I must start this post with a "This is not QQ" but there are a few issues that are concerns to me as a raiding moonkin and I wanted to post something here to get some feedback from the other raiders before I pursue it any further. So below is a post about some issues I feel deserve to be addressed and what I am looking for is if I have missed something, or if I am off base with the rest of you out there.

Inc, wall of text:
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Let me start by saying I am extremely happy to have my favorite aspect of the druid class as a viable raid member. I was forced into tanking and healing from t4-t6 because the raid utility of a moonkin did not outweigh the DPS loss between me and the other casters (especially in Sunwell).
Now, that being said, moonkins still need some love and yes I know it is early into the PTR and there may be some for 3.1, but I want to express these beforehand.

PvE:
RNG dependency, you have stated that you don’t mind RNG as long as it is not making a huge difference (like a stun), and to be honest I kinda like the proc watching aspect of Eclipse, it definitely keeps you involved. There are two major problems I see with the ability as it sits now.

1. 60% chance on wrath crit is a killer. If I do not get an Eclipse proc early in the rotation the other DPS jumps so far ahead of me I will never catch up. There are times when I get long strings of Wrath casts that crit and get no eclipse. I am not sure how to adjust this, but maybe it would be an entire overhaul of the spell (see below)

2. Mechanics interfering with rotations, there is just too much randomness involved in the eclipse ability as it is now. On Thaddius I run out of the eclipse iCD and have both dots ticking, so I want to switch to wrath to proc my lunar eclipse, but there is a polarity shift incoming, do I risk DPSing and wasting precious eclipse time, or do I not DPS and waste that time? On four horsemen we are about to kill one of them which means I have a bit of a run ahead of me, but I have both DoTs on the current target, do I risk procing an eclipse that will be wasted while I run to the next mob? And don’t even mention how many times I get web wrapped through an eclipse proc. Yes I know these abilities are getting ready to get used by the mob, but I cannot control the procs which puts me in a terrible situation on pretty much every fight (literally every fight but Patchwerk and possibly gluth).

I am not sure how hard it would be, but I have read in other threads an idea that I liked. Instead of having duration, maybe let eclipse have a “charge” and once it procs your next 6-8 starfire casts will have the bonus crit chance? Now, you are worried about not having to proc watch, but there are a few things I think that could be done to ensure there is still a time limit, like having a new eclipse proc reset the count to 6-8, so if you have extra starfires they are lost and this will also prevent stacking up starfire crits for huge crit spamming. Or even have a timer on the “charges” so that when you cast a starfire it resets the duration, but if you do not cast a SF in 10-15 seconds after the proc you lose the charges? Not sure about the best way to handle it, but we would love to see some work done on this.

While we are on Eclipse you mentioned that there are plans to buff the Wrath portion of it to make sure it is equally attractive. Well, there is an extremely simple way to fix that.

- Make the GCD on Wrath allowed to go under 1 second. The biggest complaint with Wrath is simply that we are forced to clip the GCD using it during Heroism or Natures Grace, I mean, you gave us the ability to cast wrath in under a second, I think it is only right to allow the GCD to reflect that decision. Otherwise, no matter the increase to wrath, if we are suffering dead time like we do now, Moonkins will turn away from Wrath as much as possible.

Treants, this is a simple one I would say. Why am I hit capped, but my treants are missing? Can’t they be hit capped as long as I am too? And even after the stamina buff to them, they are still the easiest pets in the game to kill. Enh shaman wolves have way more HP and abilities. (Note: I don’t need treants to have abilities, but not having them die on any fight with a minuscule amount of AE would be awesome)

Glyphs: Please quit introducing glyphs that are worse than the ones we have already. Everyone will continue using the moonfire, starfire, and insect swarm/innervate ones (for PvE at least), so if it is not giving us a benefit that is equal to or better than those, there are no reasons to switch.

PvP:
You said you are looking into Typhoon which will be nice, and you gave us Survival Instinct which is a good on snap button, I still think moonkins have major survivability issues but I am content to see what you have in the pipeline for our current abilities.

Although is matches are going to start lasting longer, we could use that barkskin ability so my Innervate is not purged away through the countless other buffs I have on at the time.

To be perfectly honest I respect resto to go into arenas, so I can’t comment much on this aspect, I just hate dying so quickly in matches and BGs.

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Anything in there that has been missed or overlooked? Feel free to PM me with a response, if this post gets an infraction for being "whiny" so that no others receive warnings. Okay after re-reading by the Glyph section may need some work to have a bit more constructive comments in it, feedback would be appreciated!

1. Eclipse RNG - I disagree with this being an issue, in general a moonkins dps will vary maybe 500-1000 at high end level. Theres some expected medium & then you go 5-10% above or below - Nothing major, if nothing else it adds excitement to have something to hope for.

2. I love how it works now. Movement bosses are designed with HP pools matching lowered dps from forced movement -- Everyone has it & moonkins are better off than others, with several viable on the move casts. Without sounding too harsh I think its a matter of thinking & planning ahead, sure Eclipse might loose potential but it does not matter that much, clever use of your instant casts is how you make world top 10 owl scores on fx Grobbulus+Thaddius.
Lowering RNG & movement penalty is just two ways less to seperate the good player from the bad one.

Treants - Fragile yes, strongest instant spell ingame if used right though. They do a sick amount of dps, of course all buffs are nice, but if more survival comes at the cost of damage potential then no thanks.

Glyphs - Starfall is a serious alternative for Insect Swarm in 3.1. On the other hand theres a glyph for all spells apart from Hurricane by then, so I dont see them adding more before next expansion.

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In general I think you are indeed being too "whiny" about Moonkins current state - I was pleasently suprised when 3.1 didn't have notes for us, if anything our dps potential is too high.
Its fun to play in its current state, we have awesome utilility, highest caster hybrid dps potential - On top of that a decently fun rotation & the clever owl gets rewarded for planning his actions ahead of time.

Offtopic:
The PvP issues I agree on - Owls die too fast. But im not really too fussed about arenas so perhaps its just my lack of skills

On #2 and your "in general" section about rewarding those who plan ahead.

I know how long a fight duration is, and I have things timed like an iCD coming up as drake#1 lands on Sarth 3d, but these are not things I can control, it just so happens that us casting heroism and burning down the first drake usually works well with my Eclipse coming of the CD. However, if you have perfected some way to predict exactly what is going to happen and not have any downtime waiting for boss mechanics, I would certainly love to hear it.

Don't get me wrong, I do very well on every fight according to WWS and make the most out of my DPS time I can assure you. But there is no real control over my proc time. Do you have a response to the specific situations I listed above? Have you honestly NEVER encountered a time where you had to move soon and iCD was up and you had both DoTs up? Yes I know there are treants/starfall but those come at set times, not just randomly when I need to take up spare time with extra buttons.

And I will be the first to admit that I do not know much about other classes, but who has it worse? The closest thing I can think of is Hot Streak, but they get 10 seconds to cast an INSTANT spell, which is much easier to manage and their DPS does not rely solely on this to be effective.

Treants - Like I said I don't want them to have damage increased or abilities, but they are still the easiest to die especially in raids, I don't suggest sacrificing any DPS but merely bringing them up to a respectable level.

Glyphs, an alternative assuming your guild forces you to apply IS for the -hit portion of the spell, which I can not imagine.

Yes we are the highest DPS hybrid, but ele shammies have closed the gap and spriests provide replenishment/hit (easier than we can) and are not really that far behind anyways.

No. Comparing the IS Glyph to the Starfall Glyph puts them about even.

I apologize, I was wrong. I thought with higher IS uptime it was pretty easily outweighed.

@Asheara, I see your points, and I can see leaving treants slightly more vulnerable, but at least the hit cap would be nice :P

I suppose we must agree to disagree, but I will end with this

I don't mind the RNG aspect to the extent that you can not control procing eclipse, but I do not think be able to control how you use the buff it gives you is dumbing down the game. In fact I feel it is exactly the opposite and in taking away the RNG portion in that respect, puts more power into the player and how they respond to it. However, I do see how it can be portrayed as dumbing down the game as well.

I wouldn't mind a change to the wrath-proccing-eclipse mechanic if it's possible without upsetting the expected time to proc balance between the two versions. Having something like an inverted Combustion where you need X wrath crits to proc it, instead of the double randomness required today. It would still be random and based on crit, but it would give me a better chance to prepare if I had a stack counter to watch. At least I would get some feedback that I was working towards my proc instead of feeling like I was waiting for the bus or something Also, being able to cast just a few wraths without fear of procing eclipse would make a big difference on some movement bosses imo. I don't think something like this would "dumb down" the owl play, since there's still the same amount of planning ahead involved. It could even encourage planning

That said, I don't really have a problem with the current eclipse mechanics. I like the fact that you can have those insane lucky fights where you just proc off the first wrath you cast. It keeps your head in the game. I would just like to get rid of the possibility to go an entire fight without it proccing. Even the half-assed idea I came up with would still allow the daredevil approach where you go with gut feeling and start casting SF before seeing the proc. "be the proc"

As for making the solar eclipse viable, I can't see an easy solution. Lowering gcd below 1s is not gonna happen, and increasing cast time with 1-2 sec would either make it into another starfire or still subject to clipping during hero/bl, seeing as our SF is already close. Having a talent to make it even longer than SF and up it's coefficient could be interesting, as could increasing it's crit coefficient turning it into a frostfire kinda thing. But both those options smell too much like mage (perhaps because my alt is one^^) Perhaps changing aspects of the spell during eclipse could work? "your wrath takes twice the time to cast but does double the damage" sort of thing? Meh... I don't recall seeing any really good ideas on how to "fix" wrath. Has there been any?

btw, is the hit cap issue with Treants due to melee needing more rating per % hit, or do they simple have a set amount of hit?

I'd like to chime in with moonkins needing help in pvp, though to me it feels more like other classes need to be brought down (dk lockdown abilities/spell survivability, ret pally lockdown/chase skills, rogue lockdown etc) because I can't really think of a way to boost kins without making us overpowered.

For pve we are pretty spot on, and though it is a bit too lame to go 2x moonfire durations (no sf) with wrathspam without proccing eclipse, I will live through it.
That said, blizzard has stated that they are looking at wrath in relation to eclipse for 3.1 (I dont have link, just remember seeing it). So I expect they will up the % chance by 10-15% or something to make wrath-eclipse a viable alternative.

Actually - as has beend pointed out - our DPS is ok. So that kind of buff to triggering an Eclipse (or any buff for that matter) would just mean we'd get a nerf somewhere else - and I'm really fine with how we are PVE-wise.

Only thing I'm missing is a balanced solar eclipse - I'd like the possibility to just go mad on wrath-spams for a change. Although I don't think Wrath will ever be better than Starfire due to latency and GCD.
Just hope they won't fix it in a way that you won't be punished for triggering the wrong eclipse.

It's hard to imagine a practical scenario where both lunar and solar eclipses will be useful within one max-DPS rotation. One Eclipse will always provide more of a DPS gain than the other, and so long as they share a cooldown, the rotation will always focus on exclusively proccing whichever one is stronger.

RNG isn't skill, though. In addition, dealing with either good or bad RNG isn't a hard choice for players anyway-if you have bad luck, you keep on hitting the same button, if you have good luck, you hit another button. Also, because of this, as you noted earlier, there can be a variance in DPS of 500-1k. That's extremely significant. Without a detailed look at a WWS or other log, it's almost impossible to tell the difference between a very skilled, but unlucky moonkin and one that isn't as good.

Perhaps the problem is that the Eclipse buff is too good, like the original Sudden Death for fury warriors. Maybe it would be a good idea to nerf the buff slightly, but increase the Wrath proc rate.

Potion of Speed.

& here's my reasoning & simplified calculations
http://elitistjerks.com/1128611-post597.html