Well, this week has been flying by and before I knew what happened, it was Friday again. Work has been a little hectic and I threw my back out picking up a small jug of milk the other day (bah... why am I going to the gym every day if I can't even pick up milk without injuring myself!?), so I have been in a sour mood and thus have not posted. However, there are some things that changed worth mentioning:

1) PW:S got its cost increased 30% or so on live as a nerf aimed at PvE that only hit PvP. Essentially, some top-tier raid figured out that the best raid-healing was for a Disc Priest to spam PW:S on everyone since it is proactive healing, and for Resto Druids to give all their Innervates to the Priest. So, Blizz decided to nerf the cost of PW:S to make this inefficient for Disc... but gave Body and Soul (a deep Holy talent) a reduction component to negate this change. So, what does this mean? It means that the PvE Priests will go Holy, pick up this talent, have the exact same power-level on PW:S (minus the Disc mastery which was admittedly 20% bonus absorbance on shields) at the same cost, while PvP Priests eat a HUGE mana longevity nerf... which was the LAST thing Priests needed.

2) Resto Shammies gained 15% bonus healing... for free... because they're "bad" I guess. I am still unsure of the change here or why it was necessary, but I am guessing that it stemmed from PvE as well and aimed at making Shammies a better option as a healer in that realm. This is ignoring the fact that Shammy PvP healing is somewhat staggering before this buff, but now they can free-heal to great amounts. Seriously, we went against a Fury+RDruid team last night and aside from the fact that the Fury Warrior had half the healing of his RDruid and the RDruid never dipped below 60% mana, Guntir's shammy was dropping 40k healing crits on me... that's a bit overboard in my opinion.

3) Lastly, there was some feedback on that "massive" Warrior QQ thread about Arms having a bad time in PvP at the moment (the thread hit the 20 page mark... gasp... Ferals had a 280+ page thread in the PTR boards get ignored followed by a currently 100+ page thread in the Druid boards getting ignored) that had this gem:

We understand that you need to be on your target to do your jobs, but it didn’t really make sense to allow close to 100% up time either. On the other hand, we understand that without high up-time warriors might not bring as much to an Arena or Rated Battleground team, and we're adding new utility in a future patch to help address that, though we’re not yet ready to share details.


I am sorry... what was that? I must have read that wrong because there is no way that a 20-page thread about Arms Warriors got a blue to confirm some "new utility in a future patch" to address their up-time when Ferals have LESS UP-TIME currently. This is just ridiculous to me... I am having a hard time grasping how Blizz can be blind to one class and entirely supportive of another. Warriors have higher representation than Ferals and are currently dealing better damage with better up-time and Blizz is going to "fix" their up-time in a future patch?

WHERE IS THE LOVE!?

Bah... barking at the moon will not do anything. Let's talk about something more fun. For instance, our 3s team is doing extremely well. We are currently at something like 2275 team rating and our MMR is somewhere around 2400 (and growing). The hope is that the T2 weapons are released to the public on Tuesday and we can buy those outright (everyone has the points for them at the moment and we're sitting the team until Tuesday).

Additionally, I decided to actually record some 3s matches this week and got a lot of fun coverage. We played against some triple-dps RMP, some Shadowcleave variants (many of which are scary as hell), and an odd wizcleave composed of a Boomkin+Affliction+RShammy. The Shammy on this team had a Gladiator title, and I can only assume that it was from running an LSD comp during S8 because this team did not play very effectively. They did peel well and tried to keep my damage down, but in the long run they simply kept training me instead of a weaker target like Guntir or Lev, so I ended up out-pressuring their Lock and got one of our delicious CC-trains to land full duration while the Lock died.

I HOPE (read: hope... Monday is actually a holiday for me so I will not be at work and I will be out hiking all day) to get a 3s video up on youtube next Tuesday to illustrate how fun the comp is. Guntir says he is enjoying it, but he is actually more entertained by how much hate we get for running it than actually succeeding with it at the moment, which I find rather hilarious. All the same, it is hard to argue with results, and results is what we are getting.

I tried running this week with the Glyph of Ferocious Bite since Glyph of Entangling Roots is LARGELY useless for Ferals now. We had won seven matches in a row and were climbing MMR faster and faster and at this point we said "we will play until we lose" as it was getting kind of late. We got matched against a FrostMage+UnholyDK+RDruid team and started with me sitting the Mage (which is our usual plan because Mages have trouble with Feral damage when getting train-dispelled). This particular Mage played EXTREMELY well; he did not panic when I got on him, he used all his escape mechanics extremely well, and it took me a LONG time to get him to Iceblock. Additionally, his DK friend was super-training Guntir and peeling me whenever he could while his Druid was basically using full-duration Cyclones on Lev every time DR fell off and largely ignoring me. It became clear why the Druid was ignoring me later in the match when we started landing pressure on the Mage: the Druid was saving all that to peel me off his mage, which he did EXTREMELY well.

Nearing the 10m mark of the match, I had forced two Iceblocks out of the Mage, Guntir was at around 20% mana, Lev was around 60% mana, and their Resto Druid was around 90% mana without having used Innervate or drinking (fucking nerf RDruid, HPal, and RShammy mana longevity please... I know I do not usually swear this badly, but something seriously needs to change here). We ended up getting an absolutely glorious CC train on the Druid for the n'th time and got Cyclone->Psychic Scream->HoJ->Belf Silence, which is basically all we could hope to do to keep HoTs off the Mage (who got stripped of HoTs during this CC-chain). I got the Mage to 20k HP with 5cps and Rip/Rake up...

Ice Barrier breaks from a Rip tick, no damage done; I'm in the middle of Nagrand Arena with the Druid Feared (at this point) and the Mage blinks to a pillar (away from the Druid) and I DON'T HAVE FERAL CHARGE UP... but the DK Deathgripped me RIGHT TO THE MAGE... I have no idea what he was thinking, but it must have been "I have no idea what the CD on FCC is, but I want him to NOT get a free Ravage off on my Mage when he is this low!"

Now, I am right on top of this Mage with 5cps, 75+ energy, Rake had fallen off, but Rip had another tick left in it... mage at around 15k HP.

Rip ticks for 5k.

I hit Ferocious Bite.

... 8k non-crit ...

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Resto Druid gets out of the Belf-Silence and NS-HTs the Mage back to 30% hp and the match continues, but not for very long because Guntir has basically run out of mana at this point. If we had landed the kill, Lev and I could have peeled long enough for Guntir to regain enough mana to land a kill on the rest of the team and win.

The recap screen shows us that the team was 2499 MMR, and while we only lost 4 team rating, we all felt slightly let down by not beating this team when we had them so on the ropes. Again, it was a very hard-fought match and these guys were absolutely amazing... but RNG simply won them the match (or perhaps more precisely - lost us the match).

Bah...

I could not sleep that night. Thoughts of the win that could have been haunted my dreams and keep me waking in a cold sweat. If only that FB had crit... I had a bleed up, so I had something on the order of 58% chance to crit. I was at the gym the next day, running through the pain when it hit me. I was at about minute 20 of my 30 minute running session and I nearly fell over in spite of myself...

I was trying out the Glyph of Ferocious Bite

Why does this matter? Go back and reread the bit about where I hit him with FB. What is significant about Ferocious Bite (hover-over that link) that makes having or not having the glyph so important.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU... if I had not had the glyph, that 8k non-crit at 75+ energy would have been 16k... a win.

Lesson learned... do not use Glyph of Ferocious Bite - you do not end up using it any more often and it actually does less damage than Shred most the time EXCEPT when you hit a guy with FB and 70+ energy because it then consumes an additional 1-35 energy and increases damage by 1-100%. The idea is that if you use FB at 70 energy, it will do double-damage before the crit multipliers are factored in. A lot of the time you would rather have the energy, but sometimes (like this time) have a HUGE finishing hit (non-crit) would be more beneficial.