Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The Weakest Moonkin Talents

I'm sure most of you are aware that Lissanna recently asked an open question:
If you could change one talent in any of the druid talent trees, what would it be? You could talk about what you want it changed to, or just talk about what makes it a weak talent that should be either changed or replaced in some way.
 I was originally not going to post about it, but after reviewing other responses I realized that my answer was different from pretty much everyone else.  So here are the talents I'd change right now if I could:

Starlight Wrath - reduces the cast time of your Wrath and Starfire spells by 0.5 sec.
This talent isn't bad for dps - in fact it's extremely good.  The problem with this talent is that Wrath already has a base cast time of 2 seconds, and reducing that to 1.5 ties it to the GCD.  This is a major scaling issue for moonkins with Nature's Grace, as it soft caps our haste at 400.  I would like to see this talent changed to something like the following:
reduces the cast time of your Starfire spell by 0.5 sec, and increases the damage and mana cost of Wrath by 40%.
This would allow moonkin dps to scale with haste for a *lot* longer then before - in fact, during heroism we wouldn't haste cap with Wrath until 494 haste rating.

I'm sure some of you are going to point out that 40% damage is more then the 33.33% (repeating, of course) Wrath gets right now from Starlight Wrath, but that's not really true - remember that damage talents are additive (when they effect specific spells).  Just because of Moonfury this would drop to roughly a 36% dps boost, and it would also reduce scaling from Eclipse slightly - which should be balanced out by the haste/heroism scaling.


Moonglow/Nature's Majesty/Vengeance/Celestial Focus/Moonfury - gain X effect for A, B, C, and D spells.
This obviously isn't one talent, but rather is all the talents in the balance tree with a specific criteria - they effect 3+ specific spells by name, when I believe they should just effect either 1) all spells, or 2) everything in the balance tree.  If you look at pure dps classes, they have talents like "increase the damage of all fire spells by X%" or "increase the critical strike damage from all frost spells by 100%".  This isn't a huge deal for single-target dps, but it does have major implications for moonkin aoe when compared to mages/warlocks.

While there are other talents that are very weak, I consider these to be the most in need of an overhaul right now - they have the biggest impact because most of them are talents that every moonkin takes.

2 comments:

  1. "If you look at pure dps classes"
    Some say Moonkins are screwed because they are not a pure dps class and thus they are stuck not being able to create a talent tree designed for only just that, dps. These same people like that we don’t have talents like the above mentioned because they normally are the Warlocks and Mages we fight to out dps. The 'it's not fair' mentality comes to light in almost every conversation I have with pure DPS classes. Why should we be beating the pure dps classes, because when we choose to we can adjust our talents to specialize in dps? I am not saying that two players, say a mage and a moonkin, of equal stat value/ilvl should have different dps in the end. What I would like is to see this topic addressed more, is it ‘fair?’ and does fairness matter, b/c they could have just as easily rolled a Druid…

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  2. IMO - Separate our roles, and make them true to their purpose. Then maybe moonkins will get the DPS talents deserved.

    Feral = Tank & Kitty melee dps
    Moonkin = Ranged DPS
    Resto = Healer

    No healing talents what-so-ever for Feral and Balance. And no DPS talents for Resto. I'd love to see the old system of +healing on gear come back instead of spell power for everyone. With duel spec, healers can't complain about solo questing anymore.

    The only spells balance and feral can cast during fights should be innervate (balance), Battle Rez, Remove Curse, Abolish Poison. Everything else should be gear'd towards melee and ranged DPS.

    I think wow trys too hard to make balance balanced, that it pretty much makes us so-so overall. Yes, I'm at the top of the dps charts in my guild, but it still seems like the moonkin gets little respect.

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