So if the early bird gets the worm then I guess the researching moonkin gets the DPS worm! Maybe?

Ok, all bad analogies aside, it's time to digest this information and see if we can come up with any useful tips or thoughts. Do not take these numbers as a comparison of Solar rotations vs. Lunar rotations. Your choice of rotation should be based upon your preferred playstyle and your gear selections.

Flaws:

I ignored a few things that could have a drastic impact on a solar rotation. When a cast time begins to reach 1 sec, the spell queuing system begins to break down. This introduces some lag in cast times and you can't actually cast the spells as quickly as you theoretically can. All of this amounts to getting less wrath casts than you should be getting. Since no spell can queue until the 1 second GCD is over, when your wrath reaches a 1 second cast, your next cast suffers your latency as a casting time penalty on top of the 1 sec hard GCD.

Musings:

The Solar rotation seemed to be based upon your wrath damage. I filled with Wrath and with Starfire and Wrath dealt more damage in the cooldown phase so it looks like we should fill the solar rotation with wrath given perfect spell queuing.

As far as casting DoTs inside of a Solar Eclipse, we came to the conclusion that you should only do it if there are 10 seconds remaining on the buff. Now, I didn't take into consideration that the DoT continues to tick after the Eclipse phase ends, but I think it's misleading to talk about DPCT because technically all you are doing is offsetting your DoT casts. This means that by casting IS under the Eclipse buff, you are pushing back your next IS cast by 14 seconds. Given this shifting, I came to the conclusion that we just wanted to see a raw DPS increase under the Eclipse buff.

The Lunar rotation seemed to carry an excessively high amount of damage caused by Starfire. I can only assume this is because the RNG monster didn't get me because I played an averages game. I think the lunar rotation suffers disproportionately when you get a bad eclipse proc rate. Along the same lines of "shaky results" was the discovery of the fact that sometimes you can cast a Moonfire and suffer zero DPS loss from Starfire. I laid out some guidelines for when you should refresh and when you shouldn't, but it was pointed out to me that these guidelines were pretty useless.

The DoT reapplication is a case by case basis where we would be unable to determine if we had the proper haste percentage until after the eclipse cycle was over. Therefore, we never really know if we will hit a dry spell and have zero NG procs throughout the eclipse cycle. I, personally, am always refreshing Moonfire within my Eclipse cycle so long as I do it within the first 6 seconds. I'm sure that I've been bitten by the RNG monster by doing so, but I also feel fairly confident that it has provided me with a DPS increase.

Long story short, I feel that what I have found here supports what I do in game. I am currently waiting for a second piece of T8.5 (yay for being low on the totem pole) before switching out a great deal of gear, but I am turning out solid DPS using a Solar cycle and refreshing my DoTs within Eclipse if I have 10 seconds or greater left.

I think in the near future I will be doing a post on the good, the bad, and the ugly of a Solar Rotation versus the RNG nature of the Lunar Rotation. I know Graylo holds a Lunar rotation as superior to a Solar rotation and I have seen many great Lunar parses to back up that theory. I have also seen some great Solar parses and once my gear improves to their level, I anticipate comparing my parses to theirs.

On an unrelated note, I apologize for this post taking so long to come out with so little true content. I had my birthday this weekend and was subsequently incapable of coherent thought. You should have seen Friday's version of this post. Quite comical!