I went out of town and completely forgot to post anything about the late post this week (and no post last week). That is my bad :-(

Let us get down to business! Guntir and I walked into the 5.0 servers last night for the first time to see what BGs felt like. To say nothing of the hilarious damage getting dished out by some classes *cough*mages*cough*, the 'new game' plays very differently than the previous one. Damage feels a lot slower, which I have always felt was a good thing, but it seems like just about every class and their mother has gotten a cooldown-based self-heal.

Wait... wait... let me back up for one second here. Let me explain something: while I try and play all the classes to some extent and even try and pay attention to all of the various changes happening across all classes, I cannot keep up by myself. I know the Feral changes inside and out at this point and I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp on how Priests will play out, but I have to say that any other class is largely a mystery outside of my cursory knowledge. I know Warlocks will either be DoT-based, Nuke-based, or Pet-based, I know that Rogues will continue being a thorn in my side, and I know that Warriors will continue charging over and over again and dealing rather strong damage while on a target. What I do not know is the specifics of the changes to every other class out there.

That being said, I feel like Feral became a hilarious BG machine. Feral has so many gap-closers that it really should be seen as unfair. A 15s cooldown Wild Charge being the mainstay of the issue. I need to start getting my addons back in place -- mainly my unit frames and nameplates addons as those are the ones that I really rely on for gameplay visibility. I had no idea what debuffs my opponents had on them at any time last night; I kept finding myself applying Rake over and over again because I did not recall whether I had applied it recently or not. Once I get my unit frames back up and running, I should be off to the races again.

One thing that is really annoying is that I have to apply SR again in PvP and really pay attention to it in terms of applying my bleeds. Blizzard may think this is a good design, but I am quite sick of it in PvP. Also, and Guntir is right on board with me on this one, we completely forget about new abilities regularly. I continuously forgot that I had Mighty Bash and Tree Posse, though I was using Mighty Bash much more often, and I had the macro of Cenarion Ward to Guntir, but having to press it every 30 seconds when we got into combat was a bit hard to remember, particularly under heavy stress situations. Toward the end of the night we started getting back into the swing of things; I was getting used to the SR rotation, applying bleeds, and trying to deal meaningful direct damage, and Guntir was healing like the best of them and coordinating moments of nuking.

Overall, we both liked how well Feral and Discipline meshed together. I had taken Glyph of Cat Form and was taking enough healing to get by, and even without Symbiosis (Dispersion), I was having a pretty straight-forward time surviving between Barkskin and Survival Instincts; I had Might of Ursoc on my survival-buttons-bar, but I never found a need to use it. I felt like my burst damage was a bit lacking, but that could be due to my opponents having hitherto unknown survivability buttons (like Warlocks having a 30% self-heal) as well as not having the level 90 PvP gear and thus missing out on Ravage. Tree Posse still feels like it does pretty good damage coupled with a 5s stun, but my Shreds just did not feel like they were hitting very hard, and FB really relies on being used at 50 energy to deal meaningful damage.