Let's Talk Turkey!
10:37 AM
Posted by Reygahnci on Thursday, August 6, 2009
Feral turkey, to be specific. What is my first impression of 3.2? AMAZING! The Feral nerfs to damage were not poorly received, I still do pretty intense damage in PvP/PvE, just a tiny bit less. The Resilience change really has made Guntir able to live through some serious burst damage (we can pretty reliably beat rogue+priest now). The DK nerfs are largely not felt (sadly, they are still tank-cannons in PvP... though we only faced Frost dks... maybe that's what the OP spec for PvP is now, haven't seen any Unholy yet).
Okay, enough of that, let's talk about our matches from yesterday, which were ALL 2400 MMR btw... not sure why we were getting teams 200 MMR above us, but that's what we got:
Rogue+Dist: we got 4 of these teams and beat 3 of them (the one we didn't beat opened up on Guntir, peeled me with a Fear (which I ate so I could trinket Blind later), and completely unloaded on him to kill him during Pain Suppression... just bad luck). Essentially, rogues in PvE gear can't do enough damage to kill Guntir without me entering into the mix, and the rogues in PvP gear simply can't kill Guntir, making the match a mana-race which we win because of Innervate. This team is actually something we're slightly strong against instead of slightly weak against. Most of the rogues we face wear all PvE gear, so while I'm still dealing the same damage I was in 3.1 to them, they are dealing 10% less to Guntir and ~8% less to me. I'm SUPER happy about the changes in 3.2 with regard to this team.
Rogue+Shadow: we got one of these opponents. It was your standard match except the beginning worked poorly... they Sapped Guntir, started stripping his debuffs, I Pounced the SPriest, switched to Bear, the Rogue jumped Guntir and popped evasion, I Cycloned him, he came out of Cyclone and tried to vanish and I hit him with Bash at the same time... so he vanished and reappeared stunned, put up a bleed, and beat them. Once rogues run out of cooldowns, they lose, particularly when you force the Shadow Priest to start healing... you're doing it right. The only trick here is that they can reset the match twice, so after this the rogue got a dispel from the priest and hit vanish#2 to try and reset, but Guntir and I just stayed in combat with the priest and drew the rogue out and killed him with Berserk + Bleeds. This match was our easiest (also our first match, so we were pleasantly surprised when Guntir lives through the damage).
Protadin+Warrior: we had bad luck on this one. Essentially, we killed the warrior twice if I got ONE crit during the Cyclone on the pally... but it never happened. Then at the end of the match, the warrior got 6 crits during his bladestorm and killed Guntir... skillz right? This isn't one we expect to lose very often (in fact, if we see these teams more I might switch back to Shred to deal more damage... but I love the Mangle spec against priest+rogue... we'll see).
Protadin+FrostDK: This is exactly the same thing as the Prot+Warrior team... bad luck with no crits at crucial times and the Prot pally doesn't OOM. One thing I tried in this match that seemed to REALLY bleed the Protadin's mana pool was that I switched targets hard and keep 5Rips up on both of them as much as possible (with SR up, of course). Prot pallies really take full damage from Rake/Rip (minus resilience and some flat damage reduction talents they have, but not much reduction in all, maybe 15%) as do FrostDKs. There was a point where both of them were at 20% hp and I had Berserk, so we Cycloned the protadin (who didn't have his trinket up... I mean this was a win!) and Berserked the DK (who didn't have IBF up either... we were gunna win) and I had all I needed, he popped his Ghoul, sac'd it for some health, got to 50%, and I just didn't get ANY crits in there. If any ONE of my attacks Crit, we win this match.
Druid+Warrior: We lost to this team as well... quite annoying really. We got the druid OOM after his Innervate (which Guntir knocked off on the first tick) and Guntir had ~4k mana... we should have won. So, I switched to the Druid (mistake #1) to keep him in combat and spending what little mana he had, and Guntir got hit by Improved Overpower, MS, SuddenDeath, a white crit, then an Execute crit... essentially he took the maximum damage he could from that rotation while healing himself for 25% of his full ability. Long-story-short: when we get to this position again (which we do a lot), I won't switch off the warrior and keep him off Guntir and just use FFF to keep the druid from drinking.
Druid+Ret: We faced this team for our first match on the new Lordaeron (which is beautiful by the way). Ret's burst is lowered significantly, but his sustained is still pretty strong. The difference is that Ret only has one defensive cooldown every 5 minutes, so we just train him and CC as needed to apply pressure, eventually we got the gib. The one thing I will make mention about the new Lordaeron is that as a Feral, I move faster than everyone else, and the crypt in the middle has been smoothed out, but the incline is now so severe that when chasing over the top, I will end up flying too far... I end up "falling off" the top instead of walking down the slope. It took me a minute to figure out how best to deal with this... just do figure-8s to avoid CC casts and it'll put you down on the ground where you can turn left/right and be next to your target.
Disc+Ret: We lost to this team... we SHOULDN'T have lost to this team, it was entirely my fault. We almost won a couple times, just didn't do enough damage while the priest was CC'd. Here's the problem: we zone in, I put on a spell-power weapon to buff thorns, and I forgot to take it off. DOH, so I'm running around this match with 3,000 less attack power. That's right, THREE THOUSAND LESS ATTACK POWER... and we almost still won. This won't happen again.
I already spoke a little about Lord, another change they did was that you start in a tunnel as opposed to an alcove now. So, there's no LoS (or bar in the middle of the entry-way) issues: ducking into the starting area cannot break LoS on anyone outside the starting area (can't duck in there and drink)... which is awesome for our team. Also changed in this patch, Sewers has become a better map in one regard that you can mount, it's bigger, and flare/DnD can't reach your stairs from their stairs, so you can stay stealthed against these comps. The one thing I noticed and hated: you have less LoS from the bottom to the top platform, meaning that using Feral Charge (Cat) from the bottom to the top only works if your enemy is right at the edge (whereas you USED to be able to get to nearly the middle of the platform... not anymore). OH, and they took the fire aspect out of the Ring of Valor: when you get to the top, the fire is on for aesthetic reasons, but turns off as soon as you can get out of the area and stays off... awesome changes all around.
So all things considered, I'm extremely happy about 3.2 thus far, we went 5-5 yesterday and gained ~20 rating (as we were playing 2400 teams non-stop), so we're going to try and grind out some more matches to climb.
August 7, 2009 at 11:35 AM
Nice to hear a little blow-by-blow and a touch of analysis. My favorite content!