I Hate Ferals
10:53 AM
Posted by Reygahnci on Thursday, December 4, 2008
It took me a while to remember this fact. 90% of the player base of World of Warcraft are terrible at PvP, and usually poor at grasping the full extent of the concepts required to PvP well. Let me put down a 'for instance':
"Ferals have none of the survival talents/abilities of other classes [long list of survival talents/abilities removed for reading sake... Bubble, etc], and therefore will be terrible in the arena as they will be the first targets and receive the train of death while their partners are ignored or cc'd."
This is just patently absurd. I understand that the previous seasons have been riddled with min/maxing their way to the top, but s4 really opened the eyes of a lot of players and showed how hybrid play can really be just as effective (and more effective) in scenarios where played right. For instance, restokin+rogue was an amazing hybrid team which trumped resto+warrior if both teams were played perfectly because of the slew of utility and supplemental dps from the restokin coupled with the longevity and utility of the rogue, not to mention they were the top 2 most mobile classes in the game. Given this understanding, my guess is that this person hasn't even looked into talents other than the ones which will increase his/her dps. Sure, if you take HotW then you can't take PotP or perhaps even Primal Tenacity, which will greatly reduce your longevity in PvP. However, by dropping HotW and perhaps Predatory Instincts, you can pick up these other really useful survival talents at very little lost dps.
"Ferals will have no place in 3/5-man arenas as their only utility requires them to stop dps'ing long enough to get a cast off, and that will never happen because their dps is so low compared to other melees that they need 100% dps time to keep up."
Again, patently absurd. Next to the Retadins before they were nerfed, ferals were doing the MOST damage in arenas consistently, with rogues a distant 3rd. The problem with rogue dps is that the only arena spec we saw was Mutilate, and while Mutilate rogues do a lot of damage, it's very crit-dependent and bursty. All we had to do was let the rogue get the opener on my priest, then I would get my opener on him and we'd win. I could cyclone/root through his evasion while my priest got away, then I could flat out-dps him and without Cheat Death, he would die. The ONLY time we had trouble with a rogue was when there were two of them, and we occasionally beat that team too... but back to the subject at hand. Roots and cyclone are both 1.5 second casts, which isn't super hard to get off in a PvP settings. Not to mention that since Maim doesn't necessarily break on damage anymore, you can use that as an effective CC as well because of the short cooldown. We had many MANY matches on beta that would require me to Maim one, root the other, and cyclone the maimed target for my priest to make his get-away, but it always worked out well, and half the time the other team didn't see it coming and would trinket maim only to get hit with the cyclone-train (as an added bonus, when they didn't do that and trinketed roots/cyclone, I would just switch up the casts and put roots on the cycloned target and vise versa).
Do I think that ferals will rule the arenas? No, not even close. I do think that our Priest+Feral team will be in great contention for a high rating though, simply because it's an unplayed comp for the most part and no one will instinctively know how to handle it. We already have strategies set up for a number of different likely popular comps, and we handled the good ones really well in beta. I realize beta and live are two different beasts, but if all plays the same, we could do really well.