I should think all 25 man raids have one draenei, or more, in them. Shamans after all can only be draenei alliance side.

At the moment the Draenei buff only works for their group (not raid), so it's not good to assume you'll always be in a group with one. (I personally have an offhand switch for it, in case my Draenei dies mid-fight.)

It's a nice write-up.

I would include Icewalker as an option though, yes move speed is much more effective than the 12hit/crit in movement fights. Naxx/Sarth3d/Maly has little movement and Icewalker surely outdoes 8% movespeed on these fights. This is a beginner's guide afterall.

They're pretty close in the general case, but it should be decided by what eclipse you use. If you're using lunar eclipse Speed is better because inside the eclipse haste is even better and crit is worse. If you're using solar eclipse Wild Magic is better because inside eclipse sp/crit are stronger and haste is wasted (you're at 1sec casts already).

Zoidfarb - you can use a potion of wild magic before the fight starts, but the added benefit on most fights is marginal. This is only really worth it on short dps races where you go all-out right away (e.g. Hodir).

Nice job Arawethion.

I'm finding that unless I pick sub-optimal gear in rawr, that a solar rotation starts pulling ahead and ends up way ahead of a lunar rotation once you obtain 2t8. Now if others are finding the same thing I think it would probably be worth noting in this guide. The difference of solar and lunar in my planned set is 93 dps with (raidbuffed) 3097sp, 262 hit rating, 706 crit rating and 455 haste rating.

I'm not getting the same result in WrathCalcs though, and with WC, unlike Rawr, I know exactly what's going on internally. I think that in general (not just for the purposes of this post), we need much more solid theorycraft on Solar rotations. There's a lot of discussion on the all the other Moonkin threads on this forum, but very little math at the necessary level of detail.

For purposes of this post, Solar rotations are tougher to play due to latency, it's unclear whether they'll ever be optimal (especially for people who aren't in great gear), and adding them would complicate things a good bit (I'd basically need a alternative Solar version of the entire Spell Rotation and Gear sections).

I am sure this is listed somewhere (preparing for inc flames), but is it true that there is a "haste cap?" I have heard of such a thing but I haven't seen any concrete details about if a cap exists and what it is.

When I look around at other boomkins on the threads I see some people with much lower haste than me and some with much higher. Does anyone have a good idea of what a "solid" amount of haste is? Not to make it personal, but mine is around 380 currently and I feel like that seems fairly high when I'm raiding (i.e. my owl casts stuff pretty fast). However, I see some people with 500-600 and I feel like I need to get way more.

Any elaboration on haste from some of the other boomkins out there who know more about the numbers would be greatly appreciated.

Also, great job on this guide! I always loved the old "Boomkin for dummies" guide and am glad to see someone taking over updating boomkin strategy moving forward!

I personally have found that a Solar Eclipse generates better DPS for me.

The rotation I use is

Starfire until Eclipse procs then Wrath until the end of Eclipse then Starfire during Eclipse cooldown and continuing to cast Starfire until Eclipse procs again.


As far as the haste cap as it's been mentioned Wrath hits the GCD fully raid buffed around 400 Haste, but Starfire cannot be haste capped with the currently available gear (I think it's at around 5000 haste) so if you're using a Lunar Eclipse rotation then more haste is a good thing provided you don't give up too many other stats in acquiring it.

Why would you not continue to spam wrath until the Eclipse cooldown finishes?

I thought that the current version of the moonkin rawr module used the wrathcalcs calculations.

It seems that WC still doesn't model trinkets though whereas rawr is for the most part. That might be part of the discrepancy. That and it doesn't use reaction time in its calculations, but if the queue system is in effect properly like they said way back in tbc reaction time shouldn't really matter all that much. At least that was my understanding of it.