fresh level 80 boomkinFollow

So I just dinged 80 the other day and want to start doing heorics. I'm dual specced moonkin/tree. I have looked everywhere in the forum and havent really found what I'm looking for. I aware of the important stats ie; hit, crit, SP, MP5, haste, etc. depending what I'm doing. My question being, do we need to gear up for heorics or just start doing them? I know the gear upgrading progression from heorics to 10's to 25's, but what about new 80 toon to heorics? I don't wanna join a group and look like a wiener. Thanks in advance. My armory is below

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Tichondrius&n=Tyronebigum

good question. think i'll go hit the heoric training dummy tonight and see. ill let ya know.

Let's have a look at your armory to get an idea of your potential. Mind you, being a skilled player can make crap gear look good and vica versa... So take it with a grain of salt. Also, Moonkin's thrive by party play/certain buffs, meaning target dummy dps is not an accurate messurement, but will give you an idea of your potential. Add to that your great aoe possibilites for a hefty mana cost, that will have you drinking a lot in 5-mans. Adjusting your gameplay here or possible talentspec will help greatly.

Talents:
To allow decent dps but maintain some manaregen, I would advice you to start with something like this. Then when you notice you can't get rid of your mana fast enough, drop 3/3 dreamstate for 3/3 IFF and after that 3/3 Intesity -> 2/2 Gale Winds and 1/1 Force of Nature. Your gear will mainly determine these choices.

Gear:
You have run several dungeons and gotten some nice blue items. You are therefor not badly geared. Your trinkets and main weapon could be easily upgraded, depending on drops/gold of course. Consider a crafted weapon. There is also the arena quest from this npc.

Another great source of gear would be reputation. I see you are mostly honored, some friendly with northrend factions. Have a look at some of them for great blue/epic rewards. The reputation grind isn't that bad as you might think. Perhaps at your current honored level there are already some nice rewards. While talking about rewards, start doing your Sons of Hodir quests to end up with your sole source of pve shoulder enchant.

Then there is of course crafting your gear. And seeying you are quite far into LW, this could get you some great items. You will need lots of heavy leather and Arctic Furs, but seeying you are a skinner aswell, you could easily grind them in a cave somewhere. Have a look at the lvl 78 craftables or the epics. Including your LW specific bracers enchant (+67sp).

About the stats: Shoot for 15-16% crit while in non-moonkin form. Then add as much spellpower you can, while also increasing haste. Haste has a great effect on your dps if you maintain a lunar rotation (starfire spams). Don't go for mp5, but rather spirit. Also hit is important enough to try to cap it, but while doing dungeons and heroics, don't overdo it. The mobs in here are not Raid level, and thus (im too lazy to look it up, estemate:) only 160 or so hitrating is needed instead of the 264 raidlevel hitrating.

Enchants: Drop the stamina enchants and start increasing stats that improve your dps, Spellpower and haste or +8/+10 stats to chest. Icewalker to feet (hit+crit). This goes for gems aswell, though combinations with spirit are also fine to gain a socket bonus/metagem.

That said and done, your gear does not look bad, but not quite good enough. You will have your work cut out for you. I haven't been a fresh 80 in similar gear for some time now, so I don't know for sure what your dsp would be, but I would think you are not quite there yet for heroics. Your spellpower and crit combination is quite low. 0 haste is no problem as you are only just now 80 and hitrating 22 is not there yet. Very depending on your skill and rotation if you can keep on performing. General target dps for heroics is 1500+, though less is very well possible but will put more strain on others to perform.

Anytime you have any questions feel free to ask, glad to help, presuming I actually did help... Good luck, moonkin will give you lots and lots of fun, now /dance!

I rated him up just for the fact he used the word weiner.

But, since armory is failboat atm and won't load for me I'll give you some of the info that people haven't covered.

First off heroic spec. As my old college football coach always told us you need a bread and butter play. Or spec in your case. This is the basic spec that allows the most amount of mana regen w/o getting away from the core talents. You'll notice that you've got 4 points to play with. You can put them into Force of Nature, Starfall and 2 into Gale Winds if you like. Usually thats the best way to do it.

Also for glyphs you want Starfire, Moonfire and Insect Swarm. Hands down these are the highest dps offering glyphs you can get.

When tier 9 comes out IS and Starfall glyph become kind of the same and it will depend on the fights your in, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Secondly, some numbers.

264 - The amount of hit rating you need for raids. Starting with heroics you will only need 2 points into the talent Balance of Power. The 4% hit that it gives you caps you for heroics. If you plan on raiding then obviously the hit rating becomes that much more important.

400 - The amount of haste you'll eventually shoot for if you start to raid. Anything after that with the incoming changes to eclipse will start to clip your wrath casts past the global cooldown. This is bad when you do that, and its a dps loss.

1000000 - The amount of crit you'll go for off your items once you've reached the hit and and haste caps. Basically you can never have too much crit when you're a boomkin. Let me tell you this though, DO NOT GEM FOR CRIT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM. It's a very hard stat to itemize and justify gemming for it.


Ok, now onto the other fun stuff.

If you're dots fall off during a Lunar Eclipse don't refresh them until after the Eclipse is over. This is a dps loss to do so.

The only time you are allowed to refresh a dot is if you are spec'd 3/3 Into Improved Insect swarm and you are using a solar eclipse. If that is the case and you have Solar Eclipse proc'd and there are 7-8 seconds left on the eclipse and IS falls off you can refresh it. Otherwise don't worry about it.


All in all to really answer your question. Go right into heroics, dont worry about it.

In all actuallity you'll find better dps results with the glyph of Insect Swarm over the glyph of focus.

I just did some homework here and my rotation (based off my spec) was what had held me back in DPS.

IS / MF > Wrath until Eclipse > (Refresh MF if needed for crit bonus) > Starfire until spooge jumped me up by 300 points and adding in Treants/Starfall for extra DPS whenever possible bumped me up by 500.

Edit: When I said add in Treants/Starfall, I meant that I alternate the two as I have the Glyph of Starfall and it's ready for at least every other fight.

Edited, Jul 7th 2009 4:58pm by sixgauge

This may not be the "best" use of starfall but its definately a good way to use it.

When you're eclipse comes up off of its ICD, meaning that the 30 second cooldown after the initial proc happens you should pop starfall to increase your amounts of Nature's Grace procs to keep your wrath coming out a faster rate allowing more chances to crit.

But as for T8 the basic rule with the 4 piece is to keep up IS as much as possible.

T9 I'm assuming it will be with the 4 piece to keep MF up as much as possible.

Since getting into the rotation of a boomkin takes a little work, even now for me I still mess up after raiding as balance for what seems forever, go to the practice dummy and just go to town on it.

The main reason for doing so is to practice your rotations yes, this may seem kinda drab to do this all the time and it may get old, but the main reason for doing so is you create the muscle memory in your fingers. Basically when you start raiding and hit gimmick fights you're not sitting there running around like a ****** and not doing any dps cause you're concentrating on your rotations too much.

Oh, get SquawkandAwe as an addon that'll track your eclipse, mf/is and FF for you. I may have said this already but yeah... Get it anyway!