Since we are at the "should moonkin pass on cloth" issue. Personally I think that when it comes to BIS items there shouldn't even be any discussion. I mean there could be endless discussions about how clothies get nothing if a moonkin takes a cloth item and then have contrarguments about the moonkin being more active than some clothies etc ... Those are quite valid points but in fact quite hard to meassure in real situations cause the real gain for raid's dps would be always bit more complicated than those mentioned, simplified factors.

Now the real situation is that when someone has to wait for a very big group of people to gear up before they can even be considered to bid or roll on their BIS it is very demotivating. It feels like because one can use more armor types he is punished but not having a chance for the best gear available for the spec.

Not to mention that if there weren't a moonkin in raid, most likely there would be some other casters ... probably a clothie. So in the end the competition still would be quite similar.

All in all, it's common sense that should decide here mostly.

Anything below 5mins can easily be 5k dps -- If you want to go 6k then a 2min kill helps alot.

5k is not alot (I was doing 4.8k or so in our first week in Naxx) If you arent lagging, are probably geared, have good raidsupport & know how to spamclick buttons that is.

Telling yourself that the reason you aint breaking 5k is because you have 3min kills is just blindness covering over the real problems.

I also find moonkin DPS sort of RNG related. With about 80% crit when eclipse is up, I have not crit 2 full eclipses in a row. Another thing is that alot of the times wrath will crit (Nature's Grace pops up) and eclipse wont proc. I start casting starfire when i see natures grace and usually have to strafe or something to stop the cast which I can imagine is a big loss in dps.

Huge. You should, instead, just wait until you see Eclipse, not NG.

I have a few questions for you Ashaera (or anyone really).

I'm at the point where I certainly do not need mana talents, and I'm trying to determine what to place these three points in. I noticed that you take both IFF and Brambles. I'm curious about IFF because I imagine for a 25-man raid you always have a SP. Is it possible you are taking this talent for the crit chance, because I have not seen any discussion on potential dps gain this talent versus loss from global cooldown.

Anyway, I have not spent a lot of time on math or even on this site. But as I see it, after dropping intensity the talents to consider are Brambles or Owlkin Frenzy.

I did use Owlkin Frenzy the other night and I was a little disappointed with the results (particularly on Sapphiron where it only procced once). I'm assuming that OF cannot proc from the aura only blizzard or life drain. Every other fight yielded 0-2 procs except Loatheb which had 5 procs (~2% increase).

Do we have numbers anywhere on the difference in dps between Brambles and Un-brambles treants. I imagine we must but I'm having a hard time finding this topic.

Also, do you use your current spec for 3D Sarth? Same night I tried out OF, we headed after to do 3D Sarth, and I ran into some mana problems with my current spec. I was still curious about OF and picked up Gale Winds as we were particularly light on AoE. When I was asked to battle res after the third drake was down I knew I was in trouble (I was at about 4200 mana before the res). Maybe it was just because our dps was stupid that day and we had so many people down and so the last phase lasted forever, combined with contributing with AoE, but I went oom at about 50%.

Anyway, it's entirely possible some of these questions are answered elsewhere and if that's the case I'd appreciate links, did skim this thread as well at the Moonkin raiding thread.

Clearly you skimmed over the part answering this in multiple threads. IFF is taken for the 3% increase in crit, not the spell hit. This works off any (f)FF applied by anyone in your raid. If you are the only non-resto Druid, then you apply it to receive the bonus.

Yes, I feared I would skip some discussion. I didn't catch anything in this thread (except one-line on the first page) or the Moonkin raiding thread, but since I posted this commented I read through the Moonkins at 80 and TP thread and there is in fact some commenting although I feel a lot of it was in the form of question or not particularly substantiated. Obviously this talent is not something that we can look at and say you're increasing your dps by x amount, but given my uncertainty also with Brambles and OF, I was moreso looking at a response that given you were to take only one of these talents which would you expect to get the most gain from, as minimal as the gains may be at this point. I'm also wondering if it varies, such as IFF is strongest if you do have a feral druid, but not so if you must apply it yourself (eta: particularly of interest to me, because our feral druid's attendance is very inconsistent). Ashaera's spec interested me as he not only didn't take the mana talents, but he's taken two of these talents, which I have not seen a druid choose to do before.

As for Aoe talents, I don't need much clarification as I think the only fights I expect a real increase on are Gluth, Gothik and Sartharion. But if I'm finding I'm only increasing my dps by a fraction of a percent on most bosses by choosing a talent over Gale Winds, then I figure I might as well take Gale Winds. (This of course may not necessarily be the case, however, which is what I'm trying to ascertain).

Yeah, I think this is mostly the case. The idea that feral FF could be utilized for the benefit of IFF was news to me, and I would agree with you that before any testing does sound like the strongest option. My only real concern is that despite several comments on this forum regarding this topic I have not seen a post that declares with certainty, that moonkins do in fact receive the crit from feral FF. Most posts started with a disclaimer, that "this is believed to be true" until eventually that disclaimer was dropped without any real evidence that I can find. But even assuming this is in fact the case, like I mentioned in my post, we have one feral druid, and he has a very spotty attendance record. Given that, I would have to be applying IFF myself which makes the choice less obvious. I disagree with you that one GCD every 40sec is necessarily worth 3% crit. I read a post in another thread which said it would equate to about a .5% increase when applying it yourself and I would think that even so with a mathematical analysis it needs to be considered that in reality anytime you're choosing to switch spells you must accomodate for lag and response time... really a human cannot be perfectly meticulous in the reapplication (sometimes it might get clipped, sometimes it might go a second or more without being reapplied, especially I would think due to the nature of eclipse) and the other variable, of course, is lag. I'm just saying when you start getting to a fraction of a percent you really have to consider if it's worth it.

I think that my post mostly stemmed out of the frustration that once a moonkin can give up Intensity, there really is only minimal dps gains to be had with an extra 3 point talent investment. I knew this when speccing for OF but the benefit from OF was actually even less than I expecting because in testing to see if it had an ICD, I dueled a friend (mage) and OF seemed to always proc almost immediately. (This of course logically makes sense, the only fight with constant damage is Sapphiron and like I said I believe that OF can't proc off of the aura, but I was still expecting it to proc more than once on fights with aoe damage, especially considering that OF does not appear to have an internal cd).

I guess if anything, I'm back where I started, only now with the knowledge that if we ever do get a steady feral druid, and the claims made here are true, that then I'll most certainly include IFF in my spec.

Cirynne, your questions about IFF are answered in the following two posts:

IFF gaining crit from all forms of FF
Benefit of FF

Basically, all forms of FF count no matter who casts them, and if you don't have a feral druid casting FFF then you should be doing it because of raid benefit due to the armour debuff.

I once had an issue with low crit rate, whereas no matter how hard I spammed my Wrath button, it took like 20+ wrath casts to get a lunar eclipse. That made my DPS sucks hard to tank levels. At that time, I had like 550+ haste and about 15% crit. Then I replaced 200 haste for like 5% crit and I noticed a DPS increase, obviously because now I can get lunar eclipses right off first Wrath casts -- here goes my bad RNG again.

Now, I am still unsure why you say "crit is an even greater dps loss". Shouldn't one consider this statement only if he is stacking too much crit? I mean, as said before somewhere in EJ Druid threads, there is only Loatheb fight to get us 100% crit rate, but just getting crit values from 4 pc T7 bonus+raid buffs, and then stacking a ton of haste, why should it give a higher DPS than? Even more, high haste values can be an issue (IMHO): currently for me, when NG procs, Wrath casts under 1s, and unless I have really low latencies -- last week got 400ms+, did old Windows registry hack trick, lowered to sub 200ms -- I am misusing haste values as GCD is still a sec. Unless I keep spamming Starfire and then totally give up on Eclipse, I do not see how gearing for more crit can be a greater dps loss.

I may had, however, misunderstood your statement -- which sounds more feasible to me. Can I get a drawing?

I scanned through and couldn't find which talents are best to sacrifice to get mana regen talents?
My current spec only allows me about 2.5 minutes of sustained all-out dps, and at my guild's current dps output this is not enough time to down a boss.

Looking to drop Typhoon and GW which I don't think will be a problem, but also considering dropping IMF so I can 3/3 Moonglow and Dreamstate. Is this a big no-no? Looking at the "base spec" on the first page (and all consecutive pages) its on almost every spec, just not sure what else can be sacrificed for longevity with minimal dps reduction until my gear is up to par.

Please note this is not a "do my spec for me" issue, just hoping someone can save me 150g+ in respec trials with an idea of what the "weakest" dps talent we have is.