Thursday, August 6, 2009

Reworking my Moonkin Offspec

With all 3 healers present in our Wednesday raid last night, I spent the majority of our Ulduar run under cover of feathers. It took a long while to get used to the strange eclipse procs, and I almost turned off Squawk'nAwe since it was only tracking the first cooldown and thus was generally being useless for me.

If any experienced moonkin have suggestions on things I can tweak/fix, please feel free to leave a comment!

Spell Rotation Attempt

Eventually, I settled into this:
  1. DoTs and IFF up on boss or large trash thingy (skip if baby trash)
  2. Wrath until Lunar Eclipse (out of habit), reapplying DoTs if they fall off before proc. Proc sets off SnA cooldown.
  3. Starfire through the proc, reapply DoTs at the end.
  4. Keep Starfiring to proc Solar Eclipse, reapplying DoTs if they fall off before proc. SnA is still showing Lunar cooldown.
  5. Wrath through the proc, reapply DoTs at the end.
I just got a bit lost in what I should cast when the Solar Eclipse ended but my cooldown for Lunar (judged by SnA since it was the first to proc) wasn't over yet. After a couple bosses, I attempted to just start weaving wrath/starfire by alternating the casts, so that when the cooldown ended I could quickly proc the next and not have to switch spells midcast. Unfortunately this sometimes resulted in cooldown confusion as a Solar Eclipse would proc first and be monitored by SnA, and out of distraction to moving around, staying alive, etc. I'd forget which one I had already procced, even if for just a couple spell casts.

Moonkin rotation just got tenfold more complex with these eclipse changes. It's honestly refreshing, as it's something I will need to sit down and really teach myself.


Crit??

I think I need more spellcrit. I was running an average 23.55% spellcrit for myself, which felt really low when it came down to procs at important times (like sitting on top of FL killing turrets). At 2500 spelldamage, my wraths were doing all of 3k damage per hit on the turrets, which felt REALLY wrong and made killing the turrets unreasonably slow at times, while the nerfed kittydruid was still beasting out his own damage. Sometimes I'd get a great proc and the turret would die quickly; other times it would take forever. It was frustrating me, and focused me on wanting to figure out how to make my turkeyself better.

The scariest part was when I considered giving up moonkin and going cat spec for my dps dualspec. 2 problems with that: 1) we already have a raiding cat and need the moonkin buffs when I'm not needed healing, and 2) if I don't play turkey, I can no longer say I have 2 druids that cover each of the 4 major druid types anymore :) So, I'm gonna try to make this work.


Mana Use/Re-Spec?

I never once needed my innervate for myself except when I was swapping between tree and moonkin specs (and thus was sent OoM just by the respec). I was running full moonglow and 2/3 Intensity. I was thinking to drop another point out of each and pick up 1 point of imp moonfire and 1 pt of gale winds, like so: 57/0/14 ??

I'm open to further suggestions on spec. I use turkey spec for soloing/dailies, occasional 5-mans (rare), and 10-man Uld/ToC raids.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I dps'd for our Hodir kill last night, and I have to tell you, I was just about completely lost. There were some pulls I felt next to worthless.

I read what I was supposed to be doing, and I knew about the changes, but it definately threw me through a loop trying to get everything firgured out last night.

I'm still not sure if and where gear, gemming and enchanting changes need to come.

Argh.

Kae said...

I tried out the spec in a Naxx10 run last night, and actually had mana trouble on trash (moonglow doesn't help hurricane). Boss fights, it wasn't an issue. I think 2/3 intensity is the way to go, and if any points are to be taken out of mana regen, it'd be from moonglow. Alterantives are Genesis (1% damage boost per point to over-times) and imp moonfire (5% damage boost per point).

We must practice our moonkinage :) I felt more comfortable with the rotations after pew pewing at easy bosses, and was better at remembering which one I had last procced. I still have a ways to go, though!

Alithea said...

Hi, random moonkin here! I just had to say that Genesis is not good for moonkins. There are a lot of other talents that give more dps.

Kae said...

Yeah, so I've gathered... which is why I've been putting the points off of moonglow into imp moonfire. Genesis would help hurricane, starfall, IS, and moonfire, but the bonus is tiny per point! A 5% bonus to moonfire per point seems to be a more reasonable way to spend the floating talent points.