Do you run with a Spriest? Trying to figure out why you're not lacking for mana. In any case, add IS into the mix if you have the mana for it. Your rotation should be one of two, depending on if you get any NG procs. IS, MF, SFx3, W for no procs; IS, MF, SFx4 otherwise. Having too much mana, you're going to be capped by the number of spells you can push out in a given period of time, so your best increase in DPS is either going to be a set bonus (4T5, 2/4T6), adding a crap ton of spell damage on your gear, or swapping for haste until you can drop DoTs from your rotation. You're in the peculiar spot of being in T6 content without 4T5, which is a tremendous set bonus for us.

Agreed, to clairify... Im coming off a recent respec, as we have an abundance of tanks and healers. My guild made the decision to stop running all t5 content in order to make the most of our 3 raid/week schedule. The lack of set bonuses (particularly the t5/4piece) is definatly a bother.

Yes, 99% of the time I do have a spriest in the group. The normal group comp is myself, 3 mages and a spriest.
I have considdered trying to adjust my gems to maximize spell damage, (and possibly haste) but I am somewhat concerned with the effects of dropping the spell hit. NG does seem to proc fairly regularly for me though. I also use my Icon of the Silver Crescent trinket whenever the cooldown is available.

*nods* I guessed as much about the respec and drop of T5 content. Good thing is that if you're hitting Sunwell any time soon, you'll have haste gear coming quick. ZA, too. Also, hit is, point for point, better than anything else DPS-wise, but that's still point-for-point. Pre-T5, 9 damage is often worth more than 8 Hit, which is how gems tend to break down (sometimes 10 damage if you're splitting it. I.E. it's better to use two [Veiled Noble Topaz] than one [Runed Living Ruby] and one [Great Dawnstone]). Until I get some time to work through the equations more rigorously (look earlier in the thread for an idea of how Haste compares to Crit for DPS), use the Spreadsheet to determine how each gem will work for you. If it says Damage is better than Hit, it's probably not lying.

Also, as to mana issues. You get a lot of mana back when you chug a pot with the Alch stone, but you've mentioned not needing it. You may consider dropping the stone for a damage-oriented trinket on bosses where mana isn't an issue. Even the PvP Last-Stand trinket would be better if you get zero use from the mana return.

Yeah, I definatlely want to replace the alch stone. (lol, well... really there's a LOT Id like to replace) Ive kept it mainly as a bonus to health pots should the need arise. (In conjunction with not seeing a better drop, and my general distaste for pvp) I could replace it with [Variable Pulse Lightning Capacitor] off Illhoof, as I have one of those sitting in the bank. Im also thinking of grinding rep with the new faction to craft the +spelll dmg variation of the alch stone.


I truly appreciate this feedback btw!

Hi, I posted this on wow forums but perhaps I will get more feedback here. Any feedback will be helpful


hey guys, I want to know how I stand against other druid with similiar gear in black temple. I am very disappointed that I am almost dead last in the DPS meter so I am not sure if I am at the level where I should be.

Here is my guild's wws report on gorefiend last night

Wow Web Stats

and here is my armony

The World of Warcraft Armory

I got stacked into a group with an elemetal shaman so I was hit capped and we used drum rotation. I think my spell damage raid buffed was around 14XX. I also was no nowhere near my tank's thread so thread wasn't an issue. Mana wasn't an issue either thanks to the new spirit change.

My casting rotation is MF (MF Idol) + 4 * Starfire (starfire idol) and apply iFF every 40 seconds.

So am i doing anything wrong?? What can I do to improve my current DPS? I also have 2 piece T6 in the bank waiting for the other pieces.... Yes I know my chest is crappy I am waiting for T6 chest or enough badges to get the badge cast.

Also how should I gear myself moving forward? Is the Bracers of Nimble Thought a good upgrade from what i have?

I am in the same boat as the previous poster. I would also like some feedback regarding my Boomkin.

Armory:The World of Warcraft Armory

WWS from Teron last night:Wow Web Stats

I am currently wrestling with a few things.

1. I just recieved [Belt of the Crescent Moon] and I currently have the badge reward [Starfire Waistband]. Replacing this belt will require me to regem some of my equipment to get my hit rating back up to 152/153. Is this worth it?

2. My 2 Rotations that I use are
IS/MF/Wx6 for Trash
IS/MF/SFx3 Bosses
but depending on how my mana is doing which is normally great with the S Priest I will also use the Trash roation on bosses.

3. I am generally always paired with a Shammy and S Priest so I get both buffs.

4. Wokuku and other druids that i have seen that are doing more DPS than I am appear to have saccrificed some +HIT rating and went elsewhere with it. Is that somehting that I might want to look into doing? Perhaps replacing my +8 hit gems with the HIT/DMG version? Is there any point at all that I would want to go below 152/153 hit rating?

5. Idols. I am aware of the Buff and Denerf of the [Idol of the Unseen Moon] and [Idol of the Raven Goddess]. Is the Unseen Moon "The Idol" to use? Or is the Raven Goddess somehting that should now be looked at?

6. Enchants. I am starting to see people talk about [Enchant Chest - Major Spirit]. Is this also the way to go now?
Also is there ever a point where I would want to go [Formula: Enchant Weapon - Sunfire] instead of [Formula: Enchant Weapon - Major Spellpower] to the weapon? Being that SF is my Boss Rotation?

I could use and appreciate all the help I can get. Please look at my Armory/Enchants/Gear/Gems/Talents/Rotation and let me know what yall think. Thank you.

I see a lot of post-T6 Moonkin still using Quag's eye but don't really know why. The proc does nothing if it goes off right before you have to move and it's so short that you lose quite a sizable portion of it to a GCD, I've never been too impressed by it and keep it in my bank and use Hex Shrunken Head & Sextant of Unstable Currents. At my current gear level, the +40 Crit rating equates to around +24 Damage and even if the proc only goes off once every 90 seconds, that's a +31 damage equivalence. I'd rather have +55 Damage than +37 and the haste proc. Maybe it would be different if I had 25ms, but since I usually play with around 300, I'll always keep the Sextant over it.

Adoriele, thanks for the reply. As far as the spreadsheet goes I am surprised the highest DPS rotation my custom rotation which is MF * 1 + SF * 5. Yup SF *5 with my current gearset. I found it strange.

As far as cooldown though, if you look at my spec i don't have tree as I spec for iFF. And there was no need for innervate since my mana didn't even drop below 50% at the end of the fight. The only cooldown that I really used were both my trinkets.

Well my optimal rotation came out to be

MFx2, SFx15.

It also came out to have higher DPS using the Sunfire Enchant.

My hit rating goes all the way down to 110.

It was also higher with Xi'ri's gift over TLC.

I am not sure I understand how you can have higher DPS without being Hit Capped.?

You may be on the edge of averaging 4 casts of SF per MF, and averaging 5. Lucky strings of crits will give you the ability to have MF up on all of your SF hits, unlucky strings you're better staying with 4 and popping a Wrath in the downtime. Try putting in a rotation of MFx2, SFx9 and see if that gives you better output.

And yeah, I know you don't have any cooldowns, that's why I mentioned it. On short fights, bursty DPS classes are going to kick your ass.

[edit] Sigh, WTB whatever EJ mechanism Lorewanderer is waiting on so he can post his FAQ/Theorycrafting thread. Borg, please read my earlier posts on this page. Hit is better point-for-point than Spell Damage. That said, if you have 50 spell damage, and 1 hit, 1 hit is NOT better. Even with 10 damage and 8 hit, 8 hit is only CONDITIONALLY better. Yes, being hit-capped is nice, but it is not at all necessary.

I don't believe hit rating is linear. The last point does not give as much benifit as the first point does. Besides it's all averages, you may hit 1 less time every 100 casts but since your doing slightly more damage it makes up for it.

Well I'm talking out of my ass so I'm probably wrong. I don't have a problem losing a few hit and not being 100% capped when I know I get more damage for it.

I don't believe this is in the DPS Spreadsheet but I wanted other peoples thoughts.

[Timbal's Focusing Crystal]

How would you rate that trinket, when you have others like this to compete with?

[The Skull of Gul'dan]
[Hex Shrunken Head]
[Icon of the Silver Crescent]
[Battlemaster's Audacity]
[Quagmirran's Eye]

I know shadow priest's absolutely love this trinket because the proc is shadow damage based and benefits from a lot of their talents and it can crit not to mention that it will be relatively easy to get if for anyone who can do Heroic Magister's Terrace. Our DOTs should technically proc it, and it sounds like it can crit, proccing Nature's Grace as well as benefit from any debuffs on the target Misery, Shadow Weaving, etc.

I only use the Quag's Eye and Icon, I will for sure replace the Quag's Eye with this if/when it drops. No dice for me so far. If anyone has seen any numbers like internal cooldown on the proc or the PPM it has, please do share.

This of course assumes we will be have at least MF in the rotation if not both IS and MF.

The Shadow priest information begins about here.

This post makes it sound that it is 10% proc, about a 15 second internal cooldown and it can crit which was done through some testing on the PTR back in February, not sure if anyone has done/seen any newer testing in live.

Okay. Caveat first: This is only applicable for Starfire spam. The model only works for one spell at a time, and Starfire is the largest part of our DPS, so I'm modeling it first. I may eventually have time to do a full workup of all of our spells and get some good information from it, but it's gonna be a bit. Anyway, here goes:

We know (from my last post) the bounds for the value of Hit rating. It's never worth more than .09562% DPS, never worth less than .08023%. Now, the high end is kind of a misnomer, as no decent raiding Moonkin will forgo Balance of Power. Quick math tells us that the first true point of Hit rating is worth .09122% DPS. Finding the point at which Spell Damage gives an equivalent benefit is a little trickier. We'll go back to the formula I posted a couple weeks ago:



Since Spell Damage only affects... Spell Damage, and not cast time, we can replace with , the expected average damage formula, which I'll post again as well (revised for better Moonfury modeling, assumption of fully-talented, though for this calculation it ends up not mattering).



New variable, , is of course your current hit rating, including normalized values for any %-based additions like BoP, ToW, and Inspiring Presence. is the Hit rating coefficient, equal to 1/12.6.

Now, since the affect of Hit is multiplied through, and thus shows on both the top and bottom of the benefit fraction, we can ignore it. Same with the effect of Moonfury. This gives us



Solving this for gives us what we're looking for:


Plugging in what we know, = 1.2, = .0009122 and .0008023, gives us a lower bound of 606 spell damage, and an upper bound of 756 spell damage. Below 606 damage, a Moonkin with BoP will always gain more out of 1 Damage than out of 1 Hit. Above 756 damage, a Moonkin will always gain more from 1 Hit than from 1 damage, assuming they are not already capped.

[edit] Before Ef pokes me about it, yes, this one's pretty easy to get a closed-form solution for the relative value of Hit in terms of damage, given your current values. Expect it fairly shortly, as well as some extrapolation about gems choices (I.E. there are no 1-hit or 1-Damage gems).

Would it be possible to do a similar calculation with crit and or haste?

I was confused by this - perhaps due to lack of coffee so far - but does this mean a moonkin with a hit rating of 140 and spell damage of 900 gains more DPS per +hit than with an equal value of + damage?

Again, it's early and I haven't had my coffee so your formulas hurt my brain at the moment - I'll look at them later this afternoon and see if it makes sense to me then.

For the most part, yes. Above 756 damage, 1 point of Hit is always better than 1 point of damage as pertains to your expected damage (I'm still debating with myself on whether hit affects cast time due to more NG procs, I.E. whether we're on a 1-roll or a 2-roll system for spells. Leaning towards 2, which means hit does have an effect, although small). As I mentioned, though, you'll rarely find the option to choose between 1 hit and 1 damage, but rather something like 8 Hit, 4 hit and 5 damage, or 9 damage. In most cases, the [Veiled Noble Topaz] is going to be your best overall gem, because of the rounding up of damage, which really should be 4.5 to be consistent. There'll be yet another break point for this, though.

And yes, Lambach, it's possible to do this for crit and haste, the equations are a couple of pages back. Final form was an equation which would tell you the point, in haste, at which haste was no longer better than crit for DPS.

[edit] Heh, okay, just read you a little better. Yes, I can work out formulas equating Haste and Crit to Damage, and in fact intend to in the long run, and will probably have to make a new thread on it as it's going to be quite long.

[edit#2] Interesting note: The range in which you need to be careful to determine which is better, hit or damage, is 150 points long. This is almost identical to the range of hit over the same span (151/152, depending on if you like to round). This suggests that, within this range, damage and hit are point-for-point equivalent, i.e. if you start at 606 damage, your best move from there is to add equivalent amounts of hit and damage. This works out nicely, as it doesn't kill you from the standpoint of the itemization formula, which penalizes stacking single stats.

In case anyone cares, I was Moonkin on our Brutallus kill. Here's the WWS from that. I kept up IS and ImpFF the entire fight as well. My gear isn't as good as some peoples (Gifted from D&T probably is the best example) but I actually did better DPS than the spreadsheet said I would, which would probably count for the Icon/Destro pots and such. I personally felt it was pretty viable, and when you include the 5.9% Crit to the party as well as 3% hit to all physical damage, I feel the place in the raid was on par with a DPS that brings nothing (mage/rogue) as well as the -2% chance for Brut to hit our tanks.

I'm normally a feral tank, but I'm still specced Moonkin and am wearing the gear I did the fight in if anyone wants an idea of what I had. (As of 1:50 EST 3/28)

Wow Web Stats

For personal curiosity's sake, which of the casters in your WWS were you grouped with? None of them show a gain of Moonkin Aura (since I assume you were always in range of them), and it might not be accurate to try and gauge by shared group buffs like Drums, Heroism, etc.

Congrats on the kill, BTW =)

Ahh yeah - I was in Moonkin before the pull and never got burned. It was Cgull, Wenzie, Vanadia, and Dvoryn.

Hi there Pudge.
Grats on your kill!

I was curious as to what your stats were like for that fight and what you were specifically stacking. I seemed to have missed your Armory when you were Moonkin - but I was showing only slightly higher numbers on Brutallus, so my curiosity is piqued.

Thanks in advance.

I don't mean to derail the current discussion, but I'm kind of wondering about some of the mechanics I'm reading. I've studied up a lot on moonkin and experimented on my own with a few things. I'm a little curious about spell rotations and what everyone else's experience has been with haste with 2.4 changes. I can't link too much (WWS, Armory link, etc.), because I'm currently at work and most webpages are blocked. Don't ask me how Elitist Jerks got through >.>

Anyway, my first question is in regard to spell rotations. I'll give a little background to get a comparisson. I'm currently in a MH/BT guild; we've cleared all of MH and we've just begun work on Gurtogg (all typical previous bosses downed). The nearly constant group make-up I'm in includes an elemental shaman, a s.priest, and some combination of the last two spots going to mages and destruction warlocks. The elemental shaman and I have gotten really good about almost never being apart so we always get each other's buffs, so I'll include totems in my stat breakdown. Fully raid buffed I run 1473 spell damage and just under 30% spell crit. As for haste, most of it isn't static. I use Fetish of the Primal Gods (I believe that is the name), Quagmirran's Eye, and drums about once per boss fight in conjunction with BL. On non-BT single bosses I'm always top 3 in overall damage. Melee tends to kill our casters on damage in BT. If you would like see my spec and actually go through searching Armory manually you can look up Hyc in the guild Infusion on Shadow Council (US) server.

Now, with all of that to go off of my spell rotations are never static. I keep seeing people putting up MF, IS, and iFF. I don't run with iFF simply because our druid tank uses fFF for a little extra threat generation/pulling, and I'm perfectly ok with that seeing as my only options to drop points into iFF would require losing some of the Subtlety talent or the 30% mana return while casting (the name of the talent escapes me at the moment). The loss of the Subtlety talent would be a big hit seeing as I'm very nearly always right under the tanks in treat. The same holds true with the mana regen talent as I finish most boss fights with no more than about 1-1.5k mana left. Now, with all that being said, I tend to use Wrath spam on trash and SF spam on bosses. MF and IS are put up when I have to move. I can understand the incorporation of IS into people's casting rotations for the tank's benefit and, of course, if you run 4/T5. However, from a straight DPS perspective I can't quite figure out why so many people are using MF in casting rotations. From my own personal trials in raids, groups, and soloing the DPS drop for incorporating MF and IS is HUGE. On a raid boss spamming SF I tend to run around 1.3-1.4k DPS. Throwing in either MF or IS drops me down to about 1.1k DPS. Using both drops me even further down to 900 DPS, and I know it is simply because of GCD. My question then is why are so many moonkins still using MF? I can't see a time short of having to run around that it is worth the mana and GCD to use? Thanks in advance for explinations!

Second question is how do people see haste affecting their overall DPS since 2.4? I haven't had a chance to do any real testing, but I did what I could in BT the other night. That night alone by no means gives an accurate example of a data set, obviously. However, in that night I was really surprised to see Wrath spam making my overall DPS jump to 1.5k while SF spam was still hovering around 1.3-1.4k DPS! I'm wondering is this was just a fluke, or if maybe the need for more mobility in BT was the culprit for the change. I'd love to see opinions or even other's experiences with this!

Thanks everyone, and happy casting!

There's a couple reasons to use MF in your rotation. First, it's the only DoT that gains benefit from both T6 and T5, so it's useful simply because you don't have to change your rotation. Second, it procs NG. Even better, it has a talent to increase its crit rate to a point where very often you gain back a third of the GCD you lose from casting it. It also has two talented damage bonuses, and it's Arcane, so it benefits from CoS as well. In all, it's a much better use of a GCD than IS when you're time-limited. The reason it's horrible for DPS early on is that it's a mana hog, providing less damage than a Starfire Hit for a third more mana. IS, on the other hand, has comparable mana efficiency to SF itself.

All that said, as Ef has pointed out earlier in the thread, there comes a point where MF is just not enough bang for the buck anymore. Either SF's scaling has outstripped it, or you have enough haste gear that the extra NG proc chance isn't worth it, or something similar. And at that point dropping MF isn't a bad thing. It's not generally possible until you're into T6 gear, especially given 4T5, but the point does exist. And then it's just SF spam all the way home, because when one spell's the best, it's the best.

As for iFF, get it. It's 3% more DPS for your entire raid, as it raises the threat cap, and that's worth much more than whatever you personally lose by dropping points in Sub (although my first suggestion would be to lose points in Dreamstate, not Intensity, as it provides much less benefit now in 2.4), losing a GCD every 40s, and spending mana keeping it up.