Moonkin stats

Every so often, I realize that I don't know as much about Moonkins as I think I do. Yesterday, I realized I had misunderstood some things about our soft haste cap.

So, inspired, I decided to make a post about Moonkin stat priorities.

General stat priority

1. Hit rating (till cap)
2. Spellpower
3. Haste rating (till cap)
4. Critical strike rating
5. Spirit
6. Intellect

Hit rating
Hit rating, like for every DPS class, is the #1 damage stat until capped. It takes 26.23 hit rating to achieve 1% spell hit chance, and you have a base 17% chance to miss a ?? raid boss (+3 levels) with spells.

Balance of Power (4%) and Imp. Faerie Fire (3%) reduce your chance to miss to 10%. This means that the Moonkin hit rating cap is 10 * 26.23 = 263. With a Draenei in your group, it drops to 237.

For PvPers: you only have a 4% chance to miss equal-level players. This means that all of your hit needs are covered by Balance of Power. Some races/classes/specs have talents to reduce the chance they'll be missed, which is usually compensated for by the Ashen Verdict ring.

Spellpower
Spellpower is the bread and butter of all DPS caster classes, and will always be better than your other stats (unless not hit capped). Moonkins scale well with spellpower - get lots of it.

Haste
Haste is great and not-so-great at the same time. We don't scale very well with haste, because at 585 haste, Wrath will have a 1.00s cast time with Nature's Grace.

Any amount of haste that brings down Wrath's cast time below 1.00s is wasted, because the global cooldown cannot go below 1 second.

I used to think the soft haste cap was 401, but I was mistaken. Only yesterday did I learn that this calculation includes the Wrath of Air Totem (+5%) haste. I do not like assuming buffs other than my own, and I don't believe anyone should. So the soft cap is, in fact, 585.

Crit
Crit rating is never bad, and has a high cap. Once you have reached the soft haste cap, crit will give you more DPS than haste, point-for-point. Your soft crit cap is based on Starfire's chance to crit during a Lunar Eclipse. To calculate your soft crit cap, first add all of your buffs/talents that increases Starfire's crit chance.

• Nature's Majesty: 4%
• Imp. Insect Swarm: 3%
• Imp. Faerie Fire: 3%
• Idol of Lunar Eclipse: 4.80%
• Lunar Eclipse: 40%

That gives a total of 54.80%. This means you will reach your soft crit cap when you have 45.20% crit chance while buffed and in Moonkin Form.

Once you are over the soft crit cap, critical strike rating and haste rating have nearly the same value, with crit being slightly ahead.

Spirit
Spirit is not a terrible stat, but the other stats already mentioned easily outshine it. Imp. Moonkin Form converts 30% of our spirit into spellpower - however, this does not mean you should gear for it.

Take this example: would you rather have 100 spirit, or 100 crit rating? You can safely ignore the regen from spirit. You should choose the crit rating, because 100 of it will give you more damage than 30 spellpower.

Intellect
Some players believe intellect is the supreme Moonkin stat, because it increases our mana pool, our regen (2% of total mana back from crits), our critical strike chance, our spellpower (12% of intel converted into spellpower), and scales with Furor (+10% intel).

However, point-for-point, intellect is very weak. It buffs our stats, but only very slightly. 1 point of intellect only increases your crit chance by 0.006%, for example.

TL;DR
Get 263 hit rating and 585 haste rating, then get crit rating. And of course, never neglect spellpower.