Guest Post: Nibelung

I was talking about Nibelung with the elemental shaman in my guild, Bergg (formerly Darkness, who you may have heard of), and he directed me to an excellent post of his on mmo-champion.com that covers his objections to the weapon.

While this is from the point of view of an elemental shaman, most of his points are valid for any class and should be considered.  They also cover most of the reasons I don't want to use Nibelung for my gear set.

So with his permission:

Let me first say that "fun" procs don't work in high end raiding.

Marrowgar.  When your valkyr stands in the fire, it will die, regardless of the fact that it can heal itself.  When your valkyr stands in the whirlwind, it will die.  When you turn to DPS Bone Spikes, your valkyr won't help you.  You--the best burst DPS class in the game--could have done more damage to that Bone Spike if you had put on a one-hander and shield, but instead, your valkyr is attacking a boss that doesn't have a notable enrage timer.

Deathwhisper.  You're attacking a magic vulnerable add, and so is your valkyr.  The magic vulnerable add dies.  Your valkyr proceeds to cast spells on the nearby magic immune add.  It is now doing less than 1 DPS.  If you get particularly unlucky, your valkyr may attack and kill a friend who gets mind controlled.

Saurfang.  You are THE best kite class/spec in the game for this fight.  It is highly unlikely that a valkyr will spawn during your kite, as you aren't casting as often.  Prior to Blood Beasts, any valkyr procs you get will continue to attack Saurfang instead of the Blood Beasts.  The valkyrs are doing 0 DPS to the most important part of the fight.

Rotface's slime spray will kill your valkyr.

Festergut's plague ability will kill your valkyr.

On Putricide, your valkyr will die to slime, bombs, and mutated oozes.  Your valkyr will not switch to kill the green or orange slimes, the most important part of the fight.  Should any of your valkyr survive, they will constantly be adversely affected by extreme travel times.

On Princes, your valkyr may get stuck on a Kinetic Orb, or an inactive Prince.

On Blood Queen, your valkyr will die to the fire and the bloodbolts.

On Dreamwalker, your valkyr will be adversely affected by movement, and they will not target the newest dangerous enemies.  Instead of having the DPS to kill Blazing Skeletons before they wipe your raid, you will be contributing by having a valkyr, which is attacking a harmless target.  --Actually, now that I think about it, the valkyr won't be attacking a harmless target.  The valkyr will be dead because of the Blazing Skeleton AOE.

On Sindragosa, the valkyr is a double-edged blade.  It can attack when you can't--when you have Unchained Magic, or when you are behind an ice block.  It can also prematurely destroy the ice block that your raid is standing behind, and wipe your raid, and waste a limited attempt.  In the event that it doesn't wipe you, it will die to the frost AOE and the stacking buffet and the cleave and the tail whip and the frost breath and frost bombs and ice block explosions.

Lich King requires even greater and smarter add switching and DPSing than Dreamwalker.  In Phase 1, your valkyr will quickly revert to attacking the closest thing in proximity--probably a harmless ghoul, which was going to be cleaved down anyway.  That will increase your Recount DPS, but in reality, it is 0 DPS; it is ineffective raid DPS, on a fight where you WILL die to the enrage.  (I did last night; 5% from a kill.)  In Phase 3, it is unlikely that you will get a valkyr spawn while DPSing the Val'kyr Shadowguard--so when your friend gets dragged off of the edge of the platform and dies, you can let them know that you decided to give some of your DPS to your valkyr, which was attacking the Lich King instead--or, in a more real scenario, dying to Defile.  In Phase 5, your valkyr will not switch to Vile Spirits because of proximity, despite the fact that they will kill anyone they hit--including the valkyr--and need to be killed immediately.  You also need the kite the Vile Spirits, so much like Saurfang, it is unlikely that the valkyrs will appear at all.  In Phase 5 and 6, you will be phased and killed.  Both phasing and death destroys any valkyrs you had up at the time.  Now you will have to wait for them to proc again to resume your DPS' full potential.

Oh, and--yes, like haste--they don't affect totems.  The difference between haste and valkyrs is that haste helps you win the game all the time, and valkyrs sometimes wipe your raid.

Take your pick.

I also thought of some other incredibly dangerous scenarios:

- Your valkyr may attack frost orbs on Heroic Anub'arak, wiping your raid.
- Your valkyr may attack a CC'd target on Faction Champions, wiping your raid.
- Your valkyr may attack dark orbs on Princes, wiping your raid.
- Your valkyr may continue attacking Putricide even after your raid leader calls for a stop on DPS.  This can wipe your raid.
- Your valkyr may continue attacking the Lich King even after your raid leader calls for a stop on DPS.  This can wipe your raid.
- You can't be on star or constellation duty on Algalon with Nibelung, because the valkyrs may prematurely kill your stars or constellations, wiping the raid.
- Your valkyr may kill a Mimiron piece out of order, wiping your raid.
- Your valkyr may kill a Freya elemental out of order, wiping your raid.

And as far as I know, valkyrs are unable to take advantage of gimmick buffs, which WOTLK is full of.  (source)

Moonkins in WOTLK

A few days ago I replaced my final piece of spirit gear by picking up the Belt of Petrified Ivy.  While this was a pretty nice upgrade over my previous Cord of Pale Thorns, it also depressed me a little bit.  With that upgrade I am sitting at almost double the soft haste cap and am significantly over the soft crit cap, and I just can't see myself scaling with the other dps in my guild who don't have those soft caps to worry about.

What's interesting to me is looking back on how we got to this point.  Blizzard doesn't hate us (people who claim this confuse me, to be honest), and I literally cannot think of a single nerf to moonkin dps in wotlk.  So how, with fairly positive attention, did we end up near the bottom of the dps charts with two soft caps to juggle?  The answer, I think, is to look at something comparable to moonkin dps - a national disaster.  In this case, Three Mile Island.

I'm not going to go over that here, but suffice to say that the disaster wasn't caused by someone accidentally hitting the big red button marked, "Cause A Nuclear Meltdown".  Disasters rarely are - instead they are caused by multiple small decisions/events that compound upon each other, and before you know it you're knee-deep in radioactive waste (or haste, as the case may be).

So what decisions started the current moonkin chain?  Let's go back to TBC...
1) Eclipse
I blame Destruction Warlocks.  Not their fault, but two tiers of shadowbolt spam really made Blizzard want everyone to have interesting rotations.  For Balance Druids (who ignored Wrath almost entirely at that point) this meant coming up with a talent or spell change that would force us to use both at some point during the fight.  Blizzard sat down at the design table and after much thought came up with the core idea of Eclipse - one spell (Starfire or Wrath) would proc an effect to buff the other spell.

Now, eclipse is a great idea with poor execution.  The original version was a dps loss, so it was buffed repeatedly before WotLK until it was a pretty ridiculous amount of moonkin dps.

2) Nature's Grace Changed To 20% Haste
Nature's Grace was always a very strong dps talent.  Changing it from a flat .5 second reduction to 20% haste was a welcome change (letting Wrath scale a bit better with haste), and the 3-second duration was also a nice dps buff.

The problem with this change was it didn't go far enough.  20% haste is certainly better then .5 seconds for Wrath, but it still leaves us soft haste capping at only 400 - a number easily reachable in even entry-level raid gear.  More importantly the 3-second duration means that a single Wrath crit now caps out three Wraths, aggravating the issue significantly.

3) Separation Of Lunar/Solar Cooldowns.
This was an interesting change because for the most part it was unasked for - the only real conclusion I can make is that Blizzard felt we were falling behind from internal data, and they decided to correct it.

This is a pretty positive change in two respects - it smoothed out Moonkin dps and it was a straight dps increase.  Instead of having 15 seconds of burst followed by 20-25 seconds of "normal" dps, we got to rotate between burst phases.  The downside to this change is it forced the soft haste cap (400) onto every moonkin.  Before you could use a Lunar rotation and cast Wrath relatively rarely, which meant haste didn't effectively soft cap at any reachable point.  Separating the cooldowns means Wrath will always be cast nearly as much as starfire, which makes the soft cap more important.

4) Trial of the Crusader
There is nothing directly wrong with this instance, but it did almost single-handedly cause a pretty big issue: item level inflation.

TotC was "unplanned" - that is, it's a filler instance so people had something to do before Icecrown.  However, in order for people to feel it was valuable the items had to be worth it, which meant introducing a new tier.  This was the first inflating step.  The second was that in order to further differentiate ToC items from Ulduar HM ones, Blizzard added another half tier.  I'm not sure why they did this, but it has pretty significant implications because the same pattern was kept in ICC.

The end result is that current Icecrown Gear is two full tiers ahead of where we (and Blizzard) thought we'd be.  That is a massive amount of stats, and as a class that doesn't necessarily scale as well with them that's a problem.

5) Buffing Eclipse
When Blizzard decided to fix WiseEclipse (which was both fair and expected) they decided to buff moonkin dps at the same time in order to prevent a nerf.  While this was nice, I'm going to look the gift horse in the mouth and state that they did it in almost exactly the wrong way - by buffing Eclipse.   With this change the first point in Eclipse - that is, when I go from 0/3 to 1/3 - is worth over 1,000 dps, almost as much as 3/3 Nature's Grace or 5/5 Starlight Wrath.

Disaster!
Now, look back at all of these changes - nothing in there looks like a nerf.  They are all either buffs or (in the case of a new instance) something that should still increase our damage.  Nothing is drastic or massive, either - they are all relatively small changes.

The commulative effect, however, was to place in inordinate amount of dps into a single talent, and one that has significant issues.  Especially since as raids progress, the one constant that always increases on average is movement - you move more in Icecrown then you did in Ulduar, and you moved more in Ulduar then Naxx.

Secondly, item inflation and repeated buffs to Eclipse left us hitting a soft crit cap in Icecrown, an issue that's only important because we are two tiers ahead of where we should be.

Third, the legacy talent Nature's Grace has enforced a soft haste cap practically from Naxx, and one that we can't avoid because of other changes.

Lessons
Hopefully Blizzard has already learned all of this - they have the data, and I am confident that they are mostly smart people.  But a few things should be obvious:

1. Too much dps in a single talent is bad.  Eclipse and Nature's Grace are the core cause of almost all moonkin scaling issues, simply because they are too powerful.  Eclipse doubles up and also hurts us more then most other classes when we are forced to move.
2. Itemization scaling is important to control.  Blizzard has already said they'll address this in Cata, so I am not too worried that it will repeat itself as a problem.
3. All buffs are not created equal.  Buffing Eclipse may have increased Moonkin dps, but it also aggravated the issues we were having or introduced new issues.  Buffing weaker talents may have solved those same issues without these complications.

4t10 is fixed in 3.2.2

Source: ( http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22748801413&sid=1 )

The warlock and druid set bonus bugs are fixed in 3.3.2.

Took three blue posts, but we got it.

Moonkin DPS Talents, Glyphs and Set Bonuses

Edit: This is updated and is current for 3.3.3.

Hopefully you all will find this at least interesting and possibly helpful:

This is a chart of all current balance dps talents, glyphs and set bonuses that I could work out a way to test (either with Simcraft or reasonably exact data).  4t9 was not included because of it's additive nature, so it was nearly impossible for me to determine how much it added.  The ordering is done by average dps per talent point (or in the case of glyphs or set bonuses, just the dps increase).

Notes
: I only calculated the personal dps bonus.  Even if the talent provides a raid dps buff, you are assumed to have it from some other source.  For example: Improved Moonkin Form on this chart is only showing the spell power benefit, the haste is a raid buff and is ignored.  Moonkin form isn't shown at all because the personal benefit is 0 (assuming you have some other source of 5% crit).

I used Simcraft to calculate all of these.  The base wowhead profile I used was this:
http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=20755359
The spec was chosen so that I could more easily move talents around to get values and to provide a more consistent baseline.

My original result for Celestial Focus was weird (the final point showed an actual dps loss).  This is a simulation artifact - what happens is at certain very exact values of haste, adding more can be a dps "loss" because of interactions with Eclipse, latency and spell queueing.  In real life these will not happen reliably (although you can use Simcraft to find and plan around them if you wish).  In order to get a better, more useful number for Celestial Focus I changed a gear piece to use a difference haste value (697) and that is represented as CF_697haste in the above chart - if you are looking for Celestial Focus numbers this is what I would use.

Keep in mind that the above chart is based on my current gear and isn't going to be accurate for you - however, it should still give a good idea of the relative value of everything displayed.

Edit: If you are interested the raw data I have uploaded it here.  The formatting is bad (non-existent, really) so view at your own risk.

Quick Thoughts - Nibelung and Owlkin Frenzy

Nibelung -

I picked this up because there's potential for it to be BIS for moonkins and what's dkp for if not to spend?

So far my impression has been very favorable - on most fights the valks live enough to provide a decent dps gain and the loss of stats just isn't as significant for a moonkin as it would be for most casters.  With that said it's hard to tell if Nibelung is actually a dps increase over my ToGC 25 MH/OH combo but it does seem competitive, my numbers were pretty comparable to top WoL parses:
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-mrvpapgf4dsn6l8u/

Given that we're only talking about 6 ilvls difference and heroic vs non-heroic loot, I'd say that's a pretty good bonus in Nibelung's favor.

The only really bad fight for it is Blood Queen - her pulsing aura shreds the valks in about 6-8 seconds basically every time, so I used the MH/OH combo there.

Owlkin Frenzy -

This is just a general FYI.  Blood Queen's Pulsing shadow aura (the same one that kills Nibelung Valks) has a silver lining - it can proc Owlkin Frenzy.

On our kill I had just under 40% uptime with 3/3, which means the talent is worth more then 1% dps per point - very much worth speccing into for this fight (although if you're expecting a lot of procs on other fights, prepare yourself to be disappointed).  On other attempts I saw as high as 50% uptime.

Why Test Dummy DPS is Pointless

I'm sure most of you already know this but I always see threads about it.  And apparently there are people who worry about it or think it is legitimate.

So put it as simply as I can: Test dummy dps is not mathematically significant.  There is a caveat to this, and I'll get to it later.  But for now, onwards.

There are big reasons (and lots of small ones) why test dummies don't matter.

1. Test Dummies Are Not An Isolated Environment
Which is to say that when a warrior comes up and hits your test dummy and applies sunder, he's ruining your test by introducing an outside dps buff.  Is it a big change?  No - you're a balance druid.  But your treants being buffed is significant.  If a mage is trying fire and puts Scorch up, then that 5% crit is big.  Or the ret pally who's doing 3% crit.

But wait - this is controllable, right?  We can get a true, isolated test dummy dps test.  So for the sake of argument let's scratch this and move on to the next problem:

2 1.  Raid Buffs Change How DPS Scales.
This is true for all raid buffs - all of your spells scale differently with each and every stat.  Everything has a different spell power coefficient.  IS doesn't scale with crit at all (MF only does with 2t9), and Wrath and Starfire also vary significantly due to Eclipse.  But that's just the tip of the iceberg - the biggest problem for a moonkin on test dummies is haste.  Letting alone that past the soft cap starfire is the only thing that scales decently with it, you run into the problem that it moves.


The normal soft haste cap is right about 400.  But that's raid buffed and it includes the 5% spell haste from a shaman.  Take away that buff and the cap shoots up to 585.  Any moonkin about 400 haste is going to see inflated test dummy dps.  Now, you could get a test dummy raid together - I suppose it's possible, and if anyone's done it I'd love to hear about it.  But that does make it pretty useless for comparison purposes unless everyone does that.

2.  N
Which is to say, the statistical sample size N (the number of tests you do) that is actually significant.

If you want a lot of math (real math with letters, not the number math most people use) then I'd suggest reading here.  Yes it's wikipedia - and yes, it's only accurate on average.  But that is still accurate significantly more often then test dummy dps, so I'd recommend not arguing with it.

Ignore the other problems.  Let's assume that you've managed 100 tests of a decent length so they actually resemble something close to what a balance druid gets (~3 minutes or more).  Let's assume you made them all equal length - that no one outside intereferred and human error was zero.

Then maybe, maybe you can take those results and come up with something within 10% of the "real" number - which is to say, the number that accurately represents your unbuffed test dummy dps and totally ignores raid scaling and all the other issues.  And what you've got still isn't very useful, because all you can is that probably you do more dps then the other guy if you ever find yourself trying to solo Patchwerk at level 80.

3.  You're Killing Patchwerk
The problem here is that you're never going to kill him in a raid.

There are fights in ICC that allow melee to pull a patchwerk*
*except some of them can't use certain moves at certain times because AOE is a bad idea**
**oh, and the ones where even if they can probably sometimes stand still the entire time, occasionally they have to move due to fight mechanics.

There aren't any fights where casters can - the closest thing is Deathwhisper (if your raid lets you) and even then you need to be capable of stopping dps so you actually transition correctly.  Or if you see a Curse about to put your Starfire on cooldown for 15 seconds at the start of Lunar Eclipse.

No one fights Patchwerk anymore.  It's just not happening - maybe in the entry raids at 85, sure, and it will be fun.  But mechanics get more complicated and difficult as time goes on, and that involves movement - interrupts, all sorts of things you need to worry about.  Unless your test dummy dps involves those too (and remember they have to be consistent for it to be statistically valid), well, all you're doing is killing a level 60 boss and talking about your dps - and it's just not important.

The Caveat
Test dummy dps isn't really important, but that's not quite the same thing as saying test dummies are useless.  I use them all the time.

Test dummies are excellent for testing a lot of simple things.  Want to know how Moonfire works with the glyph and Imp Moonfire?  Test dummies will tell you.  Want to test the new 4t10 bonus when you get it?  Test dummies are good for that (although keep in mind there are bugs that only occur on test dummies, so it's not conclusive).  Now that doesn't mean you can use test dummies to compare something like 4t10 to 2t9, but it does mean you can probably get solid numbers from them, and from that it's math.  EJ uses test dummies for specific purposes all the time - validly - but they also make sure they control the test and they get a big N.

The real purpose of test dummies, however, is practice.  When my rotation changed in 3.2 I spent a lot of time on test dummies getting used to it.  I use test dummies when I want to make sure Power Auras will track Eclipse like I want it to.  I use test dummies when I'm working on my UI, because I want to see as much as I would in a raid - DBM Test bars, cooldown bars going, everything tracking.  That means I know it works, and more importantly I get used to looking in the right place for the information.

I also usually treat test dummies as close as I can to real boss fights - any player who rides by is a boss mechanic.  Shamans are usually coldflame, Warriors are void zones, Mages are AOE explosions and Hunters I, er, ignore.  But you get the idea - make it as dynamic as you can.  The key to practice is to do what you actually have to do in a raid, and if you use test dummies for that then I'll salute you.

Moonkins, Demonology Warlocks and Cataclysm

Wow, it's been a while since I posted.

Everyone's currently talking about the (minor) balance buff in 3.32.  From MMO:

Keep in mind that we tend to make much smaller adjustments during a minor patch cycle due to the limited amount of testing time we're allotted before applying such patches. For this reason you're not likely to see any major Balance druid changes coming in the next minor patch.

With that being said, one small change we have in the pipeline will double the passive effectiveness of Earth and Moon so that it provides a flat 2/4/6% spell damage increase, up from 1/2/3%. As an obligatory warning, this is subject to change prior to the next minor patch going live. (Source)

The short of it is this is probably the final nail in the coffin for significant moonkin changes before 4.0.  Slightly less than 3% is certainly nothing to sneeze at (and thankfully it isn't negatively impacted by movement like the Eclipse buff), but it's also obviously a stop-gap measure to keep moonkin dps from completely bombing in ICC.  But as moonkins start gearing into the range where we only have one significantly scaling stat (spell power) I anticipate seeing dps hitting a pretty significant plateau while other classes continue to scale.

Now to tangent - I recently (just after 3.3) got a warlock to level 80 and have been playing him as an alt:
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Aerie+Peak&cn=Moonkin

(I named him Moonkin because I had the name and, well, I wasn't going to rename my druid.  Besides, it's funny).

I've been mostly playing him as Demonology.  If you're not familar with the spec Demonology has a talent called Molten Core - I'm just going to concentrate on one specific aspect of it though.

Increases the duration of your Immolate by 9 sec, and you have a 12% chance to gain the Molten Core effect when your Corruption deals damage. The Molten Core effect empowers your next 3 Incinerate or Soul Fire spells cast within 15 sec.

Incinerate - Increases damage done by 18% and reduces cast time by 30%.

Soul Fire - Increases damage done by 18% and increases critical strike chance by 15%.

Now it took me a while to realize this (sometimes I can be slow) but Molten Core is exactly what Eclipse wants to be.

1. It forces demonology to use a second nuke that they otherwise wouldn't touch.
2. It introduces additional RNG, but without a cooldown.  This is significant - a moonkin who goes 15 seconds without an Eclipse proc has effectively lost dps that he can never get back, but a demonology warlock who goes 15 seconds without a Molten Core proc can easily gain that back later with positive RNG.
   
3. It's charge based, which reduces the impact movement has on the benefit.
4. While it is a significant dps benefit, it's nowhere near the 25%-30% that Eclipse makes up for moonkins.  Therefore even with very bad Molten Core RNG, a warlock will still be in ok shape.
5. It does not force demonology warlock into two (or even one!) soft caps for either haste or crit (there is a slight one at well over 1k haste, and also during heroism - but nothing comparable to the 400 haste moonkins see).

To me at least the parallels are amazing - two talents with effectively the same goal but with a vast difference in execution.  After playing demonology and then going to my druid my first thought is always "man, I wish Eclipse was more like Molten Core".

Now obviously I don't want a clone - that 1) wouldn't work and 2) would be kind of boring.  But image if Eclipse read something like this:

Your Insect Swarm and Moonfire ticks have a 10% chance to give you the Eclipse effect.  This empowers your next 4 Wraths cast within 20 seconds, increasing damage by 75% and cast time by 20%.

 Now those are placeholder numbers that would need to be tweaked, but the implications are pretty big - this removes both the haste and crit soft caps (in a way that doesn't impact Nature's Grace, so avoiding resto implications), removes some of balance's dependence on movement and gives moonkins a very dynamic rotation.

Even if we don't see something like this in 4.0 (and we very well might not, since Nature's Grace is going to see changes too) the design of of the talent itself is at least reason for hope.  Blizzard may have dropped the ball big time on Eclipse, but they are learning.