Mana has been holding up fairly well for the most part. I've been doing 3/3 moonglow instead of improved moonfire. The exception is if you're in the arena for Thorim, where all of our casters ran dry (except our elemental shaman, which was down to 25% if you can believe that). This may change with better execution though.

While learning you pretty much always have to use your battle res so that sucks up some mana as well.

Agreed. I was strugging hard for mana in phase 3. I got 2 innervates and a mana tide and was still OOM hard, the solution should be to ease off the moonfiring in phase 2 and 3. Just never ever cast DoTs on mobs that you know will not live long enough for the full duration.

3/3 Intensity is definitely mandatory for Yogg-Saron(normal), but not necessarily other encounters on normal modes. Hard modes mana regen talents are definitely a must.

At the start of Yogg I had alot of mana troubles aswell. Wasn't able to sustain my mana for a second innervate even when using a potion. I respecced into 3/3 moonglow and 1/3 intensity from 1/3 and 0/3 which solved all my mana problems. My gear is probably a bit spirit heavy compared to other moonkins coming in at 497 unbuffed since there's still alot of overlap between my resto set. Still, needing 3/3 in all three regen talents feels a bit overkill, did you cast alot of typhoons? I cut down alot on it as we got further into the fight (having less tentacles at any given time was probably a big contributor too) and on the kill I didn't do any.

I did however cast IS/MF on everything in phase one and three plus on any corruptors when running between crushers in phase two, 58 MFs in total. Do you guys have public parses available for comparison?

Yeah, I was considering just holding off on the DoTs, but this is easy mode, and once we start taking away watchers, that just isn't going to be possible. It's going to be necessary to throw out as much damage as possible while making your way from tentacle to tentacle, and that pretty much means dotting up every constrictor and debuffer along the way.

E - Will try to find a parse for our Yoggs to compare.

We came to General today. I'm running 0/2 Gale Winds and dont intend to change it in the future. 2/3 intensity and ooc sufficed for regen so far as well. Procing lunar eclipse.

Starfall's lowered cooldown helps a lot with aoeing, on the few bosses where it's needed.

It seem's as if the transistion from t7 to t8 is quite big, with some of the t7 pieces actually looking slightly nicer or equal stat wise. A huge hit seem's to come from lack of haste. Is the large amount of crit on most Ulduar pieces going to be considered a worthy upgrade? I want to know which piece is gonna be the likely candidate to drop. Legs look the superior piece, but with the others having two stats + spirit, I find it harder to distinguish between them. Advice would be greatly appreciated, cheers.

As a side note, I ran a 55/0/16 spec for Yogg-Saron, gaining 3/3 Intensity for 1/2 in Nature's Reach.

On thorim I found (with a 56/0/15) build that as long as I stuck to starfall&1x hurricane at first (more if clearcast) & IS+wrath/starfire(lunar eclipse) for the trashmobs, and normal rotation for the minibosses I was more then good on mana. Even if I used battlerez (which is what, 2.5-2.8k extra mana) I would've managed without innervate.

Otherwise, I really doubt (so far ofc, not tried Yog) that you need any more mana-regen then what I have. I have very low spirit and as long as you execute the encounter well, there should be no need for anything else. I usually only run dry when several people fail and the encounter drags on for too long.

In summary, if your guild is relatively unskilled, then yes, extra manatalents would be something to seriously contemplate. If you can count on most of your guild to be skilled/aware, skip.

Speccing for Ulduar

When learning new encounters, mistakes are being made and fights last longer then they eventually will, once the execution is smoother. As a result, mana can become tight.

Pre 3.1, I had no mana regen talents whatsoever, but have now respecced to: 1/3 Moonglow, 2/3 Intensity and 1/1 Omen of Clarity. I seem to be doing ok on most encounters (8 bosses killed already on Heroic mode), although have run OOM on Deconstructor due to having AOEd a lot.

The 3 talent points spent on mana regen have be taken out of some DPS talents and I am having a bit of a hard time deciding what to drop.

At the moment, I have dropped Celestial Haste. I guess the other potential candidate for the boot is Typhoon and Gale Winds. But considering how useful AOE is in many of the encounters (as Lord Beef pointed out), I am not sure whether it would be a good choice.

Considering that Deconstructor was the only fight where mana seemed to have been a real issue, I might experiment with dropping mana regen talents again. Once we start practicing hard modes, however, I will probably need them. As an added drawback, normal mode raiding won't really be viable without them either. Since you get much less raid buffs, oomage usually ensues.

Ulduar Itemisation

I would be interested in hearing other people's opinions on our T8 itemisation. Perhaps my calculations are totally wrong but using my general stat weights (Spell Power 1.2, Haste 1, Crit Rating 0.8, Intellect 0.4, Spirit 0.2, Hit is a special case as it can be worth either a lot or nothing if you're already capped), I have come to a conclusion that:

- When swapping from T7 to T8, the overall Spell Power gain seems minimal. The set bonuses, on the other hand, seem weaker (although this is obviously a personal impression, I haven't seen any modelling on the bonuses done yet). Swapping to T8 doesn't really seem worth it or am I wrong?

- Using non set items is an option, however again napkin math has showed as it not being really worth it. The Spell Power gain you get from BiS non-set items does not seem to make up for the loss of 5% crit on Wrath and Starfire and 10% extra IS damage.

This is all napkin math and I sincerely hope I am totally wrong and that our Ulduar itemisation isn't broken.

I was fairly sure the general consensus is that 4pT8 is not worth it. Honestly, I don't have 4pT7 (just haven't had luck with helm drop and DKP) so I won't miss the crit bonus, but even without it, I'm having a hard time justifying upgrading my tier pieces. I suppose I could go with helm and pants to get my 2pT8 bonus, but the pants seem a sidegrade at best from my Wanton Spellcasters. However, my headpiece isn't BiS, and the haste it gives is relatively low, so swapping in the T8 helm will give me some of the hit that I'll lose by swapping T8 pants in and gemming for straight spellpower.

I'm wondering if 2xT8 goes towards tilting the scales more in the favor of using a wrath eclipse, considering the bonus scales better for Wrath than it does for Starfire.

I am assuming blizzard means percentage points in the set bonus, i.e increasing the 30% eclipse bonus to 45%, rather than 34.5%.. I'm no maths wiz, so feel free to point out any fallacies in my reasoning below.

To clarify what I mean, currently when you're under the effect of a Starfire Eclipse you already have somewhere in the vicinity of 75% chance to crit with Starfire. Adding another 15% crit to that is is not a 15% increase in damage, it's rather a mere 9% increase in average damage.

The Wrath eclipse on the other hand sees close to 12% gain in average damage, because of how the value of crit diminishes as you approach 100%, while a damage modifier like solar eclipse scales forever.


With a 45% crit chance before eclipse you should have NG up all the time in both cases, so I have ignored the effect of NG.

The wowhead tooltip says there is a 3min CD on it.

Elune's Wrath - Spell - World of Warcraft

That means every 3 minutes you get a Starfire that only takes a GCD to cast. Very weak bonus.