If you could change one talent in any of the druid talent trees, what would it be? You could talk about what you want it changed to, or just talk about what makes it a weak talent that should be either changed or replaced in some way.^[1]

This question grabbed my attention and I think it has some merit as a Shared Topic. I noticed Graylo made a post on the idea as well. And curse him for having the time to push this out before mine because I will be echoing his sentiments on many things. Oh well, imitation is the best form of flattery, or so they say.

Improved Moonfire

Improved Moonfire as a talent has been lost for awhile. So much so, that even as a second tier talent, it is often overlooked. It took one of the better set bonuses that we have seen to convince us to even consider the talent. This indicates that the talent needs to be reworked.

So what would I do to it? Scrap the increased critical percentage. As a modifier in PvP it does have some usefulness, but I think even using MF spam to finish off an opponent has lost most of its viability. Lets give this talent the 2T9 bonus. "Moonfire DoTs have a critical strike chance equal to 50/100% of your critical strike percentage. Also increases damage dealt by Moonfire by 5/10%."

I think critting DoTs have been on their way for awhile and this set bonus was a "test run" to see what it would do to our DPS. I also think it's been a good change and one worth keeping in the class for awhile. I considered extending crits to Insect Swarm, but decided against it based on two facts. First, IS is a talent. I really dislike talents that buff talents because I feel like it becomes mandatory to pick up the talent as gameplay was probably balanced around having both. I believe that critting IS would require a reduction in some other portion of the Moonkin arsenal and I'm not interested in walking that path. Second, IS is already glyphed for damage. I believe critting IS would require a re-evaluation of the glyph, reducing the damage increase (circa 20%).

Genesis

Raise your hand if you hate Genesis. From a Moonkin point of view, it simply does not deliver. Now yes, I have read the posts about how it's really for Resto and blah blah blah. Here's my problem: There are so few viable options in the second tier that we are forced into the least unattractive option. Nature's Majesty seems a pretty clear must bu what of the other three points? Clearly, Moonglow fills this out nicely, but what if you aren't experiencing mana problems? Where else can you put those points? In order to reach the third tier, you would need to put at least 1 point in Genesis if you didn't want Moonglow. I have Moonglow in my build simply because I wanted to make sure I didn't run out of mana. But in a 25 man, I'm sitting pretty with my mana pool and replenishment.

Fixing Genesis is a whole different beast. I believe it should maintain its viability for Resto Druids so that they can progress down the tree with some type of benefit. I also believe that the talent should offer some viable benefit to Boomkins. Since PvP oriented talents shouldn't really be prevalent until the upper tiers, I suggest a talent that maintains its healing benefits to DoT's and increases the damage and cast time on Wrath.

Wait . . . wha?!? A talent to make a spell . . . slower? Yep. I hate clipping the GCD. I hate having the value of haste reduced because it stops affecting a large percentage of my rotation. I would much rather have the spell seem more like Starfire (since they are fundamentally the same) and get the full benefit of my stats versus firing snotballs every second with no spell queuing and often clipping the GCD.

Resto Tree

While I agree that there are problems in the Resto tree as far as progression down the tree goes, I can't say that I am overly interested in posting fixes to it because I feel like a Resto redesign will mess up what I would say anyway. If you want to see some good ideas on the Resto tree, visit Gray Matter

So there was an interesting post on EJ and I let it slide off but then Graylo blogged about it and I thought at this point I'd throw in my two cents as well. My issue with recommending the speed enchant [Tuskarr's Vitality] is when you remove [Icewalker] and fall below the hit cap, you are required to regem your sockets to reach the hit cap again using [Veiled Monarch Topaz]. This results in a net loss of stats.

What I'd like to do is take my theoretical druid and change his boot enchant from [Icewalker] to [Tuskarr's Vitality] and swap out one gem to gem for hit. In fairness, it is difficult to model what 8% run speed will do for your DPS, so I will be ignoring the added DPS time on the boss, assuming that it is negligible (at most 8% of the time you are moving). My theoretical druid carries 3k SP, 40% crit and 389 haste. His counterpart carries 2990 SP, 39.73% crit, and 389 haste. If I needed more than 8 hit (either 9, 10, 11, or 12) then I would need two [Veiled Monarch Topaz]. That druid would look like 2980 SP, 39.73% crit, and 389 haste.

I will be comparing straight spell spamming instead of a rotation so that I get a look at the impact to the individual portions of my rotation. I shall name my druids Icewalker, Tuskarr 1 Gem, and Tuskarr 2 Gem. For sake of comparison no idol is equipped.

Icewalker

Tuskarr 1 Gem

Tuskarr 2 Gem

Percent DPS Lost

TL:DR

Every DPS loss was rather minimal (on the scale of .75% to .3% depending on the spell). Were we to weight the percentages of damage done by each spell, I think we would find that for Tuskarr 1 Gem, we tend towards the chosen Eclipse percentage. The real question then becomes, how much more casting time will a player acquire by being able to move 8% faster? Let us assume that we are Tuskarr 1 Gem. Then we would need to find an additional 0.5% of our fight time to be casting.

Let us take a 6 minute fight that forces us to move for 10 seconds ever minute to avoid some fire mechanic. This amounts to 1 full minute of moving. Now, with a speed boost, to escape the mechanic we would only need to move for 9.2 seconds per time. This is 55.2 seconds of movement as opposed to the original 60 seconds of movement. Naturally this allows us 8% more casting time during the movement portion. This amounts to 0.8% more cast time over the course of the entire fight. A DPS increase for Tuskarr 1 Gem and possibly a DPS increase for Tuskarr 2 Gem if an extra spell were able to be cast in the given time.

That kinda failed as a summary since it rambled on a bit so here is TL:DR v2. It seems like the DPS loss from [Icewalker] on a fight that requires movement at least 10% of the time will be less than the casting time gain from [Tuskarr's Vitality] for the replacement of 1 gem. 2 gems will require ~15% movement for this to happen.

Musings

While I agree that such fights exist (General V. etc) I feel that there are many cases where having a speed increase will encourage a player to stand longer to try and get that single cast off. I suppose technically you can squeeze in an extra 8% of your run time as casting if you've got the enchant but that will vary with every movement mechanic and therefore is unreliable. It is therefore my belief that Tuskarr's Vitality promotes laziness and bad habits among raiders, decreasing raid awareness and reducing the emphasis on reaction time even though reaction time will still be a vital component of the raid environment (i.e. spell switching, treants for BL, rebirth, etc). In addition to the aforementioned points, I also want to point out that a good raider is already moving out of the fire, moving onto snow mounds, avoiding shadow crashes, and performing a myriad of other maneuvers already without the speed aide. And if sh!t really hits the fan, there's always catform/sprint. If you need this more than once a fight, you might want to consider why you're reacting so slowly.

Today is a sad day as Karthis, of my original home server, Garona, will be hanging up his claws. It seems the game has lost it's pull for him. I will miss perusing his blog for some great feral information.

Good luck, Karthis, and as always, may Nature guide your Path!
/salute

In other news, Graylo has pumped out a very nice excel spreadsheet for modeling purposes. I'm gonna link his post, and not the spreadsheet so that you can understand what it is and what its purpose is.

Moonkin Stats and Graylo's New Model

There will be a series of blogs coming shortly that deal with the theoretical damage of both eclipse cycles, some interesting thoughts (hopefully) on DoT uptime, and other such rotation based musings. See you soon!

DOUBLE EDIT: I updated the spreadsheet, took out all of the separate gear lists, cleaned up the interface a little bit, double-checked some of my pointers and feel a lot better about it as a whole.

Download it here!

If you're interested in helping make the spreadsheet better, leave me a message with gear you think I'm missing. I'm no good at crawlers or automation so I'm doing most of this by hand and I'm sure I've missed bits and pieces.