Lunar Crit Cap - The Third Big Cap

I have mentioned this several times before, but for moonkins, there are 3 important caps.  The first is the hit cap, which is 263 hit unless you have a dranaei in your party.  The second cap is the soft haste cap, also known as the Solar Haste Cap, which is 408 haste.  This brings  your Wrath spell to be equal to the global cooldown of approximately 1 second.  The third cap is the most difficult to understand and does not really become an issue until you get in the highest gear possible.  This cap is the soft crit cap, also known as the Lunar Crit Cap.

The Lunar Crit Cap is the one cap that is not a fixed number as it is a variable based on your intellect.  The Lunar Crit cap is the point that while fully raid buffed and during a Lunar Eclipse, you will crit with your Starfire every single time.  That alone should make you want to get to the Lunar Crit Cap.  Unfortunately, it is not necessarily that easy.

First thing you will need to hit the Lunar Crit Cap is the T10 idol, Idol of the Lunar Eclipse.  This adds 220 critical strike rating.  You could possibly hit it otherwise, but you will really have to be stacking critical strike to get it.  Getting this idol will be the first step in getting to the Lunar Crit Cap.

Second, you have to figure out what your critical strike rating has to be to be at the Lunar Crit Cap.  The first piece of information you will need is your unbuffed intellect number.  The best way to get it is just to go to the armory and pull the intellect number from your character sheet.  This is the best number to get.  Do not get it during a raid from your character screen.  The reason for this is some of the buffs you will need to get to the Lunar Crit Cap will already be on you and you can't count them twice.

The next piece of information you will need is the Lunar Crit Cap equation.  Now, you can stick it into programs, like WrathCalcs.  However, I prefer the quick and dirty equation.    Here is the equation to determine your Lunar Crit Cap critical strike rating.

1575 - (Intellect/3) = Critical Strike Rating Needed

As any math teacher will tell you, solve the parentheses first.  I love my old math teacher.

Let me use myself as an example here.  My current intellect is 1457 according to the WoW Armory character sheet.  Putting it in the equation, I need a critical strike rating of  1089 to be at the Lunar Crit Cap.  Now, my current critical strike rating is 873, so it appears that I am not at the cap.  However, this is where having the T10 idol is important.  From the 1089, I can subtract out 220 critical strike rating.  This puts my requirement to be at 869, which means that I am above the Lunar Crit Cap with 873.

A couple things you may notice about the equation.  First, the more intellect you get, the smaller your critical strike rating needed.  This means that the better your gear gets, the less critical strike rating you actually need.  Second, without the T10 idol, it is almost impossible to hit the Lunar Crit Cap.  You need to have it.  This means when you are gearing up a moonkin, you may not be at the crit cap until you get all of your T10 first, which would be my first purchases with Emblems of Frost.

A lot of moonkin gear has critical strike rating, however, you should also notice that some trinkets have the potential to put your easily over the crit cap.  Those two trinkets are Muradin's Spyglass and Phylactary of the Nameless Lich.  Both of these trinkets have high amounts of critical strike rating.  Of course, the Spyglass is the easier to get of the two since it is from Lootship.  The reason I bring this up is the recent situation I have run into.  

I got both the heroic version of Dislodged Foreign Object and the normal version of the Charred Twilight Scale.  Both of these trinkets have huge amounts of haste but no critical strike rating.  Once I got both, I was about 100 critical strike rating from the Lunar Crit Cap.  I had to look at my gemming choices again and decided to put yellow critical strike gems in my yellow slots that could be changed.  As I get more 277 gear, I will be able to change those back to the spellpower plus critical strike gems or even spellpower plus haste gems.  (Although looking at Moonkin Repository, I may be up against the hard haste cap now.  But that is another discussion for another day.)

So when gearing up your moonkin, look at your gear and get to the first two caps of hit and the soft haste cap.  Then start aiming for the third.  When you hit the Lunar Crit Cap, watch your DPS explode.