I finally have a reason to post again. Quick update: arenas are laggy as shit, if one clicks too quickly on the "enter arena" button they'll get rocked and kicked out, leaving arena matches 2v0 or 2v1 or 1v1 a lot of the time, and retribution paladins are completely out-of-their-minds-OP right now due to crazily stacking multipliers on crusader strike and really short cooldown-wielding long-duration-having cc (repentance).

Okay, now that we're up to speed, I'm specing my druid for a healing touch build today. This spec, to be specific. "But Healing Touch is too hard to get off in most PvP scenarios!" Shut up and stop whining, I'm a busy man, I don't have time for your nonsense. Here, let's break it down:

I found some stacking that I don't believe Blizzard has fully looked at yet. I was trying to compare Flash Heal to Healing Touch (with the Healing Touch glyph) when I noticed something on the WoWWiki page. Priest's have Flash Heal, which is a 1.5 second cast heal and so it gets 42.86% of their healing with it for scaling purposes. Fine, but when I looked at Empowered Healing (used to give them 10% more spell power coefficients for Flash Heal, now it's 20%... but WoWWiki hasn't updated, so we'll stick with 10% for this experiment), I noticed that the total percentage was NOT 47.15% (which would be 42.86% * 110%), rather it was 52.86%.

"Why is this important, and how does it relate to Healing Touch!?"

I'm getting to that... jees, keep your pants on (unless you're a lovely lady, in which case I wouldn't hold it against you to remove them... send pics). There is a talent in the Restoration tree called "Empowered Touch" which does something similar to Empowered Healing, except the coefficient addition was designed around Healing Touch being (at best) a 3.0 sec cast, so they weighted it very heavily... 40% additional healing.

"Whoa... okay... so if I get the Glyph of Healing Touch and Empowered Touch, I'm looking at essentially a flash heal with an 82.86% coefficient?"

Damn skippy. I went and tried this on my level 70 druid on the beta server (since all servers are down for maintenance currently) and with the spec I linked before, Healing Touch is a 450 mana, 1.0 second, ~3k heal with my ~1800 healing.

"Holy pooping jehova! That's better than Flash Heal talented with 2500 healing..."

Yeah. It is. I don't think Blizz has come to terms with what they have given level 70 druids for the remaining time, but truth be told, I might not use Lifebloom anymore. Rejuvenation, Healing Touch, and Swiftmend... with 400mp5 from Dreamstate... yeah... that just happened.

I have been a bit quiet, lately, and I blame this on lack of interest. The main problem vexing me at the moment is that we are in a world of flux. A realm of ever-changing axioms, if such can be, causes us great anxiety and confusion in the best of scenarios. Over the last few months I have been verbosely looking forward to the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion: Wrath of the Lich King. Truth be told however, there is not a whole lot that I am looking forward to. Sure, the scenery will be beautiful and the quests will be long and interesting, or rather as long and interesting as quests can be while grinding, but we are still moving toward a world that is completely and utterly held in the "end-game."

In the early days, when the cap was set to sixty, the dungeons that were explored and eventually conquered were epic in scope, length, and dedication required. One would have to rally thirty-nine of her closest friends together to even attempt to walk past the first pull, and it was the defining "high-bar" for many guilds and unattainable by many more. In these days, the grind was precisely that: a grind. One would only be grinding for the "end-game" that would yield them their highly sought-after treasures from the depths of the online world. In these times, I never looked into the heart of the world to find my treasure, rather it was in competition that my needs were sated.

My "end-game" was PvP. I never longed for the gear, I simply wanted to compete. Herein lies the problem: this is no more an end-game than it is a pacification. I view the game as more of a round-based first person shooter, rather than the massively multiplayer epic that it is meant to be. Maybe this is a problem with my outlook, or maybe it's a problem with the design of the game in that it is too appealing to casuals and it does not really cater to them. Either way, it feels like once I get to the maximum level, I end up "going through the motions" for PvP and enjoying the game less and less. I am hopeful that the achievements feature added today will improve my outlook, as I will again have reason to do ridiculous things (see achievement: LEEEEEEEEEROY!). Also, the talent changes threaten to break up the current state of 2s arena play in that more viable options may thrust themselves from the shelves of mediocrity and into the fray of competition.

Season four ends on Tuesday and the 3.0 patch is scheduled to drop then as well. We finished this season at 1863 team rating on the druid+warrior, so I will get my s3 feral staff which is nice. Additionally, I spec'd restokin for fun and we did ~15 5s matches with hunter+feral+disc. We did surprisingly well considering how neither the priest nor myself were spending a horrible amount of time healing. We're probably going to continue Resto+Warrior after s4 ends, but with the new talents we're going to try out prot+resto because of the hilarious amount of damage prot is getting and the amount of stuns mixed with restos survivability. Also, we can probably duo MC a little easier with him as prot and me with Wild Growth.

Also, BlizzCon starts tomorrow and promises to have more updates, I'll be back with those.

Officially content.

Mangle (Cat) has had it's damage upped from 160% + x to 200% + y (where y > x).
Rake has had it's damage upped (and now scales ridiculously) from [AP / 100 + 190] + [1161 + AP * 0.06] to [AP / 100 + 190] + [1161 + AP * 0.18] and while this buff might seem minor, let's do some quick math. I have 6k attack power with SR up, that's 1771 total damage buffed to 2491 (720 damage buff... nice).

A blue claimed they would be looking into the positional requirement for shred, but I think I could do without that now... I'd still welcome that change with open arms... but I don't feel that I NEED it anymore.

Additionally, honor points will definitely carry over from TBC to WotLK, but arena points will be wiped.

Also additionally, October 14 is the last day of season 4 of the arena, and the likely (95% certainty) release date of 3.0.