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.