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?