Moonkin T9 4PC Bonus Re-re-reupdated
I know one of the do’s and don’ts of blogging is to never apologize to your readers about not blogging enough, but I do it anyways. I have been busier than ever (primarily at work), and I’m even having a hard time making it to my own raids on time. Still, my guild is hanging in there, we crushed our raid last night (cleared up to Vezax in 4 hours of raid time), and I’ve successfully managed to bring the Guild bank to over 30,000 gold, when it was at 1,000g just 3 weeks ago.
At any rate, back on topic, you guys have probably seen Blizzard continually messing with the T9 4pc bonus. The first two times they released it it was simply added crit, and they’ve finally made it interesting enough for me to consider it. Here’s the new bonus from MMO Champion:
Druid T9 4P Bonus – Increases the damage done by your Starfire and Wrath spells by 4%.
As most of you know, this sounds pretty damned good, but the question really is:
Does the updated 4pc T9 set bonus as well as the upgrade in stats from T9 outweigh the benefit of 2pc T8?
I think the answer is relatively tough to quantify, as the T8 2pc bonus was incredibly strong, especially with the Eclipse changes that patch 3.2 is bringing. Eclipse uptime in 3.2 is essentially being doubled, and while we won’t have 100% Eclipse uptime, it will be pretty damned close. So, would we rather have 15% crit 50% of the time and 15% damage 50% of the time or 4% damage increase 100% of the time? This all depends heavily on the actual Eclipse uptime we will be getting in 3.2, but unless the stats on T9 heavily outweigh T8 (which it looks like the super heroic mode gear will), than I am still inclined to 2pc T8, 2pc T9.
What do you guys think? As I’ve mentioned before, I am not opposed to 2pc T8, 2pc T9 being our BIS — I think it spices things up. I’m sure our fellow moonkin mathematicians will look into this as there isn’t really much else to blog about for the time being about moonkins 
Macbook
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I think we're going to see a few things come into play here. First and foremost, since we are using both Eclipses, 2T8 will lose value as our crit rate rises. I recall someone showing that we start getting less bang for our buck at 90% crit during a Lunar Eclipse and with a new (and significantly higher ilevel) gear set I can't help but wonder if we will begin to reach higher crit levels. Since 15% more damage on a Solar Eclipse will always be 15% more damage, that portion of 2T8 scales very well.
Given that half of 2T8 will become less beneficial as crit percentages rise and that we have a soft cap of 400 haste (meaning we will be looking to add more crit) I think it's safe to say that at some level of gearing, 2T8 will be diminished enough to be replaced by 4T9. In fact, I think that will happen rather quickly. That's just my two copper.
After doing some quick and sloppy math, it appears that 2T8 is still the way to go. I had it at about a 7.5% damage increase, versus the 4% damage increase of 4T9. In my math, I assumed a pre-Eclipse crit chance of about 40%. With 4% from Nature's Majesty, 3% from IFF, 5% from mage/lock debuff, 3% from Totem of Wrath, and 4% from Moonfire via the idol, that would leave a base crit chance of 21% in Moonkin Form, which is about 5% too low. After running the numbers again with 5% more crit, the results remained about the same (roughly .1% difference). I assumed an Eclipse uptime of 37.5% for each Eclipse, 12.5% spent trying to proc Eclipse (using Wrath), and 12.5% refreshing DoTs (read: Moonfire), using trees, Starfall, etc.
As Rel mentioned here and others have mentioned elsewhere, after the 21% human-form crit, the 2T8 bonus will start to decrease in value. That said, I have 2T8 giving Wrath a bonus of 8.6% for an overall bonus of roughly 4.3%, clearly already over the 4% bonus from 4T9. At 21% human-form crit, I have 2T8 giving Starfire a bonus of 8.6% for an overall bonus of roughly 3.2%.
Let's give 25% more crit to human form so 2T8 has absolutely no impact on Starfire. Because of the bonus to Wrath, 2T8 still gives about 4.3% bonus damage.
Again, this is just quick and sloppy math. We would need better numbers for Eclipse uptime in 3.2 to get a more accurate assessment. Until then, sloppy is the best I can do.
The math assumes a 40 second rotation, 15 seconds spent casting Starfire (all during Eclipse), 20 seconds spent casting Wrath (15 of which during Eclipse), and 5 seconds spent refreshing DoTs, using trees, Starfall, etc.
So, yeah, I'm still looking at 2T8+2T9, but 4T9 is *definitely* better now than it was.
I want the 4 piece bonus to be…..the two piece t9 bonus procs NG, and stacks with improved moonfire….then we are talking ubber