Update: Moonkin DPS Talents, Glyphs and Set Bonuses

Given the 3.3.3 changes I went ahead and spent some time updating my chart of our talents and set bonuses.  I added a couple of new things (Glyph of Focus and a combined Glyph of Moonfire + Starfire), and I also changed it to a percentage basis instead of a raw dps number as I feel that's more valuable information.

The original post is here - I updated that image to match this one.  The methodology was identical, and they are ordered by their average % dps increase.

The one big change is Brambles - according to Simcraft (and I ran this several times) it's behind Genesis now on a per-point basis.  I'd guess that's due to stat scaling since I used a significantly better geared set to get these calculations, but it's hard to be 100% sure.  Either way the overall difference is negligible at 1-2 dps difference per point.

Another factor to consider is that the above ignores any benefit to a tank from Thorns - if you are considering rdps then an extra ~30 damage to the boss from Thorns every few seconds will outweigh the difference with Genesis by quite a bit.  So if you are the Thorns-buffer then Brambles should pull ahead again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tier 10 Moonkin Stats

Wow.

I know everyone else is already talking about this, but I think it deserves a post.  MMO data-mined the t10 druid sets, and the balance is amazing:
251
264

There also should be a Heroic set around ilvl 277, but that isn't available yet.  It should be pretty obvious though that the stats on this are incredible:

• No Spirit
• Three Spell power/haste/crit items (helm/chest/shoulder)
• Two Spell power/hit/crit items (gloves/legs)
• Only red/yellow sockets and only spell power bonuses, and every item has at least one red socket.  So you can gem for every bonus and be gaining dps.

I'm going to go out on a giant moonkin-shaped limb and state that either gloves or legs will most likely be our off-set.  Hit is going to be incredibly easy to get at t10 (moreso then t9) and using two tier pieces with hit will probably put you way over cap, especially with the rep ring adding hit.

Now which piece is off-set will depend on what other loot is available (and there's also a small potential for us to actually use 5/5, depending on what else is available), but at first glance this is very promising.

One more last thought - get used to having high haste values again.

• 3x Tier pieces have haste, and you will probably end up using all of them.
• The rep ring has haste.
• The Emblem leather belt has haste (and is SP/haste/crit so you'll probably use it unless something better itemized is in 25 HM).
• Wrist/Boot pieces that are BIS will probably be SP/haste/crit if the pattern continues.

So, to sum it up:
You will likely have haste on every single piece of gear, barring trinkets and 1-2 other pieces that have hit instead.  So be prepared to break 600 haste again, possibly at high velocity.

How To Choose Gear Intelligently

I see a lot of threads with the following two topics:
"My dps is bad, how do I fix it?"
"Is X an upgrade over Y"?

Many times these threads reveal a lack of understanding about how to pick gear - it's very often that someone does poor dps not because they are bad at being a moonkin, but because they choose gear badly.  Picking gear can be fun (it's one of the reasons I play) and this post will talk about how I do it.

Gearing Toward a List or Not
There are basically two options you can use when choosing gear:
1) Gear towards a specific, BIS (Best-In-Slot) list.  This is a pre-determined list of gear that you feel gives you the best dps.
2) Pick up upgrades as they drop.

If you use the first method then this post won't really help you.  I don't really like gearing toward a BIS list because I have found that I never get it.  There is always an item (or two, or three) that refuses to drop or that I just can't get because of DKP/loot council/etc.  As a result, I prefer to take a more fluid approach to gearing.

This by necessity involves a little more thought then just following a list, and this post details most of the logic/thought process that I use.  Keep in mind while reading this that these aren't in a specific order - you want to consider everything, not just look at one particular section.  Just because Hit is more valuable then Spirit doesn't mean an item with Hit is better dps then an item with Spirit, for example.

Stats
You have to know what stats are good, and approximately how good.  This can be as simple as:
Hit (to cap) > Spell Power > Haste (before 400) > Haste (after 400) >= Crit > Spirit > Hit (after cap)

The only problem with this is that it's a little inexact - you don't know how much any particular stat is better then other stats, after all.  What I generally do is use the following values:
Hit: 2 (before cap, 0 after)
Spell Power: 1
Haste (before 400): 1.1
Haste (after 400) and crit: .8
Spirit: .33

These are loosely based on Graylo's numbers here.  I don't use the exact values because I don't want to bother multiplying stuff by 0.816, and I feel that these are close enough for eyeball work.  If I compare two items and they are close (within ~5 dps) then I break out a spreadsheet and compare them using more precise values, but for the majority of cases the above works fine.  Most upgrades are on the order of 20+ dps or more, so it doesn't matter if you use exact numbers - the result will be close enough.

Know What Gear is Available To You
You must know what gear is available.  The keyword is the one in italics, though - if you are in a 10-man only guild, then you are going to choose gear differently then a person running 25-man content.  There are a lot of sources for this:
www.wowhead.com
www.mmo-champion.com
Graylo's BIS lists, here and here.

Keep in mind that I'm not advocating a BIS list here - but it can still be useful to use a best-in-slot list simply to see what gear is available. 

Know What Gear Others Will Want
It's a simple fact of life that in WoW, you are gearing in a raid (at least in endgame...).  And that generally means you do not get every single item you want.  This especially refers to shared slots: Trinkets, Rings, Amulet, Tier gear, and Weapon/Off-Hand.  These are slots that a LOT of poeple are going to want, so you need to pick you gear with that understanding - because maybe something that would otherwise be BIS is something that it will take you a long, long time to get.

On the other hand leather spellcaster items are probably something you can pick up pretty easily, because so few people will want them.  This especially refers to non-spirit leather - there's not a lot of it, but you can generally expect only 1-2 people in the entire raid might be interested.

Set Bonuses
I've talked about some set bonuses, but now I want to discuss them in more general terms.  The key to set bonuses is that they don't take up itemization points like stats - they are essentially free dps.  This means that except for special cases, you are almost always better off aiming to have at least four slots dedicated to tier gear.  That can either mean going for a 4-piece bonus or a 2/2 split, but it's a rare situation where you want to use more then one piece of off-set gear.

Gear Toward The Hit Cap
I'm not sure I can emphasize this enough.  I see a ton of posts where people talk about having low dps and it turns out they are massively above the hit cap.  Unlike crit or haste, the hit cap isn't a soft cap - you get zero benefit from it once you pass the 17% mark.  So it's very important to choose your gear with the hit cap in mind (if you don't know the hit cap, I recommend reading Wisp's raiding sticky here).

I'm also going to take a second to talk about Balance of Power here - there are some people who advocate dropping BoP.  I'm not one of them - the problem is that BoP also provides a secondary benefit of reducing all spell damage you take by 6%.  While this isn't a big number, keep in mind that almost all the damage you take will be magic, and dead = 0 dps.

The primary reason not to drop BoP though is that there's just no benefit from it.  Balance is a pretty limited tree - the other talents you can pick up if you drop BoP are stuff like Brambles or Genesis, which provide single-digit dps increases.

Minimize Spirit
This is probably the second source of "well geared" moonkins doing low dps (after having too much hit) - having too much spirit.

Wotlk itemization has been pretty consistent.  Every caster item looks like this:
Stamina
Intellect
Spell Power
Two out of the following: (Hit, Haste, Crit, Spirit)

Out of those Spirit is by far the worst.  Some spirit is unavoidable - but in general if you pick items with spirit over items where you could get crit/haste, you are losing 30+ dps per slot.  That's for low-itemization slots like rings or bracers - you lose a lot more if you take a helm, chest, or leg slot with spirit, so avoid it whenever possible.

Maximize Sockets
Sockets, sockets, sockets.

They key to sockets is that they are cheap, itemization wise.  What you lose from adding a socket to an item is much less then you gain - so if you had two items that were "identical" (both SP/crit/haste and the same ilvl), the one with a socket will beat the one without.  I always choose gear in order to maximize sockets while keeping the rest in mind.

The Complete Whole
The end result of this generally ends up being very close to a BIS list - but a more fluid one.  I picked my weapon not because it's BIS (I'd prefer the Heroic Anub mace) but because:

• I had the DKP.
• It dropped.
• Weapons are a very contested item, so if I waited for another one I'd have to horde DKP.
• It's well-itemized, with a socket and no spirit.

From that I built the rest of my gear around it (because it provides hit) based on the other criteria I listed here.  I ended up with a little more hit then I'd like, but overall it's turned out pretty solid.

Switching from 2t8 to 4t9.

2t8: Increases the bonus granted by Eclipse for Starfire and Wrath by 15%.
4t9: Increases the damage done by your Starfire and Wrath spells by 4%.

I've recently decided to switch early to 4t9 from 2t8 (by "early" I mean before I can access ilvl 258 tier), and I just wanted to go over some reasons and logic for that, given that on average I should lose 1-2% dps from the change.

1) 2t8 is not consistent for burst dps.
Most if not all of the math I see on moonkin dps is about average, sustained dps.  I don't have a problem with this as it's the best and most consistent way to thoerycraft, but it is important to realize that it's not all of the story.  There are many situations, especially in hard modes, where burst dps is a very important consideration.  Off the top of my head:
XT's heart.
Stealbreaker
The Saronite Animus on General
Lord Jaraxxus, killing Nether Portals/Infernal Volcanos.
Twin Valks, breaking shields.
Anub p3
(Note: by "burst dps" I mean any dps situation roughly 90 seconds or smaller, where the value of cooldowns will be exaggerated by the short time frame).

The problem with 2t8 in these situations is that it isn't consistent, and I'll use an example from Lord Jaraxxus yesterday.  On the first Nether Portal of the kill I got lucky and it procced with a Lunar Eclipse, so I was chaining starfire crits at 16k each.  On the second, I couldn't get an Eclipse proc and so was only hitting for 7-7.5k, and less often - because of no nature's grace.  So while we killed both in time, my personal contribution dropped by almost 50% simply because of an Eclipse proc.  The fact that I use 2t8 increased that difference.

A second factor in 2t8 is that it simply doesn't scale as well with heroism - you will almost certainly waste a Solar Eclipse proc everytime that cooldown is used, and that means your 2t8 isn't doing you any good.

2) 2t8 increases RNG.
Obviously all classes have RNG (random number generator - in this case referring to how much randomness effects dps), some more then others.  Moonkins with Eclipse - and especially with 2t8 - have more then most.  2t8 is an average dps increase of roughly 6%, which is very good.  The problem is that 6% is only a theoretical number - on any single fight you could see anywhere from 4% to 10% from it, for example.  Possibly more or less - it's hard to say.

Now it's awesome when the stars align and you get a perfect dps parse to top the meters, but it's less awesome when the stars line up, beat you up with baseball bats and you place 15th.  Moonkins are always going to have RNG until and if they change Eclipse, but 2t8 adds even more. 

This is really important now with limited attempt hard modes - before we killed Twin Valks on heroic we had a 0% wipe, and it was close enough that if RNG had been a bit different we might have killed it.  So consistent dps can be really valuable.

3) I have way too much hit.
Ok, this is a personal reason and not one most of you will have, but it's one to consider.  The two pieces of t8 I use are the gloves and the legs, with a combined hit total of 116.  I recently picked up a dagger upgrade and gained 51 hit, which means I am now 87 hit over the cap.  Dropping 2t8 for 4t9 will let me convert some of that extra hit into useful dps stats, and while I might end up socketing a little hit to make the 236 cap, it will be more then worth it.

4) 4t9 will increase my gearscore.
...kidding.  Really.

5) 4t9 allows more flexibility in rotation. 
Another weakness of theorycrafting is that it generally only considers single target situations.  There are a fair amount of situations where this isn't the case - Yogg-Saron p2 being the biggest one right now.  This is a fight where dotting multiple corrupters plus the crusher isn't padding the meters but is a real necessity for the hard modes - that stuff needs to die consistently for p3 to be smooth.

The problem with 2t8 here is that it increases the opportunity cost of ignoring Eclipse - because so much of your dps is tied into that one ability, ignoring it to multi-target DoT really hurts.  It's still a dps gain, but it's less of one.  4t9 isn't tied to Eclipse, so it becomes more worthwhile to DoT up a bunch of things and just make use of Eclipse where you can.

Another benefit is that by reducing the benefit of Eclipse, you can reapply DoTs slightly more often and still see a dps gain - instead of being 6+ seconds, you instead want to reapply at 4+ for IS, and 3+ for Moonfire.  That leads to a bit more consistent rotation and damage, because more of your dps is coming from those DoTs instead of more RNG-dependent spells.

Those are the main considerations I made before deciding this.  I consider those reasons pretty valid, but of course your mileage may vary.