Is it just me, or is everyone else beginning to dislike hit as much as I do?  I obviously understand its without a question important to be at cap, and while I know this has been an ongoing problem, the sheer amount of +hit on every piece I find is annoying.  At this point in time, I think you can pretty much find +hit on any item slot available; I’m suprised the T10 balance idol isn’t something along the lines of: “Chance to increase hit rating by 200 on Starfire critical strike” or something.

So, since T7, I’ve been dealing with hit, and at some point I liked it because it helped me make gearing decisions easier sometimes; I should wear pieces that kept me around the hit cap.  If certain upgrades made me go significantly above the hit cap, then I was wasting the extra hit and could probably use another piece better itemized for me.  In ToC, it has been a pain.  I’ve been passing on upgrades simply because it would place me significantly over cap (plus I am trying to catch up on DKP), and trying to balance one’s hit cap with new upgrades is often difficult.  Although I am an enchanter and love DE’ing things, I haven’t de’ed any gear that I’ve worn since T7.  You never know what a future drop may hand you in terms of +hit.

Three of our set pieces alone (I believe: Helm, Chest, Legs), if you have the i258 version, will give you 282 hit rating alone, which is already more than you need.  That means that for every other item slot, you need to find drops that don’t have hit, meaning you are also competing with healers for most of the drops you need.  As a relatively new member to my guild, the only drops I seem to have access to are ones with +hit.  So, for example, this week, I swapped out my Pennant Cloak for the Cloak of Displacement, and had to swap out my neck (Wyrmrest Necklace of Power) with the Wail of the Valk’yr, to balance my hit rating.

In all honesty, the upgrades I made this week were not that large of upgrades, even though I switched out two i226 items for a i245 and i258.  What I really need is a new weapon and two trinkets (I need to start doing Vezax HM again…), but that’s besides the point.

Are any of you guys having trouble keeping your hit rating low?  While I understand that some gear may still be an upgrade even if you can’t use any of the +hit on it, there is some part of me that doesn’t allow me to go absurdly above the hit cap.  I am also not one to remove 1 point from Balance of Power so that I can use 2% more hit from gear.

Anyways, I hate to post sounding like I’m ranting — I really am not, and I really wanted to post to show you guys I’m still alive , I just haven’t been able to think of much to blog about x.x

Adios,

Macbook/Ballerkin

While it seems that most other bloggers have already covered this, I don’t this this blog would be complete without me providing my own 2 copper, regardless of the fact that this is a little behind the times.  My patch note posts always seem to get read the most times, so don’t disappoint me this time

Patch 3.3 Moonkin Notes

Patch 3.3 really doesn’t change much for us — and the only thing I want to cover from 3.3 is this:

Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Ummm – SWEET! I always found it a little ridiculous that combat rezzes were only up for every 2-3 attempts.  Why should some attempts not be able to take advantage of battle rezzes, and other attempts might have 5 rezzes up?  Didn’t make sense.  I am a firm believer that all cooldowns should be up every attempt — otherwise you are bound to have crappy attempts in between good attempts.  What’s the point?

It looks like Blizzard finally agrees, and they halved the cooldown on Rebirth, halved the cooldown on Soul stone’s, and halved the cooldown on Reincarnation (if specced properly).  Pretty significant changes as we prepare to step into Icecrown Citadel soon.

Sure, battle rezzing and the movement involved is a DPS killer for us as well as a mana burn, but its needed to salvage attempts when important players die.  It’s nice to have Rebirth up twice as often as it used to be, allowing us to use it more liberally without worrying if we will have it for the next boss/attempt.

Moonkin T10 Set Bonuses

Looks like they have been updated yet again (no surprise there):

2 Pieces (Balance): (Updated) When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 15% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 seconds.

4 Pieces (Balance): (Updated) Your critical strikes from Starfire and Wrath cause the target languish for an additional 5% of your spell’s damage over 4 seconds.

Not surprised that they buffed the set bonuses, and I did cover the old set bonuses in my previous blog post about the T10 moonkin set bonuses.  Without doing any math, I can predict that it will be safe to upgrade your current gear to 4pc T10, especially if you are using 2pc T8, 2pc T9.  I will say that if I do eventually make the change, I will REALLY miss the critting MF DoTs, and I really wish they made that a talent, or even a part of Improved Moonfire (OMG actually that would be an incredible fix to that talent!).

The 4pc is a little intriguing, and at the very least it will scale with our gear better than some of our other set bonuses.  I am also a fan of damage in the source of other spells/abilities (I used to love the trinket from H MgT that dealt damage when your DoTs ticked).  It just spices things up a bit, from our otherwise boring rotation.  Time will tell how good the set bonuses are, but since 4pc T9 wasn’t the strongest set bonus, I am sure that the great stat bonus by switching to T10 will merit the switch.

T10 Moonkin Relic

T10 Balance Druid Relic – The periodic damage from your Insect Swarm and Moonfire spells grants 44 critical strike rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

/YAWN.  Am I the only one that thinks this is pretty lame?  Sure — this idol will have a slightly higher uptime than our current i245 idol as well as 20 more crit, but man, that is LAME.  Actually, after checking my parses for a couple of kills, my uptime for the +200 crit buff on the idol is around 90%+!  This idol is kind of weak for a full tier upgrade.  We gain 20 more crit and a tad more uptime.  The only real reason I can see myself taking this is to help increase my gear score…

Now that I am sort of on topic, is anyone else kind of bored with stats these days?  I remember awhile ago reading on Randomsmo’s blog about how switching from T8 to T9 helps pull us away from the soft crit cap. I currently have around 3k spell power when my trinkets are up, 840 crit rating (32% in form, 35% when idol is proc’ed), 400 haste, 236 hit (9%).  I guess I could use more haste even though I’ve already reached the soft cap, but I can’t lie — gearing is rather boring these days.  Just thought I’d throw that out there and see if anyone else feels the same way.

Let me know,

Ballerkin

Happened a couple of weeks ago, but I grouped with a decently geared healer for something and trusted him enough to loan him 10k gold.  Dumb decision, maybe, but I’ve often gone out on limbs for people and its turned out just fine, so I gave the guy a chance.  I think, a lot of people tend to trust people that are more geared.  He was about full T9 — am I the only one that is more likely to loan gold to a geared player than a character in blues?

At any rate, looks like her server transferred or name changed or something.  Funny thing is, I have his cell phone number.  He sounds like he’s 12 years old so I feel kind of bad.  I ticketed it — so wish me luck!  If ticketing doesn’t work, I would LOVE to call his mom and handle it that way (LOL), so if anyone knows how to trace a location from a cell phone please do let me know.

Real post will happen shortly — I just had a midterm a couple of hours ago and it was not fun AT ALL .

Screenshot below (of the trade, not my midterm, lol):

Ballerkin

Last night on one of the first couple attempts of the night, we downed Heroic Anub 25.  I had almost forgotten the feeling of working on something for so long and then downing it.  Good stuff.

Video is on YouTube, props to Avelie for another well-put together video.

Warpath vs. Heroic Anub 25 Video

On a separate note, my designer has made a few changes to the website, let me know what you guys think of them.  Things like a nav bar have been created, and certain things on the sidebar tweaked.  Any feedbac will be appreciated — I’ve been a bit busy lately and haven’t gotten back to him with my revisions so I want to just be able to send him to this post!

Anyways, I have my first midterm of like 2 years tomorrow so I took the day off to study!

Adios

Ballerkin

The new T10 set bonuses for all classes have data mined and made available via MMO-Champion.  Hate to say it, but at first impression, I am a little underwhelmed.  I used to love seeing 4pc bonuses that I really wanted to get, but lately it seems that the 4pc bonuses they are coming up with have not been so useful.

Moonkin T10 Set Bonuses:

• Druid T10 Balance 2P Bonus – When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 10% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 sec.
• Druid T10 Balance 4P Bonus – Reduces the cooldown on your Eclipse talent by 6000.

The 2pc is interesting — it seems similar to 2pc T8, except will cover ALL of our spells, and I prefer 10% damage than 15% crit to my Starfires.  The 4pc, on the other hand (I understand the ‘6000′ is simply filler), isn’t attractive at all.  Sure, I know that eventually they will ‘fix’ Eclipse so that WiseEclipse does not work anymore and that will lower our Eclipse uptime, but that said, I still don’t think that lowering our Eclipse CD is that attractive.  Even if it does prove to be DPS increasing somehow, its still, well, boring.  Honestly, at certain levels of crit, and even without WiseEclipse, I usually am chaining (or near chaining) Eclipses on tank/spank fights.  I mean, really, are any of you guys consistently taking 10+ seconds to proc the other Eclipse than the one you just had up?

Moonkin 2pc T10 Analysis

OMG BALLERKIN/MACBOOK IS DOING MATH!?!?!  Nope, but I can definitely go through some of my logs

I’m interested in seeing approximately how long we can expect to have the buff from 2pc T10 up, since it procs of OoC and lasts 6 seconds.  Easy enough — I’m going to use my logs from our Heroic Lord Jaraxxus kill (no, I will not provide the link).  Lord Jaraxxus is probably the closest to a tank & spank fight in ToC, since you only have to move for Legion Flame, and the amount of adds isn’t *that* crazy.

Based on the above buffs breakdown, some key things I’d like to mention:

• Combined Eclipse up-time for either Solar/Lunar = 76.5%
• Blessing of the Moongoddess (the MF Idol) had great up-time = 93.5%
• Nature’s Grace uptime = 73.2%
• Clearcasting/OoC proc’ed a total of 10 times.
• Total Fight Duration: 4 minutes, 59 seconds

So, if we have 2pc T10, the 10 Clearcasting procs would give us a total of 60 seconds of the 10% increased damage buff, or ~20% uptime.  Starfire and Wrath, on average, still make up around 80% of our damage most of the time, so even though 2pc T10 affects all our spells, I think it is safe to say that if we compare 2pc T10 to 2pc T8, then 2pc T8 should win.  However, I am 100% positive that the additional stats from T10 will be huge, especially if they continue on this path of 3x different iLevels for the same tier sets.

I really hope they increase the OoC proc rate, and fix T10 4pc.  Does anyone know if they already released info on a new boomkin idol (i258)?  I really hope there is going to be one that rocks.

Adios,

Baller