Hi!
In the last few weeks, moonkin has received nerfs to…
- starsurge / starsurge trait
- incarn / celestial allignment
- resource generation
Of course, as many of you fellow moonkins know, our damage is completely frontloaded into starsurge and our dots. For example, our solar wraths hit for a few thousand less than our restoration counterparts. The consequences of these nerfs been have significant, and the viability of moonkins at high ratings (3k+) has dropped off a cliff. Our consistent damage does nothing to the high HPS of this meta (mw, etc), and comps like rogue mage are able to sit on our team the entire game with absolutely no fear. Relative to other casters, such as spriest / ele / destro, moonkins pose much less of a threat. As a competetive wow player and a moonkin main, this is quite disheartening, and all my excitement for next season has withered to nill. Of course, you can still achieve RELATIVELY high ratings as a moonkin, but players of the highest caliber (tournament players, r1, etc) will be focusing on playing other classes. Historically, changes like the recent moonkin ones are almost never reversed. With the importance of burst in this high HPS meta, moonkin seems to be cooked…
If things stay this way, which they will, it’s quite possible only two moonkins will get rank one (me and packratts, who have sat rating since before nerfs).
What’re your thoughts, fellow druids?
3 Likes
Moonkins have always been a fairly underrepresented class, and we’ve never been a class to need to rely so much on burst damage as you state it, even in metas with high HPS healers. Moonkins throughout wow arena almost always play in a rot comp, like LSD2 or the currently very popular owlplay. These have always been the most successful, although certain comps like dwts, dh/boom, war/boom, mage/boom have seen spurts of success, they’ve never been as consistent as a boomkin rot comp. This is because, historically, moonkin has been a class with very high utility, survivability (at least after wotlk), and strong spread damage. Although since the ability prune in mop we lost a lot of utility and some survivability, we gained a majority of that survivability back in legion and BFA, despite the utility being a bit worse than before. This, coupled with another currently strong utility/survivability class like spriest or ele shaman, along with a high throughput healer like rsham, creates a devastating combo that can survive through strong sustain and/or powerful CC and burst setups (if played right). I played on my old account before it got banned (maorimoron) back in MOP, and I was the only few boomkins in S15 viable for the rank 1 title. I exclusively played high sustain high survivability comps like war/boomkin and LSD2 with the state of moonkins being how they are now after the nerfs, and maybe even worse (burst was RNG and spread damage was slightly worse, utility was the only saving grace along with slightly better survivability). After coming back from a 2 year break and seeing the insanely strong state of moonkins before all the nerfs, I am actually glad they are being nerfed down to a much more manageable level than before.
Essentially, if you play a strong rot comp like I listed before, it should still be possible with good teammates to reach r1, it’s just like you said, those teammates are likely to look for a stronger class than boomkin that can fit the same role (ele sham or spriest).
1 Like
Unfortunately rot comps seem to be extremely weak with healer HPS rn…The meta almost entirely consists of mage / monk teams over 3k
2 Likes
mhm. even my friends who are only playing at glad range are seeing that trend consistent there as well. overall i do agree with you, in the current state of pvp moonkins are going to have trouble finding a place, but i still believe good moonkins can reach r1 with good teammates.