Speaking as a boomkin who was doing 10k single-target dps without even bothering to use a rotation...I'm regretfully forced to admit we should be nerfed a tad. (Though it was fun learning to manage my threat in late stages of boss fights...)

Then again, there's no real point in balancing too much right now. The current system (4.0.1) is meant to be balanced at 85, not at 80.

Yea Boomkin DPS is a bit out of control currently from what I've seen. Our Raid boomkin who's normally maybe...5-6 on the meters (respectable, not trying to slight him) was suddenly #1 with about a 2-3k DPS buffer between him and the #2 player.

And I say slight rogue buff for the sole reason that I compared my last raid against a raid 2 weeks ago w/ the same people, and I dropped about 2k dps...not terrible..but obviously would rather stay equal or slightly better if anything.

While I understand the "balance at 85" line, given the way spells scale now, I don't see why they can't balance at 80 pretty easily. Oh well.

That's exactly what we experienced last night. Our two moonkins, while not being bad at all, normally where fighting for the 4th or 5th place. Suddenly both were on the top by more than 2k dps from the rest of the group and less than 500 dps from each other. It was hilarous, we joked around on how the chickens from hell were finally revealing and taking over the world... but it wasn't so funny after some time while everyone was struggling (specially melee) to do decent damage and they were just facerolling the meters.

@Wild Colors, I salute you for being responsible and admiting the current ridiculous OP state of the moonkin. But I'm not so sure I can agree on not being a point for balancing for 80. The thing is, while this game is focused on the max level game, there are millions of players leveling and doing randoms or pvp to gain experience. If blizzard doesn't balance things for the whole leveling experience, then we'll have a bottleneck on those imbalanced levels, specially for tanks that can't hold aggro or healers that run out of mana. Remember that most of the concerns comes from players with ICC gear, but in the next months, that won't be the case anymore. People will be leveling on greens/blues through 80, and could have serious problems if damage/threat/healing is not balanced.

So, while *right now* maybe it's not so important to balance the game before 85, they have to do it eventually. Better start now that the problems are fresh.

@Jorges

I agree that, in the best of all worlds, the classes would be balanced for every level. I think Ghostcrawler has come flat out and said that they just can't do it, however. The big problem right now is that the scaling for crit and haste is out of whack (and mastery is assumed in the balancing, but not actually in the game yet). For boomkin, for example, even if Blizz changed nothing, we would get weaker when we hit 81, and weaker still for every level up to 85. This is because our effective crit and haste will drop.

Remember that ICC gear is overpowered b/c Blizzard hadn't accounted for all the half-tiers. Our haste and crit will, in theory, never get as high in Cata as it is right now. For a spec like boomkin, we had been doing 90% of our damage through our nukes because our DOTs didn't scale at all. 4.0.1 suddenly provided a huge bonus to our DOTs, without reducing the damage of our nukes. This will level out by level 85 because the bonus to our DOTs will actually be smaller. My boomkin on the beta server does not do damage that is significantly higher than anyone else's (though this is hard to measure because beta boomkin burn through their entire mana pool in about 30 seconds).

That's not to say that Blizzard shouldn't try to make things a bit more balanced now. It's just that the scaling issues may never permit them to have things balanced at every level (or even at every 5 levels). They spend their time balancing for end game, and I think that's a fair way to do it. It doesn't bother me to be underpowered and overpowered for certain periods of the leveling process (though I don't PvP until I hit max, and I can see that being a big factor).

While combat is a bit weak, the bigger rogue problem is that HaT is glitched to unplayability right now. It puts your CP on the target of the person who gets the crit, rather than the rogue's target, but since you can only have CP on one target at a time, boom! you lose your CP on your own target.