The Leaves are Back
We had a Naxx 25 run last night, so it was the end of my brief flirtation with Moonkin dps, and a very welcome return to the comfort and familiarity of my branches and leaves 
I’ve thought a bit more about what made me uncomfortable with the whole moonkin thing, and I think it’s the competitive nature of dps. I know it doesn’t have to be competitive, but I have a very strong competitive streak (my husband won’t let me play Monopoly any more!), and I found myself quite disappointed that I wasn’t putting out more damage.
As a healer it’s easy to keep my competitiveness at bay. Everyone knows healing meters are fundamentally flawed and not to be relied upon, and as long as people are staying alive, and my performance in the meters is comparable with the other healers I am quite happy.
For some reason I felt differently about dps. I felt I should be doing better. I felt that I ought to contribute more. Some of it is obviously gear shortages, as I’m still mostly wearing my healing gear for Moonkin form. Some of it is just inexperience showing (one boss fight it took me half the fight to get in range to cast my little tree friends, which will have lost a lot of valuable dps time). I’m sure it will come with practice, and as I still intend to has a dual spec of Moonkin with patch 3.1 eventually hits, I’m sure I’ll get more practice. I think I need to lower my expectations a little of how much I can contribute as a Moonkin, at least in the short term, but I still feel much more valuable as a healer.
I’m sure when dual specs are implemented there will be some people who find themselves happy in either of their selected specs, and able to switch whenever needed. For me, I suspect I’ll be a tree as much as possible, keeping the moonkin option for solo farming or for those times when I want to do something with friends who already have enough healing.
DPS is a hard role to just jump right into and expect great results. There may be a ton of DPS players out there, but that doesn’t mean that all of them are good.
The one thing that I have seen cause the largest impact on a person’s DPS is their rotation. All of the other usual factors play a role too of course (gear, enchants, gems, etc.), but if you have a crap rotation or you don’t take advantage of your procs, then you aren’t going to perform as you should.
I have put out more DPS with my sad excuse for gear than other mages with more than 50% epic gear, simply because they “think” they know how to play their class. Sometimes spamming a single spell works wonders for you, but if you really want to hit high on the DPS, then you need to be a little more on top of things than that.
What all that’s supposed to be saying to you though, is that you can’t judge your skill in DPS with just a few random shots at doing it. It takes time to get into the habit of casting the right spells at the right times to make sure that you are always maximizing your DPS and not just throwing your mana away. So keep it up and give it some more practice. I know my mage rarely stands a chance at topping the DPS charts when a moon-chicken is in the raid.
Thanks for the supportive comments. With 3.1 hitting today, I’m sure I’ll get more chances to get into it, and work on my rotation