Patch 3.3 Moonkin Notes, T10 Set Bonuses & T10 Balance Relic
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
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!10 Comments
Loading ...
I'm gonna try to be brief:
Changes to Rebirth: mixed feelings. Yeah, I agree that all cooldowns should be up every run, but having so many second chances really only makes an easy game even easier. When we (as a raid) use 5 Rebirths in one fight, it irritates me to no end.
2T10 — mediocre and based on RNG. At least we don't have to change our rotation to take advantage of it…
4T10 — we'll have to see what the ICC fights are gonna be like. If there's a lot of movement or situations where we're not casting, this bonus is going to be extremely weak. If we're constantly casting with a high crit rate, this could be very powerful. The key is, we need to build up the debuff as high as possible like a mage does with Ignite. That's hard to do when moving.
T10 idol — slight upgrade, as mentioned. The bonus here is that it should be easier to keep up in movement fights. Moonfire requires you to be facing the target, while Insect Swarm can be cast while facing away. There's no excuse for this ever dropping off. For some of us, it's also going to change the start of our rotations — it will *definitely* be better to cast IS as soon as possible to get the buff rolling.
If you've cleared all existing content, then gearing up is really the only reason left to raid. I could see that getting pretty boring. I'm still at the point where we haven't killed Yogg, let alone HMs in ToC or Uld, so there's still plenty more for me. Even with that, though, I only sign on Xiera for raids; I haven't been playing much lately, but I spend more time on my alts than on Xiera.
^ Failed at being brief, lawl.
LOL! Yeah, but I just read it all
. I see why you have mixed feelings on the rebirth shortened CD — when I led iRaid I had tons of druids (like 3 druid healers, 2 boomkins, 2 ferals), so short CDs on Brez'es would have been a little excessive on the brezes.
My new guild, however, only has about 4 guilds total in the guild, and usually only 2 are in a raid at a given time, so I assume that the change is a welcome one. When we were working on Heroic Anub 25, we only had our rezzes up every 3rd attempt — which isn't that fun.
Agreed on all your other points, although, even in movement-heavy fights, have you really had a problem keeping up MF, and therefore the idol proc? I haven't, and even if there is a lot of movement and the new idol lets you keep a higher buff uptime, will you even be able to take advantage of the extra crit while you are moving around so much?
I wish they were more creative with the idol, the set bonuses, I can live with, for the time being.
And yes, you're right about raiding. I, too, only log on to raid at the moment, partially due to time constraints but also due to the fact that I don't feel like running ToC like 4 times each week. I can't recall when was the last time I did ToC10 or ToGC10. I don't even think I have the ToGC10 achievement, even though my guild has done all the ToGC10 achievements, even Dedicated Insantiy.
Recently a friend of mine xferred to Illidan with me so I may be running old stuff to help him gear out, but I really need ICC to come out soon and hopefully it doesnt suck.
I third the sentiment about raiding. I'm currently farming toc normal with the guild, and working on h-toc, and I'm having more fun going back and doing ulduar hardmode achievments because they require more skill than the rest of the content in Northrend. Got the General hard mode done last night in 10 man, it's fun to have a fight where you have to budget your mana and burst it later while dodging incoming crystals, life leech, etc. I'm really missing that in ToC, but I suspect when we get to faction champs on heroic it'll be fun again.
I sort of wish my guild would go back into Ulduar. When I joined they already had all of the hardmodes & Algalon on farm, and although I did get all the meta achievements (well, except for the easy ones like Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare and Crazy Cat Lady), those fights were definitely more fun than the ToC ones.
Still, I think WoTLK raids have been missing certain aspects that I felt when raiding BT/SWP, although I can't put my finger on it, I just feel that T6 content was so much more fun.
I think this could be because I was more of a novice at raiding during the TBC days, but all the t5+ dungeons had a really "perilous" feel to them. I found that because of the harder difficulty, I had a real respect for TK, SSC, and even KZ before it got nerfed to death and everyone had badge gear that made it a joke. Now, it's hard to respect the new content when all you do is watch a tankspot video someone took from the PTR and reduce every fight to the two or three things you've seen already in other fights that were rehashed for each encounter.
I have a hard time finding people that actually *like* raids to be challenging. Especially without joining a 3+ raid nights per week mandatory guild.
Ok. Let's begin. Rebirth- I love the cooldown reduction seeing as how I am a druid, but all in all I am beggining to think that Blizzard is making WoW easier and easier. In the past year they have drastically reduced the amount of experiance to level, made getting experiance easier, made classes much more powerful than originally. I'm not saying that I don't like it, it makes things easier. I do however think that they should be edging back to the good old days when everything was something you had to work for. As of right now the game for me is a bit of a lull except for good old PvP. All in all, Blizzard is nmaking the game easier than it should be, but I am not complaining on the Rebirth CD, though you should not be in a situation where you need to use it more than every 20 minuites, obviously something is wrong with the raid on that one bud, not the CD. I would love for them to somehow impliment MF Crit from now on somewhere in the game.
4PC Set bonus… Good? I do not see that it has any kind of Cooldown, does this mean that it will proc every time you crit? In that case you can take your crit chance that 5% bonus and see exactly how much your damage will increase from it. Idol- Nothing special here Blizzard, way to go out and suprise us. Why not do something that would be a bit more exciting than 20 Critical strike rating, I think that MF DoT Critting would be a nice thing to use here, but I understand how they wanted to use a bit more crit as a way to help the 4PC Set bonus. Which if it procs every time you crit regardless, I think you will see alot more Crit stacking gems on druids with it.
until the 7% languish bonus from 4t10 is made to stack instead of replacing current Languish DoT with newest Languish DoT, I wouldn't rush after it. Although every 2 seconds I am dealing an extra 1k damage approximately, provided I don't crit over the Languish and restart the timer. In short, avoid haste as much as possible if you can when getting 4t10. Keep SFire cast time above 2secs with NG, or you'll be spamming thru eclipse and not ticking Languish