General Update: 6/5/2009

Sorry, guys for the recent brake in blogging. My real life has been quite hectic lately. On top of that I've been raiding a little more lately, therefore the time available for blogging has gone down. I hope my life will smooth out a little bit and I can get back to a more regular schedule soon.

With that, there are several things happening around the land of Graylo and Moonkin that I would like to talk about.

New Druid Forms:
The big druid news in recent weeks is the new Bear and Cat forms that will be released with 3.2. Unfortunately none of the other forms including Moonkin are being updated at this time, but seem to be in the queue for a later patch.

The druid forms have never been a big issue for me. I agree that its boring to look at the same form from level 10 to level 80 and look like every other druid you see, but what I looked like didn't really matter to me. That said, I like the new forms for the most part. The black Tauren Cat looks like a baboon to me. I would love it if they found a way to scale with gear, but I understand that that could be difficult. Now if they could just come up with some cool Moonkin forms, I might get a little more excited.

Moonkin Stats - Graylo vs Murmurs:
If you follow the Moonkin Repository you may have noticed that Murmurs and I have had a bit of a debate regarding the value Haste Rating and Crit Rating.

A month or so ago (its been a slow debate) Murmurs posted some shocking numbers regarding the value of Crit relative to Haste where Crit was actually worth more then Haste for a Lunar rotation. This goes so far against the conventional wisdom and the numbers that I had calculated that I was immediately sceptical of his results.

If your interested I suggest that you read through the thread. I had several issues with his math, but I had two primary concerns. First, I think his starting value of Crit Chance was way to low, and Murmurs conceded that point. The second concern I had was his numbers did not factor Eclipse or Set Bonuses into the value. He made some good points regarding here, but I still think its wrong to completely exclude them.

Obviously, I am supportive of my numbers. I did discover a couple of small issues with my model while arguing this debate so My lunar stats have changed a little bit, but not materially. However, you might find my last post in the thread very interesting.

Conceding the point about Set Bonuses I reran my model 4 times with various set bonuses to see how it affected the results. Here are the results:

Stat	No Tier	4T7	2T8	4T8
Hit Rating	1.52	1.526	1.536	1.518
Spell Power	1	1	1	1
Haste Rating	0.819	0.808	0.791	0.709
Crit Rating	0.653	0.627	0.633	0.639

As you can see, the value of Crit Rating relative to Spell Power was fairly similar for all 4 runs. It was highest with no Tier bonuses, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are all within the margin of error.

What I found odd was how much the value of Haste Dropped with the introduction of 4T8. I new that 4T8 would devalue Haste but I didn't expect it to be by so much. However, its important not to overreact to this result. These results assume a T7.25 gear level with a ton of haste rating. Every BIS list I've seen produced for a Lunar rotation sees a significant drop in the amount of Haste being stacked. At my highest, I had about 628 Haste rating. I am already down below 500, and most of the BiS lists I've seen would put most people at about 425 -450. At the same time our Spell Power is going to go way up and our Crit Chance is going to go up. Since we are losing haste Rating, but gaining significant amounts of Spell Power and Crit Rating, the relative value of haste will be very similar to what I've reported in the past.

New Moonkin Blogger: Relevart’s Druid Reliquary
I want to give a little support to a new Moonkin Blogger. Relevart's blog is still very new, but he has already gotten several good theorycrafting posts out and seems to be on the right track.

Most new moonkin bloggers I see fall in one of a couple of categories. They either post too generally without detail, don't provide reasonable explanations or support their conclusions, or stop writing after a couple of posts. Relevart on the other hand seems to be off to a good start.

If you like my blog, you may like his also. If you don't like my blog, why the heck are you still reading. :)

Graylo and the Alts Update:
Its been a long time since I did a toon update, so I thought I would give you a little update on how things are going for me in Ulduar and such. Our 25man group has cleared through Yogg on normal mode with medium mode kills on FL and IC. We were the fifth guild on my server to kill Yogg. That is a little behind what I had hoped, but is still impressive given that we raid only 9 hours a week and all of the guilds ahead raid at least 16 hours a week. This week we started on the Keeper Hard Modes. Our first target is Hodir, and it has been a little tougher then I expected. Our best attempts are getting him to 15% before the three minutes ticks off, which isn't bad after one night of attempts. I think if we can get a little better at stacking the buffs he should be down shortly.

From a 10man perspective, I was left high and dry for a little while. My late night group broke up because some of the members decided to raid at different times and there wasn't enough interest to fill the empty slots. So, I had a couple of weeks without any 10man action, but then the late night group was reformed.

Our 10man groups have been going very well. We killed Yogg very quickly and have been working on hard modes for a couple of weeks. Personally the only Hard Modes I have left are Mimiron, General, Yogg, FL+3, and FL+4. This is part of the reason I was surprised at how hard Hodir Hard mode is. The 10man versions have been much easier in most cases. That said, it is understandable why we are having less of an issue. We out gear the content because we are 25man raiders.

The biggest test we've had so far is Mimiron Hard mode. The fire's add a lot of complexity to an already complex fight. The main issues we seem to be having is range. We seem to be able to control the fires, but it isn't unusual for some one to die because they got separated from the raid. We need to work out our positioning a little more and pump out more DPS so that we limit the number of Plasma Blasts we get.

Hopefully we can get him soon, because would then be able to start working on Algalon.

Finally, there hasn't been much activity for the alts. Grayfel and Graypal have primarily been Profession Mules since 3.1 dropped. I have worked on my Mage some and he is up to about 45 now I think. I also transferred my shaman over. I know its a little stupid to transfer a level 16 toon, but I didn't want to start over. He is now up to level 22 or so.