One Druid, Many Worlds

Target Stats for Raiding Druids

Raine of Orbital Bombardment warns against running into Naxx the day you ding 80. But when are you ready to dip your toe into Wrath raiding? Raine provides target stats for all druid specs: Restoration, Feral Cat, Bear Tank and Balance/Moonkin.

More Pawn Love

Dave and Passport to Shandris provides tools to evaluate gear for Restoration and Moonkin Druids. He mentions WoWHead, spreadsheets and, my personal favorite, scales to use for the Pawn AddOn that allows for comparing gear while in-game.

Moonkin Resource site

News is lacking today, so I’m going to highlight the excellent Moonkin Repository forums. Not only is it a great place to ask Balance questions, but you post your Armory profile to get advice on improving your DPS. Plus, of course, guides:

• Moonkin FAQ – with recommended specs, spell rotations, addons, etc.
• What every new Raiding Moonkin needs to know
• Top 5 Best in Slot Moonkin Gear Guide
• Moonkin pre-Raid Wrath Gear Guide
• The Moonkin Repository Link List

  Read the rest of this entry »

Moonkin PvP advice

Macbook at Moonkin.info has some tips for Moonkin starting PvP (3v3 Arena to be precise.) He admits to be no expert, but his beginner tips are sound.

Moonkin Head meta-gemming debate

Graylo at Gray Matter takes slight umbrage with Allison Robert’s pre-Naxx Moonkin Gear Guide. Specifically with her head slot gem choices. He goes into detail why including lots of math and, fortunately, a TLDR version of his argument at the end of his entry as well.

Dreamstate Resto spec viability

Althura of OneHotNelf is trying the 28/0/43 Dreamstate Resto build. Is the loss of key healing talents (including Wild Growth) worth the extra 100mp5? She debates the tradeoff.

Cat/Bear Raiding viability

Kalon at ThinkTank theorized the cat/bear hybrid spec and its viability in raid scenarios for the Druid to be an effective offtank *and* a face-ripping dpser. Today he put it to the test and ran Naxx-25 with it. Check out his blog for the eye-popping results.

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I’ve mentioned the excellent item comparison AddOn Pawn last week. Today I found a tutorial on how to set Pawn up on the Druid blog, Matter Hair and Sharpened Claws. If you know of any good scales (especially for Moonkin), post them here.

Feral Bear Tank News

Feral Bonus Armor explained

Big Bear Butt Blogger explains what Bonus Armor is and how it is calculated. This helps immensely with understading the 3.0.8 that doesn’t allow Bonus Armor to be multiplied by Bear form. Flyv on his blog also notes that his Bear armor change since the patch is negligible, but his armor in Bear form while wearing his cat gear (for those emergency off-tank situations) went up over 60%.

Feral Cat DPS News

Cat to do list

Flyv also lists the top 6 activities Feral Cat Druids should do upon logging in after patching 3.0.8. (Hint: you have to train cat Swipe.)

Moonkin Balance News

Moonkin for dummies

Today I’ve also discovered the Elitist Jerk guide to Moonkin stats, spell rotation, enchants, consumables, talents, mods and professions. And not an algebraic formula to be seen!

Wrath Raiding Gear Guide for Level 80 Balance Druids

Allison Robert, the weekly Druid writer at WoW Insider, has another Shifting Perspectives column up. This guide covers gearing your Moonkin for Wrath Raiding. It’s in-depth and well done. (Disclaimer: I run the site.)

  Read the rest of this entry »

More Druid Patch Notes

Patch 3.0.8 has been updated on the Public Test Realm with Build 9464 which has a small change for Balance Druids:

Celestial Focus doesn’t affect Starfall anymore.

Sigh, no more mass stunning haste stacking.

Clarification on Improved Faerie Fire effects

Ghostcrawler confirmed that the Balance Druid’s Improved Faerie Fire talent will add its 3% crit increase to your spells on a target with Faerie Fire (normal or Feral FF) regardless of who cast FF. In other words, you don’t have to be the one to cast the FF on the target for your ImpFF to give you the crit bonus. He states the tooltip for ImpFF should soon read:

Your Faerie Fire and Feral Faerie Fire spells also increase the chance the target will be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increase the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by [anyone's] Faerie Fire or Feral Faerie Fire.

Guide to +hit off-hand items for Balance Moonkin Druids raiding in Wrath

The FlashofMoonfire blog took a look at off-hand Moonkin Balance items with +hit the other week after scoring the Surplus Limb in Naxx-10. It’s comparable to the Ward of the Viloet Citadel, which can be had for a mere 25 Emblems of Heroism, but FoM makes an interesting case for the superior haste value of the Limb over the superior crit value of the Ward. Check out the post to see if you agree.

New guide to playing Restoration Tree Druids

WoW-Pro.com, home to the beloved Jame’s free leveling guides, have posted a very extensive guide to understanding the Druid Tree role. Highlights include explanations of spells, talents, glyphs, builds, gear, consumables, gems, enchants, macros, addons, leveling and more.

Is Improved Mangle worth the talent points?

Kalon at WoWThinkTank makes a case against Improved Mangle for both bears (in the article) and cats (in the comments). There’s a lot of math involved, but the bottom line is the recent improvements to Swipe‘s threat generation make the points invested into iMangle less important.

Naxx-10 Tanking guides & DPS Cooking food

Bloodarrow, a Belf Hunter, compiled two interesting posts:

• A list of links to all of TankSpot‘s Naxx-10 raid boss tanking instructional videos
• A guide to Cooking recipes for L80 Hunters that will be of interest to feral druids as well since it covers food with high attack power/agility/strength/haste/crit stats.

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Last week I covered chest pieces for L70 Moonkin entering Northrend. Now, on to leg pieces.

Much like the chest pieces, you have a few quest choices and quite a few green drops with random enchantments you can find on the AH shortly after launch. You also have a leather crafted item you should consider.

Quest Leather Leg Items

The Denwatcher’s Leggings are available to both Factions through a quest line in Borean Tundra that involves making up for all those Nesingwary quests you’ve done. This is the fastest way to pick up a quick upgrade if you don’t have access to the crafted legs or can’t find the green drops on the AH.

If you are Horde and out the Howling Fjord way, there is one other option: Grounded Pants. It is one of the rewards at the end of the Lesson of Fear questline, but you then pass up on picking up the alt reward Nimblefinger Band.

Crafted Leather Leg Items

By far, the best piece to get out of the gate is the leather crafted Iceborne Leggings. The stats are excellent (equivalent to T4) and the materials are not difficult to find. Plus, the later pieces are impressive as well and it only takes 3 of them to get the set bonus of +26 Spell Power.

Next: Staves!

Wrath of the Lich King goes live in two weeks. The game has already changed with 3.0.2 introducing the massive talent and ability changes. Moonkin aka Balance Druids got enhanced DPS as well as more AE abilities, not to mention being able to use consumables while in owlbear form.

The game changes again when Northrend becomes available in the form of gear. Lots of shiny, shiny gear. The first thing you need to know before you dive in is what stats you are looking for. There is no more +spelldamage gear. It’s all +spellpower now and doubles as your healing gear. That, plus INT, mp5 and some SPI you’ll be topping the DPS charts in no time.

Let’s take a look at the chest pieces available to you in Northrend in the first few days.

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NOTE: I’ve started an updated Moonkin Gear guide for Wrath.

One of the reasons I love my World of Warcraft druid is the versatility of the class. WoW druids can customize their abilites many different ways: healing centric, melee dps/tank centric and spell damage centric. For awhile, I was spell damage centric aka Moonkin aka Balance specced. I started looking for gear to enhance my spell damage and found it hard to come by for my class.

At the same time, David Bowers, my fellow Shifting Perspectives druid class columnist at WoW Insider posted a feature highlighting gear available to non-raiding tank specced druids. Brilliant! I decided to focus my next feature on my current problem of gearing a non-raiding Balance specced druid. What I didn’t count on was my compulsion to be thorough.

Three feature length articles, five weeks and one sore pair of hands later, I completed my survey of gear for Moonkin druids leveling from 60 to 70 through The Burning Crusade expansion. You can check it out here:

• Part I – Chest, legs, head, shoulders, wrist and hand slots.
• Part II – Waist, feet and back slots.
• Part III – Neck, fingers, trinkets, two-handed weapons, one-handed weapons, off-hand and relics.

I couldn’t get to gems and enchants, so I linked the excellent coverage written on those two subjects by Fiordhraoi on his Balance of Power blog.

If you play a Shadow Priest, Warlock or Mage, you may also be interested in this third piece as many items are perfect for your damage specs as well.

Due to popular demand, I will continue the series, this time covering Restoration (healing) specced druids. I’ll link those up when they are done, probably some time in November.