I was having difficulty coming up with a suitable topic for this week's post; it seems like everything is at a hushed state of waiting at the moment. Between the impending news that is guaranteed to be released mid-March during the Blizzard press tour (whatever that is) and the hinted updated talent calculators that might come out mid-February, we are stuck in stasis waiting for any hint of news. I could write a huge post about how the talent calculators have Savage Roar with Wrath's tooltip and how that will make PvP nigh-impossible for Feral because of how easily dispelled it is and how it makes our already flaccid cp-gen that much worse, but there is no guarantee that that was not simply a mistake and has been updated out of the talent calculators in the next build. We could continue speculating over the implementation of Symbiosis, but again it would come down to new information we simply do not have yet.

/sigh ... I really want to know more about Symbiosis; it seems so potentially OP.

So, we have been running FRP and FLS with Tentmonto, a former gladiator Warlock and his re-roll Rogue. FRP is very strong against some traditional comps like RMP, RLS, and the like. Basically, any comp that has mixed caster/melee setups or even some caster-cleaves, we do very well. However, we have some real trouble against comps like VIP-Cleave, TSG, Kittycleave, and the like. Basically, a lot of melee-cleave comps give us trouble because everyone on the team is so susceptible to being trained down quickly. I, personally, feel like FRP is probably 2.2k-viable, but it will take some lucky queues where we get comps against which we excel and minimal melee-cleaves.

On the flip-side of the coin we have FLS, which plays entirely different from FRP by spreading DoT damage around to everyone and putting out tons of control via Fear/Cyclone/Roots/Hex/Bash. The only problem we are having at present is that Tent's lock is his second lock (he has two because one was a gladiator and some friends wanted to make a gladiator run with him in s9, so he rolled another lock... did not get gladiator with them, but got above 2.2k) and so he is still gearing up at the moment. He is up to about 4200 resilience now and only has one remaining piece of Ruthless (blue) gear in his PvP trinket, so he will likely be a lot less squishy soon and therefore able to start pressuring people a lot more. What I continually find interesting with this comp is how much stronger it makes Feral CC.

Feral has traditionally been all about Cyclone and Bash for control. Entangling Roots is one of those edge-case spells that simply gets trivially dispelled unless used in very specific instances on certain targets while they break LoS on their dispeller and cannot self-dispel Root effects (lawl Rets). However, when you put a Warlock into the mix, UA starts making Entangling Roots extremely effective against melees in a lot of cases. Essentially, when we open on a target, we will often have Tent getting UA up on the non-stunned target first so that I can use Entangling Roots on him immediately. Against a lot of healers, this is a full-duration CC or else they risk getting silenced while we apply DoTs and damage to the stunned target and we Cyclone off the guy who got dispelled.

Entangling Roots with UA allows us to play a lot more like an MLS comp with regard to control and damage output. We can even use Entangling Roots to give Tent time to set up the rest of his DoTs on a melee while I regenerate some energy and CC other targets. We can reset by CC'ing the entire team - Cyclone one, Root another, Fear a third, and if anyone trinkets, they eat a Hex. This, in turn, allows Guntir to play his Shaman a lot more aggressively and not worry so much about sticking his neck out to dispel or get offensive with Hex. Against a lot of teams, if he gets too cavalier, he will get swapped to, and it turns out that RShams, while being the best healer at the moment, are extremely swappable. Having a slew of options available to us to peel for him (Cyclone, Roots, Fear, Death Coil, Feral Charge Bear, Bash, Warstomp...) means that he does not need to worry so much when getting swapped.

Well, there is not much to say otherwise. We are all waiting for some MoP updates, and believe me when I say that I will post as soon as I read any.