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.

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.