Mana should never really be an issue for moonkin, though. With the number of mana regeneration talents, the innervate glyph, and the mana regen abilities that other people bring to a raid, moonkin shouldn't be having mana problems. I am pretty sure Night Elf druids can still drink 2 mana pots in a raid if we shadowmeld and drop combat during the fight (unless they changed that recently).

The only place mana could be an issue is places where something mana drains (in which case the whole raid would have mana problems), or if the moonkin doesn't have any regen stats on their gear. I end up with gobs of spirit on my gear even when I try to avoid it, because all the PvE leather gear has spirit on it, so I'm not sure who is having regen problems.

We could potentially have mana issues in PvP, but we really shouldn't in PvE.

Eh? I'd like to see something that shows this. I've been modeling all haste talents, buffs, etc. other than possibly Heroism as additive, I.E. your total haste ends up as (1 + 3% + 3% + 5% + rating/3279). If that's wrong, it needs to be known ASAP.

Erragal

Owlkin Frenzy's effect description was supposed to be per talent point, like all others, added the bit that was missing.

Dreamstate - yep thanks for pointing that out, it is corrected now (still hard to word it the way I'd like to).

Improved Insect Swarm - Deleting the comment entirely until I see some calculations done. My gut feeling always was that this is a quite strong talent but then I have seen Lord BEEF state repeatedly that it's one of our weakest ones. Would be great to see some numbers.

As for AOE talents - yes all what you said about being a team player is true so to rephrase the question:
Are there classes/specs better at dealing AOE damage than a Moonkin? If yes, then wouldn't it be better for the overall raid damage if the you passed the burden of dealing AOE damage to them and focused on single target damage if that's your stronger point? Especially if they can deal high AOE damage without having to specifically spec for it (as we do).

I guess clumping AOE talents together as "one category" wasn't very helpful as Starfall is probably the least effective of the three (due to the 3 minute cooldown) and, as you mentionedd, they also have another use besides AOE: single target damage when you have to move as they aren't channeled. That sections needs to be split and re-written.

As for what's written on mana regen talents, I've simply ranked the talents according to their usefulness and tried to make it very clear that they should only be taken if you find yourself OOM without them, and that personal testing is needed to find the right balance. Intensity and Omen of Clarity are recommended but they are pretty much in every single serious raiding build (including yours).

Please also note that I deliberately use words like "might," "assume" or "appear," which should clearly indicate that what's written at that point is my opinion/guess/gut feeling and not a fact. Those points will be corrected/replaced with more accurate and precise information as soon as it becomes available.

Thanks for the insight on how your mana situation is looking in 10-man Naxx. It is very helpful. Good to know that we most likely won't have to spend any points on Moonglow and Dreamstate.

dukes

Some very good points, thanks. Edited them into talent comments.

Lunar Guidance - what I need to do is put together a set of blue mixed non-heroic/heroic Lv80 gear and use it as the starting point calculation value.

Improved Insect Swarm - I've corrected the wording slightly again, hopefully it sounds better now.

dukes / Erdluf / thedopefishlives

AOE Talents

Typhoon does indeed look quite powerful, however I see one potential problem with it. Pushback. That is something that tanks usually do not like very much. In my previous raid group, using pushback spells was swiftly banned as tanks were getting very pissed off and it generally created chaos. What is the attitude towards this in your guilds?

Starfall - I am personally still hesitating about that one. The fact that you almost always get at least one (if not more) Nature Grace procs from it is nice. So is the fact you got another spell to cast while moving. However, the cooldown is very long. Not sure if spending one talent point on a spell you will use not more than two times per fight is really worth it. Especially if you already have cooldown-free Hurricane and Typhoon. Hmm...

Improved Insect Swarm / Celestial Focus / Nature's Splendor

Well it does need to be confirmed whether CF is additive or a multiplier. But even if we assumed it was a multiplier, wouldn't IIS be better than CF until higher gear levels when you have more crit?

And how does Nature's Splendor compare against those two?

In my currently considered spec, I need to drop one point from one of these three talents and it's driving me nuts. Can't decide at all which one is the weakest of the three (That's if I want to keep all AOE talents but at this moment I think I want to, as it will give me more utility even if it will be a loss of DPS. Usefulness > e-peen).

Using Starfall I get approximate 10k damage done per use on a single target (significantly more for aoe). If you're using it while moving it's a direct damage increase of 10k per 3 minutes, or approximately 50DPS (10000 / 180, rounded down a bit because you're not likely to always use it on cooldown). It's easily comparable to Lunar Guidance point-for-point on a single target. If you have CF you can also proc the stun, and Natures Grace procs from it.

Typhoon will not knock back most bosses, and in the AoE situations where you can use it (that aren't trash) it's either a non-issue (Maexxna spiders die very quickly) or a helpful effect (see Gluth Zombies). If there were a glyph available to remove the knockback I'd still glyph it in an instant as long as it was a minor though.

I'd say that out of Gale Winds, Typhoon and Starfall, Starfall would be the one to drop if I absolutely had to.

IIRC, your in-game tooltips for SF and Hurricane will show your post-haste cast times, with a couple of digits beyond the decimal point. Standing around in MK form, I remember seeing numbers consistent with x/1.03/1.03/(1+haste from gear). (3/3 CF plus 3/3 IMkF).

If somebody can log in, it is easy enough to check.

I don't believe moonglow is the worst mana talent(assuming I have the correct values).

3796 base mana @ 80
moonfire 21% base mana=797
239mp5(0 haste, and obviously you're not going to be spamming mf, the number is just for refrence)

wrath 11% base=418
125mp5(0 haste)

starfire 16% base=607
87mp5(0 haste)
(*all values taken from wowiki or wowhead, so if they're wrong understand that I thought they came from good sources =P)
note that moonglow also scales with haste. So these values get better the more casts you're going to get off.

compared to dreamstate @ 800int with furor you're going to get 88mp5.

Now I don't know how much int lvl 80s are going to be seeing, but I figured 800 was a good starting point for my arbitrary comparisons.

3496 Base Mana. Moonfire costs 734 base, 23 less per point in Moonglow. Casting it once per 15s (I'll assume you have either 2T6 or Splendor) grants you a whopping ~8 MP5. If you've got the SF Glyph, it's about 5 MP5 (23 mana per 24s). Assuming no Eclipse (MF, SFxN), you'll cast ~9.5 Starfires over those 24s, at 17 mana per point, for ~33.5 MP5, a total of less than 40 MP5 per point. By contrast, Intensity is worth (raid buffed) about 78 MP5 per point at T7-25 gear levels. OoC is worth ~230, and DS is worth ~44 for the first point, less for the rest. So yes, Moonglow is definitely the lowest talent on the totem pole.

And no, Moonglow does not scale with haste. People have made the same claim about OoC, and it's not true. If you cast the exact same sequence with Haste and without, ignoring passive regen, you will cast the exact same number of times before running out of mana. Omen and Moonglow do not scale with haste. The other mana talents just scale negatively.

When I was running sims a couple weeks back, I checked up on the points in Eclipse. I think we can all agree that the first point is very beneficial. The second point, from what I saw, was also fairly beneficial, though that could have been a confluence of the gearing the basic balance druid has in SimCraft, or the talent spec, or various other things. It's likely something that will heavily depend on the rest of your character. The last point consistently poorly performs.

It's not just you. I've noticed in Rawr that only the last point in Eclipse seems significantly devalued, though the value of 2/3 Eclipse vs. 1/3 Eclipse seems to vary wildly. I presume that much of that fluctuation has to do with your current crit rate - there's an inflection point there where you have enough crit that your time-to-proc is not significantly diminished by adding the second point.

One thing to note is that with only one point in eclipse you're virtually locked in to using Eclipse-Wrath buff. It becomes more of a nice benefit from a starfire crit as opposed to rotation focus. Attempting to brute force the Eclipse-Starfire buff is an exercise in frustration and I'd only advise it in a wrath-primary rotation that would be wasting the Starfire Glyph (Probably switching to the Innervate glyph to resolve some mana concerns). I haven't had any live-raid experience with 2/3, but that's my likely spec when we get to Naxx-25 so I can give some usability impressions at that point.

intentionally left blank because I can't delete