A couple of things in the current content that seem to make the most difference between "similiarly geared moonkins" is:

-use of eclipsed DoTs on all relevant targets (for example, on Cho'gall, the ability to keep DoTs on Cho'gall while you are dealing with adds, all while in eclipse)

-the ability to be in the best eclipse throughout the encounters (harder than it seems to really optimize it)

-using the correct dps CDs on phases where there are damage buffs (Halfus, Magmaw, etc)

-a user interface designed on purpose for what you are doing (eclipse management, multi target DoT management, CD management, quick targeting, quick innervating/rezzing)

-making some gainful use of every global CD you have in a given encounter

The above factors can easily make the difference between 23k and 16k dps. Part of what makes playing the 4.1 version of balance druids fun is that it takes quite a lot of experience, strategy and skill to make the most of your opportunites given the tool set we have at our disposal. It is definitely a spec where playing smarter (not harder) can provide huge gains in dps.

My guild hasn't worked on Sinestra. We are currently just working towards other heroics, so I dont know that fight. However, your ratio is spot on to my usual ratio for non-huge aoe fights.
The boomkin 4set bonus does actually increase your dps drastically. If anything I'd say it is close to what Rawr puts you at; atleast 1k dps more. For instance, 24sec (more like 20 but lets be leaniant) to get from lunar to solar. 5 of those seconds (21% of the time. Give 1sec for screwups) you have ~60%crit bonus. So that is a 12.6% +crit overall =2258.928rating=(according to Rawr 1crit=~.8dps) 1807dps. This is very very general, quick and sloppy math (I lowered all values slightly to give room for error) but it does show that even if your rotation fails it can equal major dps (just 12 sec of having your dot's with 100% crit is huge).

Looking at that WoL your eclipse uptime seems quite low (38%). You want to see as close to 50% uptime (I'm usually around 56%). Some fights are bad I know but you can prolong Solar for those portions if possible. Anytime there is a lot of movement I make sure I'm in eclipse, just have to try and time it right (run in circles and just MF spam ). To me Eclipse management is a huge aspect of it. Like Magmaw, you better just be entering an eclipse right after head goes down to get max dps off. Be in eclipse as much as possible! Dont get stuck outside of it.

For cooldowns you have treants and trinkets. I'm not sure what else honestly boomkins have but he could be referring too Eclipse, Wild mushrooms? Instead of replacing buffed dots with nonbuffed on movement, set them down and use in solar. Pop treants when you know boss gets a buff, you have full proc's of SP on, or heroism is gonna be used in few seconds etc.

This is a question about Sinestra 10 man. Handling the Twilight Spitecaller interrupting in a conventional way (Gouge?) might be an issue so I'm wondering if it's possible to simply spam Hibernate on it until it is dead?

edit:
I can answer my own question after trying tonight; it quickly got Immune to the sleep effect. We were successful with other methods. The problem with using Hibernate as part of an interrupt rotation is of course that it's a 1.2 second cast, after haste, and the add cast is 1.5 seconds long. That leaves very little room for error and reactions.

I have access to a number of normal mode trinkets, including Heart of Ignacious. Given that our dots are super strong and that they scale well with haste, is it worth using over an Alchemist's Stone or Theralion's Mirror? The mirror seems sucky because it could proc while not in eclipse (and end up wasted), etc. Right now, I'm activating the use during eclipse, just before activating nature's grace with my first insect swarm (preferably where I can multidot), as close to on-CD as possible.

My first trinket is a DMC:V card and it's probably a choice between an Int Alchemist stone (reforged haste) or the Heart.

A few big things for me were 1. prioritizing dots a bit more as they will keep ticking when you are debuffed. 2. Making sure that you do not under any circumstance use starsurge while debuffed, it was a huge loss of dps for me. and 3. if you have nothing else to do take that time to place 1 or 2 mushrooms or detonate them as the detonation isn't affected by the debuff.

I'm comparing my Sinestra dps to some ranked-but-not-crazy kills on WoL, and I notice that my dps is considerably lower but most of that is in missing damage to whelps, and most of that appears to be sunfire/insect swarm. Do most people actually dot up whelps during that phase? We've been AoE bursting them down at particular times in p3, which doesn't leave time for much more than a set of mushrooms exploding.

edit: Asking around it sounds like most (all?) of the top moonkin parses are from single-killing whelp strats (with lots of DoTs to get them low).

I have two questions.

I am a newish Boomkin druid trying to make my way into the entry level raids. Because of this, I am trying to get my gear more in order before I apply to any guilds or take any pug runs and look like an idiot.

My first question is about haste. I have calculated the haste breakpoints for IS/MF to be 67(10th tick), 1422(11th tick) and 2776(12th tick). First of all, are these numbers correct?

Second of all, I am currently sitting on 1763 haste rating (which is 13.77% without Moonkin Aura, and 19.46% with Moonkin Aura). Does this mean that I should reforge the 300ish haste above 1422 (or more, considering moonkin aura isn't applied to the raw number on screen) into something like Mastery? Also, How do I compute something like Nature's Grace when trying to figure out how much haste I can afford to reforge?

I have tried looking at the WrathCalcs listed in the sticky for some help with these matters, but I am running a Mac with Keynote (the iWork Suite) and do not have Excel. In Keynote the boxes and formatting become screwed up and the spreadsheet doesn't work.

Sorry for the noob question.

You can find my gear and more information below
Profiler - Wowhead

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.

Hmm, although I should really update that to:
Int >> Haste > hit/Spirit = mastery > crit.

Hit is most frequently traded for mastery in the reforging process; in my experience you rarely have to resort to sacrificing haste to meet the hit cap. In practice you reforge Spirit <-> mastery as necessary to meet cap, and that makes Spirit basically equivalent to mastery when selecting gear.

Hey, Ive been doing some raids today and I want you guys to take a look at the logs and maybe you can make sense of which is better.

These are my logs from tonights Shannox boss
Log 1.
I simply roll dots on all of the dogs and the boss its self, my spec has LS and i didnt move alot in the fight
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis


Log 2. This is our ranged officer who is a boomkin who has favored no LS spec and to spam Sunfire while Rolling IS on all 3 targets.
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

He heavily out gears me and i beat him on overall damage on the kill (World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis)
Altho most of the fights to follow and the wipes before hand he wants topping the meters by using his "spam Sunfire" rotation.

This has got to me because i know my rotation is more complex and should therfore (when done correctly) be alot more powerful but that doesnt seem to be the case.
I thought with the changes to LS it would stop his but just unspecing the talent seems to have negated the changes.

Ideas/comments please!

I'm having some troubles figuring if swapping 359 T11 shoulder and head for 372 non-set (thus losing 4T11) would be worth it. I'm not sure how many stats we are willing to sacrifice for the new 4T11. It obviously still have some value, and I am well aware that the issue will be moot as soon as I can get my hands on 2T12, but in the mean time since I do have the 372 non-set pieces (Hide of Chromaggus and Helm of the Blind Seer) I'm just toying with the idea.

My eclipse rotation time seems to be around 50sec, in which I have 16sec maximum of Astral Alignment. If I can consider Astral alignment as a 16sec +10% crit chance (it's late so that might be terrible wrong of an assumption), the 4pT11 would average a 10*(16/50)=3.2% crit chance.
Of course there is the fact that I will probably use +15% crit chance eclipsed SS or SF at the beginning of eclipse, which will complicate the issue, but I think the consensus for max dps is to currently ignore the 4T11 bonus, so it might also be a Moonfire that get the crit.

So is that accurate? Can we even remotely consider the 4T11 as a flat 3% crit chance give or take? That would help.

If my drowsy napkin math is utterly nonsense please feel free to correct me. You can mock me too, that's ok.

Hi, fellow boomkin here, got a couple of questions, most of them are related to burst dps.

First off, the trinket [Sorrowsong], I'm assuming the answer is yes as it is still in the updated Balance thread, but is this still worth using as of 4.2?

Secondly, what about activated trinkets? Both the Balance thread here and Mr Robot (which I admittedly don't really trust when it comes to trinkets, says some wacky stuff sometimes) say that [Necromantic Focus] and [Darkmoon Card: Volcano] are the best-in-slot trinkets, but I (and I have by no means done the math, just shallow logic on my part) feel inclined to think that a use-effect trinket would be pretty great in any fight where you need burst during a specific burn phase.

My third and last question is related to the profession perks. As pretty much everyone seems to agree about, Tailoring is a great profession as it provides more intellect than others at this point. The Balance thread used to say that it provided 120 intellect but now only says 90 intellect despite there being no changes to the embroidery (not that I haven't missed, anyway). What's up with that? Would love to know the reasoning behind it, don't sweat it though, that's not my main concern. In the second profession slot it doesn't really seem to be that important to have a specific profession as long as you have one of the "hi, I provide 80 intellect" ones, which there are a lot of. I personally have opted to use blacksmithing as it has the two benefits of being able to provide more than just intellect (largely irrelevant, I know, but still something) and the fact that it is pretty much guaranteed to provide 100 intellect in the future since stormjewels have been datamined and provide 50 in a stat. Jewelcrafting provides 1 more intellect than the other professions and the only real reason I don't use that before blacksmithing is that I didn't pick it up to begin with, it is undeniably stronger right now but it feels like it is not as much of a safe card as blacksmithing is when it comes to a future epic gem patch (getting 51 intellect rather than 81 would be disappointing, in case they leave the jc gems unchanged). Up until recently I have considered Tailoring + Jewelcrafting to be the optimal profession choices, but it recently hit me that the 80 intellect that engineering gets is actually a use-effect. Again, I'm far from experienced when it comes to complicated math so I haven't crunched any numbers but wouldn't engineering provide much stronger benefits than the other professions, considering that you can pop it during Bloodlust, during Berserking (troll racial) etc.? I also believe it synergizes well with our DoTs since they read your spell power when they are applied, correct me if I'm wrong but I'd think that gives you quite a bit of additional damage even if it's not in an ideal DoT situation (Solar Eclipse + DoTing up Beth'tilac spiderlings or something similar), right? Lastly, I'm aware that the engineering use-effect has a 20 sec shared cooldown with use trinkets. If you do choose to pick up engineering, would this affect your trinket choices for just a normal fight, and/or for the kind of fight where you would use Sorrowsong (and assuming I'm onto something in question 2, a use-effect trinket) like Beth'tilac or Ascendant Council?

Thanks a bunch in advance and terribly sorry about the wall of text, I've got a nasty habit of using unecessarily many words to say something that I could've conveyed in half the amount of text. :c