I suppose the reason they put spirit on gear in the first place, is that blizzard wants us to solar eclipse? That has to be the only answer, since I have no mana problems on any ulduar fight whatsoever. That is however with 2/3 Intensity and 3/3 moonglow.

Now that the 4set bonus on T8 has been buffed, and with the recent spirit buff, maybe this set is worth taking overall?

I haven't done any theorycrafting on it yet, but will try to do some over the next couple of days. I suppose solar eclipse means that we have to drop loads of haste (which will happen with T8 anyways) to prevent clipping, and rather up the crit and spellpower. I'm not sure if I like the idea of totally rebalancing my gear too much.

Just my thoughts on the topic. Hopefully some other smartie comes with a perfect equation, or it is being updated in rawr.

1: That's not the issue.
2: I didn't talk about why they improved it, I talked about why they included it in the first place.

The reason for the spiritfest that ulduar caster itemization is, is simply a way to limit caster dps and to limit the effects of mudflation.

No, it's so healers and caster DPS can share drops. Nice try, though.

Yes it does. If the non-set items had spirit but the set items didn't have any, then the set items would be a lot better. (nice try, though).

2/3 Intensity and 3/3 Moonglow (and 1/1 OOC assumed) is a lot of mana talents. If you're not having mana problems ever you should consider dropping a few. That said, Blizzard realizes that spirit is not a good mana stat for moonkins (it is for resto), and this is not the reason they put it on our gear.

The reasons Blizzard put spirit on gear are:
1. Complexity of gearing - Spirit is a stat. Having one more stat to itemize with makes gearing more interesting. Caster gear already has less stats then melee gear. You may not care or agree, but I assure you this is a consideration.
2. Gear consolidation I - holy priests and resto druids want spirit. Blizzard wants less kinds of gear usable by more people, for excellent reasons extensively covered in many other places. So they try to push healers and casters to want and use the same gear.
3. Gear consolidation II - this is doubly applicable to leather gear, since the ratio of healers to casters is much more biased towards the former than in cloth wearers.
4. As Kluger mentions, preventing mudflation is also a consideration, though I think a more minor one at this point.

The problem is that spirit is a vastly inferior stat for moonkins, which undermines points 2 and 3. The increase of the spirit-->SP conversion to 30% is an attempt to make spirit gear viable for moonkins, and narrow the gap between those people who managed to get the (very rare, always cloth) spirit-free pieces and those who are using "standard" leather caster gear.

To see how effective this is let's revisit Eilt's comparison of the Robes of Umbral Brute to T8.25 chest from the last page of this thread. If we assume you socket T8 with +19 SP and Umbral with SP/SPI for socket bonus, we see that the T8 gains 32 SP and loses 7 haste and 58 crit against the Umbral robe. The non-spirit gear is clearly still better (as expected), but I'm holding off on final conclusions since I don't have the Rawr stat weights handy.

Hello, I've read through most of this thread and am attempting to gain some more clarification on Boomkin's AoE abilities. Due to search limitations with the site, I'm not able to properly search this thread for the information I need. I have a few questions concerning how Balance Druids perform in AoE situations and how viable they are in them. With Ulduar's bosses, there are many situations where a druid in my guild uses the argument that the spec is very weak for AoE and if this is true (Mimiron/X002/Auriya for example), should I have the Balance Druid tank the head while the warlock does adds..?

What is a typical Boomkin Area of Effect Rotation (AoE)?

How effective is a Boomkin's AoE in comparison to other classes?

During the AoE phases of encounters, are they more suited to continue single target DPS or would it be more beneficial for the raid/kill if they focused on the boss?

I apologize for my ignorance on the class and hope my questions aren't to dumbed down for the elitist jerks here

Moonglow is the easiest mana talent to put points in as it has the smallest negative impact on your dps (your selections are Imp MF or Genesys, essentially). Putting another point in Intensity means you'd have to drop a point out of some other dps talent such as iIS, Typhoon, or Starfall.

Moonglow is approximately equivalent in value to Dreamstate, and about 2/3rds as effective as intensity, but it's at a position in the talent tree where you only have to give up Improved Moonfire to get 3/3; Improved Moonfire is a pretty bad DPS talent, making Moonglow quite high value when looking at what to use to obtain more regen.

For Vezax you should only use vapors if you have to. Estimate the fight length left and how much mana you have left, plus keeping track of how many clouds there are. Pay attention when in a shadow crash and make sure that you don't let the last spell cast when the crash effect ends, or else you're wasting a large amount of mana for very little damage.

Good point, I stand corrected.

I really don't think you should need anything else beyond 1/1 OoC and 2/3 Intensity though, so you might as well pick Improved Moonfire 3/3.

We're back to the point of negative impact on your dps. Picking up 3/3 Moonglow instead of 1/3 Moonglow and 2/2 Improved Moonfire has only a very minor negative impact on your dps. Picking up 2/3 Intensity has a larger negative impact on your dps. You're now removing more valuable valuable points in dps talents in order to get that additional mana regen.