So since there is pretty much always an eclipse active I am having a hard time deciding what to do during heroism, do I ignore Solar Eclipse during this time? I usually spend some time casting wrath to proc a Lunar eclipse if heroism is just starting or if it will last through most of a lunar eclipse, but I don't know if I should be Wrath spamming even though cast time is under 1 second with NG.

Just some numbers from a few kills/attempts last night:
Idol uptime is between 93-95% on fights like Iron Council where you can always DPS, it dropped to 70% uptime on Algalon though, however as it has been noted if there is a MF up, the proc is probably up as well. I was a big advocate of the Starfall glyph over Starfire glyph just due to how often you wanted to AE in hard modes, but with this Idol being based on MF uptime I think it puts Starfire back out ahead again. So IS, SF, MF appears to be the way to go yet again.

Since 3.2 I am finally seeing the high NG uptime that was modeled, usually around 65-60% on fights where there is not a lot of downtime, prior to this actual NG uptime based on logs was 40-50%.

On a fight like IC last night I was able to push 6.5k+ DPS, and on fights like Iron council where I struggled to be competitive for a top 5 spot I find the back to back eclipse has helped greatly (especially since I have to switch targets to the spark really maximizing benefit from solar eclipses).

On the topic of When to starfall, Wrath is already such a quick cast that you have time to cast 3 under a single NG, this leads to pretty high up time already because with debuffs on the mob and a normal raid make up, hitting 33% crit is very feasible. So instead of using Starfall with Solar, I usually try and use mine right after a lunar eclipse, giving my non-eclipsed Starfires good uptime on NG to speed the process along.

Mostly personal preference. My guess is that most people will start off with Lunar because that's what their muscle memory tells them to do. DPS-wise it's mostly a wash; you have the same time-to-proc Eclipse regardless of intended type, though proccing Solar obviously more granular in actual time-to-proc. Proccing Lunar first means you're casting Wrath, so it's also a faster way to get E&M up on the boss, but when you're talking about a single GCD's worth of time, it's a relative non-issue.

My trinket on use uptime prefers starting with a lunar eclipse first, so i can use scale of fates earlier and so have it back from cd earlier. Unless you keep it off cd for a burn phase, then it doesn't matter much.


e:
2T8+2T9+moonfire idol
Personal preferences aside. Starting an encounter with Iff, moonfire, starfall (hold off starfall if the moonfire direct damage procced NG), solar eclipse, insect swarm & continue rotation seems pretty strong.

Better chance to extend the first moonfire dot
Moonfire is up fast, so is the proc aswell
Starfire has 3% more crit then wrath via iis
NG up early for starfire via moonfire direct damage or starfall

Treants I would still base on fight lenght & heroism timing.

I had been noticing that I was getting a higher DPS without casting any DoTs. It really doesn't make much sense, but that's what I was noticing. I made a little simulator to get a more realistic idea of what DPS would be with different rotations, and of course with a bigger sample size casting DoTs was by far more DPS than skipping them.


If anyone wants to try out the simulator, you can download it here: Moonkin Sim.rar.

I was surprised with how much the DPS varied, even with 5000 spell casts. Moral of the story is stick to math to make logical decisions.

DoT's do have higher DPET than Eclipsed nukes. They always have. The question is whether, if Eclipse is near ending, it's worth holding off on the DoT so you give up an uneclipsed GCD casting it instead.

Duly noted. The same principles of the question exist though: if it's so close now to the point where it could go either way, won't the lack of 2T8 mean that refreshing the dot is clearly superior?

It certainly favors refreshing (lack of 2T8, that is). But the basic analysis of determining when to refresh is still the same; it's hard to guess extemporaneously how much later in Eclipse it might shift the breakpoint. I'll try redoing the calculation that link a few posts up sometime soon.

Also, I've never personally confirmed the result that that stat difference from 226 to 258 overwhelms the loss from giving up 2T8, I'll try to check that soon once I get around looking up the stats and plugging them into WC.

Druid_T8_58_00_13 = 100% dot uptime
Druid_T8_X = When eclipse is up, only reapply MF/IS if > X sec left on the buff
Deactivating tier8_2pc only
Just go for 100% and have fun :o

The best two T9 pieces are hat/chest, so assume you have those on for your two-piece. The best T8 are legs/shoulders, so let's assume you upgrade those two slots from 226 to 258. You gain:

79 spellpower
43 hit
-64 crit
52 Int
113 Spi

Testing in my current setup (with 2T9 and IMF added in), exchanging those stats for the set bonus trades about 100 DPS for the 43 hit (which presumably you'd cover by swapping other items). Probably a net loss unless you were really struggling for good hit pieces.

For something more hit-negative, let's try upgrading legs/gloves instead:

79 spellpower
-14 hit
-76 crit
76 haste
52 Int
106 Spi

That looks like it loses 60 DPS and 14 hit. Definitely not good.

I'm seeing 2T8 worth about 415 DPS and 4T9 worth about 175 DPS, so this isn't surprising.

Since maybe the T8 pants are weak if you don't need hit, you could conceivably upgrade T8 legs/shoulders to T9 shoulders/gloves and swap the offset piece. This might be the most efficient plan, but for the moment it seems unlikely it would bring any gain, let along a large one.

Numbers would change slightly if I increased the stats to reflect what I might be wearing in late Colissuem, but not by much (esp. since the set bonuses scale quite well).

TLDR: I still find 2T8/2T9 to be BIS.

Here's the Rawr profile I used to generate the BiS list. Obviously it's geared for a JC, though I don't think that changes anything substantially given that Prismatics don't work like they used to. Also, it's Alliance. Cows gtfo. I haven't done the final upgrade list pass to make sure there's nothing I left out of the availability list, because it will take over a day to run (I ran one for T8 that took that long simply because of all of the items marked available), and I have a raid tonight. Still, given that it's equipping 258s in every* slot, I trust it for now. You'll need to rename the .zip to .xml, hosting here doesn't like xml files.

*Except the idol slot, obviously. And, of course, the two trinkets. GG IDS being BiS even when we have access to items 45 ilevels higher. Of course, it could also be that the procs on ToC trinkets aren't being counted by Rawr quite correctly yet.

What do we know about the current Rawr model? (I know I ask this a lot; it's always just hard for me to do anything with Rawr results when I can't see the innards).

To be more specific, what sorts of marginal values does Rawr give for current stats, and what does it give for values of the set bonuses?