Druid 202 Moonkin Raiding (Not Finished Yet)Follow

I've got time at work to get this done. Be happy, and get off my back :( Also I intentionally didn't add any BBC coding into it for the very reason you can go ahead and make it all look pretty and stuff.

Moonkin Raiding, Mini Deathstars, and You!

You've hit 80, you want to raid, you've got to get ready! Here is the following things that will be covered.

1. Talents / Glyphs
2. Stats - Enchants, Gems and Consumables
3. Rotation vs Priority and helpful addons
4. Uncle Arex's Rambles on min/maxing
5. Professions

1. Talents

The raiding moonkin spec is pretty straight forward and deviating from it is usually left to 2 or 3 points pending on your play style.

The Bare Bones balance raiding spec.

As you can see the following leaves you with 2 open points to allocate as you see fit. Pending your needs the following are the most common places to put them.

2/3 Intensity - This is the most common place for those 2 points for beginning moonkins in 5 man and 10 man situations. This allows some mana regen making it much easier for extended periods of fighting.

2/2 Gale Winds - If you're doing Naxx or Uld there are situations where you will be doing much more aoe than normal.

1/2 Gale Winds, 1/1 Typhoon - This is probably the most common place for these two points. Still able to do decent aoe damage and typhoon for situational fights.

2/3 Owlkin Frenzy - This is more a pvp talent but has a slight degree of merit in some fights in WotLK, mainly in Ulduar do you find this talent to be mildly useful.

The best possible way to get 3 points to allocate is to leave one point from Nature's Reach, at the moment, tier 9 raiding, range is almost never an issue except in select situations.

The glyphs you use are entirely straight forward and you will for the most part never change them out.

Glyph of Starfire - Adds 3 seconds to your moonfire dot every time you cast a starfire, stacks up to 3 times.
Glyph of Insect Swarm - Increases the damage of IS by 30%, but no longer decreases hit by 2% on targets.
Glyph of Moonfire - Decreases the damage of moonfires initial damage by 90% but increases the periodic damage by 75%.

Now, really the only one glyph you should ever switch out is Glyph of Insect Swarm for Glyph of Starfall. There are two reasons to ever switch this out. Glyph of starfall reduces the cooldown of starfall by 30 seconds. So if you're on a fight with lots of adds glyph of starfall should outperform the IS glyph. The other reason is if you are doing progressive raiding into new content for your guild glyph of starfall will be the last amount of dps loss by losing IS glyph for the extra 2% miss chance for tanks.

That is really the only two reasons one would ever use other glyphs.

2. Stats

Hit Rating Required - 236(9%) for Alliance with the Heroic Presence buff from Dranaei, 263 (10%) for Horde. Remember, Balance of Power gives you 4% and Improved FF will give you another 3% to help you cap.

Haste Soft Cap - 400. After you reach 400 haste the value drops and crit begins to take over as the best secondary stat. The reason you soft cap at 400 is once you recieve the Nature's Grace buff you have enough haste to make your wrath casts 1 second, exactly on the gcd. Anything more can push your wraths past the apex of the gcd and cause clipping of your wrath casts.

The biggest issue is to meet hit cap, and then try to soft cap your haste, anything over 400 isn't going to destroy your dps. Barring spell power being your best stat of the secondary stats you can use the following.

Hit(until cap) > Haste(until soft cap) > Crit > Int > Spirit

Enchants and Gems!

Head - 30 sp/20 crit (Kirin Tor revered)
Shoulders - 24 sp/15 crit (Sons of Hodir exalted)
Back - 23 haste
Chest - 10 stats
Wrists - 30 sp
Gloves - 28 sp
Leggings - 50 sp/20 spirit
Boots – Icewalker/Tuskarr's Vitality (If over hit cap use Tuskarr's faster movement means more dps when you're in movement heavy fights)
Weapon - 1h ~ 63 sp, 2h ~ 81 sp

Runed Cardinal Ruby - 23 spell power
Purified Dreadstone - 12 sp/10 spirit (You will only need two of these to meet your meta. Put them into your blue sockets)
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond - 21 Crit/3% increased Crit Damage

There is one thing that needs to be said about the Purified Dreadstones though.

12 spell power / 10 spirit, because of the improved Moonkin Talent is actually 15 spell power. Due to socket bonuses it is possible that the Purified Dreadstone will become better than the Runed Cardinal Ruby.

12 spell power + 10 spirit (3 spell power) = 15 Spell Power

If your blue socket bonus is 8 spell power or more, youre purified dreadstone is equal to the Runed Cardinal Ruby.

Runed Cardinal Ruby = 23 spell power

15 spell power + 8 spell power socket bonus = 23 spell power = Runed Cardinal Ruby 23 spell power.

It's just something to keep an eye out for if you plan to min/max your character.

Now for consumables you will want Flask of the Frostwyrm and a Fish Feast. Best two combinations of food/flask you can get.

For potions you will want Potions of Speed. Always use them during your Lunar Eclipse to lower the starfire cast time.

3. Rotation vs Priority

Balance druids begin with a rotation and end in a priority fight. Much like a feral druid does. How you open up on a fight doesn't really affect the outcome of the fight, but there is a pretty precise way to open the fight to make things easy for you as possible.

Treants > FF > MF > IS > Starfall > Wrath until Lunar Eclipse

You might have to augment the opening a little bit if you're looking at a fight with lots of aoe potentional so leaving off starfall might work, but the basic idea is to push out as much starfall damage per fight as you can since it's on a minute and a half cooldown.

Queueing up Treants near the boss before the pull is a good idea. They will begin to walk back but hitting FF as the gcd is up will cause them to aggro the boss. FF comes after Treants because w/o it up you are not hit capped and can chance missing any spell until you have FF up. MF comes first as a damage spell because once you push yourself into your first Lunar Eclipse, starfire will continue to add to the duration up to 9 seconds total.

Do not be afraid to refresh dots when they fall off during your eclipse phases. Your dots need a very high uptime because they buff both starfire and wrath, and also do a hefty part of your damage across a fight.

Addons can be a very nice addition when it comes to watching your dots and eclipse.

There aren't many addons to choose from for balance druids but the following have worked the best.

SquawkandAwe
Quartz with the Eclipse Plug In

These two are the best to watch for eclipse, I highly suggest SquawkandAwe over quartz with eclipse plug in because it will track everything that is moonkin for you.

Also you will want this addon.

Wiseeclipse.

If you are casting starfire at the end of your lunar eclipse and you're SF cast time is more than the time left on the eclipse proc it will automatically cancel the eclipse buff allowing you to enter into solar faster. Also it works with the lag you have between your pc/laptop with the server to cancel the buff just as starfire hits for a crit, and then puts you into lunar immediately. This is such a helpful addon.

4. Min/Max

The more you raid the more you'll begin to understand the need to min/max to the best of your potential. A few tips and pointers.

Have consumables ready to go before you raid.
Practice your rotations on a practice dummy. The biggest thing is knowing your keybinds and the better you are at knowing where your fingers are at the faster you can react.
Keep a clean UI. Don't have distracting things around. The simpler the better. Have only the addons you need to raid on.
Watch the fights you don't know on YouTube or at Tankspot. These offer a wealth of information for you to process to make you a better raider.
Two crafting professions. This adds more to your damage. Mind you, its expensive to level if you can't supply yourself the mats. But it shows to your raid leader that you care and want to perform at your best.
Keep reading guides like this. Don't ever stop trying to learn about your class. Things are always changing and what may work now may not work in the future.







Ok, I've done quite a bit of it so far. I'll finish this sometime in the next week and then Horse you can put it in the stick for me with all those sexy BBC codes added in.


Edited, Nov 2nd 2009 9:26pm by ArexLovesPie

This is awesome, I have been looking for something like this all over the place. Just FYI in the gem section you typed the stats for Purified Dreadstone incorrectly. Just wanted to point it out to you, and thanks for taking the time to write this up :)

Just do it! you know you wanna. I contemplated switching from boomkin/resto to feral kitty/resto cause i was getting bored. but then i raided ToC and remebered why I love nuking beetches. Oh yeah, great job Arex! i copied your talent tree a while ago. appreciate ALL the moonkin advice, even though you are a nelf ;)

I had a silly question about hit. I see it's 236 (9%) for allies. So would that mean with the Balance of Power and Imp FF, I'd only have to get 2% more hit, correct? I've never really paid attention to the whole spell hit thing, so I just wanted to confirm. But even so, if we've got a draenei in the group as well, then wouldn't I hit cap and not even have to worry about gemming or whatnot for hit?

Awesome guide by the way. I'm still only 40, but I like to look ahead of myself =P

Ah okay. Was a bit confusing lol. That makes more sense though lol

Fix'd.

I have nothing more to add.