I often get questions regarding which glyphs to pick for your all-round moonkin spec, and while some of them are pretty obvious, there are a few that always cause much debate.
So lets take a look at the current moonkin glyphs, and talk about which benefit us the most, and when to pick one over the other. This is, ofcourse, purely from a PvE perspective. Things are a whole lot different when it comes to battlegrounds or arena, and I will not cover them from fear of giving out some seriously bad advice.
There are 11 glyphs that we could possibly ever consider to use. These are Glyph of Barkskin, Entangling Roots, Focus, Hurricane, Innervate, Insect Swarm, Monsoon, Moonfire, Starfall, Starfire and Wrath. The list is actually quite long, but most of them have no real place in a PvE setting.
Lets look at them in order of usefulness.
Glyph of Moonfire
Since most of us will be in tier 9, or will be soon now that we are swimming in triumph badges, I would venture that Glyph of Moonfire is one of our strongest glyphs – heck, it even is without the 2pt9 bonus. Couped with talents such as Nature’s Splendor, we benefit greatly from the dot from moonfire, and this should be in every single moonkin spec.
Glyph of Starfire
Alongside with Glyph of Moonfire, this is a very nice addition. Up to 9 more seconds on a very powerful dot is just too much to pass up on, and this will ensure a good, long life on your moonfire. Not only that, the glyph also allows you to cast starfire even if moonfire is just about to run out, and as long as you get it in a second before moonfire runs out, you will keep the dot ticking for another 9 seconds, increasing your critical strike chance on starfire. This is a must have.
Glyph of Insect Swarm
Much focus has been on IS vs Starfall, so I recently set out to find out which one would actually give the biggest benefit. I did some quick calculations on MMO-Champion and found that a glyphed, raidbuffed, target debuffed insect swarm with 3400 spell power does about 9203,285 damage. Thats a lot for a 1 GCD spell. This is more powerful than an eclipsed starfire, which crits for 15.000+, but takes two GCD’s to cast. It does fall short of an eclipsed wrath that doesn’t crit, but it’s safe to say that if you have your insect swarm glyphed, its worth putting it up whenever it falls off.
Glyph of Starfall
Insect Swarms big contender. While starfall does more damage than insect swarm per second spent casting (both 1 second), with starfall doing over 20.000 damage on a single target and more if it can splash on to others, it’s breaking point is the long cooldown. In the time you can cast one glyphed starfall, you will have cast four insect swarms, but you will also have been through about two solar eclipses, given a great 3% buff to your wraths. Thats not to say that you shouldn’t take the ability for starfall, because it is still a great way to spend a global cooldown – in fact, its only beat by Force of Nature, which does anywhere from 30-40.000 damage on a single global cooldown, but I don’t think its worth glyphing for unless you are going into a AOE specific fight. Even then, you have to consider how often you can benefit from the glyph, and Anub’Arak heroic is a prime example of that. Some guilds AOE down the adds whenever they come, and this means that even with a 1 minute cooldown, starfall probably wont be up for the second group. My guild, however, hold the second pack of adds until Anub has burrowed, and this allows me to use starfall on every add pack up until phase 3. For this fight, I benefit from it, but I only include this in my AOE spec.
Glyph of Innervate
If you are just starting out, Glyph of Innervate can be a good help. It can give you a boost if you use Innervate on other classes, and an even bigger boost if you use your innervate on yourself. But as your gear progresses, you will drop more and more mana talents, and even innervate will be sitting untouched on your action bars on most fights. With no mana talents other than a single point in Moonglow, and the pitiful mana regeneration I get from my two filler points in Owlkin Frenzy, I hardly ever drop below 80% mana in a raid, so suffice to say, Glyph of Innervate would be a wasted slot for me.
Glyph of Focus
It might seem like a nice boost to get 20% more damage on starfall, but this loses its edge as starfall will still be on a 1,5 minute cooldown. It adds up to about 4000 more damage on a single target fight, but it only adds about 40 more DPS over the 90 seconds you wait until you cast the next. I’m not even sure I would take this if I had a fourth slot for my major glyphs, and I don’t think you should either. Another hinge for Glyph of Focus, is that you generally don’t want to be so close to a boss. 15 yards is just too close for comfort.
Glyph of Hurricane
This is beneficial on very few fights. Heck, the only time I have ever used this is on the new Saurfang encounter in Icecrown, where we we’re low on hunters and thus needed a way to slow the adds. As long as you have hunters or shamans to slow the blood beasts, you wouldn’t want to use hurricane, because while it does slow them down, they take very little damage from AOE. Your DPS will take a hit, and even though you are helping your raid get through the fight, it would be much more beneficial to slow them some other way if it allows you to single target them down.
Glyph of Barkskin, Entangling Roots, Monsoon and Wrath
No.
Tags: barkskin, damage, entangling roots, hurricane, innervate, insect swarm, Monsoon, moonfire, skills, starfall, starfire, wrath
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The Frozen Throne (10 player)
Fall of the Lich King (10 player)
5 Coins of Ancestry
Is there really any option on glyphs? I thought it was rather cut and dry. And.. why would you use Glyph of Hurricane over an unglyphed Typhoon to knock the adds back?
I leave the sheeps to the mages. I’d like to think that if people have any doubts, i offer them the tools needed to make an educated decision, and since the question of glyphs still arise from time to time, its not really bad to cover.
Glyph of Hurricane can still be an option if, as in my example above, you need the slow because your raid is lacking hunters or shamans. To not glyph typhoon is to just not use a minor glyph. Glyph of Starfall is still beneficial on some fights, but it depends on how you handle those fights.
What do people learn from “Just do this!”? Nothing.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he’ll stop bothering you altogether!
Yeah, the only question in my mind is Starfall versus Insect Swarm. With WiseEclipse, I was about ready to drop the Glyph of Starfall that I’ve been using since Naxx. Now that WiseEclipse is broken, Starfall has a role in my rotation again, and having it up every second pre-solar phase is great. On top of that, I’ve changed my rotation to proc solar first, using Starfall to get those Starfires casting quickly. When I tried this, I found that my stacks for Muradin’s Spyglass got to 10 pretty damn quickly.
As with pre-3.2 (but to a lesser extent), Starfall is an acceptable and useful glyph for speeding up your Starfires in the pre-solar phase (and then keeping you at GCD for your Wrath during solar Eclipse). It’s difficult to measure this effectiveness against the easily-calculated effectiveness of Glyph of IS, but I’d wager they’re about equal for single-target DPS again.
But your Spyglass (damn you for getting that, by the way!) will be up rather quickly anyways, just like EotbM or IotDS, because we usually use starfall in the beginning of the fight anyways, if we don’t plan to use it soon-ish. Even if we dont, the actual stacking wont take long, and is such a minor part of the fight.
In regards to using starfall to get faster starfires outside of lunar eclipse, i really dont see this as a problem. Once you get your rotation going, you will have a pretty constant uptime of Nature’s Grace, and coming out of lunar eclipse you will end with a crit, and usually have a crit within a few casts anyways. You have to be pretty unlucky to consistantly drop Nature’s Grace, because your (well, my at least) crit is rather high when fully raid buffed.
As we get more crit, starfall lose its utility, and i dont view it as a tool to get nature’s grace anymore, because gear is supporting that now. Sure, starfall will ensure a 100% uptime for the duration, but its such a marginal difference these days.
So looking only at damage, i am confident that we gain so much more from glyphing an ability that not only has high damage, but is being used constantly.
I consider my personal crit to be pretty decent, but we don’t have a fire or frost mage, nor an affliction warlock, so we don’t have the 5% crit debuff on the boss. I’ve already addressed several officers about this problem, but there’s nothing they can do, or at least nothing that they’re willing to do.
Unfortunately, my pre-solar phase seems to take a while (much longer than my pre-lunar phase), so I’ve found that the help of a Starfall is well-worth the GCD and well-worth the glyph. This is especially true because I only keep IS up during solar Eclipse (and at the beginning of the fight).
What about Glyph of Rebirth?
I see that each of your glyphs noted are in terms of Moonkin personal DPS, however, I have found several upper tier guilds will have their Moonkins replace the Insect Swarm glyph with the Rebirth glyph purely because in a raid for example being able to b-rez a tank to full health immediately could mean the difference between a wipe or killing the boss. Not to mention also save the mana pool for healer’s in needing to quickly get the health bar of the rez’ed person up. Plus the claim is that such a switch ends up being a minor loss overall to Moonkin DPS.
Just curious on your thoughts about this?
I dont buy it. We sometimes equip our healers with it (back in the old Iron Council hard mode days), but i’d like to actually see a few examples of moonkins being put to do this. 30% off an ability that does about 8% of our total DPS (according to the fight i just did) is just a 2% DPS loss, but a DPS loss that is unnessecary if people don’t die. Im sure it doesn’t cost the healers much to heal a person to full once, and apart from Iron Council, there are no fights that require us to sacrifice people.
Once you rebuff your tanks, they’re going to need to be healed anyways. They’re going to get overhealed. Using glyph of rebirth is just silly.
I have to agree. Our job is to DPS. If we’re to do our job to the best of our ability, we should use tools that allow us to do so. That means Glyph of IS or Glyph of Starfall as our third glyph. If the tanks (or anyone else) are dying to begin with, you’ve got larger problems that the ability to Rebirth to full health won’t fix.
I’m not saying that people don’t die or that it can’t cause a wipe. I’m not even saying that you shouldn’t Rebirth people to prevent a wipe. You should — in fact, that’s why Blizz reduced its cooldown. But if you’re constantly using that Rebirth and the res’ed person’s health is an issue, you should probably look at WHY it’s an issue.
And just because the moonkins you reference are in “upper tier guilds” does not mean that they put out the kind of DPS they should. Remember, we still provide 5% spell crit, 3% spell haste, and 3% spell hit just for being in the raid and keeping one debuff on the boss, so there are going to be some guilds that opt to take a moonkin simply for those raid buffs, not for their actual DPS. If you’re in that position (sorry if you are), then the Glyph of Rebirth might be a better choice. If you’re in the raid because you’re contributing significantly via personal DPS, Glyph of Rebirth isn’t even remotely an option.
Guys guys, calm down. Remember how easy it is to go to a random place, put up a weird claim, and leave without offering any arguments. Take it for what it is, and ignore it at that
Honestly didn’t really mean to cause an uproar here and definitely not trying to offend people by asking an honest question to what I have observed happening recently in some guilds.
Oh and for the record, while I may not be constantly posting after each response left to my question, it does not mean I am not reading and appreciating the valuable information each individual is leaving… so Qieth please don’t assume just because you are not seeing responses back from the original poster that they simply “put up a weird claim”… honestly thought your blog was more about getting thoughts and information out there rather than being critical and harsh on those asking questions.
Again apologize if anyone got upset for asking what was entirely an innocent question and wanted to express gratitude to the responses that were given. Gained a lot of helpful information and understanding on the glyph choices.
To be fair, i did think i responded rather straight forward to your initial post, with why i dont think its common practice, and that i haven’t seen it myself.
For my second post, all i did was to quell the momentum of the flame that was beginning to rise, and i did that with how i do anything else: It may have been a valid question, but the claim you made was presented without any arguments, and thus it becomes really hard to actually take it into consideration.
In truth, you did actually go in and say that you had seen several upper level moonkins do this.
I honestly didn’t think my post was aggressive in any way. I thought I stated my point rather matter-of-factly. If it was misconstrued in any way, I do apologise.
Well I don’t use glyph of rebirth, an I could fall under the token moonkin headline. While I can def carry myself in the deeps with the rest of my guildies. I am the only moonkin that raids in my guild and we only have 3-4 druids total 2 of which are healers. So when a brez is needed its either me or the feral doing it unles the feral is asked to tank then its just me. So even though I am asked to Brez more than not, I dont think the glyph is needed. Normally I will just brez and toss a rejuv on them as soon as they accept while getting back into position, or if its a healer they get a rejuv an innerv before I start to dps.
The major reason I don’t think it is neccessary is you should not be needing to brez too much in your raids, if your just learning the raid an you have several people dying then its best to just keep going without the rez to just see the fights and not rely on brez to much. Once your guild learns the fights brez will almost not be neeeded at all then the glyph slot is just wasted.
I don’t know the mechanics of the fights not released yet, but brez is obsolete in the Saurfang encounter, and that little bit of deeps would help kill him faster if you had a ds glyph instead of the brez one.
Good discussion here… Wanted to add to the Starfall comments: seeing as we’re getting so much crit which won’t benefit our IS at all, I’ll probably be dropping that glyph for Starfall because Starfall is also a good way to get a bunch of extra hits, thus more Omen of Clarity (2t10) procs.
Here’s the situation for me – I’m always in my guild’s main progress raids and I’m the only moonkin. I have never glyphed insect swarm, feeling that a bit more survivability for the tank on a progress boss is more important than my personal DPS. Is this a valid position to take – do the Starfall/Focus glyphs become a bit more viable in that case?
Yep, it is very valid. It is about 100 DPS loss, but its perfectly fine to help out your tanks. If its not needed, however, you could switch for Glyph of IS for a little bit more DPS.