I see what you're saying, but if you check it out in Rawr I think you'll see that even when a wrath rotation starts to pull ahead, it's not by much. And you probably won't see any real world increase since starfire is more forgiving of lag than wrath due to the way the spell queue interacts with the global cooldown.

I'd prefer to see caster leather offset items be removed. Give us some sort of stat modifer to make up the difference in armor (or not, it doesn't really matter to me outside of pvp gear). That would let all* the dps casters pull from the same pool of armor and wouldn't leave druids in potentially inferior items or leaving leather stuff to rot.

*maybe not elemental shamans, but they don't want spirit items. For that matter, remove caster plate so shamans/paladins would just wear mail and druids/clothies would just wear cloth.

I may be wrong, but I got a feeling of how itemization is done this time being not as a "max out sp+haste, leave other stats behind, let's raise our dps to the stars". All mana classes got nerfed on mana, we are of no exception. Now, in order to get back our regen without rebuffing healers, looks like we will need a bit of spirit on gear, while having not too much haste as before, to keep ourselves competitive against other caster classes, plus being able to recover back our current allocated mana talent points.

I am not seeing a huge dps increase from new Ulduar gear. Instead, I see a more mana-oriented gear, still with a small room to focus on one particular stat. But I do not think we will ever see our moonkins doing way too much damage than today. We will do the same damage however lasting longer. This is our improvement post mana regen nerf, on my point of view.

Just my $.02.

If they wanted to help our mana regen crit would be a much better choice than spirit. Graylo went over the math in a blog post of his and it turns out crit is only about 2.97% behind spirit in returning mana but 433% better for dps.
Source: Gray Matter: Mana Regen: Spirit vs Crit

Shoulda just gone through the bosses to take a look at the loot since it's a bit more updated. Patch 3.1 - Ulduar - Yogg-Saron :3

Thats some very very good points.
But, i would like you to talk more about why we shouldn't also try to get the cloth gear? Im seeing peices dropping with awesome stats for us. Its a massive nerf to us not to take upgrades. Especially in my guild where we use dkp.

Another comment was made that alot of gear in uld is centered towards longer fights (more spirit) There seams to be absolutly no need for spirit in any of the boss's ive fought so far. currently 7down on 25man.
I admit alot of my gear has spirit on it, but i have no points in intensity so im not getting any mana back during casting.. which i alwasy am during the fight. I finish most fights near or at full mana. 90% of the time in the top 5dps/dmg done.

You should probably pick up Typhoon and Gale Winds. There's a lot of AoE involved in the instance, and Typhoon especially is very useful as an extra instant while moving and can hit a lot more than you might think (hits both arms and Kologarn on that fight, useful for AoEing iceblocks on Hodir and for use as an instant for when movement is needed, adds on Freya, packs in the Thorim tunnels, adds on Mimiron, etc etc). I'd suggest if you do pick up Typhoon to use the minor glyph though, as mobs bouncing around are quite annoying.

Faarque, you don't have mana problems because you don't have Typhoon and you don't have the Starfall glyph. Both increase the drain on mana by quite a significant amount if you use them a lot. I don't understand why you have 1 point in Dreamstate and don't have Force of Nature though, as FoN is one of the most powerful talents we have when used correctly.
I'm interested as to where you're seeing these awesome cloth pieces. So far I've only seen cloth items with very similar stat breakdowns to leather items, apart from some of those with hit rating (which have hit rating instead of spirit), which isn't of much interest to me because of the hit gained from other pieces of gear. Filtering through gear on wowhead returns this list which contains very few items, and only one cloth piece (which admittedly is ridiculously good).


Another random point: I'm at odds with just how many blue sockets there seem to be on gear right now, especially with a lot of those having pure spellpower bonuses. Being a jewelcrafter carries a hefty benefit due to the number of blue sockets; if there were to be an increase in the power of spirit it would also help to reduce the lead that jewelcrafting has over other professions.

Wasn't able to search for anything about this but has anyone managed to obtain the 4pc yet to test to see if the IS proc really does have a 3min CD(according to wowhead spell info)? Just would like to know if the 4pc is absolutely terrible or just bad.

I have forgotten that Celestial Focus's bonus multiplied. That indeed makes it a stronger talent. I have now respecced to take 3/3 Celestial Focus, 2/3 Improved Insect Swarm and dropped Intensity altogether. I seem to be managing with mana, even on Deconstructor, now that the kills are much smoother.

However, to be the devil's advocate, you don't need 100% uptime on your dots to take full benefit of Improved Insect Swarm.

Using IS before spamming Wrath to trigger Lunar Eclipse will give you full benefit for your Wrath casts. IS can fall off whilst you're casting Starfire during Eclipse, but it doesn't matter as it doesn't affect Starfire at all. Using two Moonfires per Eclipse cycle will result in 100% uptime. So you get full Improved Insect Swarm benefit without having to cast any DoTs during Eclipse.

We had Living Flame drop as well and I passed on it for two reasons

1 - Hit isn't an issue now, and with how many Ulduar items have downright silly amounts of hit on them, I think it's going to be a bigger issue not overcapping your hit than reaching the hit cap..

2 - 505 spellpower for 20 seconds every 2 minutes equals roughly 84 spellpower on average. Dying Curse's 765 spellpower for 10 seconds every 1 minute (45s internal cooldown + ~15 seconds of casting before it procs, which is probably pessimistic..) equals roughly 127 spellpower on average. The Living Flame has a slight advantage in that it's burst on demand, but that also means the average damage is even lower if you don't use it as soon as it's up.

90/120 second cooldowns should sync nicely with Eclipse. Has anyone modeled timered trinkets that way?

You have to make the bonus spellpower from Living Flame work about 50% harder to make it equal in spellpower value. This is not impossible if you mix it with bloodlust, treants, and eclipse but it does take quite a bit.