Well, I am getting pretty disappointed in Mists of Pandaria (panda-rhea). First, Blizzard shows the talent calculators months ago with Savage Roar being back to the broken-for-PvP "increases damage by 30%" version and does not respond as to whether that was a mistake. Then, we get a huge slew of Monk information and all I see is this:

Detox

  • 520 Mana, 40 yard range, Instant Cast, 8 sec cooldown
  • Eliminates ailments from the friendly target, removing all harmful Poison and Bleed effects.
Well, fuck you Blizz...

I honestly try to not get all worked up over alpha stuff; it does not usually do any good and things are so prone to change. However, this is just stupid. Adding in the ability to dispel bleeds is ridiculous with the current system. Every spec that relies on Bleed damage relies on the fact that they cannot be dispelled.

Warlocks complained in Vanilla about the fact that Affliction was impotent against classes with Magical dispels because they would spend all their time putting up DoTs and dealing zero damage. To compensate that, Blizzard implemented Unstable Affliction, which provided a pretty solid means of dispel protection and aimed at keeping healers from simply dispelling Warlock DoTs blindly. Eventually, Shadow Priests got some love in a similar manner and Vampiric Touch was given Sin and Punishment to provide dispel protection. Okay, but all this does is give Warlocks and Shadow Priests a casting priority: get VT and UA up first so that you can stack up your other DoTs and have some protection while doing so.

However, Feral only has 2 DoTs - Rip and Rake. Applying Rake is trivial and while it is the only spammable and undispellable meaningful DoT in the game, it costs over a third of our resources to apply, so we cannot go running rampant applying it to everything everywhere. Furthermore, the present design requires a Mangle debuff to be on the target for Rake to deal full damage. No, Rake is not the problem... Rip is.

Rip requires 5 combo points to apply and causes the Feral to forsake dealing burst damage via Ferocious Bite. Getting 5 combo points requires a minimum of 3 critical hits from a combo builder and then using 30 energy in Rip; this ends up being a minimum of 3 crits: 1 Rake, 2 Mangles. That is a minimum AND AMAZING RNG of 130 energy. If the Feral starts from zero energy, which is usually the case, it will take 13 seconds to apply Rip... and an 8s cooldown removes both Rake and Rip??? WTF???

I have been thinking about this for the last couple hours and I honestly do not even think that giving Rip dispel protection will do any good. I cannot imagine how it would be fair without something absolutely over the top like "If Rip is dispelled, you get 50% faster energy regeneration for the remainder of the duration of the dispelled Rip." (read: you had 12 seconds left on Rip when it was dispelled - you get 50% more energy regen for 12 seconds). Using the currently implemented dispel deterrents will not get the job done: a 4s silence and a 3s fear are fine for classes who can trivially reapply their DoTs immediately, but it would have to be an 8s CC that did not DR with anything for the Feral to get even CLOSE to having Rip up again and that would be horribly unfair in a team environment.

I am truly at a loss. I do not know what Blizz is playing at and I do not think that Monks will be balanced at all in MoP... I just had hoped that it would not be so blatantly overpowered against Feral.