Moonkin 2t10/2t9 vs 4t9

I have been debating recently on whether to switch to 2t10 earlier or later - everyone should be doing it once they can do 4t10, but 4t9 vs 2t9/2t10 is a pretty open question.

This is mostly just to help me organize my thoughts on the matter.
4t9
Increases the damage done by your Starfire and Wrath spells by 4%.
The major advantage of this bonus is that it is reliable - it has no RNG component at all.  It also doesn't have any major disadvantages, but it is important to note that the talent is additive and not multiplicative.  For example, during Solar Eclipse 4t9 is actually only a 2.66% increase to Wrath damage.  This makes it relatively weaker then you might expect at first glance.

Math generally shows 4t9 to be worth slightly less than 3% dps.

2t10
When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 15% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 sec.
This bonus has a couple of interesting factors to it:

• If it works like other similar buffs, then the benefit will last the entire duration of a DoT.  A moonfire, IS or Starfall that you cast during a 2t10 proc should tick for 15% more the entire duration.
• You can gain Omen of Clarity automatically by casting Gift of the Wild.  This means that if you need to, you can use 2t10 to gain on-demand burst dps.  Since balance druids generally lack this, it might be valuable to explore (for example, imagine if you were having trouble on Marrowgar hard mode killing bone spikes - it would be very possible to hit gotw just before the cast finishes and get that little bit of extra burst for ~5 seconds).  Keep in mind that for overall sustained dps, casting gotw is going to be a loss unless you can do it while you're moving.  This isn't something you add to your rotation every six seconds - but that doesn't mean you should ignore it either, and hitting it right before the fight starts (as another form of pre-potting) may also be valuable.
• AOE - Omen of Clarity procs a lot when you're chaining Hurricanes.  2t10 should be a significant boost in damage on any fight with a significant AOE component.
  

 2t10 does have a few significant disadvantages:

• RNG, RNG, RNG.  Omen of Clarity is a relatively low proc chance (6%), and on average you will see around 2.5 procs per minute on a single-target fight.  But there can be a lot of variance in that number - the odds of going an entire minute with zero procs is roughly 8%, which is high enough to occur relatively often.  Other fights might yield you 4-5 procs per minute, it's all up to the dice gods.
• Six-second duration - spell damage is calculated when the spell cast finishes, not when it starts.  To get the 2t10 bonus you have to finish the spell cast within the buff duration, which means that calculating uptime on a six second duration is inaccurate - you will generally only get 5 to 5.5 seconds of useful buff time out of each proc.
  

 Overall, 2t10 looks to be worth slightly more than 3% dps, and significantly more on AOE fights.

Other Factors

• Set itemization - separate from the set bonuses themselves.  2t10 allows me to drop two items with spirit.  Even with the marginalization of haste past the soft cap, it is still very much superior to spirit.
• Item lvl - I still have mostly 245 t9.  Going to t10 gets me 251/264 items, which is a very nice stat gain.
  
• Experience.  Using 2t10 optimally means paying attention to the procs.  I have 1.5 seconds left on a 2t10 proc during Lunar Eclipse - do I cast a starfire (which will not benefit) or do I put up Insect Swarm, which will?  Since I will definitely have this set bonus at some point, the earlier I start watching it and incorporating it into my decision tree the better off I will be later in hard modes, when paying attention to dps will take a second seat to fight execution.

The experience factor is what decided it for me - if I can pick up 2t10 next week and start getting used to it now, then that's all the better for eventual hard modes..  Waiting for 4t10 will push that learning curve back another three weeks at least, picking it up now means I can start playing with tracking, addons and GotW right away.

Boss Tuning and Hard Modes

When ToC first came out - and to a lesser extent now that ICC is out - there were a lot of complaints that the bosses were "too easy".  And a lot of these posts seem to imply that easy normal mode = easy hard mode.

The error with this is that it assumes mechanics are the primary driver behind interesting boss fights.  This is true to some extent - a straight tank-and-spank with nothing else happening would be very boring.  But the key factor is that mechanics are only interesting if you can't ignore them.

• Marrowgar is easy now because, well, it doesn't matter if the whirlwind hits you or if you leave a dps in a spike for 15 seconds.  
• Deathwhisper is boring because you can easily kill the add waves, dps the boss down and never hit enrage - and the Death N Decay and add damage isn't that impressive.  
• Gunship has no real dps and barely any healing requirements - if you are undergeared you can just have your tank go over less often.
• Saurfang is the most difficult of the first four - it has an actual dps requirement, although not a very high one.  With proper positioning we saw 3 marks in 25-man this week, and zero in 10-man.

The common factor between all of these is very simple:  Dps and healing requirements are too low for mechanics to be important.

To say it another way, what makes boss fights interesting is dps and healing requirements.  Not by themselves, but because they force you to pay attention to the weird stuff bosses do.  If Marrowgar has a tight enrage and his whirlwind will two-shot you, then suddenly it's an awesome fight.  Did the mechanics change?  No - but they became more important.

The same is true for practically every normal vs hard mode, and it's why I expect ICC Hard Modes to be awesome.  Every fight so far looks like it could be a blast on heroic, and Blizzard hasn't disappointed in the past.

Prepping for Icecrown Citadel

I recently re-evaluated my character choices in light of the 3.3 patch (probable release date of 12/08/2009, or next week), and just wanted to go over the changes I made.

Gear
No changes - I already use 4t9 and with the 2t8 nerf I see no reason to change.  I did modify my gems slightly, going back to Potent over Reckless for good yellow sockets.  I lost 120 crit rating when I picked up a second Reign of the Unliving, and with ICC as the primary focus I don't see a need to value haste over crit any longer.

Spec
After some deliberation I decided to go into Icecrown with my Anub spec.

This took some thought.  I originally planned to go with something almost identical to the above, but without Typhoon and picking up the last point in Imp IS - that's a pretty optimized single-target build, but also with strong AOE.  However, reading strategies it looks like a lot of guilds find unglyphed Typhoon to be useful on Saurfang - there are adds that can't be tanked and need to be CCed, and Typhoon is a good choice because of the knockback + daze.

You could also easily do a build with 3/3 Imp IS and 1/2 Gale Winds, but it appears that at least two of the first four fights will have a non-trivial AOE component (Gunship/Saurfang), so I opted to go 2/2 GW.  One point in Imp IS is a relatively trivial single-target loss, while one point in Gale Winds is a very significant AOE loss.

Glyphs
So Starfall and Reign of the Unliving walk into a bar.
RotU: "I'm a trinket that procs from critical strikes, but only every two seconds.
Starfall: "What a coincidence - I can crit on a one-second period which exactly matches up with you.  Maybe we can work something out?"

Silliness aside, the Starfall Glyph (30 second cooldown reduction, NOT the focus glyph) and the Insect Swarm Glyph have always been relatively close in value.  My feeling is that with the neat little synergy between Reign and Starfall will make the glyph a bit more valuable, especially since I now use two of them.

If however you don't have Reign there are a few other reasons I changed to Starfall:

1. Each one of the first four fights - and many of the later ones - have adds.  Glyphing Starfall vs IS is a close call in a single-target situation, but as raids get complicated single-target situations tend to go away.  Expect a ton of adds in ICC, which will increase the dps benefit of Starfall.
2. Glyphed IS is important to keep up - you don't want 100% uptime but you should work it into practically every part of your rotation.  Unglyphed IS is much less critical - you pretty much want it up during Solar Eclipse... and that's it.  This frees up Insect Swarm as an, "oh, I have to move" spell - moving from fire?  Hit IS. Icecrown will most likely have a lot of movement, so having IS available more often will help mitigate some of that otherwise lost dps time.
   
3. 3% miss - I don't want to get into an avoidance vs EH argument, but suffice to say that 3% miss - while not being critical or even particularly important - is still, well, 3% flat avoidance.  Your tanks can't depend on it but it might prevent a death.

Keep in mind that if you Glyph Starfall you need to keep fairly close track of it and make sure you use it as often as possible - and as fight mechanics dictate.  I use Power Auras for this (and for Treants) to let me keep track of them easily and see when they'll be available, but other addons work as well.

Obviously any of the above might change in the future, but my goal is just to go into normal modes with something solid for all of the fights - for hard modes I anticipate optimizing on a per-fight basis, of course.

Latest 3.3 PTR - Moonkin Buff.

Both Eclipse effects have been increased to 40% from 30%.  Screenshot is in 4t9:

This is a pretty large buff.  If we use the 2t8 estimate of 6% dps (pre-nerf), then this should be on the order of 4% dps - just making up for the WiseEclipse nerf (if you weren't aware of it before, the Eclipse change in 3.3 is to nerf WiseEclipse).

The downside is that this buff comes in the form of increasing our reliance on Eclipse.  One of the big reasons moonkins have RNG issues is because Eclipse is such a large percentage of our dps, and this buff (while welcome) will only increase that issue.

This is concerning because the trend in an expansion is that later bosses = increased movement.  Now this is a generalization - obviously it's not true for all bosses.  But if you look at most fights, as mechanics get more interesting you also have to move around more, and this change is going to make movement a really big killer for moonkins.

Moonkin Icecrown Itemization

Ever since we saw the moonkin t10 stats, I've been following MMO with interest to see what's been data-mined.  It finally seemed like this is the tier for solid moonkin gear - even the emblem gear includes two SP/haste/crit leather items, a nicely itemized belt and decent gloves.

As more and more items have been found, however, I've been getting more and more uneasy.  The items I was expecting just weren't showing up - there's only one moonkin leather item so far, and it's 10-man.  Everything else leather has spirit, without exception.

Now this post is obviously a bit premature, because the loot lists we have (I'm going off of mmo-champion.com) is of course incomplete.  And there's always the "data-mined info is data-mined" maxim, and there is some truth to that.  But I find it worrysome that there are zero 25-man leather items for moonkins found so far, in the final tier of the expansion.  And by the time we have complete loot lists, it will be (practically) too late to raise these concerns.

This was true in ToC/ToGC as well - we generally ended up with leather boots/belt, and they had spirit.  But that's not a significant issue because the cloth gear was identical or worse - there was no SP/haste/crit cloth belt or boots, for example.  And we had the Anub legs, which are very nice but also are only one slot of gear.  However, Icecrown cloth doesn't suffer from the same drought moonkins are - it looks like there will be nicely itemized pieces available for almost every cloth slot, and both below pieces are so far almost certainly BIS for moonkin:
http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50062/plague-scientists-boots/
http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49978/crushing-coldwraith-belt/

I guess the current loot just leaves me with questions and concerns, especially if you consider this interview and the following excerpt:

Greg: The nice thing about Icecrown Citadel from an itemization perspective is that we have lots of bosses. That's something of a relief coming from the Crusaders' Coliseum, where we had only five bosses. For Icecrown, we can afford to have multiple options for a particular slot -- say a healing leather bracer or a melee trinket -- and even itemize some of the more unusual pieces.

So my issue becomes - how did we get a moonkin-specific leather item in ToC (5 bosses) but miss out in Icecrown with 12?  Why is it ok to have multiple healing leather bracers but nothing for a moonkin - especially if you consider that many resto druids would be able to use a "moonkin" bracer and put it to good use?

So, what do we do?
It seems to me that the best solution is simple and pretty straight-forward.  There's a lot of leather spirit gear on the Icecrown tables, and a lot of it has crit but no haste.  For resto druids with their new haste cap, this makes it feel rather subpar especially with how poor crit is for Trees right now.

It seems that some of this gear (and it doesn't have to be a lot - 2-3 pieces, tops) could easily be turned into moonkin leather and solve two issues at once.  Resto druids can afford to use some items without spirit - if anything it will make their mana use more interesting - and those items would help them toward their haste cap.  And this would give moonkins leather alternatives, instead of forcing us to go for cloth.

Icecrown Citadel Raid Progression

Blizzard released their plans for ICC progression last week and the implications are pretty interesting - I wanted to give myself some time to think about it though.

Here's the post.  I'll try to cover the important bits:

Gated Release

Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live.

The first section that opens will include the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. Progress beyond that point will be prevented for several weeks.

In a nutshell, this means we'll probably get at least three weeks per wing before being able to progress behind it.

My Reaction: This is amazing, and thank you Blizzard.
If you're in an endgame raiding guild then you probably experienced (at least in the past) that the first 1-2 weeks of a new instance are hell.  When Ulduar came out my old guild raided 6-days for the first two weeks because of the progression rush - very top end guilds require more, with the very top (Ensidia/etc) going 24/7.  The really nice thing about this change is it spreads out the "learning the new bosses" phase across a period of two months or so.  I like raiding and I'm willing to put a lot of time into it, but I never liked the first few weeks of an instance.  With this change, we get to learn and see some new bosses, we get gear - but we also have time to go back and run ToGC, to run 10-mans, and to do heroics while experiencing all the new non-raid content.  It'll make for a nice change of pace.

Hard modes would of course take up more time, but it seems Blizzard thought of that:

Easy Mode First

There are other elements that gate access along the way. Players may not attempt any Heroic versions of 10 player encounters until they have defeated the Lich King in a 10 player raid. Similarly, players must defeat the Lich King in a 25 player raid before they can attempt a Heroic 25 player encounter. So players must master every normal difficulty encounter in Icecrown Citadel before attempting Heroic difficulty.

The Lich King may not be attempted until Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, and Sindragosa are defeated. Furthermore, the Heroic difficulty of The Lich King encounter may not be attempted in any week unless the three aforementioned encounters have been defeated in Heroic difficulty that week. 

Simply put - no hard modes until you've killed Arthas once on that difficulty.  I feel this is another pretty positive change - it's nice to experience all the content once, and it also helps prevent weird situations where one guild may kill a boss months earlier then anyone else and skew rankings.

The Lich King gating is also good because it provides a more "final" Hard Mode boss, unlike Ulduar (where you could go kill YS-3 before doing any of the keeper HMs).  This gives a little more "linear" feel to a winged instance that otherwise wouldn't have it.

One could argue that the nice pacing would eventually go away once you get to hard modes, but no worries, once again we have:

Limited Attempts

The initial number of attempts provided for defeating Professor Putricide is only five. When Blood-Queen Lana'thel unlocks, the amount of total attempts remaining will increase to 10. Then when Sindragosa and the Lich King unlock, 15 total attempts will be available to defeat all four bosses. After a raid has exhausted their attempts for the week, the Ashen Verdict must withdraw their support and the four most difficult bosses all despawn and become unavailable for the week. The limited attempt system is a feature of both Normal and Heroic difficulty.

Yay, limited attempts!  This is a nice equalizer between the more hardcore guilds and the ones that aren't, so in general I'm in support of them.  This has a couple of interesting twists, though:

• Only four bosses are limited - Putracide, Blood-Queen, Sindragosa and the Lich King are all limited.  The other bosses aren't.  This is a new look at the tribute system, where the "easier" bosses are left available to progress, but the harder "gate" bosses are limited.
• Limited attempts on normal modes - this is completely new, and we're also not 100% sure how it works.  I am hoping that normal and HM attempts are separate (IE, you would have 15 HM and 15 normal attempts for the gate bosses) but Blizzard may go with a homogenous system.  Separate attempts would be preferrable because it would reduce the problem of "how many HM attempts can we try and still kill Arthas?", which can lead to raid drama and problems.

Of course, this means we'll have another instance where we sit trials and spend hours hoping the DC-boss loves us, right?  Well...

No Insanity

There will be no explicit rewards for defeating the Lich King with a specific number of attempts remaining as there was with Trial of the Grand Crusader. There will also not be an achievement to complete Icecrown Citadel without being defeated by a boss encounter, or letting a raid member die. (i.e. A Tribute to Insanity).

The only real problem I have with limited attempts was the Insanity achievement - not a problem itself, but the fact that it was tied into progression and gear.  And a lot of other people seem to agree, so Blizzard took them out.

There is one more section to Blizzard's post, and I think it's easily going to be the most controversial:

Progressive, Automatic Nerfs

In the weeks and months after all twelve encounters are unlocked, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters become available. This represents the Ashen Verdict growing more powerful and gaining a stronger foothold in Icecrown Citadel. To further help raids, Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream will begin to provide assistance by inspiring the armies attacking Icecrown Citadel. This is represented as an additional zone wide spell effect applied to all players that will increase their hit points, damage dealt, and healing done. This effect will also increase in effectiveness over time. Players may opt out of the spell's effect if they so wish.

There's two effects here, and both serve to make it easier to complete content.  Over time we will get additional attempts, and we will get a zone wide buff to health, damage, and healing that gets stronger each week/month (or however they do it).

My initial reaction was that this is ridiculous, insane and I can't believe Blizzard did it.  More attempts I can see - going from 15 to 20 attempts won't help a lot, but will serve to let guilds working on the content still feel like they have something to do.  The problem is with the second effect.

The problem is that gear already does this - it increases your damage, healing and health over time.  That's practically the definition of upgrades.  So what is the point of adding a "free gear" aura?  Raids that are doing ICC would already get this effect, so what is the benefit of this change?  It will let more people see the content, yes - and this is a good thing.  But from the viewpoint of a progression raider, it just seems like a horrible idea.

However, after thinking about it I started noticing the last line more:

Players may opt out of the spell's effect if they so wish. 

The wording here is kind of interesting - "opt out".  That sounds like something you might do for a more difficult run, and Blizzard has been known to reward those.  Maybe Blizzard intends for the "Glory of the Icecrown Raider" achievements to only be completable if you opt out of the buff?  Or possible additional rewards/titles by doing so?  If so, that would make a lot of sense - more casual guilds could see the content easier, but the hardcore raiders would be able to opt out of the effect for progression or additional rewards.

Overall
I think the system looks nice.  There is a good balance between gated/non-gated, and between limited attempts and unlimited.  They also managed to make Arthas the "ultimate" boss, both in normal and hard mode.

The only change that I'm not really happy with is is the raid-wide buff, but even that could be cool if done correctly.

11/16/2009 - General Update

I'll be posting something more substantial soon but I had a couple of updates I wanted to cover that are pretty minor:

1) I've started logging every raid I do to World of Logs, and I've added a link to that over to the right, under my armory and guild site.  There isn't much up there yet, but tonight's 25 ToGC should go up, and hopefully more content this coming Tuesday/Wednesday.

I use Loggerhead and run WoL's live-raid tool, so generally everything I raid will be up there.  This includes 10-mans (which I almost always tank) and anything my DK raids.

2) I've started rewriting my simulation spreadsheet.  The previous version had a lot of limitations - it's handling of DoTs and cooldowns was pretty clunky and it was hard to get good estimates for the value of RNG stats like crit or hit.  The new version should be a bit more robust and hopefully give more accurate values.

I did sit down and ask myself if I was reinventing the wheel (given tools like Wrathcalcs or SimulationCraft) but decided that it was different enough to be worthwhile - a dps simulation generated in a spreadsheet offers some advantages that Wrathcalcs and SimulationCraft don't (and of course, some weaknesses as well).  And there is always the value of having multiple tools look at the same information, just to see the differences in output.

3) The topic of my blog came up in guild chat the other day and my raid leader asked if I had talked about his gearscore yet - he has the best on the server and he gets tells two or three times a day about it.  Sadly this is actually true - he gets tells like, "Hey I heard you have the best gearscore on the server, that's awesome" (although usually with decidedly less capitalization, grammar and spelling).  So this is for you Romo.

Edit: Followup
Owlkin Frenzy - 0 procs Beast, 1 proc Jaraxxus, 6 procs Faction Champs, 1 proc Twins.  So, useless.

Bad News about tonights raid: I went full retard on Twins and died twice.
Good News about tonights raid: We still managed to one shot it and got our first Insanity (and I got my neck).