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.