Moonkin Vs Kitty DPS 3.1Follow

Those are also ideal situations where you can stand around attacking the boss (ie, Patchwerk). Those types of fights will be very scarce in Ulduar. I'm also expecting kitty DPS to be knocked down a few pegs because it is AMAZINGLY high right now.

I can push over 4.7-5k dps on patchwerk but on most fights I'm not even in the top five at all compared to enhancement shamans, fury warriors, shadow priests, aff locks and survival hunters. I do though almost always in overall damage done throught a raid come in second or third.

I'll be glad to see kitty dps go up, I think its important that it does. I also know and understand I won't be the top dps unless its certain situations.

But like I said, I don't really measure skill by dps. I've measured it based on how well you get your job done in a raid and the combination of your dps and damage done.

I'm pretty sure kitties won't be able to sustain 7.5k-8k in 3.1

I'm not sure exactly how up-to-date Rawr is, but does the latest build include the changes (nerfs) made to Primal Gore and the SR glyphs? Those may have a significant impact on the theoretical DPS you're looking at.

If the raid blows all their CDs, sure, we might be able to hit that because we scale pretty good with most buffs. But over the course of an entire boss fight, I'd expect a kitty and a moonkin to be much closer to each other.

One last thing I think most of us can agree on: Moonkins could use a bit of love right now. Blizz made minor changes to the tree, but nothing to really help them. They rely too much on RNG, it's unhealthy.

So, yeah, expect kitties to be tuned before or when 3.1 goes live. They're having a really tough time balancing us while taking everything into consideration (complex rotation, PvE, PvP, etc).

Well once you hit the 4 set bonus for moonkins I forsee a pretty good dps increase since you'll be able to push out instant starfires, add in the 2 set bonus for 15% more damage for a starfire. Right now raid buffed my SF crits are about 12-13k and max out around 14,500.

So lets take the average.

12,500 X 1.15 = 14375

14375 - 12,500 = 1875

Simple math and it adds 1875 more damage to my starfire. Now doing my average max hit.

14,500 X 1.15 = 16675

16675 - 14500 = 2175

So an increase of 2175 to use simple math. Also toss in the fact I don't have the starfire idol, which on average adds about 1k more damage to your sf crits. Also throw in the fact that with 4 set its an instant cast with the changes to Nature's Grace you're no longer accidently wasting your NG proc on wrath when eclipse procs for starfire. I can forsee boomkins pushing some pretty crazy dps.

More spell power from new items, so starfire is going to hit even harder.

Another thing is the reduction of the cooldown on starfall. I use starfall in every boss fight, I may even pick up the glyph to lower its cooldown to 1 minute in 3.1 because it's such an easy buff. One thing I am curious to see though is since starfall procs nature's grace if you can use starfall to basically get a 20% haste increase every minute because of the lowered cooldown.

A lot of this is just pure speculation but something tells me people are going to be surprised how much damage boomkins are possible of putting out.

I'll probably stick with the normal raiding glyphs, its possible I might not be using the IS one. Even though my guild has had everything on farm since about beginning of december, except 3d, that extra mitigation would actually be pretty nice in our first few steps into ulduar.

I just really want to see the starfall change though with nature's grace. If it's working the way I'm thinking that is going to be so freaking awesome.

I'm going bear/cat, because my guild is figuring out how to handle dualspec -- probably with a declared "main spec" for any given run to get loot priority -- and the feral stuff has more overlap. The end result is that I may not get mainspec rolls on the best gear in any run, but large upgrades for one spec will likely benefit the other spec to a smaller extent.

If your raid is heavy on melee moonkin aura probably won't be as useful as the melee crit bonus from kitty provided you don't have any other feral druids.

You might want to note that an elemental shaman would provide the same 5% spell crit as your moonkin aura, if said ele shaman comes often.