I promised a post this week, and so it must be! First and foremost, let me just say that this post is going to be a little scatter-brained, as I am a little scatter-brained this morning. I have a routine, you see, that involves getting up at 6:15am every day, taking a shower, brushing my teeth, and eating one fried egg with 12oz of 2% milk while I take my pills - yes, this makes me an old man of sorts, but the pills are like fish oil and a multivitamin... everyone of every age should be taking these. Well, I forgot to buy milk over the weekend, which was a blur, but my mother-in-law (still not used to that title) made me an Irish Soda Bread muffin to take with me to work today, so it ends up working out: skip the egg and milk and have a muffin and some coffee instead. Life is good.

Guntir came up from San Diego this weekend, so I did not have a chance to get him to help me test Savage Roar. The one thing I will say about that is that two beta Druids I trust with these matters told me that SR is no longer dispellable, and while it will be annoying to have to keep SR up when dealing damage in PvP, this change is a welcomed one. Guntir and I went to lunch on Saturday and talked about WoW a bit; apparently, the Undead racial was changed from Underwater Breathing (lawl) to some proc-on-damage Life Drain. Essentially, Guntir found that roughly 1/8 of the nukes he cast would return equal amounts of life... not too shabby.

One of the reasons that I have not been posting very much about Feral in MoP is because I have covered all the theoretical stuff. I discussed talent builds, game-play general points, and even intricate assumptions based around numbers and guesswork. However, without Blizzard putting in pre-made level 90s (or even 87s), I cannot test Symbiosis which is really the only thing WORTH testing besides Dream of Cenarius and Cenarion Ward, which I think will be rather overpowered in a 2s context (and maybe Nature's Vigil, but it looks pretty bland as a "macro this with Berserk" talent... it will be good for burst, albeit boring).

Another reason that I have not been posting is because Diablo3 was released and I honestly have not played WoW in a few months. Diablo3 is just one of those games that allows me to just sit down, Skype Guntir, and mindlessly kill stuff for fun and profit for hours; it is amazing. The game is stunningly beautiful, the story is about as good as I remember either Diablo or Diablo2 being, and the soundtrack is pretty solid (although, I really do miss hearing the original). I rolled a Barbarian simply because I always play a barb in the diablo universe, and while they are not the most amazing character right now (Demon Hunter and Monk are topping the bill in terms of power), I have a build which makes me nigh indestructible as a tank, which allows Guntir, who rolled a Witch Doctor, to throw flaming nightmares at our opponents and sweep them aside easily.

As I say, my nostalgia hurts. I was listening to the track (linked in the previous paragraph) on loop most of the morning while writing this post, and all I kept thinking of were the fun times spent in Tristam in D1/2. I know that sounds odd, given that the games were about going out into the world and smashing baddies, but I really did enjoy the music immensely. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I base a lot of my affection of a game on their soundtracks. WoW's soundtrack is somewhat tepid; it just does not get the job done for me. And while I enjoy D3's gameplay, the soundtrack is a bit bland in places and never really sets the tone of boss fights appropriately. There's a fight against a giant spider lady that is particularly creepy, but the soundtrack never plays at that angle: it stays with the fast-paced feel of boss fights, but you never feel the adrenaline pumping because the music never pushes your imagination. It is really hard to describe in words, but for a giant spider fight that has elements of "where did she go?" thrown in, it should have creepy music that gets intense when the boss comes back into the fray.


We will finish up with Diablo3 soon enough, I am sure, and MoP is still on track to have pre-mades ready in the coming weeks, so there should be plenty to talk about.