Warlocks are bad, that is all.

Let's talk about alts. Why do we make alts? because our mains are not super fun anymore. Why aren't our mains fun anymore? because they are lackluster in the aspects of the game we crave.

WAIT, this has just changed... it's official, my brother loves playing his priest and I love playing my druid and they SEEM viable together on a 2s team, at the moment on beta. Our whole world-view has been turned upside-down... we haven't talked about my warlock or his warrior until yesterday which was basically "I don't know if I'm even going to grind that warlock up, now," to which my brother responded "I'm in the same boat with my warrior."

I'm hoping that no one notices the amazing synergy between priests and druids right now, because as it stands, we feel like one of the more dominant 2s comps (aside from any shockadin+dps team... shockadins never oom because of Judgements[sic] of the Wise... a broken talent that returns 20% of TOTAL MANA whenever a Judgement[sic] is used).

Essentially, feral brings good damage, a snare, roots, cyclone, offheals, great survivability and escape mechanics, nigh-unrootability, nigh-unpolyability, and innervate to the table and the priest is quite possibly the best healer in the game (and can survive for a ridiculous amount of time given my brother's new-found spec). In fact, let me talk briefly about this spec: I don't think Blizz had any idea of the possible combinations of "upon getting crit" procs that a healing priest can muster. With this spec, a critical strike against him (or a false-positive that would have been a crit if not for resilience or talents or abilities) causes FOUR effects to proc: Blessed Recovery (a mediocre self heal over time effect), Focused Will (causes additional healing received and less damage taken, both percents, and this stacks), Martyrdom (causes no knockback on casts), and Blessed Resilience (the best one... causes you to receive NO critical strikes against you for 6 seconds). All things combined, he can't be crit for 6 seconds, gets additional healing on himself, can't be interrupted from damage, and gains bonus healing for a short duration. This spec is insane... it also has Reflective Shield (which is amazing against everything but ret pallies who have a bugged talent which gives them a chance to 1) ignore absorption effects and 2) accidentally do double damage when they ignore absorption effects) and Lightwell, and while we all laugh about Lightwell, it's definitely better now that it applies a HoT upon use and cannot be destroyed by enemies.

Right now, we basically pick either the weakest of our two opponents or the most damaging (so, in the case of rogue+mage, we can't decide which to attack... prolly mage with HEAVY cc on the rogue, but in the case of warrior+shockadin, we attack the warrior to keep him off my brother). The reason this strategy works is because I have reasonably good peels as-is with Infected Wounds, but if things ever get to the point where he needs mana, I can innervate him OR cyclone one and root the other while he runs off and drinks. Not to mention I have bash on a 30 second cooldown and Maim up all the time... I am probably the best team-mate in terms of peels right now.

This is what we are experiencing in arena at 80 on the beta realms... we're hoping that Blizzard doesn't notice us racing to the top, and that we make it to release in this way (or better... some blue posts keep surfacing saying how we're going to be buffed etc etc). If we do, we're going to spend a good amount of time at the beginning of the first season climbing in an attempt to reach the top with our mains, something that we have never done before. The only team that gives us a hard time at the moment is rogue+mage, which is to be expected when played well. Additionally, ret+shock gives us a hard time, but it is only because the shockadin has infinite mana without drinking... something I hope (and we all expect) will get nerfed.

Things are definitely looking up, and GhostCrawler says that we can expect some love on Mangle(Cat) and/or Rake in an upcoming build... so that'll be nice.

and so I am here. Just as a quick reference, the last post noted that I could pull 2100 dps without much effort at all, well they have finally added proper armor to the training dummies, now I am only rocking 1600 dps, but so are rogues, so I don't really mind all that much. I have been doing a lot of maths with Toskk over in the beta forums (he does Rawr, the feral druid gear optimizing program, and also tons of rotation maths for PvE) and we basically came to a consensus that Savage Roar is probably the the best thing for druids in the end, and it scales (talented correctly) about as well as Slice and Dice in terms of weapon scaling. That's actually a HUGE deal considering that druid dps didn't scale before.

Also, I had some time to tweak the PvE rotation for dps, and came up with:

Mangle
Savage Roar (14 secs)
Shred (12 secs left)
Shred (10 secs left)
Shred (8 secs left)
Rip (probably had at least one crit in there)
Mangle
Savage Roar (repeat)

Additionally, those initial Mangles turn into Shreds if there's a warrior in the group applying Trauma, which will improve the druid's dps by at least 50% (from bleeds and Trauma).

We did some more disc+feral arenas last night. All things considered, we are pretty good. We hit 1600 fairly easily, although half the matches don't end right and don't award points at the end, so you have to leave the arena and call it a draw. We have 30 played officially, but my guess is that it's closer to 60-75 with a winning record. We play surprisingly well against druid+warrior and druid+rogue. Druid+rogue is especially fun because it's just a game of hurt and switch while we win the mana war. I start out attacking the rogue because he'll be the only one I can see, and I keep dps'ing and peeling him off my priest while their druid starts using mana. Next, I maim-into-cyclone the rogue (who should be at least 75% or lower) and switch to the druid, who will run away from the cycloned target, leaving him to fend for himself (and usually my priest is there to fear after cyclone and dot the rogue to keep him taking damage). Then I Maim and if he's low enough, I call out the gib and bust all my cds, else I cyclone and get back on the rogue. Druid+warrior is just "let the warrior kill himself dueling my priest, then when the druid pops to heal the warrior I kill the druid." Also, I kill druids surprisingly well since I have a snare and move just as fast as their travel form in my dps form. All things considered, ferals are pretty much the anti-restos in terms of escape-ability.

Sadly, there are some broken teams at the moment. Ret pallies have an AoE attack on a 10 second cooldown that heals for 20% of the damage they do, also they have a talent that lets 50% of their swings ignore absorption affects. Ret pallies are very difficult to deal with, especially on double dps teams, but the most annoying pallies are the holy ones. They never oom... ever. Like, on live a pally will EVENTUALLY run out of mana, in 10 years, but you can fight through that and hope that he eventually runs out. On beta, they simply don't dip below 90% unless they are spamming holy light, but even then their regen is simply stupid. Also, shamangs never OoM either thanks to water shield. It's pretty impressive how well water shield works: you can't attack a shamang because he'll get his mana back faster due to the water shield proc, and you can't ignore the shamang because he'll just drop combat and drink. I think both of these healers need looking into with regard to PvP balance.

Then there's my priest. My poor constantly OoM priest, he's out of mana first, and usually dead first... there just needs to be something done there. Currently, he does not have Rapture, but we're going to try that build out soon, so who knows.

Someone on the beta forum perturbed me by claiming that ferals at level 80 could only maintain 1600 dps... I want to prove him wrong but I'm having a hell of a time trying to get my game running with a dps meter.

I'll post back with numbers.

EDIT:

Here I am:


As you can see I'm rocking over 2100 dps sustained for at almost four minutes. This is without me thinking much about the dps rotation except while I'm doing it, so you'll see some Rake's and one Maim, and probably some other retarded stuff. Long-story-short: feral dps will be fine against raid bosses, in fact it's comparable to mut rogues and mages right now.

Again, I am back with more stress testing results. Firstly, let me note that Blizz is going to increase the damage output of Chaos Bolt in an upcoming patch. My first reaction to this was not "woohoo!" as many would guess, but rather one of "wtf?!" I feel this way because currently no one can actually train the max rank of Chaos Bolt. As it stands now, we can only train rank 2, and there are 4 ranks of the spell, and blizz is content just blindly upping the damage.

Bah, you got me into the forums again... anyway...

So, I did some more feral stress testing last night, and while I think feral will be stupidly fun on a real server, it's just mind-bendingly annoying on the beta server. The lag in Wintergrasp is amazing... I can't even express how bad the lag is. Wintergrasp is going to be lots of fun... but damn... that lag...

Anyway, I decided to see how high I could get some abilities in org on the training dummies (which, if you haven't seen them or heard about them, could very well be the best addition to the game; you have boss-level targets in orgrimmar that can be attacked and your damage can be tested... very awesome). I was messing with Ferocious Bite when I got this gem.

That's right, 15k damage on a ferocious bite crit. Either Blizzard doesn't care if ferals can really rock their burst potential that high, or they just don't know. Either way, I'm looking forward to being feral again.

Also, the strangest thing has happened, my brother is looking forward to being discipline. It's a little confusing thinking about him as a healer after so long as a dps class... but then again it will be hard to think of my druid has a dps class again after so long as resto. Anyway, disc and feral have a lot of synergy with one another and end up doing alright in world pvp, we will have to wait and see with the arena even though we have high hopes for it. For now, let's just all stare at that crit and enjoy it for a while.

EDIT:
This just in, GhostCrawler (class developer) has just announced that either LotP or ILotP will have a mana regen component, which will really help ferals in the arena game, as mana is really the crux of the matter. If we oom, we lose. Giving us an active mana regen on our one purpose (dps) is just what the doctor ordered. The only question then becomes "how do we make enough room for it?" Did you ever think you'd see the day where you had a feral build without HotW? The point is, 10% attack power scales decently, but not as well as 6% more damage might (and you get iLotP which would help a healer keep you up).

SNEAKYEDIT:
I just went and tested the numbers of this spec versus this spec. I was actually a bit surprised to see that the numbers come out basically the same (in damage terms) even though the latter spec has less attack power. The trade off really becomes a scaling issue; that is, if you use Savage Roar with the first spec, you're AP is going to increase by more, but at the end of the day, the second spec will still be doing 6% more damage, which looks like it will make up the difference in damage from attack power. Therefore, you get Improved Leader of the Pack and lose a little mana in the hopes that the regen from the ability outways the ~800 mana lost from not picking up HotW. This is really exciting. This is a talent that scales well and we actually have the choice to ignore it. I am very excited.

ALSO, something minor that's pretty cool and worth noting: battleground tokens (and other types of tokens as well) no longer take up bag space, they have their own pane on the character menu called "Tokens" which list all your various currencies. VERY cool, I hate walking around with eots, wsg, ab, and av marks taking up 4 slots in my bags.

ME! Lawl. Anyway, quick updates first, then a long diatribe about feral:

Everlasting Affliction: neat on paper, broken on beta. The shadow bolts and drain life spells do indeed reset the duration of Corruption, which is awesome, but the spell damage coefficient part of the talent is not working at all.

Pandemic: neat on paper, just not very good at all in practice. Rather than truly making the tick of a damage-over-time-ability do double damage as a critical strike, they took a cop out and made it a proc on dot damage that would fire a little mini shadow bolt which mirrors the damage that proc'd it (it looks like Timbal's proc). The problem here becomes painfully obvious when playing with the training dummies in Org. First, it mirrors the damage instead of precalculating double damage and spreading it over the two attacks, so if your dot tick SHOULD do 700, but it gets half absorbed (or something reduces its damage), you don't get double of the original damage, but the final damage. For example, say you have been pounding this priest into the ground and you are about to knock his PW:S off and it has 650 damage left on the shield. Your corruption SHOULD hit for 700, but 650 gets absorbed by the shield, and Pandemic procs a "crit", which SHOULD be 1400 damage done, but instead the total damage done is 50 (650 absorbed) AND 50 from the Pandemic proc. 100 damage done instead of the 750 that should have happened on a shadow bolt crit instead where the critical damage is calculated first then the absorption effects are calculated. This is just a sloppy talent at the moment.

Haunt: Just not a very good spell anymore. It was changed from "returns health equal to 20% of the damage done during Haunt's duration" to "returns 20% of Haunt's damage in health." Oh, so it gives me back ~400hp with PTR gear and it improves my dot damage by 20%. It's kind of neat, but I don't see it being a break-out talent anymore.

Backdraft: nerfed from "increases the haste of your next 3 destruction spells by 30%" to "reduces the cost of your next 3 destruction spells by 30%." Probably decent for PvE locks, but I won't be taking it.

Improved Soul Leach: nerfed from "20% of the damage done is returned as mana" to "2% of your max mana returned. This is a double-edged sword because at least the change scales in a way we would expect... with mana. However, 2% of your maximum mana in full PvP gear is about 250 mana, which is less than the cost of every spell by about double. I am extremely underwhelmed with this talent. At least 20% of the damage done was tons of mana... which might be overpowered, at least it made me have to chose between some talents. Now, this talent (and probably the talent before it) is off the table.

Shadowfury: Instant cast now, stun is up to 3 seconds. This is just awesome. Very awesome.

Shadowflame: a slightly expensive spell that does decent damage and applies a decent dot... except for the range being less than amazing, this is a pretty decent ability. I'm luke-warm on it, and I will have to actually try out some PvP with it before I decide completely.

Demonic Circle and Demonic Circleport: This is exactly what destruction builds (and probably others as well) need in the arena... an escape mechanic. My 2s team gets by mainly on ignorance on the part of our opponents. They assume I am sl/sl, but if they don't, they usually train me and win because I have no way of making distance from a warrior/rogue. Currently, the teleport ability only costs 100 mana, which is rather nice, but it won't tell you in any way whether you are in range of teleporting, and 100 yards is smaller than one would imagine.

Pyroclasm: doesn't yet work with Conflagrate.

Ruin and Devastation: broken... can't put a single point into Devastation at the moment.

Chaos Bolt: there are only 2 ranks at the moment, so the damage is pretty non-existent. Also, I haven't tested the "piercing" aspect of the talent yet.

The rumors about Spellstones and Firestones becoming temporary weapon enchants (or like them anyway) are either only rumors or not yet implemented.


LET'S TALK ABOUT DRUIDS. I guess I'll start with feral since that's where I spent the most time.

Berserk: A really neat ability, however nerfed from "immune to all cc/snares/roots for duration" to "immune to fear for duration and cannot use Tiger's Fury." Personally, this is just Blizzard being bastards. They found that Berserk was exactly what the doctor ordered on feral, and it made them a little too good. So, instead of nerfing the duration or something that could be handled, they simply changed the entire mechanic to be "when the druid pops Berserk, cc-train him as hard as possible." Also, it breaks on shifting out of cat, which makes Berserk cause the druid to be susceptible to even MORE cc options than usual (poly, entangling roots, etc). All thing considered, this talent needs some love before I'm completely sold on it, but I have so many points in my feral build as-is, I will probably take it for grinding, if nothing else. Also, this is basically Adrenaline Rush for druids, so dps+druid is a viable option if you time your cc-zerk just right. Something tells me that shadow+feral could be rather viable with fear+roots+cyclone.

Infected Wounds: Best. Talent. In. Feral. Tree. Now that it only stacks twice to get that 50% speed reduction, ferals are quite the opponent against ranged dpsers. We can keep close proximity with hunters and wreck mages by shifting out of their rooting abilities and cat-leap with their blinks. Also, 20% attack speed debuff on top of the movement speed debuff? Ferals will take all three talent points here. Period.

Rend and Tear: takes some getting used to the dps-cycles, but in PvP, my guess is that timing won't be an issue. Set up a nasty little finishing combo such that one has 5 combo points and is dps'ing one target. My brother and I were working on this: a good fear-bomb will knock your opponent out of combat with you, and you can start a nice little "pounce-fb-tiger's fury-shred-shred-shred" combo that will USUALLY kill most non-plate-wearing classes. Oh, I also had a 5 point ferocious bite crit for 12k against a target dummy, and those are raid-boss stats.

Feral Charge (cat): The cooldown is too long and the minimum distance makes it unwieldy. True, rogues have to contend with the same cooldown, but they get a damage bonus on the ability as well. Personally, I like it even though the animation is a little odd looking. If the minimum distance were removed, it would be an amazing talent, as is it's just "great."

King of the Jungle: Yes. Finally, ferals have a cooldown baseline ability in Tiger's Fury and it's damage has been buffed significantly to warrant the cooldown. Additionally, KotJ makes it an amazing combo-ability, since a feral druid needs to keep certain abilities up to do GREAT damage, they will spend 100 energy rather easily putting up a bleed and mangle and getting to 5 combo points, so the quick "gimme 60 energy and a heap of damage" ability is a welcomed change. Additionally, it's on a short cooldown where we could actually use this a few times in an arena match.

Primal Tenacity: Definitely saw this working at wintergrasp. My brother spec'd disc and he was having NO trouble keeping me up during the stuns, and the fears didn't last nearly as long as they used to. In fact, I kept hitting my trinket when a fear had only one second remaining... guess I'll be saving trinket for Cyclone.

Savage Roar: Amazing, I was rocking 6k AP with this badboy up, and it lasts a GOOD long while. The problem with this is keeping it up during a FB-combo. It gets difficult getting 1) SR up, 2) a bleed on the opponent, 3) FFF on the opponent, 4) Mangle on the opponent, 5) 5 combo points on the opponent. If you can manage those five things (you can even ignore 4), you can get some ridiculously high FB crits. All things considered, it's nice to have something where if one opponent is going to get away, instead of giving up those 5 cps you might have, you can just pop SR and switch targets.

Omen of Clarity: Doesn't proc as often as it used to, but at least it can't be dispelled anymore.

Nourish: Damn... best heal in the game.

Revive: 'bout damned time.


I have been furiously posting feedback on the beta client, and rigorously posting in the beta forums to try and address the feral mana issue. Ferals only have 6k mana, and shapeshifting (talented) costs 900 per shift. It's just too much for ferals to be viable in PvP because they end up losing all their utility as a cc'er and a quick spot-healer. Although, they claim to be focusing on that and they hope to have a solution out in the next build. Also, they said that they will likely enable barkskin's use in feral form, which would be nice.

Couple other things that are awesome: 1) macros follow your account... no more actionbars fubar at work, 2) feral swiftness working indoors is amazing, 3) Furor letting my cat keep all his energy all the time is amazing. Couple other things that are NOT so awesome: going my infinite-mana ToL/Dreamstate spec, I only have 33% physical damage reduction as compared to the 28% I have without it on live. And because I am not gemmed for mp5, the starter resto set has 650ish mp5 out of the 5 sec rule, and 280 in it. At least ToL can't be sapped and lifebloom lasts 10 seconds. Also, 5k Nourish HITS are amazing.

Lastly: November 13 is two days before my birthday, and it is also the announced release of WotLK. It's going to be a good end-of-the-year.

On a side note: we went to a party over the weekend and my gf made out with another chick. Is this awesome?

I got in... so did my brother... how random is Blizz?

Anyway, I decided to copy my druid account over, so in a couple days when the copy finishes (wtf right?), I'll post some stuff.

Things I want to test out:

1) ZerkZerk
2) FeralSnarel
3) Passive OoC
4) King of the Jungle
5) Spell power changes (Lots of healing gear, mind you)
6) Resto spec (ToL in particular)

EXCITED... I was going to post something this morning about how depressed I was, but I got busy and closed the browser... also I'm not depressed anymore. Looking forward to testing this biznatch.

NEXT-DAY-EDIT:
Okay, so I got my druid over... but I'm STILL patching. Gotta thank Blizz for completely missing the point of distributive patching. I'm sitting here at work with our dual T1 lines, trying to download this patch (which is 3.0.1... not a build number... I guess it's all of them???) which is 2GB big. So, I search around for patches, and there are a bunch on torrents, so I get my client up to 8714 (3 patches) and I hit a brick wall. The ONLY torrents out there now are the "3.0.1" patch variety. SIGH.

At least it's gone down from 2GB to 1.15 total... as if that were a good thing. Plus, I still have to install the client, then patch at home. It looks like playing the beta servers TOMORROW might not be out of the question... but it is for today.

I don't usually gush over abilities/talents that haven't been locked into existence yet, but this one has to be noted.

Everlasting Affliction is a hilarious talent that is the 45-point-tier of the Affliction tree, and causes all damage done by (meaning every tick of) Corruption, Unstable Affliction, and Siphon Life to increase the bonus spell damage received by 5%.

Okay, so let's use Siphon Life, and 1000 spell power as a base for the test. 81 damage every 3 seconds for 30 seconds, and it gets 100% bonus spell power for the duration. That means: (81*30/3 + 1000) * 1.05 (SE) * 1.1 (SM) and let's say you don't have any other buffs up (Haunt, ISB, etc). That's base damage of 2090 over 30 seconds... not bad.

BUT WAIT, every time it ticks, it gets stronger. Okay, let's divide that by 10 to get the first tick: 209. Now, the second tick is going to have 5% more spell power, so - (81*30/3+1000*1.05)*1.05*1.1/10 = 214. That's pretty good, I went off and crunched the numbers and found that the very last tick of Siphon Life(max rank) will tick for 273, which is almost 70 additional damage from the first tick. This gives us a complete bonus of 298 damage, very nice.

Hold up, getting extra damage from dots is nice and all, but wasn't there another part of Everlasting Affliction that was pretty neat? Oh, you mean the "your Shadow Bolt and Drain Life abilities have a 100% chance to reset the duration of Corruption" and Corruption gets this nice +5% spell damage thing as well? Yeah... that's pretty ridiculous. Let's go over the math here. Same exact stuff, except we have to change the numbers up a bit. For one, they are changing Improved Corruption (because Corruption is going to be base instant cast now) to be 20% more damage done by Corruption. Also, we get 5% more damage from Corruption from Contagion, and again we are not using CoE or any other shadow buffing abilities.

Okay, so the math rolls like this: (1080+1000*1.26*1.05^T))*1.05*1.1*1.2*1.05/6. That's Corruption's total damage, plus spell power times the coefficient for Corruption with Empowered Corruption times T, the tick multiplier which starts at zero (which makes it multiplied by 1 for all you non-math-wizzes). Then we multiply that number by our multipliers (Shadow Embrace, Shadow Mastery, Improved Corruption, Contagion) and divide by the number of ticks to get the tick damage. The first tick will do 576. The last tick will do 683. That means that this 5 point talent deep in the Affliction tree will give us 359 additional damage from a full Corruption duration.

However, there is no "full" Corruption duration anymore, we can keep tacking on time because of Everlasting Affliction. If I hit the opponent with a shadow bolt while corruption is up, I get a whole new timer, but the same Corruption, so the multiplier keeps stacking. If I only get it to go around twice, it will be ticking for 855. If I continue to keep Corruption up, it will continue to grow. This is where the stupidity of the talent comes into play. The Blizzard devs have not implemented an upper-bound for this yet. So, on beta we are seeing locks going up against those mobs in Blasted Lands who become immune to death unless you have the quest item, putting a Corruption up, and keeping it up with drain life. After 1 minute of Corruption being continually refreshed, it will tick for 1096. This is completely bonkers... look at this graph that shows the damage Corruption would do in a 5 minute boss encounter.



I'll let you think about this... the numbers speak for themselves in my opinion.

Titles, mounts and rare items should be the reward for doing well in arenas....not the equipment you need to compete. You don't see olympic atheletes competing for brand new Nike gear....they compete for medals....Nike supplies the gear to make them competitive.

Man, I was in the WotLK-PvP forum and came across this gem. At first, I thought of all the derisive retorts I could make, but then I think the poster's point started sinking in. This is probably the heart of the matter which I have been complaining about since the onset of season three (and probably a LITTLE bit before that). WHY am I competing to get gear which will be used for competition? It just makes no sense. I have finally become one of those jaded resto druids who has a warrior in full s4 (save for s2 shoulders and a s3 mace) team mate and we just laugh at some comps in 2s. I especially laugh at feral druids, though we don't see many of them. I have become that which I hate most... a cynical annoying druid in good gear who feels he is elite because of his purples.

I remember when I was feral in the arenas. Admittedly, the time was short-lived, but it was most certainly fun. Now, I'm having less fun being a heal-bot (though I am having some fun, admittedly) and mocking those who strive to make a name for themselves as a terrible specialization at the present build. How am I not a FotM druid? Sure, I have been around since the beginning with my druid as my first 60, but I have forsaken my feral ways just to advance myself to a plateau of gear that does not in any way help me play the way I want to play. I even remember saying "I'm just going to go resto until I get all my feral gear." I have had feral gear for a GOOD while now... a full s3 set (save for the helm with is the engineering helm) with the s2 mace... and where has it left me, continually upgrading my restoration gear. Well, NO MORE.

From this moment on, I guess I'll be upgrading my feral set. The nice thing is that I'll have some arena points laying around, since I have nearly no confidence in any of my teams getting to 1950... and I don't feel like upgrading from s3 to s4 pants and spending 500g getting the pants enchant. The good news is that when 3.0.X finally gets shipped out to the real world, I should have a decent feral set to try out with my brother's spriest or his pally... whichever he chooses to be the lucky one. Interestingly enough, I think that pally+feral could be a decent combo since ferals bring decent damage to the table along with never getting snared, so the pally can feel free to use BoF on himself, rather than the druid, who will be doing some snaring of his own.

Oh well... why am I getting gear by competition, for competition??? It is because I love competition. I'll keep coming back so long as the arena has SOME semblance of fairness and it still gets my heart pumping.

We are readily waiting for 3.0.2 to hit PTRs. That's right, Chaos Bolt, Backlash, Fearl Improvements, CRAZY Resto improvements, all hitting the PTR with the intention being that we would see a Live release of talents/skills/inscription before the actual WotLK release. To say the very least, I'm salivating. From what I'm hearing, Chaos Bolt builds are AMAZING burst dps, even against priests sporting 500 resilience, though Pyroclasm is not working with the current build of beta, and neither is Molten Core, so that frees up some room for Soul Leech and Improved Soul Leech, among other talents.

Also, guntir is talking about spec'ing disc instead of shadow at 70 IFF the spellpower changes go through and his dps gear is the same as the disc gear (give or take some spirit, etc) in terms of healing, and if that's the case, then I'm going to be spec'ing Haunt for the amazing dps and self-healing to couple with the drain team, it'll be weird.

On top of that, RESTO is insane right now. The Balance tree was completely revamped in the lower tiers, probably for synergy for healing builds because there simply aren't enough good healing talents in resto to spec 61 point in there (let alone 71).

OKAY, here are the builds:

Destro

Resto

Haunt (edited, they buffed a talent that requires 5 points in it now)

My warlock is rocking 4/5 s4, s2 shoulders, s2 weapon, s4 offhand, and s4 wand... he's not going to hit 1950, we can just forget that, and it's unlikely that we're gunna hit 1800 unless we get a HUGE string of NOTROGUE+healer or double-dps. Currently, we do 10 matches a week or so and we get 5-8 rogue+healer teams, so going up isn't really an option. I thought that warrior+shamang was supposed to be amazing now... why don't we see them, or warrior+druid, or warrior+healer anymore... we just see rogues.

Rogues rogues rogues.

So anyway, rocking about 1000 arena points at the moment, I guess I'll wait till I get to 5k, then see what's up. Maybe I'll buy the other set... who knows... who cares.

Okay, next week I will have enough points to buy my s3 healing main hand on my druid. This is awesome, as it is the last REAL upgrade I will be getting for a while. I dunno if we'll ever hit 1950, but if we do, then we're likely to hit 2050 as well, as we were convinced that 1800 was doable based on the fact that we were 100 points lower. However, if I get to the point where I have no upgrades (and I dunno if I'm going to be upgrading to the s4 pants, as it's a lot of gold to be sinking into a measly upgrade, might just try and bubble 1800 long enough to get the s3 feral staff). Who knows, it's all crazy at the moment, and people are talking about 3.0 hitting live servers within the month...

wouldn't THAT be interesting.