Category Archives: Theorycrafting

Moonglow or Furor? The age-old question: Is it better to save mana or gain mana?

This question has been answered many times before, but the answer tends to fall under one of two extremes: it either references a complex formula which goes right over my head, or it gives an absolute X is better than Y without much explanation. I’m going to try to answer the question in a way that falls in between those two extremes. I’ll answer the question in layman’s terms with concrete examples of how the two talents affect your mana pool.

First, let’s look at exactly what the talents do:

Moonglow – Reduces the cost of your damage and healing spells by 9%.

This is a very basic bonus. The benefit you’ll see from Moonglow depends entirely on how many spells you cast and how much mana they cost. The more mana you spend, the more benefit you will see from Moonglow.

Furor – Increases your maximum mana by 15%.

Furor is a little more complex. Besides the flat mana increase you get, you will also see a bonus to any mana regeneration that is based on your mana pool, such as Revitalize, Replenishment and Innervate. Furor is a talent that scales with gear – as your mana pool increases, so does the benefit you gain from Furor.

So how do you tell which talent will create a more positive effect on your mana? With math!

Moonglow

Let’s look at Moonglow first. To figure out how much mana you can save with Moonglow, you need to have an idea of how much mana you spend on any given fight. To do this, I looked at random 30 second snippets of boss encounters and broke down how many spells I cast and how much mana they cost. Here’s one example:

I also cast 2 Regrowths during that time, but left out their mana cost to account for Omen of Clarity procs (I assumed a rate of 2 OoC procs per 30 seconds).

After looking at 5 random samples, I found that 3 points in Moonglow would give me an average mana savings of 4823.5 every 30 seconds.

Looking at different fight lengths, Moonglow saves:

Furor

Now let’s look at Furor. I looked at the impact Furor would have on a mana pool of 100,000. First, there would be a flat bonus of 15,000 mana. Second, there would be an increase in mana regeneration effects.

• Replenishment returns 1% of total mana over 10 seconds. An extra 15,000 mana would mean an extra 150 mana from Replenishment every 10 seconds.
• Revitalize returns 2% of your mana whenever it procs. It has a 12 second internal cooldown, but from examinations of my own logs I found an average proc rate of once every 13.5 seconds. An extra 15,000 mana would mean an extra 300 mana from Revitalize every 13.5 seconds.
• Innervate returns 20% of your mana and has a 3 minute cooldown. An extra 15,000 mana would mean an extra 3,000 mana from each Innervate.

I looked at how much extra mana would be regenerated with a base mana pool of 100,000 over a 3 minute fight:

Add that 9,699 to the flat 15,000 mana increase and 3 points in Furor would gain you 24,699 extra mana over a 3-minute fight. I then expanded these figures to account for larger mana pools and longer boss fights.

My full calculations are available in this spreadsheet.

Results

When all the math was done, I compared the numbers for Moonglow and Furor and put them in a pretty graph.

Things we learn from this:

• Furor gets better with larger mana pools.
• Moonglow gets better with the amount of spells you cast. It gets better in relation to Furor as the fights get longer.
• At current mana levels Moonglow will provide more of a benefit than Furor on any fight longer than 3 minutes.
• Furor will not become competitive with Moonglow until our mana pools start hitting 150,ooo (at least) and even then, only on the shorter fights.

I hope I’ve helped to clarify the issue for those people (like me) who want to understand the reasons why one talent is better than the other without doing too much math.

*Disclaimer: I did not account for temporary Intellect increases in my Furor calculations. The temporary mana increases make only a few percent difference. For example, on a 3-minute fight with 100k mana, Power Torrent procs would increase Furor’s mana regen by about 4.9%. As mana pools increase, this number goes down.  Adding in the temporary Int boosts does not affect any of the numbers enough to make Furor better than Moonglow for any fight length or mana pool. And I’m all math-ed out.*

Thanks to Hamlet for reviewing my spreadsheet. For those looking for more druid theorycrafting, I suggest downloading Hamlet’s TreeCalcs. Thanks also to Zosima for making sure my math-to-English translation made sense.