Dear lord, there is straight up NOTHING going on. We have not played any more 3v3s since I last posted playing with Merk and hitting 2159... we're just sitting around waiting for him to be less busy with Heroics in ICC. Hopefully, we can grab him today and make a 2200 push...

Okay, so the TR has moved forward to the top 8 and basically shows a few things:

1) Casters are horribly imbalanced right now.
2) Fuck casters

Yeah... I made this point in a GC thread on the boards that was discussing how "OP" MS effects are currently, and while I generally agree that 50% healing debuffs should go the way of the dodo come Cataclysm (and really should have been done away with this expansion), Casters dwarf the imbalance that healing reduction effects present.

How? Well, if healing reduction effects and healing in general were truly overpowered, then we would expect to see plenty of double-healer+Warrior comps coming through in the top8, but we actually see the exact opposite of that; there were ZERO double-healer teams that made it through, Warrior or otherwise. They simply do not exist because the strength of a double-healer team is the fact that double-healer can out-heal TRAINS... but Casters don't train... they GCD people. A healer (or two) cannot heal through 2 spells that land instantaneously and kill the target.

Hopefully, something is done to staunch the craziness that is Casters on Bloodlust... because it has honestly gotten out of hand. Every other queue is against a spellcleave of some variety, and 90% of those matches are won or lost by virtue of whether the opposition landed a GCD-gib on someone. Luckily, a lot of those teams will focus on me instead of Merk or Kyske... which means that if they stun me, I take 30% damage reduction and those gibs are much less likely... and I have Barkskin and Corroded Skeleton Key if things get dicey or Kyske's eating CC or something. We get into trouble when those teams eventually turn on Kyske or Merk and GCD them on the swap... I hate spellcleaves and I hope they nerf Bloodlust into a self-buff only.

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We started running Super-Mega-Ultra-Beastcleave (I don't recall if I posted this before now). It is a Holy Pally, Disc Priest (Guntir), BM Hunter, Enhance Shammy, and me (Feral)... we basically pick Lock/Priest and train them to death.
There's not much to say here except that matches are quick and fun, and we'll be making a 2200 run as best we can.

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There has been some talk in the forums about the possibility of season 9 starting at some point. I thought that this seemed likely for a while because we have been in season 8 forever now, but Guntir and I had lunch yesterday and we discussed this and he brought up some really good points as to why there likely won't be a s9 that matters:

1) There technically wasn't a season 5 in TBC.
2) Season 4 simply ENDED when 3.0 was dropped because they really couldn't balance anything around the 3.0 changes until level 80.
3) Season 9 would mean another tier of PvP gear... but there isn't going to be another tier of PvE gear... so that would mean PvP gear would be BETTER than PvE gear (iLvL-wise)... and we can't have that.

Therefore, I'm forced to admit that there probably will not be a season 9 until Cataclysm. Though, I feel that this is good... we really shouldn't allow the spellcleaves to continue for another season; they will have had their moment in the sun and after season 8 ends with 4.0, we would expect the changes to make EVERYTHING insane... not just casters.

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I hate myself, in case you didn't know. I'm forever a masochist, apparently, and after we actually hit 2200 and I buy my Greatstaff, we are going to try and help Seere hit 2200 to buy his weapon (he's a friend, after all), and then we were going to do something stupid.

What constitutes as stupid?

Disc+RestoShammy+Feral

Yeah... double-healer Feral. We are going to have to get Guntir a Solace or Purified Lunar Dust, but otherwise he already borderlines upon infinite mana in the presence of Innervate... if we put Mana Tide into the equation and another healer to balance out the load, no one will ever oom.

I think I have brought this up before, but this comp is run to some success in the European battlegrounds. They have hit 2600 under this spec and the basic idea is always the same: mana burn the most mana-dependent target, and train them to death. This is essentially how we play 2v2s as-is, putting another player into the mix who has an interrupt on a short cooldown, another CC that doesn't share DR with Cyclone, Roots, or Psychic Scream, Grounding Totem, Tremor Totem, and insane healing to boot... just seems like it would be a worth-while comp.

SURE, matches would take a while and revolve mostly around turn-n-burn nuke-play from both healers during long CC-chains on the opposing healer(s), but we're good at that play-style as-is... so why not, right?

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Last note... there have been a LOT of "Disc+Feral HALP" threads on the Druid boards of late, and I often find myself getting sick of reiterating the same strats over and over again to different players. Therefore, I have been toying with the idea of recording some matches and creating a YouTube channel where I can upload them with commentary to show how to handle certain comps as Feral+Disc.

I know I haven't been the biggest on the streaming videos of late... I have been spending a lot of time trying to get the Skype recording into action (unsuccessfully as of this writing) before I started streaming again... it's annoying to only hear me talking and answering questions with Guntir's speech being completely overwritten by blank audio, as it were.

If I get the Skype-recording working as I want it to, I will probably do this and may even start recording 3s matches... or 5s perhaps. The problem is that I don't think that any of these matches show off skill... it's mostly "out face-roll" your opponents and land a kill through heals.

I miss 2s being a valid bracket...