Ok so my guild is wanting me to go imp FF. Thats fine and dandy. I just want some clarification. I know that FF and Imp FF does not stack. However I was under the impression that if a feral pulls with Feral FF that my imp FF would not over write the efects of his FF. Even though I may see the buff under his portrait that doesn't neccisarily mean he's getting the effect of the 3%hit.

If you take a look at Rawr, it will show you what your non-mana-limited max DPS spell cycle is. For an early to mid T4-level boomkin, that's usually IS/MF/Wx7, whereas mana considerations at that gear level usually restrict you to IS/SFx4 for longer fights. Starfire has a higher scaling coefficient with spell damage, also, to add to the poster above me.

ImpFF will overwrite Feral FF, the icon remains the same and the text won't change (same as when you're buffs don't short ImpMotW benefits), but the feral that put the initial FF up will see his buff go away because it'll no longer have the timer on it for him/her, while you will see a timer on yours. If the Feral tries putting FF up while yours is still there he/she will get an error saying that a more powerful spell is active.

You'll can also tell which are yours by looking at the debuffs\dots, yours will always be first (top row, left side). Also yours debuffs\DOTs will slowly gray out, motion picture style (i assume this effect is blizz and not one of my addons). Better yet, I'd suggest just getting quartz, it will put timers right above your cast bar so you can see when spells are expiring and when they are overwrote\break.

From my understanding, at your level of gear, you're approaching the point where the damage return from IS is no longer worth the global cooldown it takes to apply it. If you're using it for the debuff effect, of course you should keep using it, but be aware that it gains no bonuses from talents and will be out-scaled by your direct damage spells fairly quickly.

Ok, so im sorry if this question has been answered somewhere in this gigantic thread lol. I have a few questions though as my guild ventures farther into BT.


While browsing this forum a bit I found someone saying you should not use Moonfire unless you have a shadow priest because it uses to much mana, is this true? I usually never find a problem with it directly. I may run out of mana occationally (Usually Alar fight, phase 1) but I never figured moonfire is what would make or break it. And I would think it would lower my DPS.

Also, I read something about IS not scaling well after T5 gear. im at 1383 spell dmg raid buffed, should I drop IS? Last night I did some testing in TK (we cleared the first 4 bosses of hyjal and decided to kill kael), and I didnt notice much from taking out IS, but moonkin DPS can always seem a bit skewed to me depending on crits. Im at 2k dps sometimes, other times im at 800 :P


My biggest reason for coming to this thread is to find out about spell haste. I read a post saying 'if it has spell haste, the worste that will happen is nothing' and I found this to be untrue. Us boomkins love our crit, and rely crits to increase our DPS amazingly (Huge numbers + reduced casting time = win :P) so if you replace a belt with just spell haste over a belt with crit. . . its taking a step back if anything. So do we want spell haste, and if so what good does it actually do?

Thanks!

~Klawz

MF boosts your DPS. If you have the mana, use it.

At 1383 +spell, and 23% crit in MK, Wrath does about 20 more damage, on average, than IS, with the same cast time. Not a huge number, and IS uses much less mana (plus providing the debuff).

Haste means same damage in less time. You can use the leftover time for even more damage, assuming you've still got mana.

Hit (until cap) > +spell > crit

for Moonkin PvE. A point of Haste is worth about a point of +Spell when your +Spell is about 1200 more than your haste rating (the raw crossover is about 1100, but that assumes no lag, pure SF spam and no mana issues). Above that limit a point of haste is better than a point of spell, but not by much. Below that limit stack spell.

A point of crit doesn't become worth as much as a point of spell until much later (+spell at 1600 or so, and at least 100 times as high as your crit% IIRC). Crits are nice, and NG is cool, but the math says that point-for-point, +spell is better.

whoa, how is haste better than crit? I know if I could stack more crit than my DPS could go through the roof.

It would not "go through the roof". Crit is very expensive from an itemization standpoint - it takes a LOT of crit to add any appreciable amount to your crit chance. In addition to this, a 1% increase in crit will not add 1% to your dps. I don't have time to do the math to demonstrate how much it would improve by, though. I can tell you, however, that 1% haste will give you a 1% dps increase, period.

Both Crit (ignoring Nature's Grace for the moment) and Haste multiply your DPS by (1 + kR), k being the rating coefficient, R being the rating itself. Starting out, Haste has a larger coefficient, 1/1576 instead of 1/2208. Beyond that, you normally start gearing from a standpoint of 0 haste, whereas crit starts with a kR of about 20%, which means that the relative benefit of haste is much larger when you start adding it [(1+k)/1 > (1+.2+k)/(1+.2)]. Nature's grace works to mediate this, but it doesn't help by far. Having 100% crit would give you a constant 314 haste assuming you had none already, but 100% crit costs, using a base of 20%, 1260 rating. I don't know about you, but I'd rather spend 314 rating to get the same effect instead of 1260.

[edit]
Yeah, 1% haste isn't a 1% DPS increase either, for the exact same reason that 1% crit isn't (again, ignoring Nature's Grace).

Nah, not necessary. The relative benefit of 1 rating for either haste or Crit is k/(1+kR), or for 1% it's .01/(1+P). With 0 rating or percent already, yes, it's a 1% benefit, but it decreases. At 99%, 1% is only worth .01/1.99 = .5025%, just over half the original benefit.