Are moonkin viable in end game content?Follow

In my experience, doomkin can keep up with mages until mid-T5 levels. At that level, mages (and warlocks, rogues, and hunters) simply scale better. If you can find a guild that is understanding, though, they'll allow a doomkin because of the huge boost he'll give the mages and locks. Doomkin are kind of like enchancement shammies and survival hunters: brought primarily for the buffs they provide, but capable of putting out pretty good damage.

I'm really surprised at your results with elemental, though... our best elemental shammy is in nothing but T4 (and I mean nothing, not one piece of PvP, badge, ZA, or T5+ gear) and he regularly pushes 1100dps. Our doomkin haven't come close to that, they're usually more around 950dps (one is stubborn and refuses to wear cloth, the other suffers latency issues or he'd be pushing 1200dps).

This is what our DPS usually ends up as on fights like Winterchill or Karathress, taking the best person from each class:
- Destro locks (1300-1700dps, T5+ gear)
- Hunters (1200-1400dps, T5+ gear)
- Rogues (1200-1700dps, T5+ gear)
- Mage (1200-1300, T5 gear)
- Survival hunter (1100-1200, T5+ gear)
- Fury warrior (1100dps, T5 gear)
- Spriest (1000-1150dps, T5+ gear)
- Elemental shammy (1100dps, T4 gear)
- Enhancement shammy (1000-1100dps, T4/5 gear)
- Ret pally (950-1100dps, T5 gear)
- Doomkin (950-1050dps, T5 gear, but with latency/gear problems)

Ele shamans sort of, peak out at T4-T5 content. At around that area they are amazing. Almost nothing holds them back but a tank with the same gear lvl. But after this moment of brilliance they fade out and rogues, locks, fury warriors, and hunters just start widening a gap in the dps.

So from what im hearing from you is moonkins are almost, brought for their aura. Ive heard numerous jokes about "crit chickens" and i was simply wondering if anyone here had experience with high end moonkins.

Well, ill probably just end up going to what druids are truly made for .....healing.(PvP)

ya, stick an elemental shammy, holy pally, spriest and fire mage in a group with a crit chicken and watch the grins never stop. mana battery from the priest, a paladin that can heal endlessly thanks to crits+battery, more dps for the shammy, mage and druid from the battery, as well as 8% crit from totem of wrath and moonkin aura plus an additional 3% hit from the totem.

We do bring a crit chicken to our raids, but solely for the group buffs. He is in T5+ gear and can't even keep up with myself who is feral. The aoe debuff from his hurricane is also nice for the big aoe pulls in MH especially.

I talked to him a bit about dps, and from what i heard starfire is less base dps than fireball and with no dot effect, so in equal gear he could never keep up with a fire mage. I also believe they scale worse than most other dps classes as gear improves.

Ofc, this comes from a feral druid, so i haven't actually tried out the dps, but i did see our crit chicken always comming in as one of the last in dps.

Not really "peak out," more "lose their #1 spot." They still scale decently well, especially once they've got the haste to switch from 3/1 to 4/1.

There are three groups of DPS:
- Pure DPS, very little other support (mages, locks, rogues, hunters, fury warriors) - 2300+dps Sunwell
- Partial support, good/very good support with decent/good damage (ret pallies, doomkin, survival hunters, shammies) - 2000-2300dps Sunwell
- Pure support, low damage, extremely high raid support (spriests, afflic locks) - 1500-1800dps Sunwell

Feral's are usually "forgotten" because they are not there to DPS. Just like a 2nd prot warrior or a prot pally are not expected to do dps. The fact that we can do decent DPS is just a bonus.

Boomkin are DPS and therefor need to be able to justify their spot (through DPS & support). Ferals are automatically in and don't need to worry about it.

This is amazingly different to pre-BC where I had to heal for every boss fight even though I was feral (and I was lucky to be allowed to raid as feral). Ferals used to be outcasts and you had to prove yourself each instance you did against much scepticism - people used to drop group as soon as they found out a druid was tanking. The compliments after a run were the only thing that kept me trying to prove people wrong.

you young whippersnappers and your multi-spec viability! why in my day we dpsed, tanked, nuked, and healed all as one spec! and we liked it that way dagnabbit! you kinder-folk talk about this and that crazy instance experience, or pulling off some insane tankage somewhere...well, let me tell you, you dont know insane until youre main tanking AND main healing the same damn run! that was par for the course in my day, and we wouldnt a had it any other way!

I think all five or six of our Druids pre-TBC were Feral.

Admittedly it was 0/30/21 for Heart of the Wild and they never left caster form, but still... Feral!

EDIT: To actually address the OP, they do peter out somewhat after T5 (to be more specific - the pinnacle of their power is at 4/5 T5, and after people start acquiring decent amounts of T6 you'll fall behind) but if you can find a guild willing to bring them for the crit buff you'll be okay. By and large, though, Elemental Shaman are the clear winners in the comparison; they tend to do better in T6-era gear than the Crit Chickens and bring superior buffs (5% Crit and Battle Rez vs. 3% Crit, 3% Hit, 50 mp5 and Bloodlust, plus much better offhealing potential).

Edited, May 13th 2008 2:36am by RPZip

Quite, I knew I forgot something.

I also didn't mention Imp. FF, but it's not as good as people might first assume; it's raid-wide, but all of the classes with a 142-baseline miss rate (Arms Warriors, Retadins, Hunters) will be hitcapped. It's useful for Rogues, Fury Warriors and Enhancement Shaman but it's not gamebreaking... and while it's almost certainly better than spending the points for yourself (even though it hurts your spec), it's still not that great.

One thing often forgotten about the benefits of Imp.FF is that your tank will usually not even be close to the Hit Cap. This means the raid will benefit from a few % more threat generated which in turn allows each threat-capped member to do those few % more DPS during the encounter. This can work out to be a massive buff for the raid (just not necessarily easy to measure).