Man... work has been super-hectic. I have not been able to find the time to play WoW, let alone write posts about it. Okay, well now it is Thanksgiving Week, which means that my workload has diminished a bit so I can crank this post out.

Tomorrow, the world ends! The Cataclysm is officially happening tomorrow; no, not the expansion, but all the stuff that leads up to the expansion: the world cracking, Deathwing escaping, the world changing, etc. While this is kind of cool, there are still no skirmishes (as far as I know), and therefore there is no PvP. No grinding as well will amount to no WoW worth playing. Let us face facts here, battlegrounds pale in comparison to the Arena in terms of actual PvP. The Arena is just more intense and more bang for your buck in terms of time committed and fun gained.

We have had a while now for people to play the new 4.0 build on Live and determine some understandings about the change of the game. The funny thing is that I played some Battlegrounds as Feral a bit to test some things out, and while the healing has been drastically nerfed and many healers are feeling underwhelmed with the changes, Guntir is still a dominant healer with me around. We walked into BGs with healers in those bgs complaining about how hard things were and yet Guntir and I were facerolling everything in our path. So badly were we beating these guys that we just stopped doing them... there was no challenge.

Here is a funny little post out of Arena Junkies that I thought was worth putting up. It has a poll amongst Arena Junkie members (that is, people who have hit 2400 in any bracket) as to which class (dps) will be the most overpowered in Cataclysm. Right now, the number one class is obviously Mages since Frost is essentially "Proc Fingers of Frost, spam Icelance, collect points." However, the interesting bit is which class is #2 on the "OP-Meter." That is right; it is Ferals claiming the cream-of-the-crop voting for #2. I can see a number of reasons why this might be, but it basically amounts to "Rip and Rake do TONS of damage with Mastery being our best stat, and now we don't need SR up 100% AND we were given a kick to deal with casters." In my opinion, the big change there is the Kick... although it is hard to argue about SR not being mandatory for reasonable damage given that it costs so many combo points. As a prerequisite for damage, it was a hindrance, but as simply extra white damage, it can be used at 1 point after the full ramp-up of Rip/Rake for basically 50% more white swing damage for nearly free.

Let's see... changes... changes... oh, Leader of the Pack is being nerfed from 8% healing to 4% healing on the proc, which I think everyone saw coming. At least the mana portion stayed the same (8% base mana returned; I wish this was total) so we still have powerful shapeshifting (ss'ing is cheaper than in 3.3.5 even at 85; it's awesome). Although, Natural Shapeshifter is still in the Resto tree, and for the life of me I have no idea why. OH, Vengeance is going to remain on the Feral after leaving Bear Form (might be canceled if you enter cat form though) so we can actually shapeshift out of Bear Form in PvP to drop snares or throw a Cyclone or what-have-you and keep our additional attack power; that'll be nice. Other than that, there is not much to say on this front.

Comps-wise, Guntir and I keep talking about threes comps to run in Cataclysm... we LIKE the idea of having a DK with us, but all signs out of the Beta so far is that DKs will be less than amazing at 85 even with Necrotic Strike. Only time will tell, but we are keeping our options open, and with Mages getting the #1 slot on that list, it isn't outside the realm of possibility for us to run Feral+Frost+Disc, which might be a strong comp.