Yes, mana is a huge issue on Vezax Hardmode and to a certain point, gear dependent. 8k mana when the Saronite Animus spawns is a bit low. From my experience, around 10k-11k should be sufficient to be able to DPS the Animus down and finish off the boss afterwards. If you go low, simply stop DPSing entirely (including using dots) until the add is up. Raid DPS should be sufficiently high to achieve this, with relatively "good" shadow crashes for the casters.

As far as Eclipse is concerned, I've tried hard to get viable rotations up, but in most if not all situations, it proved counter productive both mana and DPS wise, since you can and will be losing most of the buff, depending on the RNG with mark/crashes. Starfire spam (with IS up, especially when you have to move), though a bit mindless, seems to work rather well and should conserve as much mana as possible. Haste wise, I simply don't feel that nerfing my haste to the ground for a 2-3% more crit is really going to have any serious impact.

There's been a lot of discussion regarding DPSing on General Vezax. I normally am Resto but for this particular fight, I decided to try out Boomkin to see how well a dotless rotation would work on the encounter as some others have discussed. I had a few questions that I thought would more appropriate to ask here instead of the Simple Questions thread.

Do stat values have the same weight while inside and outside of a shadow crash? That is, do haste, crit, sp, int, and spirit retain their same relative values? I've noticed that more ideal gear tends to be Int/SP/Crit/Haste, but most of my gear actually has a lot of Spirit because most of it is from my resto set. Using a dotless Lunar rotation, I managed to output nearly 14,000 dps which I found a bit interesting for my first time DPSing on Vezax.25. This got me thinking that Spirit may increase in value significantly as a dps stat due to the 100% damage buff, but I haven't found any information on EJ yet that might suggest so. I was also wondering if Haste becomes lower in relative value due to 100% boost from the crash.

Unfortunately I do not have the WWS yet, but I will post them on the proper thread when I have it available. For reference, this is the snapshot of my meter for my guild's kill as well as my character sheet and starfire data.

hi, im kinda new around here and i wanted to ask on what rotation is good for a moonkin to improve my current dps.
currently i have 14.23% Hit Rating which makes me capped if i use iFF for the additional 3% and currently my crit rating is at 24% moonkin form and my sp is at 2248 while in moonkin form, all of the stats are self-buffed using only mark of the wild.

my current rotation is this, iff->MF->IS->Wrath (Till eclipse proc)->SF (Till eclipse fades)->repeat

im currently pulling a dps range of 2.7k~3.2k (tested on a dummy)

ill look for further references along the thread to see what im looking for, but any opinion regarding my post would greatly help, thanks


and btw, here's my armory for further observation:

The World of Warcraft Armory

you're not using some good talents like Celestial Focus and Improved Insect Swarm. You can take talent points from some mana regen talents like Dreamstate and Intensity.
After that, I see you don't have any Tier bonus!
Just see at some wowarmory from other moonkins, you'll have an idea of what you've to do! And be sure to correctly refresh your dots! For better SF put MF, for better Wrath put IS! If you're not into an eclipse proc, just refresh both when them fade.

thanks for the reply

actually, i have the [Valorous Dreamwalker Vestments] but i used [Raiments of the Corrupted] for better hit rating, should i rather stick with the item set for an additional tier bonus or ?

ill try to respec so i can allocate the points from Dreamstate into IIS, and then remove gale winds and -1 to intensity so i can allocate them for Celestial Focus.

Yeah, probably you are playing just naxxramas, so more haste instead of crit is better. Go for the tier chest

You are hit capped at 263, so you don't need 300+ xD Just stay at least 263 or close to it, you can also use hit rating food if you do too many miss.

You just need 263 if you put iFF on target or a shadow priest is in raid, cause it's +3% hit.

edit: corrected.

No. If you are specced into iFF and there is a feral putting up FF(F), you will get 3% crit, but not 3% hit. You would have to have a spriest putting up misery or another Balance Druid putting up FF for that.

I find that mana issues are really a direct result of guild composition. If your guild is doing comparable DPS, then fights are shorter, you own DPS is higher, and mana is a non-issue. But that doesn't happen on most fights with my guild. We aren't a strategic bunch. We just go over fight mechanics and assume everything will be kosher beyond that. We wiped a number of times on Hodir last night, Our fights are mostly focused on avoiding negatives rather than taking advantage of positives. "Don't stand in the circles" rather than "Make sure you're getting storm power and stand in starlight for DPS boost". Despite the boosts available, our melee DPS is only pulling slightly more than normal, and our ranged DPS is doing almost nothing extra, due to movement issues and healing problems.

The end point is, the people you play with and the variables around you will have just as much effect on gearing as Rawr or WC numbers will. If you're like me, and end up with a lot of dead DPS and having to pour out nonstop to try to beat an enrage timer, you'll probably value int and mana giving trinkets a lot more than if everyone is completely on the ball.

This is certainly true, but I'm surprised you could have mana issues, especially with 3/3 Intensity, even with sloppy players around you. Most Ulduar fights can't go that much longer than expected or else you wipe anyway. I only swapped to 3/3 Moonglow recently for Vezax (which I'll probably keep generally since IMF is so weak), and I've rarely been short on mana. On a long Yogg I can run out if I Moonfire everything too liberally, but even then only if I don't Innervate myself. I don't really see, for example, how you would ever run out on Hodir.

Also, you're not at hit cap in the Armory.

It is true, I'm not hit capped. I will sometimes eat hit food for boss fights, but it's all depending on mechanic. I'm less than 1% under the hit cap, so 46 sp is often worth more to me on straight DPS fights like Ignis, Razorscale, or XT. On fights where missing might cause significant issue, I will use hit food instead. I run 2700 sp buffed w/totems, so 46 sp is 1.7% of that, and 1.7% sp is often more DPS than .76% hit, or at least, if my mental math is right.

As for mana, it can be dependent. I don't get to use innervate on myself, it is saved for the healers. Raid buffed, I have about 153 MP5, and 22k mana. Due to the aforementioned healing issues, I sometimes find it necessary to hot myself up in the middle of a fight, but even without that, I find I'm not getting enough back from crits to make up for what I'm spending, and we don't have any shadow priests in the raid at the moment, and whatever replenishment effect we had was returning me almost no mana, and some fights didn't see any replenishment.

I'll be honest, I run with a guild composed of friends. We have a lot of room for improvement, but sometimes it's hard to see us committing to that. Our method of downing bosses seems to be ramming ourselves against them over and over til we eke out a win, and continuing to do this until we outgear the content. We never really improve our strat or execution in a permanent fashion. Just down a boss and move on, or don't down a boss and whine about the "baddies". It is the primary reason we are stuck on the keepers, and are unlikely to pass them until Blizzard has nerfed them into oblivion.

Could someone with an american account post a bug report on the [Gloves of the Frozen Glade]? Comparing them to [Handwraps of the Vigilant] it seems they're about 20 points under budget; either that or the Handwraps are 20 points over.

Did you actually compute that or are you just eyeballing it? It does look a little fishy, but the increased cost of stacking a stat can be deceptive. Maybe 72 to 82 Stamina, though horribly inefficient, really does cost that much.

Eyeballing it - I tried to get to grips with the ilvl formula but kept getting stupid answers (like ilvl 259 without taking sockets in to account). It's +10 stam, -3 int, -8 spirit, -19 crit. I really, really think that's off, especially as stam is 2/3rd of the cost of the other stats. Would be nice to get a confirmation either from someone who can use the formula properly, or from a Blizzard poster.

Okay, so Vezax hard mode, 10 and/or 25. Should I be doing anything outside the Shadow? Even just keeping IS active so that maybe i'll get a OOC proc or an insta starfire? Or is it just not worth it?

Next, should I be looking at swapping gear? Currently running at about 23k mana at the start. Should I look to swap out the gear and ignore 4pt8? and just get gear with INT on it to pump up my mana pool. I'm also assuming I'll need to respec and drop some talents in favor of Moonglow and maybe Imp trees.

edit: just realized one error, 4pt8 is basically worthless as a normal SF fits nicely inside the GCD thus an instant unless it's used with OOC outside the vapor. 8% proc chance isn't enough to merit using it.

Here's our first night of attempts at Vezax Hard: General Vezax

I mostly used IS/Solar with normal gear/spec. On the easymode kill, I used IS/Lunar, which worked surprisingly well. Lunar doesn't seem suited to serious hardmode work though; you're typically not going to be lucky enough with Eclipse to recoup the mana spent casting Wraths.

Why do people talk about not casting DoT's here? IS gives roughly twice the DPM of any other spell. You should be casting it anytime you're in a Crash and it's not up. Other than that, spam Starfire, and when Solar is up, cast Wrath.


To answer above poster--definitely never cast anything when not in a Crash. In fact, it's very important to have your debuffs somewhere visible, so you can immediately stop casting if the Crash fades to avoid a huge waste of mana.

Are any Glyphs useful at all on this fight then? Rebirth? Wrath pushback?

In theory, starfall glyph to reduce cooldown when it's used on clearcasts. That's difficult to do and probably not a major increase anyway.

Glyphs don't matter much for Vezax

Actually starfall is very bad for Vezax cause it can kill the clouds by mistake.

No it can't, starfall wont target clouds because they are not hostile untill you attack them.

Just to clarify, during the iCD are you still casting wrath or spamming SF?

We worked our first night of attempts on him the other night. I attempted it with my normal spec but it was just not working for me mana wise, so I switched to 3/3 Moonglow and even took owlkin frenzy instead of Starfall/Typhoon/Gale Winds and replaced Celestial Focus with Brambles since the shadow crash negate so much haste for a solar rotation anyways.

The mana cost of Starfire appeared to be ~510 mana, while Wrath was ~349, so 2 SFs totaling 1,020 mana vs 3 wraths (rough estimations here) for 1047 mana. With wrath averaging 8,400 that is 25,209 damage for 1,047 mana. The alternative being an average Starfire of 13,000 or 26,000 damage for 1,020 mana.

Respective DPM:
Wrath - 24.0773
Starfire - 25.4901

While this appears to lean towards SF throughout, it is important to note that I simplified Starfire to a 1.5 second cast, when it is really a 1.2 or 1.3 meaning you cast more than 2 SFs in the time you cast 3 wrtaths. This slight difference will end up leading you to Wrath being more mana efficient I believe.

Anecdotally, after I respec'd and only kept iFF, IS and using a solar roation with Wrath filler, I seemed to have more mana left when the Animus would spawn compared to attempting to use a lunar rotation. On our kill (normal mode) I switched back to the Lunar rotation and did WAY more DPS, but was bone dry on mana practically (we broke a vapor but tried not to stand in it).

If you check the latest version of WC that I'd posted on the other thread, I added a simple DPM calculation. From memory for now, but with my current stats it looked something roughly like:
Wrath: 14
Starfire: 18
Wrath (Eclipse): 20
Starfire (Eclipse): 24
IS: 37
MF/SFall: 10
FoN: 60

Definitely use a Starfire filler in any case. Note also that these values are with 2T8--if you don't have 2T8 then ignore Eclipse and spam straight Starfire (and IS).

---

Vezax spec:

I did swap to 3/3 Moonglow, but that's reasonable enough for a general-use raid spec anyway. I can see dropping Typhoon and Gale Winds (Hurricane theoretically is useful for Clearcasts, but this isn't all that practical). Starfall is good to have a point in since you can still Clearcast it.

Does Profound Darkness proc OF? If so, it's clearly worth taking for this fight; if not, it seems worthless.

Otherwise, I wouldn't change the normal spec much. All the normal DPS talents still add DPS/DPM (IIS only if you're using 2T8/Solar). CF is DPM-neutral, but I'd still want it for higher Starfire DPS while the Animus is up. Brambles is just a truly tiny amount of damage (note that nothing it affects is buffed by Shadow Crash).