Patch notes are always a fun read.  Reading them or at least knowing what to expect is often great, and can sometimes give you some sort of advantage over the people that haven’t read the patch notes.  As always, you can find the current PTR patch notes over at:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

What’s Changing for Moonkins in Patch 3.2.0?

Let’s go through it:

Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This means each use of Innervate will give half as much mana as before, but it will be available twice as often.

- Definitely a welcome change, if you ask me.  Overall, if you were the type of boomkin to actually use Innervate on yourself in a 25-man raid setting, this doesn’t change much, minus the fact that you have to cast it twice.  However, since I don’t Innervate myself, and assume most other boomkins don’t, the change is nice.  Why, you ask?  I personally save my Innervate for my healers, particularly my holy priests.  If you ask me, Innervate used to return too much mana to them, and now, I’ll be able to keep 2 priests per fight happy instead of just one.  Even if you did used to use Innervate on yourself, everyone has died right after an Innervate or even while its up, so I do enjoy this change.

Balance of Power: Now reduces all spell damage taken by 3/6%, rather than reducing the chance to be hit by spells by 2/4%.

- Another change I readily welcome.  We all take Balance of Power anyways, for the 4% extra +hit, and I *much rather* have 6% reduced off ALL spell damage taken than simply a 4% chance to miss a spell.  Definitely more a PvP change than a PvE change, but less damage means less heals needed in PvE too

Owlkin Frenzy: Now also restores 2% base mana every 2 seconds for the duration (10 seconds) in addition to its current effects.

- An interesting an unexpected change.  Obviously its free mana on a talent I already took for PvP, but I still don’t think the mana regen justifies it for PvE, if that was their goal.  In PvP, if I’m ever near going OOM I probably wasn’t going to win the match anyways, so I don’t see it helping me personally in Arena.  What I do wonder, and maybe will do math on sometime, is if the change (10% of your base mana back to you when it procs), may outweigh Intensity?  Who knows, maybe I’ll analyze that in a future post.

Eclipse: The Starfire and Wrath buffs from this talent are now on separate 30 second cooldowns. In addition, it is not possible to have both buffs active simultaneously.

- This is the crazy change.  I don’t even completely understand it, but it is obvious that this is going to change our rotations, which sucks because it means I will have to update my spell rotation guides .  But seriously, from the sound of it, our rotation may now be something like: FF, IS, MF, spam SF till Solar Eclipse, Wrath till Solar Eclipse is over, and continue spamming Wrath to proc Lunar Eclipse.  Rinse and repeat. Somewhere in there you’d have to refresh your DoTs, but if that’s what this change means, I accept it.  It’s definitely a BUFF, if I’m reading it correctly, because it will almost double, I believe, our Eclipse uptime.  No more waiting for an Eclipse cooldown to be done, because you can simply proc your other eclipse!  Definitely await a new post on this, how it will affect us and our idols (Graylo briefly touched on this).

Other Patch 3.2.0 Changes

Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

- Not directly related to us, and without looking at parses I’m sure that Replenishment and Moonkin form make up the bulk of our mana regen.  The change isn’t as bad as it seems but it definitely is a nerf to everyone’s mana regeneration.  We used to get 1.25% of our maximum mana every 5 seconds, now we are only getting 1% back every 5 seconds.  Not sure how important that 0.25% of our mana pool ever 5 seconds can be, but I doubt it will hurt us too much, especially if you have a couple of points in Intensity.

Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.

- Not a change I particularly like.  I understand where they are coming from — all gear should be accessable to all types of players — but I’m not sure they have properly weighed the other side of the discussion.  Gear isn’t just gear; gear is also an indication of a player, their raid experience, and usually how much of an asset a player is to their guild.  Sure, some people get carried through raids, but it is very unlikely that a full T6 player back in BC didn’t know how to properly play his class.  With gear accessible like this, players could theoretically only run Heroics and VoA every week and be full T8.5, almost on par with players consistently clearing Heroic Ulduar weekly.  I am going to have to change the way I PuG players, as I won’t be surprised anymore to pick up gear players that are scrubs.  Oh man.

Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage over time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. The other effects of resilience (reducing critical chance, critical damage and mana drain effects) have not changed.

- I like this change, might end up helping us in the long run in PvP.  I had long since ditched my PvP set for Arena’s and was simply sticking around with full PvE gear (+ PvP trinket).  With these changes, you will probably be seeing me actually use my PvP gear — I’m sure most of the targets that actually kill moonkins in seconds are killing us via direct damage, not DoTs.  I enjoy this change very much .

Conclusion

Lots of good stuff in this patch, make sure to check it out and let me know what you guys think!  I really hope to update you guys soon with what the Eclipse changes will mean for us, and hopefully write up on the new ideal moonkin spell rotation.  I also want to re-look Owlkin Frenzy, although I doubt the mana regen addition to it will do much for us. One things sure – I definitely recommend liquidating your current stash of Emblems of Conquest that you may have and getting Runed Orbs – you can bet your antlers that the Runed Orb price (currently over 1k each on my server) is going to drop to where the Frozen Orbs (50g/each) are on my server!

MacBeezy

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Reader questions pour in all the time, and I apologize.  In between the full-time job, reapplying for college (OMG), raiding 12 hours/week, managing two blogs, and all my recent guild drama, its been hard to write good stuff.  If you care to see what my guilds been up to recently, most of it is up on the link above which goes to Ulduar25.com.  We are currently pushing to kill Yogg this week on 25, which would be great.

I’ve already seen this topic covered before by a couple of different moonkin bloggers, but I received this question a couple of times — people want to know my opinion.  I’ll lay it out as simple as I can –

If your guild does not let you roll on cloth as a main spec roll, you probably should not be in that guild.

That is my honest, unbiased opinion.  With the exception of tier gear, there is no leather on our BIS list, and no leather that I aim to get.  It seems that all leather gear currently available is designed for resto druids, or as small upgrades for boomkins, but nothing that we really want.

I can understand Blizzard’s logic, however, in making leather gear function for either resto druids or balance druids.  They have made it clear that they don’t want a piece of loot to be exclusively available to a certain class/spec — think, feral druid staffs, druids using polearms, the merging of spell power and healing gear, etc.  For them to make a beautifully itemized (no spirit and 3 sub-DPS stats) piece of leather gear, it would pretty much be identifying the piece as strictly a moonkin piece of gear, and people would get angry if it dropped often.

I also see the other side of the argument – clothies can only roll on cloth, yet boomkins can roll on cloth and leather.  It is somewhat of a valid point, but the concept doesn’t hold any water when there is hardly any good leather gear for druids (I am a bit picky in my gear choices ).

So, if your guild leader, raid leader, or master looter won’t let you roll on cloth, I strongly recommend you look for another guild.  If they do not know enough about the different classes in the game to know what type of gear moonkins are looking for, then chances are they are overlooking other key matters, both in the game and in the guild as a whole.

So, in conclusion, here are your choices for your next step:

• Talk to your guild leader, send him links to my blog and others that discuss the cloth vs. leather debate.  Also, try to tell him specific items you are seeking that are cloth, and see if he can make exceptions on a per-item basis.
• Settle for what leather you can get, there are some decent pieces out there but most cloth is better.  Still, if you get 5/5 tier pieces, than there are really only 3 item slots that you would have to fight him for.
• Join another guild that allows moonkin to roll on cloth.

Sorry for the short post, but I haven’t had many new moonkin topics to discuss, so if any of you have anything you would like to discuss or see blogged on, please email me.

Macbook

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So, I’ve been silently (and slowly) working on a new blog these past couple of days.  I’ve always wanted to start a blog on raid leading and being a guild master, so that’s exactly what I did!

It’s also going to feature boss strats that I’ve found particularly useful in my own experiences in Ulduar, tips on leading pugs, stuff of that nature.

So, if you’re bored or want to support my newest site, go check it out and comment!

The URL for the site is www.Ulduar25.com

You can also subscribe to its RSS feed!.

Thanks guys,

Macbook

P.S. – No, this doesn’t mean I’m going to blog here less

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What are your thoughts on buying gold?  It has been made abundantly clear on both my blog and the rest of the WoW blogosphere that buying gold (and ads about gold selling) are generally frowned upon.  In fact, I’ve had fellow bloggers refuse to link to my site because of some of the ads I’ve had up!

The thing is, I personally don’t think that buying/selling gold is really all that bad.  I understand its a violation of the Blizzard TOS, but other than that, I don’t see any reason to disagree with the practices of these companies (except the ones that spam Trade and LFG channels).

Trust me, I know all the arguments as to why people are against buying gold, mainly:

• Messes up the WoW economy (how, I’m not sure)
• Unfair to other players (how, I’m also unsure)
• People miss key game aspects by not farming gold
• Why else is gold buying looked so badly on?

Thing is, I personally know a lot of people who only have time, and play the game to raid.  For the record, I never have, and will never buy gold. I would never need to, I make at least 5,000 gold each week from selling things on the AH.  I don’t even farm, do dailies, or grind mobs/reps for factions.  Enough about me though, I’m trying to get a grasp as to why gold buying is such a negative thing.

I always feel weird about blogging about controversial issues, so I’ll say again that I don’t endorse or participate in gold buying/selling.  The thing is though, I can give a few reasons as to why I don’t see it as such a bad thing:

• Gold doesn’t provide many benefits over other players just because you have a lot. — It seems that one of the arguments against gold selling is that people who have lots of gold have some sort of advantage over people who farm for theirs.  This is not really the case, the only thing more gold will give you is let you purchase some BoE items, get the best enchants on your gear and appropriate gems, but that really isn’t that expensive, and most BoE items are easily replaced by BoP drops.  In either PvE or PvP, the amount of gold you have in your bags can only go so far, and you are not going to out DPS someone who has 1,000 gold simply because you bought 50k gold last night.
• Gold RMT (Real Money Trade) messes up the WoW economy. – I don’t see how this ever could happen.  The WoW economy mirrors economies in the real world, it seems.  It’s all about supply and demand; so the only way someone could feasibly mess up the WoW economy is if they bought tons of the same items and resold them much, much cheaper.  I can’t see how else they could destroy a virtual economy.  If anything, it might stimulate the economy and get more stuff bought/sold, but who knows.
• Unfair to other players. — No.  It really isn’t unfair.  If WoW was free to play, maybe it would be unfair, but since we assume most players that play WoW have at least some money to afford a decent computer, a solid internet connection, can afford at least $15/month, etc.  This also goes along with the fact that more gold doesn’t really give you too much of an upperhand with other players,  so someone with 100k gold really doesn’t have many advantages over a player with no gold.
• Buying gold makes players miss key game aspects. — I missed tons of key game content, and continually do so.  I levelled from 1-60 by instancing the entire time.  Do you think I read quest text and stuff like that?  I don’t do most world events, the Argent tournament, and other stuff.  People play the game as they choose, most of the people in my server never cleared Sunwell, etc.  I don’t agree with this argument either.

So, I understand this post really isn’t moonkin related, but I am looking for hopefully some reasons as to why you guys don’t agree with gold buying/selling, or even if you don’t think its bad at all.

In other news, and by the way, the pic of that bags is not my own screenshot, I have been making gold insanely easily these past few days.  I’ve been working on building our guild bank money (which dropped to 1,000g while I was out of the country, its now at 8,000g and its only been a week!), as well as my own personal gold.

As always, I’ve been using my professions to make incredibly fast gold.  I simply purchase mats I may need off the AH, and craft items like Sapphire and Brilliant Spellthread, Wispcloak, and pieces of the Frostsavage set.  I try to run Onyxia at least weekly, both for fun and easy gold, its good times.

In completely other news, I just switched back to an iPhone after having a Blackberry for nearly a year.  Its taking a little getting time to get used to the touch screen and snazzy iPhone features (as well as a decreased battery life), but hopefully I’ll be able to setup the Wordpress on iPhone app and take this blog to another level.

Macbook

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