A thought has been troubling me today. In raids I usually get FM, and with my usual spec with 3 pts in iIS I'm sitting at a 97% chance to crit with all raid buffs in 4t9, with the new 10% from eclipse added. With the new idol, that's an extra ~.5% chance as well. As it stands, haste rating beyond 400 is obviously less valuable for us than it is for other casters, and with the gear upgrades in ICC I don't see how getting the soft crit cap for Starfire will be difficult either. From what it's looking like, extra crit will be worth much less for us than it will be for other casters like extra haste is already, making our gear obviously scale much less, resulting in a lower net DPS gain comparing to other casters receiving equal stat upgrades. What are your opinions on this matter? How much less DPS do you estimate we will be doing in BiS 277/284(LK) gear than other casters knowing that they receive higher DPS increases from equal stats to us?

FFB and TTW mages both gain more benefit. I don't know about Arcane mages. An "easy" way is to look up spec stat weights, however this often fluctuate with a toons gearset.

That being said, we can choose to NOT have the buff, passing it to someone else. FM shouldn't be taken into account when calculating your soft-crit cap.

TBH, I'm personally still going to aim for the maximum amount of stats out of my gear as possible even when I soft crit-cap, with a slightly higher emphasis on Haste which has always had a higher stat weight for me anyway.

Could you help me understand these numbers? When i look at the PTR Simcraft (SampleOutputPTR - simulationcraft - Project Hosting on Google Code), it puts 4pt9 at 9653 DPS, and it was updated on the 26th, so it wouldn't factor in Eclipse changes. With your numbers, considering eclipse changes, we are put lower than this. I was under the impression that the +10% eclipse buff generally made up for the loss of 2pt8 and WiseEclipse, but from your numbers it doesn't quite seem to cut it?

The loss of 2pt8 really shouldn't be an issue as the tier 10 would have overridden that anyway. It would be illogical to balance against gearing at the start of a patch compared to gearing at the end, i.e. when players are in their tier 10.

What are the numbers for 4pT9.245 3.2 vs 3.3, assuming WE on 3.2 and no WE (as it doesn't work) on 3.3? Forgive me if these numbers were already in the previous post - I wasn't entirely sure what the 4 different setups corresponded to

edit : never mind, I guess the top 2 are feral, I made the incorrect assumption that in a moonkin thread the stats would be comparing different moonkin setups rather than comparing moonkin vs feral

Looks like the change is a nice little buff in the end for 4T9 giving +224 vs 3.2 2T8+2T9 and +282 vs 3.2 4T9

I suspect this explains the difference (but I haven't tested it): strict_gcd_queue=1 became a default for simc on the 30th.

I'm going to follow up in the simc for fur and feather wearers thread, since this is more about the simulation, than about raiding.

Firstly, following that argument leads us right back to TBC days or worse, pre-tbc. The idea is for hybrid dps to be roughly 5% behind theoretical max of pure class dps I interpret to mean you should expect to top the charts a few times without grossly outskilling or out-gearing the pures. In fact on same skill and gear, I would expect a hybrid like the Moonkin to top the charts occasionally but less than a hunter/mage/lock/rogue would but a few times, as certain encounters would play to your strengths and another specs weakness, and certain times you may not be the target of random boss effects, as they would.

With a 5% disparity, you should easily see your moonkin topping the charts, just less often than the hunter/rogue/mage. 5% is a small margin that skill, encounter design can easily make up for and allow a moonkin to sometimes be ahead, the 5% shows overall that generally speaking on more fights a pure would be topping. So, you should expect to occasionally top charts, and if you’re not generally as a Moonkin or any hybrid amongst peers at least some of the time, then your dps needs to go up by design. Either by buffing or fixing what is causing it to dip very far below it’s theoretical max mean output.

Which brings me nicely to the next point
A very well written explanation by Ara [reply 2506], I couldn’t explain it so nicely in layman maths terms. I agree 100% that the main problem with balance druid dps both for pvE and pvp, is the heavy reliance on standing still to cast, as Ara has just explained, you lose a lot more dps moving than any other caster class appears to, because the largest dps contributors, eclipse, wrath/starfire casts are interrupted by movement increasing their downtime and your general output moreso than most.

Wrath clipping haste is another issue that doesn’t help, but nowhere near as significant as how much this spec is penalized for moving. Despite the 3.1 eclipse change, which helped. We must however be careful not to assume our intended dps is meant to include a 100% eclipse up time. As ways to counteract this problem, I’ve been in favor of shifting more damage contribution into the DoTs of IS and MF by having those dots critting from the start, and eclipse also boosting Moonfire and IS as well. I have also been a big fan of a new spell, some sort of instant cast that fills that time period, usable in the normal rotation when standing still and eclipse procs up, but, it gets interesting when you’re on the move, a spell that does more damage when you’re not doing a timed cast has never been tried before, could be interesting for cataclysm.

I am not in favour generally speaking of increasing Wrath’s cast time to ease the clipping problem. To me that just lends more emphasis to haste, almost like a lot of people a glued on haste gear. Haste was the way forward for the TBC days, maybe some still want it like that. I like that crit plays a larger part for Moonkin, and tbh, too few casters rely on it as a main stat, if we were all needing haste as the top stat after SP, it would be boring. But saying that, a large factor in this it is because blizzard has been itemizing us with so much haste, when our class design has such an obvious low soft cap. So we get alot of haste that simply doesn’t scale us as well as it would do anyone. Solution is either make haste more valuable for balance druids by re-designing wrath to not clip so easily, or give/provide crit heavy gear instead.

We needed to have had more crit in the earlier sets and raid drops because we didn’t scale as well with haste so our improvement was lessened. I know the wrath clipping is not a good thing and that needs to be sorted out. Also wrath being more distinguishable to starfire would be good.

Perhaps if Wrath had a small chance to proc an extra wrath completely free, i.e. the extra wrath did not trigger a gcd, or cost mana or anything, it is there to make up for the times you do clip. Let me explain, so your haste is high enough that every wrath cast is 0.7 secs, so you’re losing 0.3 secs for each wrath cast, at this point, every 2 to 3 wraths cast should yield an extra free wrath. So the chance for a free wrath is directly tied in with haste somehow, or a fixed value could be given instead.

The addition would read in Starlight Wrath talent. Reduces your wrath/starfire by 0.1 to 0.5 secs and occasionally yields a second instant wrath at no mana costs. The chances of this occurring increases with haste. This would be the description. It has to be this talent because this one reduces the time of wrath, at a 2 sec wrath, there is no clipping till a much higher haste value. The description is simple, but the formula can easily predict at exactly what the soft cap is, and with every increase in haste you get can predict how much clipping you get and therefore determine when the extra free wrath will occur.

This solves the wrath clipping problem, and gives it a bonus effect. To make it more distinguishable to starfire, wrath could at base also do a number of things, , add a stacking dot, or debuff of some sort, or affect some other druid abilities like say would allow your insect swarm and Moonfire dots to have a chance to crit equal to your crit chance for those spells, for the next 3 secs, stacks up to 5 times.

I must admit, heavy math makes my head hurt. Trying to understand Simcraft calculations melts my brain. I would be very interested in hearing about the findings once Simcraft has been tweaked, but i don't think i could dive into the discussion myself, at least not more than i have managed so far.

I will be on the lookout for some updates in this thread, however, and leave the number crunching to the smarter guys..

Another thing I am curious about is the 4 piece Tier 10 set bonus. Does this stack up to 3 times? I remember reading somewhere that it did, but no real confirmation.
To be honest, I would hope that there is no limit on it, and I would be mortified if only one effect could be up at any one time. With a 15k Starfire, you get a 1050 damage buff over 4secs. This is quite low if it is only one effect at a time, especially so when you realize that a Wrath crit is about 6-10k depending on raid buffs, bear in mind we have to consider small raids as well as large raids.

What would make sense is that every crit you make languishes. The max you can get up at any given one time anyway is 4, if you crit wrath consecutively 4 times in a row. Normally it would be 2 on Starfire, so having a limit makes no sense, 3 or otherwise.

Saying that, the set piece is a cool DoT you don't have to proc watch for or press, and well you are bound to have one running all the time. if your crit rate is above 25% for wrath and 50% for Starfire, which is to be expected on any reasonably well geared raiding druid.

Updated TTT/Spreadsheet. A bit early, but the patch is only 5 days away and I got around to doing it now.

Ezoleet, to my knowledge each crit refreshes the timer and increases the total damage that is done over that time period. If you crit for 10k, it will have a dot ticking for 4 seconds hitting for 700 damage. If you crit for 10k again 1 second later then that will add another 700 damage to the pool, meaning the dot is refreshed to 4 seconds but with 1225 damage in the pool. 3rd crit in a row pushes that up to 4 seconds, about 1618.75 damage.

I don't know when the ticks hit, the above is based on previous posters (can't find poster to quote I'm afraid) where it was likened to a Mage Ignite.

We all seem to be excited about the extra crit we're getting in the next patch for lunar eclipse... I hope none of us forgot that we still need to use that upcoming golf-swing timer that someone is obviously trying to put together at the moment. Can Moonkins golf? Only the next patch will tell.

Unless I missed some important patch notes about how blizzard is trying to remove a need for such an addon.