DPS: In 963; Sp 588; Dmg 2097; Hit 270; Cri 26.11%, Hst 189; MR 338 (84)

Heal: In 1092; Sp 850 Dmg 2281; Hit 28; Cri 21.11%; Hst 231; MR 544 (154)

In VH, 2900 DPS, in UP 2100

I accidentally left my healing gear on in VH when I didn't realise you now need to click the Equip button in Equipment Manager to activate the gear change. Our party went on to do UP after, and I noticed when I went to link the Battemaster trinket to someone who had lost Hit due to a gear change.

I've been doing a lot of research since I noticed this yesterday evening, and still more to do. You will notice that Hit had little to do with my DPS (though it may have been more in VH, had I had more - the miss rate showing on recount was a phenomenal 60%). I may have to do a run with combat logging on and webstats to do a detailed analysis. Hit cap for druids is 283/6, depending on which site you read and with my talent spec, so I need to go back to my bank and find an old piece of gear with a little more hit ... or maybe not.

It may be that the instance is the difference - druids do much, much better with "stand and nuke" fights rather than ones that require movement. However most of UP, except for the harpoon boss, is pretty static. We didn't have the kiting boss in VH.

Crit also isn't an issue, as I have 5% more in DPS spec. though it certainly has resolved my OOM issues. 10% less dmg also does not make up the 20% difference.

This leaves 40 Int , 220 Spirit and 42 Haste as key stats to be checked.

Now I am still learning about gearing - knowledge is so spread out on the web - and I can't see anything obvious in the talent tree ... unless it changed in 2.3...?

It's not int. Yes, that has helped with the size of my mana pool, but as this post on  Raiding Basics: Moonkin Druid (UPDATED 3.2) shows, it is incidental rather than necessary. This suggests that the best stats for raiding boomkins are:  Hit > Spell Damage > Spell Haste > Spell Crit. Crit is lower on my healing set, and there's not 20% difference in my damage.

Now in 5 mans, and trash mobs in raids, you get lots of short fights that add to the overall fight data on recount, but I tend to chain-cast Hurricane if there are 3 or more NPCs. However, on a 1 minute boss fight, 22% haste is the difference between 5 starfires at 11K average each and 6. The soft cap for haste is 400 and I am nowhere near this on either gear set.

Sooo ... haste is the one I think I need to check out. More later!