Druids!! =)

 First of all, you should realize that topping damage charts is *not* what we're about. In individual dps we lag a little behind the best, but we make up the difference by boosting the damage output of the group and the raid as well as bringing druid utility on top, and that is always going to have to be part of the argument about "why bring a balance druid".

In general for this article I've taken the approach of comparing our favorite fluffy Moonkin to a Firemage, generally acknowledged to be *the* dps specialist of wow. So, let's get down to exploring the dps that a Balance druid does bring along.

The key talents for max dps:

• Starlight Wrath (for 0.5s casting time reduction on both wrath and starfire)
• Moonkin Form (5% crit aura, decent armour)
• Focused Starlight (4% crit with both wrath and starfire)
• Moonfury (10% more damage on moonfire, wrath and starfire)
• Vengeance (crit damage increased from 150% of normal to 200%)
• Wrath of Cenarius (1.2x multiplier on +spelldamage for starfire, 1.1x for wrath)
• Nature's Grace (0.5s casting time reduction after a crit)
• Insect Swarm (we'll cover why later)

I've ranked them more or less in terms of importance.

Generally, casting time reduction talents are 'teh schnizzle' - they scale both the original damage and the +spelldamage contribution by (original casting time / new casting time), so Starfire's damage output gets multiplied by 3.5/3.0 = 1.1667... and wrath by 2.0/1.5 = 1.33 ;} These talents also increase your crit frequency, because crit chance is not corrected for casting time.

To understand the effect of crit chance on dps, I've found it handy to think of the effect of crits as a multiplier on the normal dps of a spell. Say you do 100 damage per hit, you crit 5% of the time, and your crits do 50% more damage so 150 damage (which is normal)... that means you end up doing 100 x 95 + 150 x 5 = 10250 dmg over 100 hits. Expressed as a multiplier that's 1.025, which gives a generic formula as (1 + (crit chance as fraction * crit dmg multiplier)). Working backwards from the total effect of a crit, you can almost always derive the crit damage multiplier this way, if the exact maths seems opague at first.

Starfire vs Wrath vs Fireball

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• Starfire '= 540-636 damage = 588 avg per 3s cast (talented) = 196 base dps.
• Wrath = 381-429 damage = 405 avg per 1.5s cast (talented) = 270 base dps.
• Fireball = 717-913 damage + 84 dmg dot over 8s = 815 avg per 3s cast (talented) = 271 base dps (plus dot).

These amounts are without talent modifiers, and so the differences will scale with the talents, slightly increasing the real gap between Fireball/Wrath and Starfire. I'll do the below at +800 spelldamage and 30% crit (a 0.3 crit fraction).

Starfire has a 1.0 +spelldamage coefficient, and scales at:
(base + ((1.0 [coefficient] + 0.2 [wrath of cenarius]) * spelldamage)) * 1.1 [Moonfury] * (1 + (0.3 [crit fraction] * 1.0 [Vengeance crit multiplier] * 1.2 [nature's grace]))
which gives 2315 avg per 3s cast, or 772 dps (with curse of shadow 849/872 dps and with Tier5 bonus 933/959 dps

Wrath has a 0.57 +spelldamage coefficient, and scales at:
(base + ((0.57 [coefficient] + 0.1 [wrath of cenarius]) * spelldamage)) * 1.1 [Moonfury] * (1 + (0.3 [crit fraction] * 1.0 [Vengeance crit multiplier]))
which gives 1345 avg per 1.5s cast, or 897 dps

Fireball has a 1.0 +spelldamage coefficient, and scales at
(base + ((1.0 [coefficient] + 0.15 [Empowered Fireball]) * spelldamage)) * 1.1 [Fire Power] * (1 + (0.3 [crit fraction] * 1.1 [Ignite crit multiplier]))
which gives 2538 avg per 3s cast, or 846 dps

There are a few things there which need a little explanation - let's start with the way Nature's Grace behaves. Nature's Grace acts as a multiplier on the crit dmg multiplier. The size of the multiplier is equal to the ratio of casting times, hence the 1.2 = (3s / 2.5s) on starfire.

WARNING: Nature's Grace DO NOT reduce Global Cooldown, which make effectively your Wrath to cast in 1.0 sec, but you still have to wait 0.5 extra seconds for the global cooldown (most people wont notice it because 0.5 second is very fast and will give the feeling your wrath cast back to back, but it got tested and video cut 0.1 sec by 0.1sec and showed up that it doesnt reduce global cooldown). This will eventualy lead Starfire to do more DPS than Wrath (which happen rather quickly when you count in Curse of Shadow and tier5 bonus).

The crit multiplier on Fireball comes from the way Ignite behaves, which is a 40% extra dmg dot on the target after a crit, which means that the total damage is a 1.5 * 1.4 = 2.1 multiplier on the damage of a single crit fireball, which reduces to a 1.1 multiplier per % crit chance on overall damage if you put it through the process I described above.

The fireball dot I've left off the general calculation, since it doesn't scale with spelldamage and also continually gets overwritten so it only adds a straight 10 dps or so to the effectiveness of Fireball. Imp Scorch I've left out since it's build-up dependent and that lowers the dps, and so effectiveness depends on the number of fire mages in the raid and so on.

Moonfire and Insect Swarm

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• Moonfire = 220-258 damage + 444 dmg dot over 12s = 693 dmg per instant (1.5s) cast, 0.08 instant coeff + 0.67 dot coeff
• Insect Swarm = 792 dmg dot over 12s = 792 dmg per instant (1.5s) cast, 0.8 dot coefficient

Only the instant portion of Moonfire can crit, but that does minimal damage and doesn't scale that well due to the low coefficient even when talented, so Moonfire spam is not generally a good tactic and should be replaced with Wrath spam at high +spelldamage, but both the DoTs scale well and they remain worth casting for quite a long time - in effect at 800 spelldamage, Insect Swarm does 1432 total damage per cast, or 954 dps over the global cooldown, moonfire slightly less.

Insect Swam is the most mana-efficient dot in the game, and does dps roughly equivalent to a Priest's Shadow Word: Pain at about half the mana cost, so it's up there with the best. It's the thing to use when low on mana and you're unable to get close to a target to melee some mana. This combined with Lifebloom spam is a ninja dps/hps combination when the crapola hits the fan.

Optimal DPS Cycle

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combining dots and nukes

Insect Swarm -> 7x Wrath... In wrath-spam, Insect Swarm still pulls its weight at 800 spelldamage
Insect Swarm -> Moonfire -> 3x Starfire... in starfire-spam, Moonfire is worthwhile as well, and you need to fill the extra 1.5 gap, although you could use Wrath for that

Beyond about 1200 +spelldamage the dots start to loose out to nukes altogether because of the scaling effect of crits and some of the other talent influences. Insect Swarm is likely always going to be worth casting in boss fights though, just for the to-hit debuff.

All the usual tips apply - use Moonfire and Wrath for short fights when you might not complete a Starfire cast, do the last 20% with those spells because of the combined effects of execute and mages "burst-dps'ing" targets down, use Hurricane when it's up and you have groupings of 3+ targets available, use innervate to regain mana when it's not needed elsewhere since does the job without you having to stop, and even the Treants can be a useful addition - they're like a 3k, 300-dps dot.

In conclusion

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Starfire scales very well, slightly better than Fireball with all the relevant talents in fact, and would catch up to Fireball dps at around 2500 +spelldamage. In real terms, it's about 70 dps lower at 800 +spelldamage, so a firemage is roughly at 110% compared to a Moonkin when looking at the nukes. The dots boost 'kin by about 30 dps in total after accounting for time used on GCD.

Wrath surpasses Fireball quite quickly - the compounding effects of Wrath of Cenarius, Vengeance and Nature's Grace make it very, very good for burst damage, and it stands up well once you take into account situational mage talents like Molten Fury (20% more damage once the target drops down below 20% health)... to go into "burst mode" a druid switches to Wrath, although the mana useage is quite fierce.

The remaing gap in main nukes - Starfire vs Fireball - is covered by the 5% crit aura on Moonkin, which results in a net 0.05 addition to the crit fraction on the other four party members. You could see this as giving around 18% additional damage to the Moonkin (0.05 crit * 1.1 crit multiplier on 3 dps casters at 110% of the moonkin, assuming a 4-dps-caster-and-healer raid group), and the 3% to-hit bonus for the whole raid's melee damage from Imp Faerie Fire is then entirely profit. Basically, 3 mages + moonkin >> 4 mages in terms of pure damage output from the group, and the presence of the Moonkin is bumping the damage from the other 3 mages up by 5.5% on the damage meters.

It's also worth noting that a balance druid's two main nukes - Starfire and Wrath - are on different damage types but scale more or less equally through the same set of talents, which means that in situations where Firemages have to switch to almost entirely non-talented nukes -- eg a fire-immune boss meaning having to use frost or arcane damage -- a Moonkin has the advantage of being able to use a second *talented* nuke with a different damage type.

Ultimately, a balance druid's strength is in a combination of good damage and versatility.

• you have good, scaling nukes of two different damage types
• you have two DoTs which are useful in many situations where Direct Damage spells are sub-optimal
• you have the Moonkin Aura and Improved Faerie Fire to add to the raid's effectiveness
• you stack 2% avoidance on the MT from Insect Swarm, same as him having 2% more dodge
• you have Hurricane - 8s of 20% attack speed reduction is sometimes more valuable than raw dps
• you bring an extra Rebirth and Innervate
• and... you can heal when you have to ;)

The only real things the raid looses relative to having an extra mage along is some AoE damage, kiting ability and an extra Polymorph. Hopefully that was
clear and helps ;)

Addendum

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Scaling by Spellpower Amount

I thought it might be useful to see what happens at different +spelldamage and crit levels when you compare the dps of the main nukes, Fireball and Starfire, and also how that compares as a percentage, using the above formula's.

at 15% crit:

+spelldamage...... 200 .............. 300 .............. 400
firemage...............446 .............. 495............... 545
moonkin...............358 (80%)..... 410 (83%)...... 462 (85%)

at 25% crit:

+spelldamage...... 500 ............. 600 .............. 700
firemage.............. 650 ............. 703............... 757
moonkin.............. 566 (87%)..... 623 (89%)..... 680 (90%)

So you can see the gap in damage done is pretty big at low levels of spelldamage, say when you start TBC at 58-60, but it gets progressively smaller as the amount of spelldamage and +crit gets bigger... it doesn't matter which you increase, 'kin scales better with each one... but the amount you make up gets smaller and smaller until the nukes draw level at 2500 spelldamage or so, and then Starfire starts to very slowly pull ahead.

Which means that as you go further through the game, moonkin becomes very worthwhile to take along because the crit aura pushes moonkin's total damage contribution ahead of a firemage. As a rule of thumb, to work out the total damage a moonkin is adding, you should multiply his damage meters damage-done by 1.2x (yeah, it's a bit of a simplification, but mostly not too far wrong).

But it also means that if you take a moonkin who is not geared as well as the rest of the raid, the dps gap may look quite big at first. That gap comes down quickly as the gear gets better, but don't expect every moonkin to do uber damage immediately when dropped into a 25-man raid group in blues ;p