Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Boomkin PVE: Working as intended?

I have recently "dusted" this toon off and proceeded to do the same thing I have been doing with my other toons; dailies in Tol Borad. Again, I am talking PVE here, not PVP, which I don't have enough time to discuss.

Having been playing a frost DK and shadow priest, the Boomkin felt squishier. Yes, with procs and whatnot I could destroy a mob fairly quickly, but if there was more than one it was another issue. Having to switch back and forth in different forms to heal was tedious and even then, if there was more than two, I couldn't even close to out healing the damage.

O.k., maybe this seems like a QQ, but it isn't really. I am curious if this was Blizz's design for Moonkin as PVE has changed dramatically from 1-80. Being a DPS spec, I know we shouldn't expect to solo everything, but it begs the questions:

Shadow Priest can slow, bubble and heal via damage without changing forms. On another note, Shadow seems (for whatever reason) to take less damage (physical and melee) then my Boomkin.

Frost DK can death strike, has AMZ and procs constantly (2HD) with rune of fallen crusader. Additionally, with plate and no heals can solo as a DPS the same three mobs that will wipe me and with less effort and equipment. I know; apples and oranges.

Ret pallies, Ele shaman, Fury Warriors and even rogues get self healing and significant damage reduction and/or crowd control abilities over the Moonkin.

No, I don't want them nerfed or receive another homogenized ability to compensate. But it concerns me that I do less DPS (not heroics/raid) than my friend who plays a Blood DK while grinding in PVE and most of the other classes listed, but with no clear offensive advantage to compensate.

Is this working as intended?

Not really being a theory crafter type, the only thing that I could think of that would potentially make it better would be to increase the mitigation on Boomkin form or make the Moonkin frenzy something that increases defense or heals via melee or something weird like that. I don't know, but it makes it hard to play this toon unless I am grouped versus soloing easily with other DPS toons!
The game isn't really balanced around questing and solo PvE. I know that's not exactly a satisfactory answer, but the designers run into enough problems trying to balance a game that encompasses both group PvE and group PvP. If they tried to drag in the solo aspects of each one, you'd get an even bigger mess (eg "we're trying to move away from hard counters" and the ensuing nightmare of feral root breaks).
Yeah, agreed. I guess I mentioned it because when I hit 85, all I can do is PvP and queue for dungeons on a daily basis. Being that I have a 40 minute wait time, that leaves me to do dailies to grind rep and get better gear for raiding. I guess I need to group...

So you are right, they can't balance everything around soloing, but I am not sure why it got twice as hard for a Moonkin as opposed to any of the other classes I am playing.

/shrug
About the only problem I had while questing was mana efficiency. Damage was never really a problem. By the time I got to Twilight Highlands (~84) I pretty much had to drink about every other pull if I was lucky since my mana pool wasn't able to support the high costs of my spells. Doing instances wasn't much better, had to drink after just about every pull while using my own innervate on CD. We basically have to wait until we can proc an Eclipse for Euphoria, which can be a while if grinding individual mobs and have to drink between pulls.

It got a lot better after I got more 346 pieces, and now with full 359 gear I barely have to use my own innervate while grinding in TB (assuming I get to wear my PvE gear, which I do get to do occasionally). The larger mana pool from all the intellect on the gear REALLY helps, both in the amount of mana you have and the mana you get back from Euphoria. That said, our mana regen is designed around a normal raiding rotation (shifting between Eclipse states) and doesn't really lend itself well to solo grinding while leveling until you have enough gear to get a large enough mana pool.

Sucks, but it's just something we have to deal with.

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