This is undoubtedly going to be contentious ask (with some people being strongly for and some strongly against) so while I’m going to try to be succinct, this post might end longer than I meant it to. My viewpoint is that Moonkin Form is a relic of the past, and was added during a time when Druid healing was serviceable even when specced for damage. I’m going to try to explain what the consequences of that were then vs now and also try to explain why I think it needs to go.
In Vanilla and BC, players and even the developers were much more concerned about hybrids being able to “do it all” and were fairly conservative with how they approached hybrid specs as a result. The idea of a balance druid doing competitive DPS, offering utility, and being able to start healing the raid at a moment’s notice was pretty grotesque to most players. Moonkin Form was added to ensure that balance druids had to give up raid utility if they wanted to start healing so that there were trade-offs. The crit aura (3% and later 5%) would need to be temporarily lost, and that’s actually a fairly big loss to a caster group. It also separated PvP survivability from healing, ensuring that healing yourself to full in PvP encounters came with the trade-off of temporarily making yourself more vulnerable to physical damage.
Nowadays, these are relative non-factors. Moonkin utility has been shifted away from raid-wide auras and off-healing and toward spells like Typhoon, Innervate, and Rebirth, which are all active abilities. The damage contribution we receive is a direct 10% damage increase, which only affects ourselves. Druid off-healing is also frankly almost a non-factor nowadays and is mostly valuable for soloing and quest content, as it saves time between pulls. It costs a huge amount of mana and heals for an amount that can hardly be called life-saving except in very rare cases. And while you’re healing, you’re not doing damage, which in PvP is a fairly big deal anyway.
So, what purpose does Moonkin Form serve nowadays? I want to argue that it exists solely for negatives and offers no positives whatsoever. A world where Druid spells simply hit 10% harder and the armor/instant starfires were moved to a passive would have almost no impact on the game except for the loss of Flap and would be a significant quality of life improvement. Moonkin Form is the only Druid combat form that has (with the exception of Flap as aforementioned) no abilities of its own. It exists to take away options, reduce the reward for the work we’ve done collecting gear and appearances, and add an extra step when doing things like shifting out of travel form and healing yourself before you can start combat again. It is also subject to the same mechanical systems as feral shapeshifts, meaning that when they are altered for balance reasons, the Balance tree is also hit despite not being able to take advantage of those mechanics in anywhere near the same way.
I realize that a lot of people like Moonkin Form because it’s cute, but I don’t believe that the flavor Moonkin adds to the game is worth more than what we’d gain if it weren’t there. Tree of Life form was removed for a lot less.
There are also a lot of ways to preserve its flavor. Incarnation is still in the game. There are glyphs and tomes. You can add shapeshifts with tomes but you can’t completely remove their appearance with glyphs because other players need to know that you’re in Moonkin Form for balance reasons.
There are also going to be arguments like “Druids are about shapeshifts” but that is not and never has been true. Druids are about nature and the natural world, and shapeshifts are a part of that fantasy, but not all of it. Restoration druids have been designed such that feral forms mostly offer utility for years and no one has thought of it as being any less Druidy. If anything, it’s more. Resto is pretty much the “default” druid spec. The rest of them still feel like afterthoughts at times to this day.
Okay I’m done. Love you all. BYEEEE