If you play a Moonkin, or a druid for that matter, you would have realized that all your talent points have been refunded to you. There was a pretty good amount of confusion as if this patch that was made live yesterday would further buff, or nerf balance druids. To be completely honest, I still don’t know. Chances are, it probably evens out, and they just made a few changes but nothing a new spec couldn’t balance out.

They basically Moonfury have the same benefit it had with 5 points in the talent, except now it only costs 3 points. That’s not a nerf.

They nerfed Earth & Moon by changing it to a 3 point talent instead of 5, and it dropped our total spell damage by 2%. Nerf.

The new patch also stopped the moonkin AoE spells from regening mana, something I absolutely LOVED on Hyjal trash pulls. I could basically AoE forever without going OOM, because I was regenning more mana on every Hurricane I cast than the mana cost of the spell. Total nerf, but it makes sense, so I’m not really complaining.

They also buffed Eclipse, but since that’s a talent that I’ve never been fond of, it doesn’t affect me.

My New Raiding Moonkin Spec is 48/0/13

Seems like a pretty weird spec, right? Most raiding moonkins are going full balance, 61/0/0, and a few others (and my old spec), are using 56/0/5, picking up Furor for an extra 10% intellect in Moonkin form.

I decided on my new spec because I had to compensate for the fact that my DPS had essentially been nerfed by 2%. 2% may not sound like much, but, it is. The patch essentially gave me back 4 talent points that I didn’t know where to put. I pulled talent points out of other balance talents I didn’t need, and went deeper into the resto tree that I usually wouldn’t have done.

I dropped Dreamstate, and picked up Intensity

I never really did much research on Dreamstate vs. Intensity before. When I used to spec balance pre-patch, I used to pick up BOTH Dreamstate AND Intensity, and I never really noticed if they helped me out too much.

So, on my new talent build, I put a whopping 1 point into the Intensity talent, and completely dropped Dreamstate. I ran a little Sunwell Plateau last night, and had no mana problems what so ever. When you have a raid with a Shadow Priest and Ret Pally, you can be sure to hardly ever go OOM. When I start leveling after WoTLK, I’ll throw 2 more points in Intensity, and 1 point in Omen of Clarity. That’s all I’ve planned out so far

I also picked up Master Shapeshifter

Sure, I did waste 3 points in my talent build picking up Natural Shapeshifter, for the AWESOME (sarcasm) benefit of reducing the mana cost of shapeshifting by 30%, but I did it so that I could use 2 other points and pick up an extra 4% spell power in Moonkin form. Plus the buff looks pretty cool when I’m in moonkin form

Conclusion

I really like my spec, and I’m putting out awesome DPS. I don’t think we got nerfed, and if we did, it was barely noticeable. Take advantage of the free respec, and build carefully rebuild your talents.

On a side note, I’ve been looking at the traffic stats for my blog, and its basically increasing daily, so I know there’s people visiting this. You guys should drop me a comment or check out my forums, I feel like I’m talking to myself sometimes until I see the visitor stats

Macbook

P.S. – I somehow almost forgot to mention this. They nerfed my favorite Glyph ever — Glyph of Starfire, which increased the DoT of Moonfire by 3 seconds everytime. It used to stack unlimited, but now they nerfed it up to 9 seconds. Big nerf there, that tick used to count for 13% of my boss DPS even while only having to cast it once, at the beginning of the encounter. Oh well