erragal

Understood. You're just looking at it from the perspective of resource usage in a mana-limited environment as opposed to our current live situation. My apologies for the misunderstanding; actual raiding has put very in tune with the fact that we have a mana surplus in most encounters which is the situation where haste is considerably more valuable.

I do believe the concept of negative scaling for passive mana regen is going to be a bit confusing for most people, but it still goes back to something I consider a very important technique: learning how to calculate exactly how much mana you need to make it through a fight of a given length is the only way you can really determine the value of the various mana talents for your situation.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

You really are arguing semantics at this point.

 

• Adoriele

No, I'm really not, unless every Moonkin can reliably tell me it's impossible to go OOM in a fight. In any other case, there's a chance you go OOM. How much Omen, Moonglow, etc. affect this chance has nothing to do with Haste. How much Intensity, Dreamstate, etc. affect this chance is negatively impacted with more haste. If you're mana-neutral in Naxx with just passive effects, and you gain more haste as you move to Ulduar without gaining enough Int/Spi, you will lose your mana-neutrality. It has very real implications.

 

Khalanis

I think the mistake is in my wording on how it relates to haste. Moonglow is a straight mana savings per spell cast. Assuming that mana, like energy can be used like a max damage limitation for calculations any mana talent's ultimate goal is to add available mana to be turned into dmg. It could be termed that moonglow scales with mana regeneration, as any mana being passed through the moonglow filter will save 9% mana. So, you can calculate throughout a fight that you cast spell Y X times and get a static benefit from it.
As you gain haste you spend more mana per second, remembering that any mana spent on moonglow spells is 9% more mana to spend again. So the benefit doesn't scale with haste, it scales with mana usage, which itself is increased with haste.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

I think everyone realizes that you get more mana savings from moonglow as your haste increases. Or rather, you're able to cast the same amount of spells regardless of haste [ignoring regen].

I think everyone also realizes that as haste increases, intensity and dreamstate don't give you as many extra casts before running out of mana.

The relative value of moonglow versus intensity and dreamstate increases as you add haste, and that's what's important.

 

Kuruk

I know it's been, at least partly, discussed at various points in the locked thread but to have it all in one place, I'd like to confirm how Eclipse affects our spell rotations.

Am I correct in assuming that:

- Without Eclipse, the highest DPS rotation is: (IS) > MF > SF x 3 > Wrath (until Moonfire falls off)

- With 3/3 Eclipse, the highest DPS rotation is: (IS) > MF > Wrath (until Eclipse procs) > Starfire (until Eclipse cooldown is over)

Now, what seems to be missing:

- 1/3 Eclipse
Would it be something like:
(IS) > MF > SF (until Eclipse procs) > Wrath (during Eclipse only)

- 2/3 Eclipse
Would it be the same as 3/3 Eclipse?

 

thedopefishlives

The highest DPS rotation with Eclipse has yet to really be determined. The reason why is that, depending on circumstances, it may be better to just continue MF/SFx3/IS/W and simply switch to spamming SF under Eclipse. I haven't determined the conditions for Eclipse yet, and I suspect it'll take quite some time to find out.

 

Kuruk

Update 24/11

I changed the thread title to represent better what this thread is supposed to be about: a discussion of talents relevant to Moonkin builds, their nature, effect and mechanics.

I tried to move away from setting out "must take" templates, to simply describing and commenting on talents. Whilst comments will always be subjective to a certain extent, I am trying to base them on the discussion and information shared here.

The Restoration tree has now been done and the Balance tree is rewritten up to Tier 3. I will continue on it, as time allows.

 

Khalanis

I was looking through the talents today and I just noticed something. Vengeance gives crit dmg bonus to all balance spells capable of critting except hurricane. I wonder if it is intended or an oversight that hurricane can actually crit now.

 

Erdluf

Typhoon can also crit, but does not gain from Vengeance. It may be an oversight, or it may be that our AoE is considered to be strong enough.

 

Unknownchamp

It can. This is why Blizzard nerf'd moonkin mana regen on AoE.

 

Ailetha

Contrary to the original post, you do not have to be targeted or have aggro to get owlkin frenzy to proc. You only have to take damage.

Also on the subject of mana regen, you should be fine in a 25 man with just OoC and standard raid buffs - I haven't taken moonglow, dreamstate, or intensity, and the only fight I've had any amount of trouble on was KT. Even then, I got mana burned 3 times, so I wouldn't have had that trouble if I hadn't been mana burned so much. There's no reason to waste precious talent points on mana or mana regen if you don't need it. In addition, if you are picking up the leather gear from Naxx, you're already going to have a ton of spirit and are going to get more and more from your innervate as you gear up, making mana talents generally even more unnecessary.


You're talking about at least 6k damage per treants proc when specced full into this. It's a pretty big amount of damage done.

If you have to choose between this or a mana regen talent, i'd first and foremost consider whether you actually need the mana or not. Unneeded mana is wasted talent points that could be spent on damage. For example, if you don't need the mana, taking brambles over moonglow is a automatic minimum 50 DPS upgrade on a 4 minute Patchwerk.

The remembering thing is easy to fix - just get Ghost Pulse addon, and it will pop the icon up in the middle of your screen when the cd timer is up. Or you could get Cooldown Timers 2, which would display a bar for you.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...ks/Ailetha.png

 

• Arawethion

Even if Brambles does that much damage, I'd be surprised to see it rise high enough in the priority list to realistically be in many raid specs.

Here's my current outlook (which is still highly subject to modification as more information comes out):
After taking the must-haves, you're at 49/0/13 and can choose 3 of the following 6:
Brambles
Celestial Focus
Imp. IS
Imp. FF
Owlkin Frenzy
Intensity
(Dreamstate and Moonglow are unrealistic choices for current gear/content scenarios).

Brambles is less DPS than CF, even ignoring the fact that it's highly unreliable. There's almost no way that Brambles/CF are going to be better than 3 of the other 4 for anybody.

I'd say that for the talents which add DPS, ImpFF (if your group has no Misery) > ImpIS (I've been playing with Rawr, which is currently making IS/MF/W rotation with glyphIS and ImpIS look very strong) > CF (suprised at the hate for this talent in this thread) > Brambles.

Owlkin Frenzy is a bunch of fun and I hate to give it up, but any reasonable estimate of the uptime makes it look like a terrible deal for 3 points. On the back of the envelope, it would need ~30% uptime to even match the ~3% DPS increase of CF. At 15% to proc, 30% uptime would require you to be hit roughly once every 5 seconds throughout a fight.

So relevant questions for someone picking a spec are
1) Do you need Imp. FF?
2) Do mana concerns cause you to pick Intensity over either CF (if ImpFF) or Brambles/Owlkin (if no ImpFF)?

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

erragal

You may not need 3/3 Intensity. If you only need 1/3 to cover your mana concerns then you have to decide where to place the other two points. Considering our continued lack of confirmation about feral faerie fire giving the crit benefit it would seem most beneficial to put those extra points into brambles.

When I specced IFF for 10-mans I had 1/3 Intensity, 1/3 Eclipse, no Starfall and full IIS/CF.

Your evaluation really seems to be missing something with the '49/0/13' skeleton. I can only assume you're automatically dismissing Typhoon + Gale Winds. You'll find the majority of people's specs are including those; this makes the decisions a bit trickier. You may want to reevaluate the value of aoe effectiveness in raid encounters.

 

• Arawethion

I was including Typhoon, Gale Winds, and Starfall (which I view slightly higher than this thread seems to so far). I tried to make a link to the talents I had in mind, but wowhead doesn't allow you do set up specs with invalid gaps in them. The 49 are the entire Balance tree, excluding the ones I specifically mentioned in the post.


Regarding partial Intensity: your point is right, that the theoretically optimal setup is to see exactly how many mana talents you need in order to last through whichever fight you're theorycrafting for, and put the rest into DPS talents. I tend to take a more pragmatic outlook towards mana concerns, however. You're at any time necessarily speccing for at least some variety of potential encounters/situatons, so you have to make efficiency decisions in somewhat broad strokes. Intensity gives very good mana returns in exchange for a small DPS loss. Simply speaking heuristically, odds are high that the correct balance between mana and DPS will lie far to one side of the Intensity "spectrum" for any given fight, and rarely right in the middle of it.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

erragal

I agree with this point; theory can only look at a specific fight situation and it is difficult tocalculate exactly how many times you'll need to hurricane/typhoon in a given attempt. Rebirths are entirely unpredictable as well. Trial and error is really the best way to establish your mana needs for a given raid instance. After my experiences in Naxx-25 i've decided to go down to 2/3 intensity; my mana was well past sufficient even in the most aoe intensive encounters with multiple poorly aimed hurricanes.

Keep in mind that mana issues can also be resolved with gearing. Higher intellect significantly improves the value of replenishment and mana-on-crit. Simply upgrading your gear may minimize the value of intensity in that way as well (Particularly considering how much more intellect the Level 80 gear has). In my case at least right in the middle is the ideal spot.

 

Khalanis

I'm pretty sure the bare bones balance spec starts like this (49/0/12), The point in dreamstate is just a filler point to get to the next tier. Depending on your talent choices you won't need it anyways since others will get you your 1 point needed.
So realistically you're looking @ 11 talent points to move around between:

1-Omen
1-Starfall
3-Improved Faerie Fire
3-Intensity
3-Brambles
3-Celestial Focus
3-Improved Insect Swarm
3-Owlkin Frenzy

22 talents to choose from. Which means you get to keep and decide against 11 points.

1) If you are so free from mana limitations that you can avoid every mana talent, including omen, you're something else. good job =D For everyone else, you're going to pick it up.

2)You're going to want to ask yourself if you will be grouping with a Spriest. If no, then you want IFF. If yes, I would say reserve making a choice on this until you get further down into tough decisions, as only 3% crit makes IFF similar, but probably worse than IIS, since IS doesn't decrease DPS by as much when cast for the same benefit.

3)I'm not sure on starfall numbers, but it sounds like it's a decent single target dmg bonus for 1 pnt. The obvious AoE benefit is there too so you'll probably want this one aswell.

From here if you've picked these up that leaves you with 6 talents remaining(9 if you didn't get IFF)
If you have 9 points and mana isn't an issue, the choices are pretty easy here. If you don't plan on AoEing solo, or without a tank, then you don't really need owlkin frenzy. This leaves you with 9 talent point choices you haven't said no to, or aren't mana based.

If you only had 6 talents remaining, or you'd go OOM without mana talents, the choices get tricky at this point.
3-Intensity
3-Brambles
3-Celestial Focus
3-Improved Insect Swarm

Two of these you'll be going without, and if you have a lot of mana issues you're going to be dumping even more into dreamstate =/

3%crit(SF) / 3%dmg(wrath)
3% haste
15% treant dmg

choosing two of these is the tricky part. Obviously if you're running out of mana any of the mana talents is going to be more dps, so go with those if you have to.
This post was intended to just walk down the choices a little, and without good numbers yet I can't really say on these last three which is going to be your better choice at this point. But hopefully this outlined the standard starter builds a little.

 

Kuruk

But to take damage the boss has to target you as a lucky recipient of one of his abilities (unless you "stood in the fire"). Of course there are exceptions - fights where you will always receive some damage. But point taken. Didn't express myself very well there, will try better as I rewrite the rest of the post.

That is the obvious part and I did try to mention it at least once in the OP. Experiment and take only as much regen as you need, according to your raid situation/gear, otherwise you are wasting points.

What is the difficult part is figuring out which damage talents increase your DPS the most. Lots of testing and calcs is needed here.

Thanks for the tip about the addons to help watch the cooldowns, I will try them both.

Khalanis - your skeleton Moonkin spec is great. I think I'll include it in the OP once I finish rewriting it.

 

Starfox

Wasn't it always that way?
HastedCasttime = Casttime * 1/(1+HasteBonus1) * 1/(1+HasteBonus2) * ... * 1/(1+SumofHasteonItems)

Hello.
Light the fuse.
For all my homies.
Do not run, we are your friends.

 

Gwyyn

thanks for all the notes on my ideas before, didn't realize some things and it really helped. BUT there is one thing I did read that I'm not in agreement with, and I have some basic math that seems to prove it out.

Moonglow - how useful it is to our mana conservation.
Here is the thing about moonglow - the more mana effecient our spells are the less useful it is.

But some basic numbers.
ASSUMPTIONS: I'm assuming 50% crit rate in raid buffs. I'm not listing haste here at all.

Starfire spam -
Without moonglow - 607 mana every 2.75 seconds (averaging the 3 sec regular and the 2.5 from Nature's Grace 3/3)
With moonglow - 552 mana every 2.75 seconds.
So I save 55 every 2.75 seconds or 100 mp/5. Not better than dreamstate here IF you have over 1000 int.

Wrath spam -
Without moonglow - 418 mana every 1.25 seconds.
With moonglow - 380 every 1.25 seconds.
So I save 38 mana every 1.25 seconds or 152 mp/5. Beats dreamstate unless you break 1520 int.

or lets toss up a test rotation, assuming 50% crit rate on starfire and crit led up to moonfire so it's a 1 sec cast on moonfire for ease of us. Casting rotation = Moonfire, starfire, starfire, starfire, starfire - 12 seconds.
Without moonglow - 3225 mana. (797 for moonfire, 607 each for starfire).
With moonglow - 2933. (725 for moonfire, 552 each starfire).
so in 12 seconds I saved 292 mana. which comes out to 121 mp/5.

So I'd say it is useful for many situations, but the huge things that make it different is your own spell rotation. But if you have a spell rotation you like, it is easy enough to calculate the length of rotation and the mana cost of it.

(((Cost of Rotation/length of rotation) - ((Cost of Rotation*0.91)/length of rotation)))*5 = mp/5 moonglow 3/3 saves you.

Also it's good to know that the moonglow is almost completely gear independant. So it gives you pretty close to the same mp/5 increase whether you are in all greens or all epics. The only difference is how often the nature's grace procs.

 

Gwyyn

Umm actually pull the whole innervate thing out of the last post if it actually works as listed. "Increases the target's Spirit based mana regeneration by 400% and allows full mana regeneration while casting. Lasts 20 sec.".
Mp/5 is not spirit based, so not sure if innervate even applies to dreamstate? Does anyone know.

 

Balog

Does Brambles still increase Thorns damage based on the recipient's +spell damage, not the caster's? If not, it would be a great help in generating threat for tanks. If it is, well, it still works for paladin tanks. I know tank threat isn't an issue at the moment, but Ghostcrawler has stated that it will be at some point in the future.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

It does NOT increase the effect you get from mp5 from gear, or from things like dreamstate.

 

dukes

Haste affects moonglow pretty heavily. The faster you cast your spells, the higher the number in the same space of time comparitively, hence a greater mp/5 gain from Moonglow. However Moonglow and Intensity only work while casting / while inside the 5 second rule, while dreamstate adds on to your current regen, increasing in casting regen and out of casting regen. Just something to note for those fights with some spell casting downtime (although there are comparitively few that it isn't a significant effect).

 

vakgraun

Hi there, I was doing some math about moonglow and Dreamstate for a Raiding Moonkin.
My current condition is lvl 80 Blues with some T6, and our Raid composition is with out a SP (our SP quited), So i have to get IFF for now. And cos i have those 3 points spent there i was debating if I should get Moonglow or Dreamstate

This are my current stats Unbuffed are:
Int 680
Spirit 310
Crit 20% (in Moonkin Form)
SP 1600
Hit 172
Haste 150

And this are the 2 builds that I'm debating:

(58/0/13) (3/3 Moonglow)
(58/0/13) (1/3 Moonglow - 2/3 Dreamstate)