on what's happening(is it lag, is it EU server, is it intended...), but I'm banned . If someone could make a post on the blizz forums and maybe try for some clarification it would be much appreciated.

 

Dothorio

I recently switched from playing my mage to playing a druid. My guild is 6/6 ssc and 3/4 tk. According to the spreadsheet my best dps cycle would be IS MF SFx3 rinse and repeat, which is what I've been doing. However, I'm coming nowhere near to the average dps of 958.7, even on stand and nuke fights where I can focus on maintaining my cycle. In fact, its more along the lines of 600-750 dps. I doubt that this big gap is due to me keeping up faerie fire, what am I doing wrong?

Here's my armory link: The World of Warcraft Armory
Here's a screenshot of the spreadsheet:

J'adore quand un plan se déroule sans accroc

 

Horao

Has anyone with 2 piece tier 6 tried getting 157 haste and using a 1x moonfire 5x starfire rotation?

It works like this: 157 haste is 10%, making your starfires 2.7 seconds.
2 piece tier 6 adds 3 seconds, making your moonfires last 15 seconds.

1x Moonfire - 1.5 sec GCD
13.5 seconds left
2.7 seconds starfire * 5 = 13.5 seconds

Total 15 seconds, 1 moonfire ticking complete, 5x starfires.

This drops the non scaling insect swarm out of your rotation, and makes the nearly all your dps benefit from crit. It also creates the opportunity for 3 crits within 1 rotation allows for Insect Swarm to be inserted for those that are really paying attention. (I.e. 3 crits = 3 natures grace procs, extra 1.5 seconds, the GCD for IS).

Anyone tried that yet?

 

Moginheden

I just got the Recipe for [Skullfish Soup] from the new cooking daily quest and noticed it's not in the food buffs section. I've added it to my local copy but I thought it would be useful to add to the main version as well.