What Moonkins Bring to PvP

Kitty PvP At Its Best

Blog Azeroth is doing a shared topic this week about what your class brings to raids.  I hope by reading this blog, you have seen all the benefits of bringing a moonkin to raids means in terms of crit buffs, armor debuffs with Faerie Fire, damage output, etc. 

This past week on the last day of raiding for this expansion, I got my 25 man Glory of the Icecrown Raider drake, which I hope to have a pic up in the screenshots section soon.  This means up until Cataclysm I have two goals.  Max out Justice Points and max out Honor Points.  My guild has started doing organized 15 man BGs to get ready for rated BGs in Cataclysm.  While I haven't decided whether I'm going to apply to the rated BG group, I have found out what moonkins can bring to a rated battleground PvP setting. 

1) Pseudo-Glass Cannon - The term "glass cannon" usually refers to clothies, like mages, who can bring incredible amount of damage but can be killed relatively easily.  Moonkins are a different class that I like to call a pseudo-glass cannon.  We can pump out a lot of damage with Starfall, Starsurge, DoTs, Wrath, and Starfire.  However, we can also heal ourselves, have more armor than clothies, and have a mechanic that damages melee if they hit us with Thorns.  That is why I'm using my PvE gear in our PvP battleground matches.  I can survive so that I don't need resilience but I can still pump out the damage. 

2) Typhoon - A situational spell in PvE becomes an incredible spell in PvP, especially with the fun things you can do with it.  I love being at Lumber Mill in AB and just waiting for someone to start capping the flag.   A second later, they haven't capped it and they are flying off the cliff praying to their diety of choice that they survive the fall.  In addition, to the knockback, it also has a snare effect that slows them down incredibly.

3) Entangling Roots + Solar Beam = Dead Casters - Ideally, this would be used against healers, but would work with any casters.  One of the things I have loved doing is finding the healer in a group, casting Entangling Roots followed by Solar Beam and you have a useless healer that will die quickly.

4) Solar Beam In General - This has so many great uses.  If you see one of your melee guys against a caster, cast Solar Beam on their opponent and they are dead.  You can also use it on choke points.  My favorite was the path leading down in Isle of Conquest to the Docks.  You set it up right before the end of the road and meet the enemy before they get down and they go down easily.    Although a guildie would disagree with me, Solar Beam has very situational use in a PvE setting.  At level 85, it may be a better tool with a couple more points to work with, but I would much rather get higher damage boosting talents in PvE.  That is why I have dropped my feral tank for the time being for a moonkin PvP talent spec.  I may drop my moonkin PvE set for a while so I can tank some heroics for Justice Points and for leveling, but we will see about that.

5) The Potential of Wild Mushrooms - While I don't know how they will finally work, I can imagine some awesome potential in PvP for Wild Mushrooms.  Imagine you are in Warsong Gulch.  You set up three mushrooms by the tunnel entrance to your base.  The flag carrier uses a different path to get in, but they try running out the tunnel.  Detonate those mushrooms plus add in the talent that makes the mushrooms create a area of slow and you have an incredible PvP tool.  Think about the possibilites in AV, the road to LM or GM in AB, by the gates in SotA.  So many awesome possibilites.

And this is not including all our normal PvE benefits including MotW, critical strike bonuses, DoTs, Faerie Fire, and even Rebirth in rated battlegrounds.  So I encourage you in the last few days of this expansion to try out BGs.  If you are on Ner'zhul, you can come in on the Conquest BG pre-mades, where we are owning the 15 man BGs.  If you really love our premades, I would recommend applying for the rated BGs team in Cataclysm.