Moonkin item selection 9 comments

Gear selection crosses every players mind in one form or another as soon as their first mob drops a new piece of armour. As you level the decisions are usually pretty simple, however when you get to an endgame situation deciding what gear to use can often be tricky.

I have put together the chart below that illustrates the basic process I go through when evaluating whether a new item is an upgrade or not for me. There are subtleties to this, and I will go through how I actually decide on a gear set as a whole another time. This is meant to indicate whether you should use that lovely set of legs that dropped, for example.

This chart is not meant to be extensive, it should be used as a guide. In most cases it should help you to improve your balance druid, just be careful as some items are clear upgrades even when not indicated so on according to this graph. Trinkets are a great example of where it gets hard to decide whether or not to take an item. Set bonuses are another one, in general a higher tier is better. The itemlevel part should account for that though, in addition to not breaking having 2 2-piece sets or 1 4-piece set.

Finally, I am aware that 30% unbuffed in Moonkin form is not the soft cap for crit, however it is a good baseline amount beyond which aiming at haste and crit equally appears to be somewhat beneficial. It is also a nice round number. More information on critcal strikes can be found in my earlier post, Moonkin critical strike rating

Comments

Bahamutth 2:29PM on the 12th of Feb 2010

how about intellect * 1.2 = spellpower aswell

Aeiedil 6:29PM on the 14th of Feb 2010

It's all well and good looking at Int but honestly in WotLK levels of Int (and Stamina too) are practically the same from item to item. If you wanted to find a precise figure for the DPS increase conferred from a specific item then yes looking at Int would be useful. In general though it's not too neccesary with the current itemisation.

Rohas 2:54AM on the 28th of Jun 2010

I want to thankyou for you excellent site. Your insightful knowledge has helped me go from bad gear selections and 2.5k dps , to better educated gear choices, enchants and rotation plus 3.9 - 4.1k dps.

Keep up the good work,

Rohas (Dath Remar)

Rohas 2:54AM on the 28th of Jun 2010

I want to thankyou for you excellent site. Your insightful knowledge has helped me go from bad gear selections and 2.5k dps , to better educated gear choices, enchants and rotation plus 3.9 - 4.1k dps.

Keep up the good work,

Rohas (Dath Remar)

Aeiedil 11:33AM on the 28th of Jun 2010

Always nice to hear from players the site has helped :) :)

speedemon 1:53PM on the 9th of Jul 2010

is the 10% hit before or after talents?

Thanks

Aeiedil 4:42PM on the 9th of Jul 2010

After talents

haleighrulz 7:34AM on the 21st of Jul 2010

What is the number of hit that we should ideally have?

Aeiedil 9:53AM on the 26th of Jul 2010

10%, or if you have access to a Draenei and can rely on them to not die/be out of range etc. then 9%. Personally I aim at 10% always.