Druidify - Bored Druid Musings

Whoa, Monday Happened!

2012-02-06T14:23:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the late update, everyone; I completely blanked on my post today and was hitting my work issues hard in the face. Let's talk about that NAO tournament!

Okay, so the finals came down to RLS and Ret+DK+Disc. This did not really surprise me. Okay, well, the RLS being in the finals did not surprise me - it was snutz, original, and kollectiv; no one should be surprised by this. What did surprise me is the Ret+DK+Disc team getting past the Feral+Shadow+RSham team. It did not really seem like Yipz and co were having much difficulty in defensive cooldowns being popped and landing insane CC-chains, but in the three matches that mattered, they simply could not etch out a kill on the DK, nor could they peel the cleave long enough to get through the insane damage (and Necrotic Strike) that the DK and, to a lesser extend, the Ret put out. To put things into perspective, the Feral, who had essentially all the up-time in the world, hit about 500,000 damage in the second match, but the DK, who was peeled a LOT and kiting with defenses, ended up doing close to one million damage. The Ret, who is brought along for burst, also ended up doing about 600,000 damage that game and was largely the focus of the CCs put out.

Personally, there were a fair few things I took away from this tournament:

1) PvE gear in PvP is broken; it makes for overpowered classes and not everyone has access to them - this needs to be addressed.
2) DKs have insane damage output but weak survivability against melees; maybe this is the balancing point - DKs against melee-cleaves will get trained to death, but against caster teams are invincible, and against both teams put out more than any other damage-dealer in the game.
3) Feral is there for sustained damage and selective burst.

Really, I want to stress the last two since I have harped on the first point for the past few posts. First and foremost, DKs are INSANE. If a DK gets to sit on a target without getting peeled or forced to play defensively, that target is going to die. Against casters, DKs never really have to play defensively; all the defenses a DK possesses work while being offensive against casters. However, against a melee team, DKs have to actively use stuns, roots, and silences defensively and try to kite out of kill-shots. To top this all off, bad DKs can simply train damage into both melees and casters with impunity. On top of that, their damage output is staggeringly higher than every other damage-dealer in the game presently. Their burst is strong, their control is strong, their sustained damage is strong, and NS puts them over the top. Oh yeah, and I am referring to Unholy here... not Frost... which gives up some sustained damage and survivability for more control and twice the burst. I, personally, do not feel any empathy for running trains on DKs and killing them in smoke-bombs... they deserve it for their crazy damage and control.

Okay, but the main point I want to talk about is with regard to the 3s team dynamic and the shift in understanding I have been going through for the past couple weeks. While watching the NAO stream, the one thing the commentators continually looped back on was each player's role on their team, and rather than looking at "melee" vs "ranged" vs "healer", as I tend to, the commentators kept saying things like "brought for his situational burst" or "brought for the sustained damage and CC". Really, when discussing the Feral+Shadow+RSham team, the commentators made a point of saying that the Shadow Priest was there for control and setting up huge burst attempts. In fact, they went further in saying that while Ferals bring strong CC and sustained damage, they really teamed well with Shadow since they both have on-a-dime burst that is extremely strong.

It took me a while to realize exactly how this dynamic plays out, but eventually I started seeing a trend. Most arena teams that played in the tournament were variants of "control and pressure, then CC and burst". In fact, if we look at RLS and RMP, we can see this dynamic played out really well - the Rogue is largely there for control and sustained damage, but has some strong burst that he can bring to the table. In the case of RMP, the Mage brings pretty unreliable sustained damage, but good control and amazing burst; in the case of RLS, the Lock brings amazing sustained damage pressure and, good control, and some on-demand burst (by way of Demon Soul). In fact, if we take this a step further and start looking at teams like Shadowcleave and PHD, we start seeing this trend in full - there is good sustained pressure, good control, decent-to-good CC, and on-demand burst for kill attempts.

Really, when all the dust settles, it is less about whose CCs do not share diminishing returns, or whose spells work well with whatever... it comes down to "can you put pressure on your opponent, make them use a strong CD before you are counter-pressured, and score a kill during that window of weakness?" All that must be done is line up your CCs, control, and burst damage; do not kick into immunities, do not waste finishers on damage reductions, and keep them from killing one of your teammates. It is a tricky balance, but one that is decided quickly.

I have long felt that Feral needed to keep Rip up 100% on the kill-target to pressure the opposing team. Once I learned more about burst rotations in PvP, I found that I do not really even have to use Rip all that often except when matches start running long. In fact, I am starting to see that FMP is probably the best Feral comp simply because it relies on the Feral's sustained pressure and control, then sets up burst opportunities every thirty seconds with the Mage. Watching the NAO has left me wanting to play this comp more than anything ^_^.

How About 'dem Purps!?

2012-01-30T10:37:00.000-08:00

I got home from the gym at around 5:15p on Friday, so I had about an hour to kill before doing dinner and going out and all that. On a whim, I decided to visit the arena junkies to see if there were any videos worth watching. Low and behold, I happened upon the NAO live stream, so I clicked over and ended up getting to watch Datah's team playing. Datah ended up playing very well, though his opponents seemed at odds over what they should be doing to handle the Junglecleave. Unfortunately for Datah's opponents, their biggest advantage was exploited (maybe too harsh a word) z-axis via Demonic Teleport and TStorm, but FCC does not require a path, and Hunters do not require melee range, so it was largely a non-issue even on Blade's Edge and Dalaran Sewers.

Aside from Datah's victory in the losers bracket (sadly, I missed the main-bracket action where Catlol was putting on a stomping running Feral+Shadow+RSham), the announcers were busy with their propaganda. It became clear mere moments after opening the stream that this was going to be a lecture on balancing PvP with some background of high-rated arena matches being played as well. The topic up for "debate" was whether PvE gear should be allowed in the arenas. The NAO tournament had the rule of "no PvE gear", which included Dragon Soul and Firelands purples (no trinkets or legendaries, basically). I do not believe that this is a debatable topic at the higher brackets, or even a few seasons into an expansion; I think that regardless of the player, most will agree that PvE gear in the arenas is unfair.

I can see the argument from the side of "but I worked so hard for my legendary and OP trinkets... I should not be barred from using them!" and to a certain extent, I agree that if someone put in the effort to get nigh-unobtainable gear and got it, they should be allowed to use it how they see fit. The problem, in my eyes, is a question of balance as it pertains to procs, although, in the case of weapons, there is obviously a question of ilvl for melees. I remember in s4 getting pitted against RMPs with the Twinblades, and just laughing as they trained someone down effortlessly because of their unfathomable damage. Keep in mind that this was a time before "heroic raiding" was even a concept, so the legendaries in question were OP in their only form. In this case, it was not so much the weapons' damage output (though that helped) as much as the proc, which made Rogues attack roughly twice as fast (as a spec which relied heavily on white-damage).

Today, we have a similar situation - weapons and trinkets with procs that are without a doubt too strong against other players. The list of culprits are well-known: Cunning, Vial, the staff, and the daggers. Each one of these has a proc which can shift the game in the player's favor easily. Cunning and Vial both have procs that simply deal way too much damage to the kill-target instantly with no cost. These are the most easily remedied procs, though only Vial is going to be patched soon, and the "fix" in place will not so much resolve the issue as make it less bursty; good, but not great. The daggers have a proc, but it stacks and makes the Rogue powerful, but not super overpowered until we look at the big picture - essentially, Rogues with double-legendaries get to walk around with a "bonus 1200 agility" buff, which is a HUGE gain in attack power over any other melee. Lastly, the staff - the proc itself is absolutely astounding and I honestly cannot believe that it is still allowed to proc in the arenas. Doubling a damage-dealing spell-cast is so mind-blowingly overpowered that it really does not need me to describe why.

I think that Blizzard cannot simply make a rule like "PvE gear not allowed in the arenas" because early-seasons for expansions will have people in blues getting into the arenas and trying to compete. Amending that rule to "purples" will essentially limit rerolls later in the expansion from easily stepping into the arenas. The only viable method of balancing the issue is to make a rule like "PvE gear will not proc in the arenas". This opens up an entirely new can of worms as it would also cast a light onto the BG and rBG stages and probably leave people wondering whether the same rule should be applied there.

The vicious cycle continues and we can see this spiraling out of control. The slippery slope is whether the procs on PvE gear would function everywhere, just not arenas, just not PvP, or no where but in raids and dungeons. The value of those overpowered weapons starts dropping unless the player's focus is non-arena/pvp in a number of those cases. In fact, a lot of high-rated players would probably stop raiding altogether if there were little-to-no incentive for PvP in doing so.

Without going much further into the subject, I am reminded of a long time ago when strictly-PvP players were not rewarded with any weapons at all until they attained rank14. Essentially, if all one did was PvP (battlegrounds, back then), there was no way to get a weapon upgrade. The only players who could realistically get a PvP weapon were the ones with overpowered PvE weapons. The grind was annoying and largely impractical for all but the diehards. Blizzard saw this as a failing on their behalf and added in PvP weapons that were attainable by more PvP-ers with the addition of the arenas, and the process has been getting tweaked ever since.

Ultimately, the debate rages between PvE and PvP. There was a situation in The Burning Crusade where PvE players would doing 10 matches a week to get points to buy a PvP weapon to progress their raids, since the PvP weapons were "easy" to get as compared to the raid content. There have been a great number of discussions as to whether this was a failing on Blizzard's PvE design or its PvP design, but basically what it came down to was a change to make it more difficult to get PvP weapons so that PvE-centric players would largely not look at them as a viable option for progressing in PvE. We are at a similar stance, at the moment, but looking at it in the mirror; left is right and all that. Many PvP players are looking at PvE content (looking for raid making this easier than ever) as a means for getting one of those OP trinkets so that they can progress in PvP.

As in season one, the damage is already done; Blizzard cannot take the Vials and Cunnings away from the LFR lucky few who won them fair and square just because they haven't gone back into an LFR and are moving their arena teams forward. The toothpaste is out of the tube; there is no going back. Additionally, Blizzard cannot simply nerf those trinkets - many rely on them in PvE to continue their progress. Well, now we have a problem; the PvE'rs have got arena weapons again... but it is not season one. We cannot fix this with a new season and a more learned item mechanic (no trinkets drop in LFR will not even fix this since normal mode progression is still rather easy). Blizzard may end up having to take rather drastic measures to truly fix this problem.

There are a lot of grumblings, at the same time, about the human racial (every man for himself), since it allows the player to equip two role-centric trinkets rather than a PvP trinket and a role-centric trinket. This is an interesting side-effect of the same issue, in my eyes. I do not really mind humans having access to two trinkets, as I would see them with a Vial or Cunning either way, but the human would have ~450 more resilience than another race. I think that the problem is, and has been for a while, resilience.

Okay, this is getting long. Resilience is essentially the crux of PvP and largely the difference between PvP gear and PvE gear. I believe that the problem has always been that resilience simply does not have enough inventive to use it over some powerful trinket or weapon from a raid. Why would I go for a tier-2 weapon if I could get a legendary? Why would I use the Badge of Conquest over a Vial? The tradeoff is always "resilience versus an overpowered proc".

Well, when put like that, it makes the problem simple to view and understand. The proc is "worth" more, in the eyes of a PvP'er, the resilience lost. We simply need to make resilience a better stat than the proc without really changing the game; since the NAO tournament shows us a relatively balanced play-field (everyone is in full PvP gear with no PvE gear; roughly the same resilience across the board) and allows us to view the game on that even ground, we can assume that this is the balance-point.

So, what if we change resilience rating to be per-slot. By that, I mean, that resilience rating would largely correspond to a number; 400 resilience rating is worth 1 resilience (say). That would mean that full PvP gear would be ~16 resilience (16 slots, 17 if you equip mh/oh, but that should add up to the 2h equivalent). Okay, so what we do is make it so that in any given season, 16 resilience is the goal for resilience for all players, so that any player who drops a piece or two of gear for PvE gear loses something valuable... simple!

All damage and healing done to another player is at -48%. So, if you hit the target dummy for 10,000 with Shred, you would hit a player for 5,200. Similarly, if that Greater Heal would normally heal your tank with no buffs for 15,000, it will only land for 7,800 on another player.

"Wtf Rey... that doesn't fix anything... that just makes everything happen on a smaller scale and stam will out-pace it very quickly!"

Fine... here's the fix:

1 Resilience increases damage and healing done to player controlled characters by 3%.

If a player has 16 resilience (meaning that they are wearing resilience in every slot), then they will have +48% (3 * 16) damage and healing to player controlled characters.

Boom. Fixed. Fixed forever, in fact. Essentially, all players start out at the same deficit at the beginning of the expansion (when HP, damage, and healing are low), but as each progresses and gets more and more resilience, they will be gaining more and more damage/healing against players. When everyone has full PvP gear, they will have 16 resilience, and therefore have their "balanced" damage output.

If a player decides to drop a resilience trinket for a PvE trinket, then they will do 3% less damage with everything, including the trinket's proc. If they decide they want to use legendary dagger, the gain might not be 3% overall damage, but the loss certainly will be. Now, this idea is far from polished; there are definitely things to consider with a change like this.

* Would resilience keep its current functionality of reducing damage from other players?

Of course - this is why resilience is a good stat in general. Balancing damage so that it is manageable for healers and defensive/offensive cooldowns. The issue at hand is how to deal with people who trade 1% more damage received for a huge burst from a trinket or weapon. It is not the damage received that needs to be increased, but rather the tradeoff in damage done when NOT using PvP gear.

* How would rerolls in the middle of an expansion ever expect to get up to geared in a quick manner if they will be losing all their games to teams at low ratings, but 16 resilience, since they will be doing roughly 50% damage and healing?

Well, the honor gear would have ALMOST as much resilience as the main PvP gear. If we make it so that honor gear gets you to 12 resilience, and full conquest gets you to 16, then you are close enough to compete after kitting out an honor set that you can start acquiring arena gear.

* What if 3% damage is not enough to dissuade people from using trinkets like Vial and Cunning; they might not care that they do 3% less damage overall as long as their burst is still stronger?

Good point, what if we make the scaling of resilience non-linear again but favor it in the opposite direction? Say that having one piece of resilience gear does not get you a point of resilience. Maybe even three pieces does not get you to one point of resilience. Maybe if you are half-geared, you will have 4 points of resilience. Once you get to 12 pieces of gear, you are up to 9 resilience, and at 14 pieces of gear, the player will be at 11 resilience. At 15/16 pieces of gear, the player will have 13 resilience as opposed to 16. Now, that player is at a 9% damage or healing deficit as compared to his full-PvP wearing counterparts. We can scale it so that being "mostly PvP-geared" is simply not the same as "entirely PvP-geared", but not cripplingly so, just enough to disencentivize players from putting on a PvE trinket.

* What happens next season when new gear comes out, do we get more resilience than 16?

No, the scaling simply changes (like crit rating every expansion) during a season transition. Say you have 16 resilience today (at 4800 resilience rating, or whatever the number is), and tomorrow the new arena season starts - you might have 8 resilience tomorrow (at the same 4800 resilience rating). Now, as you upgrade your pieces of gear (16 upgrades total), you will gain a 0.5 resilience. That means that every two upgrades you get gives you 3% more damage or healing as well as more stam and your primary and secondary stats (more crit/mastery and agi, in Feral's case).

* What about the honor gear, though? That is still an upgrade from last season's arena gear, but just not as much.

Correct, the honor gear (12 resilience) is exactly half-way from last season's arena gear (8 resilience in the new expansion) to this season's arena gear (16 resilience). This is actually a good thing! The start of the new season actually gives rerolls the chance to gear up at nearly the same rate as last season's gladiators. Additionally, if forces to the gladiators of last season to actually roll BGs to upgrade their gear to honor to improve their resilience while they are capped on conquest points.

As I said before, this method probably could use some tweaking, and I definitely have not seen it from every angle; I am positive there are edge-cases that I am missing. Point them out and I will try and answer them as best I can. I do not know what, if anything, Blizzard plans on doing about PvE gear in PvP content, but I think that my solution is clean, simple to implement, and straight-forward to understand.

MoP is a Helluva Drug

2012-01-23T08:46:00.000-08:00

Happy Monday, everyone! Firstly, let me say this - Feral+Rogue+Priest is hilarious control when not going against melee-cleaves (TSG and Enh+War+Pal). When we are firing on all cylinders, we have a hard time being stopped. Tentmonto also swapped his spec to a slower Hemo spec and threw on some 397 LFR axes, and suddenly his damage went through the roof (almost catching up to me on some matches, hur hur). Additionally, Tent brought over his warlock and we started carrying him on 3s until he gets geared a little better running Feral+Aff+RSham. This team is actually the more hilarious of the two; as soon as his warlock gets gear, this comp will be gladiator viable (not to say that Feral+Rogue+Priest isn't, but we have hard-counters in plate-cleaves whereas Feral+Aff+RSham seems like bad-rls - decent-to-OP against everything).

Mists of Pandaria.

Guntir and I were talking on Sunday about some of the unmentioned changes that we are seeing in various tooltips on the calculator. I have pointed most of those out either here or in the Druid boards, and most of these are Druid-centric (though, I did mention how Rogues are losing their +20% healing received as well as Ferals, so I cover some other classes as well). Guntir was looking more into which healers would be the flavor of the month once MoP dropped and the arenas were opened again and has basically narrowed it down to Holy Pallies, who are getting a spammable CC amongst a handful of hilariously overpowered abilities in their kits (including AoE blind as their level 87 ability).

I do not care to talk too much about Holy Pallies here; I am more concerned about a post from the blues last week concerning abilities and talents.

We're going to give you all of the "mandatory" talents to your class spec, and you'll learn those talents at certain levels like you do with core class spells. Players who skip over what we consider mandatory talents today -- like Raging Blow or Hot Streak -- are unintentionally (or maybe even intentionally) gimping themselves, and that's not what we want to have happen. We want players to be able to experience the full power of their class, so we're going to award certain talents straight-out.

Specifically, there are a number of talents in the Feral tree to which this quote directly applies. One of my favorites to hate on is Blood in the Water, which is now just a part of the Ferocious Bite tooltip. I have always liked this talent in general, as it can be a truly powerful one if the stars align. My main annoyance with it is the fact that Blizzard stated that they wanted players to spend more time in an "injured state" in Cataclysm as compared to Wrath. This, of course, never came into fruition and healers are still largely playing the "heal 50% of the target's hp in one cast" game, which leads to opponents never being sub-25% except right before they die. The 2-set bonus from PvE gear gets that number to sub-60% hp, which is much more of a reality in PvP situations in my experience, but I doubt that Blizzard will be changing our "execute" any time soon.

Ravage has also gotten this treatment in that it now innately gains a 50% critical strike chance against any target above 80% health. Similarly, we notice that Brutal Impact is now baked into both Skull Bash (although, it looks like Skull Bash might actually be free; there is no energy cost associated with it) and Bash. Rend and Tear gets this treatment baked into Shred's tooltip (20% more damage to bleeding targets) and Rake now simply has a 15s duration as if Endless Carnage was baked into it.

I thought that this stance by Blizzard makes a lot of sense in light of their new talent design - six tiers per class and one point per tier as opposed to six tiers per spec with five points at each tier makes for very little room for "flavor talents" like Blood in the Water, which is mandatory in PvE, but certainly not PvP. Blizzard has basically said that the non-mandatory talents that are still almost always taken are the heart of the new talent system - Feral Charge is taken by every Feral regardless, but it is in no way mandatory in a PvE sense; so it becomes a talent choice and gives flavor to the class.

Another interesting change that Blizz talked about was the less mandatory, but still defining talents in the current system:

The third category of talents are still pretty cool, but they just aren't at the same level as other talents. These talents make good glyphs. For example, an early version of the warrior tree had Rude Interruption as a talent, but we feel it's too situational to compete with the other talents, so we'll likely make it a glyph.

This is, without any pretense, huge; staggeringly huge. Notice amongst my listed talents which will be baked into our abilities out-right which are missing: Furor, Fury Swipes, Feral Aggression, and Primal Madness (I suppose that we could include Heart of the Wild, Natural Shapeshifter, and Master Shapeshifter in this group, but these are, what many consider to be, mandatory talents and I expect we can see these simply baked into the class some how).

Now, basically all Druids have considered Furor to be a mandatory talent since Vanilla - being able to have enough rage to Feral Charge (Bear) someone has been mandatory for PvP forever, and since Furor was updated to allow the generation of energy in cat form while not in cat form, Furor has been a mandatory Feral talent. I am hoping - nay, praying - that Furor is simply baked into the class come MoP; I cannot see it going live without this being a part of being a Druid since it has been for so long. Elle has pointed out that Cat and Bear forms both have their Furor-aspects baked into the tooltips, which is awesome!

However, Feral Aggression and Primal Madness seem ripe for being turned into glyphs. With Faerie Fire being changed to only be a single stacking application in MoP, we can ignore that portion; however, we can see the bonus 10% damage to Ferocious Bite easily being part of an FB glyph, and Primal Madness seems like it would be a decent glyph addition as well. Fury Swipes is something of a mystery to me; I do not see it being anything but free damage for Ferals and to be quite honest, I do not see it really fitting with Druids at the moment - I would guess that it is either being scrapped entirely, or Blizzard simply forgot to put it into the talent kits for Feral (and maybe Guardian).

"But wait... you said 'staggeringly huge'... these don't sound so amazing!"

Okay, you got me there, that was just house-cleaning for the huge stuff. Blizzard said that they want to change up the glyphs situation a while back. I do not have the quote on hand right at the moment, but from what I recall of it they wanted it to be like this:

Primary Glyphs - huge ability-defining differences
Major Glyphs - smaller flavor changes, but still somewhat useful
Minor Glyphs - ... might be going away in favor of just baking all these into the classes

What I took from that coupled with this latest talent explanation is that the PGs are going to be revamped. At present, Feral does not really have a choice when it comes to PGs; we take Bloodletting, Rip, and Berserk because they are the obvious dps choices. This, again, is boring! Bloodletting is the most interesting amongst them, and if we look at Rip's new tooltip, this is baked into the ability already. NOW YOU SEE IT! This is the staggeringly huge bit - a lot of the boring glyphs are going away in favor of more interesting ones. Dare I say it? Glyph of Ferocious Bite might be changed to allow it to refresh the duration on Rip on targets at or below 60% health? What about amending the current primary glyphs like Tiger's Fury - "Reduces the cooldown on Tiger's Fury by 3 seconds and also causes Tiger's Fury to give 20 energy for the duration. At the end of Tiger's Fury, the energy is lost"; Glyph of Berserk - "Increases the duration of your Berserk ability by 10 seconds and causes your Berserk to give 20 energy for the duration. At the end of Berserk, the energy is lost."

I can see a whole slew of these "new" primary glyphs being added in MoP. It could make for some very interesting choices!

Whoa

2012-01-19T07:36:00.000-08:00

Apparently, mid-day the blog went to some "mosaic" view... not really sure wtf happened there, but I'm back now and the SOPA/PIPA blackout has ended.

Hope everyone enjoyed it! ^_^

Mondays Are Hard

2012-01-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

Ugghhhh... I got into work yesterday and had, in essence, an all day emergency with a production machine, which is why I did not get a chance to write up a post. Additionally, I went home and drank in excess and did not have the capacity for rational thought, let alone decent writing. However, it is now Tuesday, and I am feeling well (sort of) and it is about time I kick this pig, as they say.

First, let me give up an update and an apology for last week's novel of a post. Ultimately, I think that removing Vengeance from PvP is probably a decent decision balance-wise, I simply take issue with the precedent it sets. Well, I have finally updated my kit to include a season eleven first tier weapon, so my damage per second has gone up by at least 100. With nothing else said, this damage upgrade is somewhat shocking, but when I look at the damage output of other classes, I can understand it. There are essentially two types of damage-dealers in the PvP game right now: those based on control and therefore low damage, and those based on high damage and less control. Feral happens to blur that line ever so slightly with Cyclone, but is leaning much more towards the high-damage and less control side.

I got home from work last Tuesday around 3:45p. Guntir does not normally get home from work until 5:30p, so I did both of my LFRs (and was lucky enough to simply get in on the last boss of each and down each on the first attempt; woo!) and collected my 500 "dragon-points". I realized a while ago that those points simply do not get me anything I care too much about, so I traded them in for Conquest Points, which go against my weekly total, but also give me earned points against my season, so that put me 500 points closer to my tier one weapon, which I could get that day by knocking out some games.

So, now I'm sitting there at 4:15p thinking "if only i knew some people who would run 5s with me for points, I could have my weapon ready for games tonight." So, I get into trade chat and start spamming "2300 exp Feral, LF 5s, pst". I get a few tells from 1800-rated guys saying that the server was dead and the only few good PvP'rs are already on teams and what-not. So, I am sitting there a bit discouraged, but not too bad; I sort of knew that the server we were on was not very lively. Then, out of the blue having not spammed trade chat for at least ten minutes, I get a tell:

"Hey, we might have a spot on our 5s for you." - some Rogue

Hmmm, well, let's see what he's got. His achievements had him listed as a 2200+ player in 2s and 3s, but he has no Duelist title... hmm. I respond and explain that I am really just trying to get points today for my weapon, but I would run 5s with him. Then he starts explaining to me how he had rolled this Rogue up two seasons ago because he wanted to play a Rogue instead of his Warlock, who is a multi-gladiator. Whoa, did not see that one coming. Anyway, we started running FRP, and while we still have some kinks to work out, we are playing very well. We have yet to run the 5s team, but I am excited to see how we play together, given that his priest friend is also a multi-gladiator (Guntir would be playing his shaman).

The thing I notice the most about playing with a gladiator-caliber player is just how coordinated he makes the game-play. I am not specifically talking about calling out everything he does and making smart moves and target-calls, though that is definitely part of it; I am mostly talking about how having a teammate who plays so well affects how well we play. He will apply pressure so instantly that I will have an opportunity to apply pressure on a different target via Cyclone or a stun, which will allow Guntir to land the perfect fear-bomb. Just getting everything to click is much easier and it allows us the opportunity to beat teams we have had trouble with in the past, such as caster-cleaves and hard-core melee-cleaves. Seeing him Shadowstep to a healer to land a kick and follow it with a full blind while running back to the kill target is something beautiful to behold, and it makes my Cyclones that much more powerful.

Okay, while that is exciting, I want to talk about Symbiosis. Obviously, we are slowly marching toward MoP and are likely to hear more and more about the level-87 abilities for various classes. Symbiosis is nice in that it is not outwardly obvious how it will operate, which leaves people like me miles of room to speculate. Symbiosis is also nice in that it sets the tone for how the ability should work in theory, and it is expressed in a way that makes it seem like two possible scenarios could unfold:

First, I see the scenario where it is basically a useless ability. We are all hoping that this is not the case, obviously, but I really could see the Daily Blink's rendition (gives everyone Seal Form while we take useless spells like Fortitude or Shiv) coming to fruition. Why would Blizzard do it this way? Well, simply because the alternative to this scenario is, to put it bluntly, scary.

The other scenario I see for Symbiosis is that it acts exactly as worded, and it is blatantly overpowered and inherently unable to be balanced. Think about the following use-case: I cast Symbiosis on Guntir in 2s; I gain Leap of Faith, and he gains Healing Touch. At face value, Leap of Faith for me is not a huge boon, but when you consider the fact that I have Wild Charge at my disposal, it becomes a game-changer. If we are fighting on Blade's Edge, Guntir can now jump down to try and pull down a melee, and I can grip him back up. Alternatively, if I chase a Warlock down from the bridge and Guntir follows to heal, then the healer might follow as well. When the Lock teleports back to the bridge, I can Wild Charge up to the Warlock, and grip Guntir up to follow to keep me healed up. More-over, Guntir can run in to Fear-bomb a group without much worry at least once a match, because I will be able to grip him back to a pillar if need be. There is also the case where Guntir gets into a full Kidney Shot from a Rogue and the Rogue starts his Shadowdance; I would be able to pull him out and waste most of that dance.

So, there is a really interesting bit of play there, but what is more interesting is that I gave Guntir Healing Touch. Why is that interesting? Well, if Guntir has a melee on him and he needs to heal, he can just start spamming Healing Touch. If the melee kicks him, he would be kicked on Nature and could continue to cast his normal disc/holy spells. There is definitely a case to be made for giving a healer a heal, that would otherwise be useless to me, especially if that heal is in a completely different school and therefore would not be locked out from kicks (or vise versa).

Additionally, since the tooltip reads "grants the Druid one ability from the target's class, varying by the Druid's specialization", it would not be a stretch of the imagination to see that Rogues, as a class - not a spec, get Evasion, Sap, Recuperate, Gouge, Vanish, Dismantle, Cloak of Shadows, Redirect, and Smoke Bomb, just to name a few. I feel that it is easiest to visualize the swap with a Rogue, since our play-kits are so similar, but even a warrior would have Execute, Overpower, Berserker Rage, and Shattering Throw to trade. Obviously, when we start looking at other classes with completely different resource systems, we have to stretch our imaginations a bit more to see how it would work.

I expect that any abilities we gain from Symbiosis (and abilities we give) would have to be class/role specific. That is, we might get Overpower, but it would be the same functionality, but a different spell built around our scaling and mechanics. It might read "Overpower - Requires Cat Form - Instant - Instantly overpower the enemy, causing 540% damage [same damage as a Shred, but doesn't require being behind target]. Only useable after the target dodges. The Overpower cannot be blocked, dodged, or parried."

Of abilities we could give a Warrior or a Rogue that would be useful, Stampeding Roar comes to mind. The problem I see is that we simply do not have a number of utility skills that would not make for a completely broken rotation for another class. If we give Warriors Rake, for example, they now have another ability in their rotation that provides a strong damage over time bleed; would that give a Warrior/Rogue/Dk/etc the upper-hand dps-wise in a PvE environment? What about Dash? Could we give a Warrior Dash without it being overpowered? I am honestly struggling with what we could give a Warrior that would not be either useless or overpowered.

The Second Monday

2012-01-09T08:01:00.000-08:00

I was walking back from Starbucks on Sunday morning when it dawned on me that I had not wish any of you a happy new year. I sometimes forget just how long I have been maintaining this blog (believe me, it is a surprisingly long time), and it is readers like you for whom I write; happy new year!

Briefly, there is a patch up on the PTR and while most of the listed changes are bug fixes *cough*magesnerfeddamage*cough*, there is one aspect I would like to discuss more deeply:

Vengeance is no longer triggered by receiving damage from other players.

Okay, I see where Blizzard is aiming to go with this; it makes sense to a certain degree. Allow me to put some things into perspective by saying that yes, Blizzard needed to do something about most tanking classes in the arenas, and yes, this is definitely a change that will affect tanking specs in BGs as well and that might have been needed to a certain degree on a small number of maps. I think that, overall, this change will be warmly received by most BGers (save for the tanks, of course), largely not affect most high-rated PvPers, and generally ruin an interesting and fun way to play the game.

Okay, so you step into a battleground and end up going toe-to-toe with a Blood DK and you do not happen to be a Druid, Hunter, or Rogue; what do you do? Generally speaking, you run or die. How about a more specific case to which most mid-range PvPers can relate - you are running Warrior+HPal and you get into a match against BloodDK+BloodDK; what do you do? There is currently a lot of debate going on over whether this should be a supported style of play, and generally the argument makes its way back to BloodDKs more than most any other tank (though Feral comes up frequently as well since our dps spec also has access to Vengeance).

While I tend to agree that Vengeance is a mechanic that needs to be examined thoroughly in PvP, I do not believe that it is one that needs to be absent from PvP entirely. Largely, I do not see any benefit from Vengeance except in BGs, and let's be honest - BGs are sort of gimmicky PvP anyway and should be taken with a grain of salt when discussing game balances. In the arenas, if you are a tank spec, then you are rolling the dice that you will not be matched against a decent Rogue, Hunter, or Druid, and while Druids seem to be in short supply in 3s, Hunters and Rogues make up half of the DPS toons one faces (more-so Rogues than Hunters... by a HUGE margin).

I think that the Vengeance change just bothers me mainly because of the tone it sets - Blizzard thinks that Vengeance is well balanced in PvE, and is largely unwilling to attempt any changes to it in a PvP context because of the ramifications any change might have on PvE. Many cynics will end up calling this a "lazy fix" because of that tone. These are the types of changes that Blizz has stated again and again that they truly do not want to do but, without doing some extremely hard balancing, are necessary.

I think that one argument that could be made is one for the Blood DKs. Believe me, there is no love lost from me on DKs in general, but I actually do feel for long-time Blood DKs because Blizzard essentially made a stance that Blood was the tanking spec, removed all dps viability from it, and in doing so removed the play-style from any competitive PvP environment except for running flags in WSG and WSG2. Now, when old-time Blood DKs probably just queued up in 2s to get some points for the week and found a comp that works as well as a niche in BGs, Blizzard is again coming in and saying "you should not be viable at this - we are removing that viability next patch."

Once again, it is tone. I do not like how Blizzard approaches some of the changes in the last few months; swinging the nerfbat wildly at anything that peaks up. I feel like this change, in particular, will end up disenfranchising a huge number of players who have come to enjoy the play-style which, around Vengeance, they have built. Moreover, I feel that this nerf is simply another that ends with the casuals feeling a little better (though they are largely still going to lose half their matches and BGs, and will find something new to gripe about) while the players who had found a genuinely interesting way to play the game in the medium brackets are left to pout and again have to go back to the cookie-cutter specs and glyphs and play a game they were probably bored of already.

---------------------

It is probably worth switching messages here; I have beaten that horse to the ground by now and all of you get it - I do not like the Vengeance change, but I think it will largely "fix" the "problem".

Of course, this does incur new problems. Looking ahead to MoP, now any tanking class is going to have 2 other options except for Druids, who randomly get a fourth option. That is, DKs will have 2 dps specs, Pallies will have 1, Warriors will have 2, and Druids will have 2. Essentially, what ended up happening to DKs was done because it was the "easy" choice to make Blood the tanking spec since they had two separate melee dps specs; doing the same to Druids would have been impossible as any Feral (such as myself) would have quit the game on the spot since no other melee dps specialization exists. In MoP, Blizzard is giving Druids a new melee spec, but it will be a tanking role and Feral will be the melee dps role.

There are a lot of subtle changes happening that are truly laying the ground-work for MoP. Vengeance not proc'ing against Players is just one of the larger one-line changes that sets up the MoP landscape. In essence, MoP will have "tank as a spec" beaten into everyone's head by the time it drops that no one will question it - Blood, Prot (and Prot), and Guardian will be synonymous with tanking. Will tanking specs still be required to tank things like Van/Drek in AV? Will a dedicated tank still be required for IOC? What about carrying flags? Essentially, all the tanking mechanics in the game are going to be balanced around Vengeance and if Vengeance only procs when an NPC hits you, then tanks will have no place in PvP except tanking AV. Even running the flag will be left to survival-heavy classes, but maybe not tanks, since so much of their survivability revolves around Vengeance.

Feral, moving forward, will require a lot of changes. I do not think that many yet realize just how much survivability Feral is losing from the split between Cat and Bear. Survival Instincts, while a strong defensive cooldown, is going to be Guardian-only. Going Bear Form is going to be useless in MoP as the armor and damage reduction, both innate and Faceblock (honestly cannot recall the name), are going to be Guardian-only. Cat Form is losing its innate "20% extra healing received" and really not seeing any new defensive cooldowns in the spec, forcing Ferals to choose talents which provide survivability such as Displacer Beast and Renewal.

Will said talents be enough to overcome our losses? Probably not; at least probably not in my opinion. I feel like there is a ton of choices to be made that simply leave Feral at a strained position vying for any semblance of a niche in PvP. At the moment, Feral is the spec that brings an instant-cast Cyclone, but training said Feral means those instant-casts are few and far between already and removing the damage reduction options we currently have just means we will have fewer opportunities in the future.

What can be done?

Well, I think that MoP is far enough away that we can expect some more changes to be made in many different means, but we must stay vocal about Feral's needs (as well as our wants). In my opinion, Mangle needs to be treated as the PvP dps button. Our survivability, at the moment, relies on our ability to pick up Displacer Beast at the first tier, and if Shred is around what our damage is balanced and it does 20% more than Mangle, then we cannot use Mangle without a change; this means we cannot take Displacer Beast over Feral Swiftness without a change.

I am, as I have done in the past, lobbying for Mangle to provide 2 combo points baseline, and an additional combo point upon critically striking (via Primal Fury) for Feral but not for Guardian. This would be a distinguishing change that would make Mangle a viable alternative in terms of utility and damage-dealing with limited up-time on a kill-target (particularly, with limited up-time to the target's backside, as is mostly the case against mages). Shred would still do 20% more damage than Mangle, as it is currently set up to be in MoP, but Mangling would provide more finishers with a limited up-time; this leads to more ability to use Predator's Swiftness as well as Maim and Savage Roar in a PvP context. Additionally, this allows Ferals to make choices like Displacer Beast without having to worry about how they will ever get behind their opponents.

I feel like Feral will, at one point or another, require an ability to reduce damage aside from Barkskin. Additionally, Feral will be the only melee dps that can do nothing against a caster in order to either reduce damage or immune damage all together, and I am expecting this will change, but I would not be surprised if it were overlooked. Hopefully, we see another iteration of the talent trees and abilities book before too long.

... and there is still the question of how Symbiosis will work and what it will mean for Ferals.

The Honor Grind

2012-01-02T08:21:00.000-08:00

As many have probably guessed, I am having a bit of trouble stepping back into the arena after my hiatus given that my gear is "old-n-busted" as compared to the current season's gear. That being said, I have been grinding honor. Maybe it is just my broken memory, maybe it is just me being a cynic, but I remember BGs being a lot more annoyingly bad in the past. I have had a great number of BGs where I will be sitting at LM in AB and calling out in bg-chat "inc farm" or "4 inc bs" etc, and the team will, without any protest or conflicting words, rotate properly and defend the node. The only exception to this rule is in EotS where my team will insist on fighting over mid in a 2-2 bout with me holding the flag at FR saying "I am not capping; push MT and stop fighting at mid".

By the way, I missed when this happened, but apparently the scoreboard informs player specializations now. Fantastic! I have seen a number of addons that print summaries as the BG is about to begin showing how many healers the opposing team has and how many my team has. Guntir tells me that this was a ninja addition in one of the posts between 4.0.6 and 4.3 (the builds I have played). Technically, it should not really matter how many healers your opposition has, but seeing that your team of 15 has 4 healers is a pretty welcomed sight which, in my view, fills the team with a bit of confidence - especially when you see the opposing team has one or fewer.

Another aspect to BGs that was added in my absence is the "role" indicator. While it is largely useless in EotS and AB, knowing who the tank is and who the healers are in AV, WSG, TP, and to a lesser extent IoC is extremely helpful. In the last few days, I switched my spec over to my "tanking" feral build (which long-time readers will recall was an attempt at adding survivability to my double-healer+Feral team back in June) to run flags. Basically, I take Natural Reaction and one point in Thick Hide over Primal Madness and an additional point in Fury Swipes. In essence, I get 18% damage reduction in Bear Form, rage when I dodge, a bit more dodge, and some minor armor, and chance to be crit reduction in exchange for 20 energy from TF and Berserk. With a pocket healer, this spec makes me nigh-invincible now that I am around 4200 resilience (as compared to ~3500 last week).

Another thing that shocked me was my discovery that the season 11 honor weapon was only a 6 ilvl improvement from my season 9 tier 2. I was grinding to try and replace my weapon thinking it would be a decent little upgrade, but I have basically given up that idea. It will be another few weeks before I have "earned" enough conquest points before I am allowed to buy my weapon, but I am looking forward to seeing that upgrade. Additionally, I think all the kinks are worked out now and we should be running a kittycleave variant this week on Wednesday. Seeing the damage potential from Warrior+Feral in bgs (random warriors), I am excited at the prospect.

It's Monday!!!

2011-12-27T10:59:00.000-08:00

... kinda! I had Monday off from work for the Christmas holiday; it was glorious, but I did not end up writing a post. Additionally, since I made a post late last week, I covered all the interesting PvP bits from our exploits. As a recap - we hit about 1850 with my season nine gear then queued into a war+rsham team that farmed us for a bit. It was lame, but largely due to them being 2100 rated and having season 11 gear.

Let's talk a little bit about MoP and Feral. I, having re-upped my subscription, am back to trolling the wow boards (Druid boards mostly - if I go into the arena boards my blood pressure spikes and causes me aneurisms). It seems like a lot of Ferals are concerned about abilities being removed or changed to Guardian-only and the talent tree choices in general as it pertains to Ferals in PvP. I, on the other hand, am extremely excited for the Feral builds in MoP, and here are a bunch of examples:

We are losing Survival Instincts and many Ferals are concerned that our survivability will be lackluster.
Our first tier talents offer no choice for competitive PvP - we will still need Feral Swiftness in order to get behind people and land Shreds.
Our fourth tier talents offer no choice for competitive PvP - we will be forced to take Wild Charge for mobility.
Our sixth tier talents offer no choice for competitive PvP - every Druid will be taking Disentanglement.

I tend to agree with the sixth tier argument as every Druid (Feral for sure) will be taking Disentanglement for PvP, but I argue that this solves a lot of problems otherwise. For instance, Disentanglement means that Tireless Pursuit is no longer a valid talent selection - why would we want Dash and Stampeding Roar to break roots when we could just break them with a shapeshift? One could make the argument that allowing StR to break roots for your partners might be useful, but I contend that that is for what healers are.

Okay, so you're nigh-unrootable again, what does that have to do with the rest? Well, Wild Charge is useful for getting or swapping to targets, but if we are difficult to peel then we might not need charging in general and might opt for Incarnation which looks to offer hilariously powerful damage when coupled with Berserk (I am already imagining comps like Rogue+Feral+Healer where the Rogue provides lockdown and the Feral sets up for Incarnation+Berserk to land with a Shadowdance... scary). I do not think that many would pass up Wild Charge, since it can be used as another defensive cooldown in Caster or Travel form, but the extra damage is definitely some may be willing to try out because of Disentanglement.

Additionally, the change to Mangle/Shred interaction means that Mangle-spamming will be 80% of the damage of a Shred, cost 5 less energy, and not have a positional requirement. More to the point, there will be no reason to NOT use Shred, but in situations where getting behind your opponent is not simple, Mangle-spamming will be roughly the same damage. That means that Feral Swiftness is less useful, and my argument is that it would be optional to the point where I would be taking Displacer Beast because of the added survivability. Already, with the loss of Survival Instincts, I have picked up 3 "new" talents which improve survivability and I contend that I have not given up any damage in doing so. In fact, I contend that I have made myself more rounded for dealing damage by focusing on Mangles rather than Shreds.

We all know that this is not the final pass for Feral in MoP, but if things end up playing out this way, I think we can all be excited about the unique role that Ferals will bring to PvP in MoP. Essentially, we will have control, be hard to control, and deal decent damage. If nothing else, Typhoon, Demo Roar, Cyclone, Entangling Roots, Bash, and Wild Charge will allow us to effectively control an opposing team, and if our survivability and damage are up to snuff, we will be a strong piece of many 3s comps (particularly ones with strong damage and control like FMP or EbolaCleave).

About the SOPA Thing...

2011-12-22T13:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry about that instead of a post on Monday, but I felt that I had to speak up on the matter. There is still a lot of work to be done to keep it from passing, but I'm done with my civil discourse for the moment.

Okay... yes... I re-upped my account. In fact, Guntir and I did some 2s for fun running Feral+RSham to shake off the cobwebs and we went like 9-3 or something and got to 1000 (woo). We both have Friday off, so we will likely be grinding that noise up quite a bit (hopefully 2k, but whatever). This time around, I am taking the game much more with a grain of salt and looking at it as a hobby that is fun for a bit. I really should not get so wrapped up in ratings or what-have-you as I was previously.

There were a few things I noticed upon my return, however. First, I have to say that damage is absolutely silly at the moment; I am hitting the target dummies for 50k from time to time in season nine gear and am twitching at the notion of going to season eleven gear. Second, Rogues are insane at the moment; as crazy as my ability to deal damage is, there's is much more bursty. Lastly, MS is right back where I said it would be; if you are going to run a comp these days, you need to have MS... again.

The Rogue thing was hilarious. We had a match against Rogue+HPal and Stevely was hanging strong and doing alright mana wise, but when the Rogue decided to swap to him, he'd have him from 140k hp to 10k hp inside a cheap shot. I do not know if it is just shadow dance or what, but Rogue burst has gotten insane in my absence. On the flip-side of things, we were facing off against 1500-2000 scrubs, wearing season nine gear, and mopping the floor with them. We had a match where I DC'd in the middle of it, came back without addons, and still beat a DK+Disco team because the Disc simply refused to trinket; I suppose he assumed his DK would live through my damage.

Oh yeah, that's another thing - when did DKs become awful at survivability against other melees? Is it just me, or can I train a DK straight into the ground, now? We faced a fair few of them and I kept finding myself with 15 seconds left on Rip, Rake and Mangle applied, and five combo points to use and a FCC. I would do the old FCC->FB->Ravage combo to drop some strong burst, though back in season nine that would only have done between 25 and 35k damage, and it would do anywhere from 50-60k damage. Again, maybe these guys are just really undergeared, but that seems like a huge amount of burst against a plate-wearer to me.

Oh yeah, Guntir played with his Warrior friend and says he's better at a lot of the subtleties than any of our previous 3s partners, though he needs to learn things like when to swap and when to back off. The nice thing is that he seems to have a grasp of the more technical aspects (one's which cannot easily be taught) and only needs to practice the simpler ones (or have me call out targets). I am looking forward to seeing what we can do as a 3s team.

Oh Dat MS...

2011-12-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

I realize today that I said I would post back as to whether Guntir and that potential third had done any arenas; well, I got in contact with Guntir and he said that the other guy wanted to do BGs to grind up some gear first. I know what you are thinking: "why not do arenas as well?" That is what went through Guntir's and my head as well, but whatever - we are in no big rush. Hopefully, he and Guntir will get some games in this week and we will know whether it is worth the time and effort or not.

I have been playing a lot of L4D lately. It truly is a fun game that I can pick up and play for an hour of simple fun. The only reason I bring it up is because we have some nomenclature which basically fits the form "dat [something]" when something is done well (or amazingly poorly). For instance, if you land a really slick pounce as a hunter and it ends up costing the other team a health pack (good teams) or you land an instant-kill smoker pull, one would generally say "dat pull" or "dat smoker" or "dat hunter".

"Dat MS"

I got into work this morning and checked my email, like always, and aside from a number of work-related emails that somewhat bothered me, I was pleased as punch to see that Squanky uploaded two more videos [one and two]. Now, aside from the hilarious strategies used and the one teammate who calls the enemy a "banana" (over which I spent minutes laughing), the overwhelming message to take from these videos is that MS is back to its previously OP status. The first video is Squanky's KFC against a Junglecleave of the disco variety, and the big plan was "kill priest till he dead"; it worked perfectly. The second match is against a Shatterplay and the strategy was "kill mage till he dead"; it, too, worked perfectly. In fact, neither of these videos showed any signs that Squanky's team was even feeling pressure from his opponents.

On the one hand, I am glad to see a Wizcleave get beaten, and I would love to hear that melee run-down comps can compete against Wizcleaves again, but I am willing to bet that KFC/TSG/etc are going to come back in favor to the point of being every other team queued... that is an annoying prospect. In fact, I am reasonably certain that a 25% MS is going to spell the death of priest comps (except, interestingly, RMP will come back to favor because of the peels for the priest) and the reemergence of "must have MS to compete". That may sound like a bad thing, but in the long run it will likely be good for all of us without a healing reduction. Recall, Blizzard is testing the grounds for MS et al and seeing if this last effort is the balancing point for which they seek. If not, as I suspect, then likely Blizz will have to do away with the effect forever and balance healing and damage around, wait for it, healing and damage.

This season may be the TSG season (again), but hopefully it will open the doors to a MoP without MS effects.

Better Late Than...

2011-12-07T08:10:00.001-08:00

Ugh... I had the most abysmal stomach flu set in early Saturday morning and I am still recuperating; hence the late post. On the other hand, I gave out two posts a week for the last few weeks, so it is probably a wash.

So, the end of the season has come and gone and yesterday marked the start of a new one. I have a few things to say about that, but firstly I wanted to mention this: Guntir was going to try and get some 2s games in with a guildy of his (mage, but mains a Warrior) and see if the guy is any good. If so, he was going to suggest running 3s with, wait for it, a Feral he has run with in the past and see how that bodes. It is still early and I have no idea whether he actually ended up playing with the guy or not, but I am interested to hear what he says.

That's right, I may be saddling back up before MoP and getting back into the PvP game to see how 3s fares this season as Feral. Sadly, I am an entire season behind on gear (I do not even remember the name of the gear I am wearing, but it was the season before the one that just ended all T2), but hopefully that will not end up mattering too much. Guntir had been playing 3s with some friends of his on his Priest (RMP) and they were getting pretty decent for beginners (somewhere in the 1600-1800 if I recall correctly), so if we do end up running 3s, I do not think it will be with Guntir but Stevely (his Shaman) instead. Supposedly, Feral+War+Sham is a decent comp at the moment.

I will try and post back when I hear from Guntir on how, or if, that went down.

Back to the new season in general! There were a lot of changes in 4.3 and not a lot of them made sense. Furthermore, being less and less attached to the WoW scene in recent months, I found it harder and harder to keep the changes made in my head. I felt like I saw that Rake got buffed at one point, but when I looked through the patch notes (and I scoured multiple versions of them) I never found that change again. Additionally, Blizzard took the initiative to nerf Wind Shear for Resto Shammies [finally] only to actually buff Wind Shear for Eles and Enhancement shammies. Enhancement in particular are scary anti-casters now; I do not know the scene well enough to speculate fully, but I would not be surprised to see some UnholyDK+Enh+Disco teams this season just because of the amazing caster-control.

Blizzard is moving Bears back to the stam-banks of yore. I never really understood why the decision was made to reduce the HP of bears in the first place. Unlike [insert any other tank here], Bears only have one means of mitigation (okay, we all have vengeance now, nevermind) in Dodge and the rest of that was made up for in superior damage reduction from armor and damage soak in a high health pool. When the health pool got cut down so long ago, the tanking scene for Ferals just changed too much. Additionally, in PvP going Bear used to be a defensive cooldown, of sorts, and with roughly the same HP as caster form, the only boon was gotten from the extra armor, which was also nerfed.

Anyway, we shall see how things play out. I suspect that 25% MS is going to be extremely strong in the current setting and we will see teams like TSG and KFC back at the top where the combined unhealable damage cooldowns and MS effects will make for nigh-unbeatable healer-zergs. Blizzard will likely, but do not hold me to this, end up removing healing reduction effects for MoP when this balance attempt does not pan out.

It is Not Monday, I Know!

2011-11-23T07:32:00.001-08:00

However, the talent calculator was released by Blizzard and it has some truly interesting stuff worth discussing, and it seems to have answered a lot of my questions.

Firstly, take note that Wild Charge has been updated to include Cat Form, which does exactly what Feral Charge Cat and Stampede do on live - leap behind an enemy and cause your next Ravage to cost no energy, not require stealth, and have no positioning requirement. This means that tier4 largely must be considered as the "Wild Charge Tier" for PvP Ferals. Also worth noting, Wild Charge has effects for non-shapeshifted (which we knew about), Travel, Flight, and Aquatic Forms as well (which we did not). I admit, when I first read about Wild Charge, I thought it would be governed by the specialization chosen by the player, but now I think that it will be given to all Druids who take Wild Charge and the effect will simply vary depending on the form.

What is interesting about this revelation is that the non-shapeshifted version of Wild Charge is actually amazing in terms of survivability; it is essentially Leap of Faith except that the Feral can decide when to use it. The macro possibilities will be rather insane, but the ability itself will be great. Imagine a "cancel cat form, wild charge [target=guntir]" macro - it would be a 30s CD to use as a get out of jail card on maps like Blade's Edge, Sewers, or even RoV in certain scenarios. Similarly, Travel Form is basically Blink plus a 20% damage reduction for 10 seconds. I do not know if these sorts of abilities will remain to live because Wild Charge seems grossly overpowered for Resto, but who knows.

Otherwise, the talent tree is largely unchanged for Ferals. More interesting is the Feral specialization and the abilities given. We still get Bash at level 8, but interestingly it is defaulted to a 5s stun now (instead of 4) and does not matter what specialization is picked (that is, Balance and Resto also get the 5s stun of Bash). Similarly, Pounce is a 4s stun by default and every spec gets it for free.

Of the spec-based abilities Ferals get, Tiger's Fury coupled with King of the Jungle (from live) comes as no big surprise. Mangle only reads "Damage varies by shapeshift form", which I think is funny because Wild Charge looks like the old Shadowform tooltip: "Wild Charge, Chapter 1 ..." Similar to this is Rip, having been given "Glyph of Shred" or whatever it is called now by default - increasing the duration of Rip by 2 seconds whenever Mangle or Shred lands on a Ripped target (max 6). I am truly wondering what is to become of the Glyph system since many of them are now on the abilities baseline.

Blizzard suggested that Mangle would no longer increase Bleed damage and that it would do roughly the same, but slightly less, damage as Shred; however, when we look at Shred (which is a Feral-spec-only ability now) we see the new tooltip says "Shred the target, causing 540% damage plus 335 to the target... Deals 20% additional damage against bleeding targets."

Looking at Mangle on live, it claims to do 540% damage as well, so the real differences here will be 1) positioning requirement, 2) 20% more damage from Shred, and 3) Mangle costs 5 less energy. Obviously, this will require the finalized numbers to make an actual assessment, but I am still not sold on Mangle being "very close to Shred" in terms of damage per second. This is definitely a step in the right direction; Mangle is easier to use in PvP for sure, and without that additional 30% multiplier from Mangle to Shred, it gets much closer. My in-the-head-napkin-maths say that would equate to 9 Mangles for every 8 Shreds and 20% more-again of 8 Shreds is basically 9.6 Shreds at the same damage as Mangle. That is roughly a 6.25% increase in damage for using Shred over Mangle in the long-run.

I also find it interesting that the old tooltip for Savage Roar has returned: "Finishing move that increases physical damage done by 30%." The Savage Roar on live specifically says auto-attacks, but the one on the talent calculator looks a la early Wrath. Forgetting, for the moment, that this is probably just a mistake, this could mean the old rotation comes back in flair in MoP without the requirement of Mangle. Additionally, if we are Mangle-spamming in PvP anyway, this will be easier to maintain and it probably stacks ludicrously with Tiger's Fury. Again, this is likely a mistake (I hope), but it would be interesting otherwise.

Okay, we finally have an answer - Predatory Strikes is back in full force: finishing moves have a 20% chance per combo point to cause the next nature spell with a cast time less than 10 seconds to become instant cast and cost no mana. Things are still early on, but it would be interesting to see if Blizzard has plans to, like Nature's Swiftness, allow the nature spell to be cast in form. I am holding my breath and crossing my fingers, but that might be way too overpowered. Additionally, while Predatory Strikes does nothing for Ravage, Ravage now simply has an innate 50% additional critical strike chance against targets above 80% hp.

Interestingly, also still present is Dash and Stampeding Roar in their current forms and causing the removal of all roots and snares. In the case of Stampeding Roar, I understand this completely as it is useful for your teammates, but with Disentanglement on the table, why Dash? Additionally, with these abilities still granting root-breaking, why does Tireless Pursuit exist if it is simply another Dash? I would say that this is going to mean much steeper costs on shapeshifting, but we still have Leader of the Pack to restore 8% of our total mana, so I am sort of at a loss.

Notably missing is Remove Corruption; it seems that only casters will have access to dispels of these types in MoP. For instance, Balance has Remove Corruption which removes a Poison and a Curse, but Feral does not. Oddly, both Elemental and Enhancement Shammies have Cleanse Spirit to remove a curse. No idea if this is intended or not, but it is early-on in development, so who knows.

A new ability, near as I can tell, is called "Might of Ursoc", which increases maximum health by 30% and increases health to 30% if below that. Lasts 20 seconds on a 3min CD. This is obviously a survivability ability, but it does not specify Bear Form, so that is a bit odd. I would have though at least it would say "activates Bear Form" as Demoralizing Roar and whatnot does.

Additionally, something interesting about these sorts of abilities is that they all "activate Bear Form" now, rather than requiring the form. This is interesting because canceling a form never caused a GCD before, and using a form used to cause a GCD; I wonder if Blizzard is finally getting around this by allowing abilities out-of-form which cause the form to fire at the same time as the ability. This makes the game play more fluidly depending on whether Shred/Mangle/Rip/etc get the same treatment. That is, say you are in Cat Form and you want to land a long stun and also use Rip, you could, potentially, hit Bash which would stun the target for 5 seconds and activate Bear Form on the same GCD, then when that GCD ends hit Rip and get back into Cat Form on the same GCD that Rip was applied. At the moment, no Cat Form abilities which deal damage state "activates Cat Form", so this might be a non-issue, but it is something to think about.

I have been saving the best for last, of course; Symbiosis is a new ability learned at level 87:

4% of base mana
30 yd range
Instant cast
Creates a symbiotic link which grants the Druid one ability belonging to the target's class, varying by the Druid's specialization.

In exchange, grants the target one Druid ability based on their class and combat role.

Lasts 1 hour and persists through death.

Okay, well... that is insane. This does not say whether the target must be friendly or hostile (or either), but based on the wording and the fact that it lasts 1 hour and persists through death, I have to imagine that it is only usable on friendly targets. If I am understanding the ability correctly, and I make no guarantees that such is the case, then Symbiosis will allow me to gain an ability from Guntir based on my role (dps) and give him an ability based on his role (healer). Maybe this is like a friendly-only version of Dark Simulacrum? I am having a hard time even speculating on exactly how this will work.

I AM excited, however.

I hope that it does not steal an ability from my friend and myself, but I could see that happening as well. Something like, I "take" Mind Blast as a Feral from a Priest so that priest can no longer use Mind Blast, but instead they "take" Regrowth from me (haha, I just looked; Feral will not have Regrowth, Nourish, or Lifebloom).

More than likely, this will mean that Guntir would receive a new ability in Rejuvenation or something, and I would get access to Shadow Word: Death or something. We would each still "have" these abilities, but we each gained one of the others' abilities based on our specs.

Those Were the Days

2011-11-21T07:09:00.001-08:00

Another Monday, another chance for me to wax nostalgic. Firstly, I closed escrow on my new place last week and moved in over the weekend; I am super-tired, but love the new place entirely except for one thing: I believe the windows are old and have poor weather stripping. It got down to ~48 last night (not too cold for some people, but in Southern California, that is considered low) and it could not have been more than 52 or 53 in my home >_<. We have a fire place, but a family member who did our home inspection said not to use it until we get it inspected by a professional. Anyway, I am still excited.

Okay, I didn't know exactly what I was going to write about today, and I had one of those "oh come on Rey, you only suggested the once a week on Monday thing like two weeks ago, you can't fail now!" Then it hit me; I guess I just should start writing it instead of writing about how I came up with it... it's early... leave me alone.

So, a growing concern of mine has to do with the "we want Hybrids to feel more hybrid-like again and use non-main-role abilities more often" stance that Blizzard has taken toward Druids in MoP. I am truly worried that Ferals will be balanced around having to get out of a fight and throw 3 Wraths (or something) every now and then to deal our best melee damage. This may be effective in a raiding environment where boss mechanics may make melee range impossible for 10-15s every now and then and therefore a reason would exist for a Feral to pop out and start lobbing Wraths until the end of the phase, then get back into the fray with increased physical damage for a short period, but balancing Feral damage around these sorts of mechanics will simply make Feral a lackluster option for PvP, where doing anything less than your maximum for any period of time is a waste.

The flip-side of this is that Warriors and Rogues (in particular) are getting abilities to use from range that will do decent damage when not performing their primary role. I suppose it could be that Blizzard is planning on making melees balanced around their physical damage, but trying not to punish them on raid encounters that require more than tank-n-spank. In fact, the more I think about this, the more I see it being an actual possibility that Blizzard simply wants all the melee classes to have something to do (besides die in the fire) when the fight calls for short periods of "get out of melee". For instance, if the ranged classes can just sit there and pelt the boss with icebolts over and over again, then the only way for the melees to compete is for them to be in a tank-n-spank situation in which the melees can go whole-hog as well.

Interestingly, in most fights (that I remember from my raiding days) the ranged will have to move or die in the fire, and even some encounters had entirely mobile phases (safety dance comes to mind readily) where the ranged could only use instants. AHHHHHH, it is all coming together now - the melees ONLY use instants while in melee range and can do so while mobile; the ranged ONLY use cast-time abilities while stationary and cannot do so while mobile. However, the ranged classes can use instants while on the run and most melees cannot do anything while not in melee range. If we look at encounter dichotomy, then we see why Blizzard is doing this: enable the melees to contribute while not able to perform their primary positional role in the same way that casters can. Okay, so when a Mage has to move, he'll spam Scorch (if talented) to keep his DPS up, and if a Feral has to get out of melee, then he'll drop some Wraths on the boss to keep his DPS up.

What is most interesting about this is that if Blizzard gets this right, then those talents at Tier6 are useful in PvE, but definitely not mandatory. When compared to Disentanglement, both Heart of the Wild and Master Shapeshifter look stronger provided that the raiding content actually has fights which require these sorts of mechanics; yet, when I think about PvP, I have to imagine that the normal Wrath-spam will be close to the HotW Wrath-spam, since it only increases our Intellect by 50% of our agility. I am sure that the numbers are not set in stone, but it is probably going to be close enough that it is a worth-while button to press in a raid encounter, but not a required one. That being the case would mean that Wrath is a semi-powerful button to mash in general.

Blizzard said that Ferals will be getting Nurturing Instinct by spec in MoP, and that it would be powerful enough to make using a Wrath a worth-while endeavor in the situations where melee is impossible for 5-10s for one reason or another. What intrigues me is whether this will impact healing as I expect it will impact nuking. Since Blizzard has largely done away with the idea of healing-vs-damage spell power, Nurturing Instinct is likely to remain "gives X% of your Agility as spell power and causes heals to be 20% more effective on you while in Cat Form". If our mana pool is gigantic at baseline (as discussed in the previous post) then we can assume that we could actually use a fair few heals before running out of mana, and if we assume, too, that Leader of the Pack is still in MoP as our only form of mana return then we may have windows of healing followed by a return to the dps role in PvP.

Really quickly as an aside, Innervate is based off of the casting Druid's total mana and all Druids will have the same mana pool regardless of spec in MoP. Either Innervate will have to change, or we will bring the best buff in the game for healers. Likely, Innervate will be changed to be spirit based since that will be the regen stat, but who knows.

Okay, why did I name this post "Those Were the Days"? Back in Seasons 1/2, Feral was bad. Feral was god-awful, truth be told. Feral was better than it ever was in Vanilla, but it was still terrible to behold let alone play. In season 1 or 2 before the days of Feral Charge Cat or Infected Wounds, we would occasionally get out of range of our targets when trying to land a killing blow, which almost always led to the inevitable Moonfire-spam. Moonfire was an ability that was not terrible for Feral. I do not really recall why; we may have had some talents that simply made it work out that way, or we had an instant which did not scale well from spell power and thus had a high base damage; whatever the reason was, Moonfire-spam was the kill-shot we had against runners.

Obviously, Blizzard does not want Feral to end up spamming Moonfire as a killshot attempt at runners; we have many (and I mean many) abilities to close the gap between us and our foe, but with this focus on "Hybridity" in MoP, I cannot help but wonder if Moonfire will be one of those spells I end up putting back on my bar for those rare cases where I need to take down a Grounding Totem while my nuking-buddy is winding up a CC or something critical. It will be interesting to see, if nothing else. I am sort of hoping that we do not need to put Moonfire back on the bars - I am looking at the talents and current abilities and saying "I don't even know where Typhoon will go let alone Moonfire >_< ! ! !"

On an Issue of Stats Continued

2011-11-16T09:28:00.001-08:00

I know, I know... I promised one post per week, but this came out today and I had to write something.

Okay, so here is a quote from GC concerning the upcoming change to healers with regard to mana pool scaling around int.

For healers, there should not always be a clear cut answer. Intellect may still be the superior stat, but not by as much as it is today. (Again, for healers -- DPS specs aren’t designed to run out of mana if they use their regen mechanics every now and then.) Mana pools can still be large (we are thinking 100,000 mana at level 85) so that it doesn’t feel too bizarre to existing casters and doesn’t feel too much like rage or energy.

Okay, so the idea is that mana pools will be static in size and never change; that is, if you have a mana pool then the amount of intellect you have will not change the amount of mana you have.

Guntir pointed this out to me and it hit home, allow me to state that again:

If you have a mana pool then the amount of intellect you have will not change the amount of mana you have.

Okay, so while on Live Resto/Balance Druids have 100k mana pools, for example, because they have huge amounts of int from their gear and gems and whatever else; however, Ferals only have 26k mana because none of our gear has intellect on it. Now are you starting to see the issue? Ferals will potentially have 100k mana pools in MoP simply by virtue of this new mechanic. Intellect will no longer matter, so Druids, regardless of spec, should have the exact same mana pool size. This is HUGELY interesting!

I was concerned about us having access to Disentanglement, particularly because of the statements that Blizzard had released concerning Feral and how it was the escapist class and how other melees did not have the option etc. I was concerned that Disentanglement would be an option Ferals could take, but then Shapeshifting would become this hugely expensive move that would take a majority of our tiny mana pool and cause shapeshifting to become a choice with the consequence being that we may not have the mana for an instant-cast Cyclone later (or what have you).

Feral being a Druid with the same mana pool as a Resto Druid, on the other hand, is hugely appealing. We will just have to wait and see how this plays out.

On an Issue of Stats

2011-11-13T07:42:00.001-08:00

Before I get into the stats, I thought I would share some thoughts on this little quote about MS-effects:

We dropped the healing debuff from 50% to 10% some time ago, but were convinced at 10% that it was hard to appreciate the effect at all. We want to try Mortal Strike et al. at 25% to see if it feels useful but not mandatory. If 25% is too much and 10% is too little, then it may mean the entire mechanic may not have much of a future. We decided to only change the debuff for the warrior, rogue, and hunter, restoring the original relationship between “strong” and “weak” MS that we had in Lich King.

Essentially, Rogues, Warriors, and Hunters will once again have the most potent healing debuffs in the game. At 25%, however, they are half as powerful as they were in Cataclysm. What strikes me as interesting in this change is the question of source - where does Blizzard see a lack of warrior, rogues, and hunters in high-end PvP? To be fair, I have been out of the game for a few months now and have honestly not kept up with the flavors of the month and who is on top, so it could very well be that I simply am not noticing that caster-cleaves are back in force or that DK+Spriest+Druid is the best threes comp around. I simply do not know; however, I would still guess that Rogue/Warrior/Hunter representation in the arenas is more than adequate with their 10% healing debuff.

In any case, the most interesting bit here is the suggestion that MS-effects may end up being removed entirely if 25% turns out to be too strong. The reason that this intrigues me, other than the fact that these overpowered mechanics are finally on the chopping block, is that Blizzard is not willing to delve any deeper than numbers. They suggest that if 10% is too weak, and 25% is too strong, then it is a problem that they refuse to solve by trying again at 15 or 20%. On the one hand, I think this is because Blizzard does not want to disenfranchise players by changing this value every other week, but on the other hand it may be more to the intrinsic problem that is anti-scaling.

I have discussed MS-effects ad nauseum, so I will try and keep this brief - at the core, MS-effects scale inversely with a healer's power, and while a healer's power scales pretty linearly with gear (which scale exponentially during the course of an expansion, but is pretty much static during a season), MS-effects cut that growth in half (or by a tenth, or a quarter - whatever the value of MS is at the time). What ends up bring the issue is that at some point MS-effects are either powerful enough to cause concern for a healer, or they are simply a mana-burn in that the healer has to use more mana than in the absence. Either way, this put teams without an MS-effect at a disadvantage, unless they can do 10% (or 25% or whatever MS is) more damage overall and therefore cause the same healing requirement of the opposing healer. For the longest time, the former was true, and for a very brief period in Cataclysm, the latter was true. I fear that going to a 25% MS will bring back the "non-MS teams will be at a disadvantage", and ultimately Blizzard will have to scrap the effect as the suggested in the quote.

To the stats! Blizzard had a "dev's watercooler" discussion about stats. Particularly, the issue of exponential stat growth was discussed. This is something that I talk about at every expansion, it seems - the public gets a glimpse of some of the gear that is released and goes bonkers over the absurd stats on each piece. Way back when TBC was released, we saw greens that had three times the amount of stam on them than tanking purples from Black Wing Lair. Then in wrath we saw the same thing but with primary stats like intellect and agility. This cycle continues every single expansion; how else could Blizzard get the public to buy those expansions unless the gear upgrade continued growing and forcing the out-dating of one's current gear?

In this, we see a growing problem - each expansion shows damage increasing in an exponential fashion. In Vanilla landing a 200 was a big hit; in TBC 2000 was huge; in Wrath we saw some caster cleaves dropping 10ks on people in a gcd; and finally, we are in Cataclysm now and I quite some months ago while dropping 30ks on Mages with FB or Ravage fairly regularly. While this damage is not going up exponentially (as my mathematically inclined readers will note), it is definitely going up in a non-linear fashion, and growing roughly with our stats on gear. If we look to MoP, then those 30ks that I can drop may well be 50 or even 75k hits, which would mean people should have something like 250k hp... some bosses in Vanilla did not have that much HP.

So, Blizzard has basically discussed two options: 1) the "MEGA DAMAGE" option and 2) the "squish" option. Basically, mega damage would be allowing the trend to continue, but updating the scrolling combat text and whatever else to accommodate "10M damage" (to show 10 million damage, as an example; I would imagine that 10K would be more inline with MoP) in the far future. I am not a fan of this method because it honestly does not fix anything. Damage will still be growing at this ridiculous rate and while people will be excited about seeing huge numbers, they will not be killing anything any faster, so it will not really matter.

The squish option basically acknowledges that each expansion's end-game content always causes exponential growth (as you can see in the image to left which I am borrowing from MMO-Champion). Notice that the growth while grinding is usually very small and the end-game makes everything crazy.

The squish method aims to resolve this issue by retroactively reducing the ilvl (or just flat stats) of each previous tier, thus reducing almost all the "current" gear into greens/blues from the next expansion.

As an example, when MoP comes out, if this were to be done, then our current gear would drop from ilvl 391 to perhaps ilvl 99, and MoP's gear would start at 100.

Also notice that the last tier, MoP (represented in red), has a HUGELY steep growth in the end-game when compared to the previous "squished" tiers. This is the interesting bit - the end-game tier would still grow exponentially at the time it was new, but once a new expansion comes out, all that gear basically gets squished down into blues/greens of the first level in the next expansion. This is exactly what happens at present, but it is done by the next tier being as strong as that exponentially grown tier of purples before it while the squish method essentially artificially does this by spot-reducing the end-game gear of the then-defunct expansion.

Blizzard rightly worries about causing players stress under this model by having us going from 30k crits at level 85 to 5k crits at level 90. However, if the HP pools support it, we are still simply doing a portion of our target's health, and the actual numbers do not really matter except to make the player feel better when they are huge. Personally, I like this method the best as it actually aims to wrangle in the out of control growth.

Class Balance Q&A

2011-11-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

I know I said I would try and only post on Mondays from now on, but damn... some of these questions are the ones I asked on Monday. Check it out!

Comment From Christina Thomas

I noticed in a sample of the druid talent tree coming up in MoP, that there seems to not be many restoration-specific talents. In fact it seems a lot like hybrid-esque talents. Is this intentional? Will the lack of restoration talents be made up for in the spells they get?

Wradyx:

The overall philosphy of the Druid talent treee is to bring some hybridization back to the Druid class. The 4 Druid specs have become very focused on never using the forms that they do not specialize in. We would like to bring the whole class back together more. So, interesting functionality themed around the different combat roles has been introduced. Some players have objected that they aren't good at the other roles, and those abilities aren't worth the global cooldown they cost. To address this, we are making the existing Nurturing Instinct talent baseline to both Feral and Guardian Druids, and making a new talent which grants attack power based on Intellect for Restoration and Balance Druids. That will make the occasional use of core class abilities that require other forms useful even to the Restoration Druid. In addition, the combination of talents may let a Restoration Druid do things like use Demoralizing Roar, which cc's nearby enemies, triggers an instant heal (from Disentanglement), and increases armor and health all in a single gcd. That capability is useful to Restoration Druids even in a raid setting.

I am not entirely sure what to make of this... it seems like they are honestly trying to bring back the "hybrid" feel of Druids, but in all honesty Feral only became a worthwhile PvP option when that hybrid-mindset was diminished to near extinct. When we have utility built around doing something other that min/max-stuff, we tend to suck at min/max stuff. As long as Blizz promises that while in a min/max environment, we can perform up to par, then I do not mind being designed with a little utility flair thrown in on top.

Comment From Bellajtok

A lot people are worried that with druids being able to do well at our other roles, we'll see the return of the "hybrid tax". It's the same old story: if we can perform any role when needed, raids will stack us, unless we don't do as well in our specific roles, in which case we're bad at what we most want to do. What assurance can we get that we won't have this problem?

Celestalon:

We are very interested in opening opportunities for more hybrid gameplay in druids, as you can see in the level 90 talent tier, while still allowing an option for players who want to never do anything outside their role. We don't intend for that added hybridization to be offset by any sort of DPS nerf. While DPSing, a druid's DPS will be entirely competitive with other DPS. We hope to see druids that do things like, "DPS in Cat Form most of the fight, but during one phase, when healing is super difficult, pop out of Cat, hit Heart of the Wild, Tranquility, and spam heals on the raid to help top everyone off, then go back to Cat and resume DPSing." In that sort of the situation, the Cat will have spent less time DPSing than other DPSers, but his/her DPS while DPSing would have been competitive, and in exchange helped save the raid when healers were falling behind. You can probably think of many situations where this would be useful in raid content, or in some 5man content, and frequently in PvP. To clarify a bit further on how the druids will perform at their off-roles: Ferals and Guardians will have Nurturing Instinct, which increases spell power based on Agility, and Balance and Restoration will have Killer Instinct, which increases attack power based on Intellect. They will have a smaller toolbox of spells for their off-role, but the strength of those spells will be competitive, when under the effects of those hybrid talents.

Correction, not a new talent, a new baseline abiltiy for Resto and Balance that grants ap from Intellect.

What I do not like about this explanation is basically that the two talents in question are essentially PvE-specific (Master Shapeshifter and Heart of the Wild) while Disentanglement is a hugely overpowered PvP abilities for most Druids. I guess I should be less argumentative, as this will allow us to be back where we were mobility-wise before we got nerfed in the face and forced to sit in roots with no breaks.

Interestingly, this makes our decision at the first talent tier less interesting; we simply will not have to take Tireless Pursuit since Disentanglement will largely override it.

Comment From L

In the old talent trees, a lot of the talents gave players spec-specific gameplay mechanics that are core to its gameplay, such as the Mage's Hot Streak talent. Others, such as Infected Wounds for Druids, also provided important benefits/mechanics, but might not be necessary to take depending on raid composition (i.e. if another player brought the debuff). With the new talent system, how are these mechanics going to be incorporated into the classes? It would seem overwhelming to players to roll all of the core spec mechanics into the "Level 10 Pick Your Spec" decision, and are talents like Infected Wounds going to be made choices of some sort, or are they also just going to be rolled into the spec?

Ghostcrawler:

In most cases, if it's a fun mechanic, we give it to your spec. All Fire mages get Hot Streak at a certain level. Feral druids (but not Guardian druids - the new bear spec) learn Infected Wounds. As with every expansion, we are taking a close look at buffs and debuffs, simplifying the matrix a bit, and making sure you don't feel like you are locked into a certain debuff.

BADASS! I love you Ghostcrawler!!! So, this means that PvP Ferals will likely take Typhoon over Faerie Swarm for most teams just for the added control.

Comment From Clayton Nash

Are there any plans to simplify the feral cat druid dps rotations or are you happy where they are right now?

Wradyx:

The Feral rotation has been simplified slightly in 4.3 by renaming the Glyph of Shred and allowing it to trigger off Mangle instead. In addition, in 5.0 Mangle will no longer cause a bleed damage debuff and so no longer be required in the rotation. At that point, the two abilities will be interchangeable, changing only by whether a Feral Druid can attack from behind or not. That will make Feral easier to play in high movement encounters and encounters with facing restrictions. The current Feral Charge and Stampede talents are becoming part of Wild Charge, so you can select not to have that complexity with Ravage. Past that, we are pretty happy with the rotation and feel there is a strong Feral community that enjoys the current rotation.

WHOA. Well, this means that Incarnation is off the table for PvP (likely) since Wild Charge will be a huge mobility and burst talent that is nigh-mandatory for PvP... but that's okay, I'm glad it is still in the game.

Comment From Monopedia

With the previously mentioned removal of the +bleed debuff will Feral druids have Mangle taken away to become Guardian only and Shred lose its positional requirement. Without the bleed debuff and its obvious lower damage output than shred, Mangle is extremely situational especially when somebody else is already providing the ability. Or will Mangle debuff on the target just increase the feral druids bleeds and shred damage?

Celestalon:

Mangle and Shred will both exist for Feral (cats). Mangle will no longer apply a debuff, but will be usable from any facing, whereas Shred will offer slightly more overall DPS if you are able to stay behind the target. Guardians (bears) will have Mangle, but not Shred.

In case this was confusing from the other post talking about Mangle-vs-Shred. They will both be there, but Mangle will not improve bleeds or shred's damage. Shred will do a little more damage overall, but the gap is closer now... maybe we just Mangle in PvP finally???

Comment From Michele

I think this is the main question that feral druids seems to have right now: when you said that Shred will do "slightly" more damage than Shred, did that mean that mangle is going to get buffed a little to provide less penalities in the several encounters we can't Shred? Because the difference between those skills is pretty big currently.

Wradyx:

Our own internal numbers show that once the Glyph of Shred works from Mangle as well as Shred, the difference between a Mangle and a Shred rotation is actually fairly small (in the 5% range).

Whoa... yeah; if Mangle and Shred are honestly within 5% damage of one another, Mangle-spam will become the PvP norm and we will never have to get behind our opponent again. That would be GLORIOUS.

Comment From Dennis Mooney

There hasn't been any questions answered about Resto Druids yet. Can you talk about our extremely weak state in PvP and the fact that we're the only healer not only not seeing a buff but seeing a nerf in 4.3?

Wradyx:

We will definitely be addressing some of the PvP weakness of Resto Druids in 5.0. For one, the ability to recreate the Restokin builds of earlier expansions was introduced in the talent trees. Carefully selecting talents like Typhoon and Wild Charge together will give Restoration Druids a lot more opportunity to control. One of the new abilities Resto Druids will get baseline is a replacement for Barkskin that can be cast on others with the same effect and cooldown. Finally, we have a new level 87 ability abiltiy in mind for all Druids called Symbiosis that will blwo your mind and potentially add a lot of flexibility and utility, including survivabiltiy options.

I only included this because of the new ability, Symbiosis, for all Druids that will blow my mind and potentially add a lot of flexibility and utility. No idea what is meant by this, but a great teaser to keep in mind.

Comment From NateDosMil

As a Druid, I feel that the level 90 talents feel too much like work. You guys put so much effort into making the Moonkin unique and more complex, so why force us to shift more often to "fill other combat roles?" Poor kitties are going to have a nightmare of a time dealing with this...

Wradyx:

The level 90 Druid talents deliberately come in 3 different levels of work required. Heart of the Wild is perfect for an encounter where there is a period where increased healing is needed for a short time, and dps is not the need of the encounter. Something like the Chimaeron encounter where more healing is needed at certain times, and dps is less important. Master Shapeshifter targets the Druid who is willing to do a lot of work shifting back and forth or occasionally needs to heal or damage, such as Blood Queen Lanathel, where a Tranquility boosted by the talent would help your group a lot during her air phase. Disentanglement is there for the "lazy" Druid who doesn't want to do that work, but still gets some benefit from a well-timed shapeshift.

Soooooo basically the PvP Ferals get Disentanglement; a talent which used to be baked into the class. Oh well, we will gladly take it over those other two rotting piles of dog-vomit.

Let's Talk Turkey!

2011-11-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

I really wanted to get into discussing the blue post concerning stat points in the future and how to get around the exponential growth problem, but I have resigned myself to finishing what I started (though I also pseudo-promised this would be published Monday and it is in fact Tuesday). Therefore, I ought to finish up talking about the talents as we know them.

Before we can get into the issue of actually picking talents, we need to understand the role which the Feral of MoP will need to play in PvP. By the looks of the talents, Feral has access to some truly amazing utility talents which could potentially net us some truly interesting builds, and if nothing else we will have a wide arsenal of abilities which lay outside the scope of dealing damage. Additionally, we cannot take for granted that which we currently have; with the talent tree toss up coming in MoP, we may end up losing some current talents in favor of ground-shaking balance adjustments - we may not have Predator's Swiftness any longer and therefore may not have the ability to throw out instant Cyclones after finishers.

Why do I say that particularly? Well, if I look at the talent trees directly, I notice that all Druids have access to Nature's Swiftness in the second tier. Further to that, it also increases the duration by 50%, so that Cyclone would last 8 seconds in PvP (9 otherwise) like most other CCs. Again, this is just speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt, but it is important to acknowledge these types of possible caveats so as to not get one's hopes up. Personally, I do not believe that Blizzard will allow Nature's Swiftness to go ahead as-is because an 8s duration instant Cyclone from a Resto Druid would be an atrocity.

Okay, as the title suggests - let's talk turkey!

I find the first tier the most interesting, though not for obvious reasons. I think that every Feral sees the allure of an ability like Displacer Beast; we all have begged for something like this for a LONG time, but the cooldown is much longer than I would have imagined. Again, taking nothing for granted and treading lightly, we may be cautiously optimistic that simply specializing in Feral will innately lower this cooldown somewhat while leaving it as a longer cooldown for Resto/Balance, but I do not know for sure. The truly interesting thing about the first tier is that of the other two abilities, they were something which we had taken entirely as Feral previously - we are accustomed to moving 30% faster while in Cat Form and for the last few months breaking roots and snares when using either Sprint or Stampede. Yes, this tier is the most interesting to me because it implies a lot about the state of talent trees and how Blizzard aims to force choices amongst players in the future. Personally, I am leaning towards Displacer beast simply because of the huge number of things it does - teleports in a random direction 20 yards (quite a distance), removes all periodic damage effects (CloS on steroids), and puts us into prowl for 10 seconds.

Essentially, Displacer Beast is Blink, Cloak of Shadows, and Vanish rolled into one on a 3min CD. This can be used either offensively (again, assuming that we will continue to have access to Feral Charge Cat and it providing a free Ravage after use) or defensively as a get out of jail free card. Its true utility will only be seen in implementation; by this I mean that if we purge all DoT effects, stealth, THEN teleport so as to keep enemies from even GUESSING to where we have gone, then it will truly be an amazing talent (and one which even Restos and Balance druids will likely take). Even if it teleports us, then applies the purge+vanish effect it will still be worth-while, I imagine, but it will give away our "random" positioning which would truly be the strength of the former.

My pick: Displacer Beast

The second tier is interesting in that Nature's Swiftness has been changed to allow for an 8s Cyclone castable in Cat Form every three minutes. This is basically Blind on PCP... there is only one thing in the game that can break Cyclone (another taken-for-granted assumption) and that is the trinket. Most Druid teams essentially fish out trinkets with Cyclone and then use their longer CC-trains on the target when trinket is down. This allows for a longer train, in many cases, but also gives potential to dispels and damage-breaks and the like. However, if Cyclone is now a does-not-break-on-anything Blind which also keeps the target from receiving healing, then it may be worth taking just to set up some extreme CC-trains.

Again, I do not expect Blizz to allow NS to go live as-is... it would truly be too overpowered even at a 3min CD. The other option for Feral is Renewal. Essentially, every 2min I can simply give myself 30% of my hp as a self-heal in case I need a button to survive. I suspect that we will not have access to Survival Instincts any longer in MoP being as the Bear and Cat specializations are being pulled apart at the seam, but I could be wrong. My guess is that Renewal will be the button we press instead of SI when we need to survive a few more seconds, but I could be way off base and maybe we will still have SI in our arsenal (would be great) and this is just another button to press when your healer eats a CC train.

Because Cenarion Ward is a heal and based around spell power, I do not see Ferals picking it up.

My pick: If we do not have Predator's Swiftness anymore, Nature's Swiftness; else Renewal.

The third tier is another amazing tier in terms of interest. Faerie Swarm is basically our Feral Faerie Fire as-is, except there is a tacked on 50% snare thrown into the mix. Now, I have no idea what Blizz is playing at here; it could be that Blizzard is removing Infected Wounds in favor of forcing Ferals to pick up Faerie Swarm and gain a ranged snare on the GCD (a la hamstring + range), but who knows at this point. I suspect (and truly hope) that Infected Wounds remains in the game and Faerie Swarm is simply a snare aimed at helping Balance and Resto, though if Resto has access to a snare, then they would be the only healer with one (as far as I know) and that seems a little bit weird to me. If I were in Blizz's position here, I would be looking to give Balance a ranged snare (a la Slow) and some added utility for mixing with physical damage-dealers, so I would rewrite Faerie Swarm to say "When in Boomkin form, Faerie Swarm also causes a 50% snare for 15 seconds" so that the intention is clear. This would allow Infected Wounds to remain as-is and would give Balance Druids an option for ranged utility and a snare for escape.

Mass Entanglement was something I was truly excited to see until I read the "Cannot be cast while in Bear Form or Cat Form". I do not know why this stipulation is on there, as having a 2s cast AoE root effect would be strong but probably not overpowered, particularly if we are forced to stand still while casting it. Oh well. It looks like it's going to be an area of effect spell like Death and Decay, but then apply Entangling Roots to everyone standing there once it fires. I expect Restos will take this in a heartbeat, but the other option is also interesting.

Typhoon is back! I do not know why this is not simply a staple of the Balance specialization; it has been as long as Typhoon has been. I guess the new staple is Solar Beam, though I would be lying if I said I had not hoped that Solar Beam was going to be one of the new talent choices which Feral could acquire. If Infected Wounds remains in the game for Feral as our snare, then I will definitely be picking up Typhoon. Having played Boomkin for a while during season 8 (for funsies and to get my Arena Master title; Boomer was for 5s while Feral kind of sucked in 5s), I can say that Typhoon is one of those abilities that can entirely change the game, and while Feral is up in people's grills most the time, we occasionally need to peel someone off of Guntir, and Typhoon gives a 6s 50% snare and knocks the target away, and since priests have access (currently; no idea if this will remain in MoP) to an ability which breaks snares, Typhoon is a must-have for a Priest healer on the team. Additionally, Typhoon allows Ferals to cheese some fights on certain maps by knocking a player down and making a match 2v1 or 3v2/1 for a bit, and that advantage is HUGE.

My pick: If we have Infected Wounds, then I will take Typhoon. If we no longer have Infected Wounds as a snare, I have to take Faerie Swarm.

The fourth tier is another one of those tiers which caused me to sit and think for a few minutes. Wild Charge looks like it will likely be the Feral Charge equivalent and while it does not currently have a Cat Form version, I expect it to be the Feral Charge Cat we have come to know and love of late - charge an opponent and allow a Ravage out of stealth with no positional requirement for 8 seconds. However, maybe this is just a utility talent and there will be something else in store for Cat Form and the Feral specialization will have the Feral Charge Cat functionality built into the spec. I cannot know at this time.

Incarnation is, essentially, Shadow Dance on ... I am running out of drugs that make people stronger at this point. It allows the Feral to use abilities which require stealth for 30 seconds AND it allows, during those 30 seconds, for the Feral to use Prowl. The latter portion mentioned here may seem like a non-issue, but recall that being able to use Ravage instead of Shred is a huge dps boost, and having access to a combo-building stun instead of a combo-consuming stun means utility and damage output. I have been asking for a long time to have access to Pounce on a cooldown instead of Maim, and now I apparently have access to such a talent. Although, a three minute cooldown for 30 seconds of crazily increased damage output and control may actually overwhelm my need for Feral Charge... I know... that is how insane this talent is.

Think of it this way: for THIRTY seconds, you are allowed to use Ravage instead of Shred. Shred requires Mangle be applied and a Bleed be applied in order for it to do great damage, then you have to get behind your opponent and start Shredding. It is difficult to get behind an opponent sometimes and getting there while Mangle/Bleeds are applied is even tougher. Ravage, on the other hand, requires you to be behind your opponent for full damage. One would still want to have Mangle and Bleeds applied for additional supplemental damage, but Ravage will do full damage regardless. Additionally, one can use Pounce to stun the target in place for four seconds to line up a few Ravages. However, the kicker is yet to show itself; Ravage costs 60 energy, so it is a bit expensive and cannot really be spammed. That is, unless the Feral has Berserk activated at the same time, then someone could fire off 4 Ravages in a row before becoming energy-starved under normal circumstances. I really do not know how I feel about this talent versus the ability to use Feral Charge Cat, but if FCC is baked into the specialization and Wild Charge does nothing for us, then the choice is a no-brainer.

Force of Nature is unwieldy at present and the damage from the tree posse is less than amazing, but as an honest talent, it may receive some much needed love from the Devs and get an overhaul. Additionally, the talent states that capabilities will vary from specialization to specialization, so it may have some truly interesting abilities to offer Feral once the specifics have been worked out. I will keep my ears open on this one.

My pick: If we have FCC from the specialization, then I will take Incarnation; if Wild Charge ends up replacing FCC, then I think I will likely take Wild Charge, but Incarnation is still on the table if mobility is strong enough without the charge and some dps is required.

The fifth tier is absolutely my favorite tier. This is the CC-tier, if there is such a concept. Demoralizing Roar is essentially an AoE blind that lasts for 4 seconds on anyone within 10 yards of the Druid (which is reasonably large, but not super-large of a radius). Additionally, the talent reads that using this ability would force the Druid INTO Bear Form instead of requiring Bear Form, so it seems like this will truly be accessible for Ferals to use while in Cat Form; maybe this ability is a set-up for Bash on a CC-target (Demo-roar everyone, follow those 4 seconds with a 5s stun in bash on the train, follow that with a cyclone???). Additionally, this is on a 30s CD... this is absolutely bonkers to me being that it is an AoE CC that does not (at present) share diminishing returns with either Cyclone, Stuns, or Roots. I would imagine Restos take a good long look at this one.

Ursol's Vortex is like... no I'm going to stop that now. Essentially, it is an AoE Deathgrip on a 30s CD. The talent suggests that it is useable in all shapeshift forms, which leaves me wondering if that means that it cannot be used while not in form (Caster Form)... which would mean that Resto could not pick it up, though they probably would not anyway as they are usually trying to escape from baddies, not bring them closer for hugs and kisses. I like this talent for Feral, maybe more than Demo Roar (even though the idea of having even MORE CC appeals to me greatly). Think about it in terms of "with Typhoon"; if I go to a ledge on Blade's Edge or Sewers maps and bring everyone to me, I have to take one step and turn around to Typhoon - instant match-reset button. I am really looking forward to testing this out.

Bear Hug is an interesting ability, but as it is largely a self-CC that does pretty decent damage to the target (it will do 30% of your HP to the target and we can basically assume that that will be about 30% of their HP as well) it is not an ability I will be considering at first.

My pick: PROBABLY Ursol's Vortex just for the added control outside of the scope of CC. Also, bringing a kiting player to me for damage is a huge boon for when Feral Charge Cat is on CD.

The last tier is arguably the worst and most boring. Heart of the Wild is still in the game as a "do some other role almost half as well as the main-spec'd would" on a HUGE 6 minute cooldown. I simply do not see this talent as being anything good. It could be that Innervate has finally been removed from the game and HotW is how Feral is supposed to regain our mana, but we really should be past the point of relying on mana anyway (unless we're spamming heals in a probable-loss situation). Additionally, it increases our hit rating... Blizzard still does not seem to grasp, or they have more changes in store to address, why Feral does not really care about hit rating past the 4% (or w/e) needed to land a kick in PvP.

Master Shapeshifter is another, albeit passive, talent which allows the Druid to perform some non-main-spec'd role poorly-but-better. Essentially, it says that throwing out 3 non-instant spells would increase attack power by 30% for 15seconds. I have no idea what the wash is, but my guess is that the 10-15 seconds it would take a Feral to lob out 3 spells to gain that 30% more attack power would be more than lost in damage NOT dealt during the ramp-up time. Blizzard keeps trying these hybrid styles of play and they simply never work. Bear and Cat are different specs now... Blizzard can allow Druids to stop being hybrids in this ridiculous sense.

Disentanglement heals the Druid for 20% of his maximum hp every time they shift with a 30s CD in addition to allowing the Druid to remove Roots and Snares via Shapeshifting. This is a no-brainer; every Feral will take this ability unless shapeshifting has been drastically changed for MoP.

My pick: Disentanglement (though I hope that Blizz does something to change HotW and Master Shapeshifter... they are simply awful at the moment and I would like a choice at the highest talent tier).

Well, those are my picks for the moment. Of course, I will try and keep everything as up-to-date as possible and post updates when applicable, but I am excited about the prospect of some of these combinations (like Typhoon and Ursol's Vortex). We shall see.

Next time, I hope to get into the stat crunch and Blizzard's musing on how best to address exponential stat growth throughout expansions as it is truly an interesting subject of debate.

God Damn It Blizz...

2011-10-31T09:58:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Reygahnci, and I have a problem.

Well, technically my name is neither Reygahnci nor do I have just one problem. I meant to write a few posts since the last one, but life has taken some unexpected turns in the last few months. I mentioned my engagement which is coming along well, but is requiring a lot of planning and taking up a lot of my time. Additionally, I'm in the middle of buying my first home and hoping to close escrow pretty soon, which will mean a multitude of packing and planning and calling ISPs and a-hundred-and-one small annoyances over the next month. On top of all that, I am still doing my gym-going after work now (I've lost 70 pounds since last November when I started) and so I get home tired and beat after about 10 hours away from the house.

So, here I am at home playing some casual game like L4D or reading a good book when Blizzard says "oh, done playing WoW, are you!?" and hits me in the face with their Blizzcon announcements.

No more traditional talent trees
Druids have four specialization options

There were, obviously, way more announcements than simply those two, but to be perfectly fair, those two were enough to actually peak my interests. I called up Guntir (who moved for a job as well as my various other business) and said "dood, they may have got me back for the next expansion..." My guess is that Feral will still be a second-class spec and I don't expect 2v2 to be around much longer, but I do think that the new specialization direction is one with the potential to be good for the game, particularly with regard to balance in PvP.

For those who live under a rock or simply no longer keep up with the day-to-day announcements, Blizz has publicly stated that talent trees are going away forever in the next expansion. Well, not exactly "going away" as much as "changing so dramatically that they might as well be going away entirely." At present, there are 7 tiers of talents in every tree, which each subsequent tier requiring 5 talents points minimum to progress to the next. At level 85, one will have 41 talent points to spend however they choose, but the majority of these talents are "mandatory and boring" in that they are of the flavor "increases your damage by 1/2/3/4/5%". If one's role is to deal damage, then this talent is one which must be taken to improve worth in one's role. In reality, the choices to be made are largely along the lines of "there are 3-4 talents per tier, you can take 1-2 of them". This makes it something like 14c8 for the main tree alone and more likely 18c8 when you consider the other two trees as choices as well... that's over 40,000 combinations from which to choose.

Now, here is the problem: when one really gets down to the nitty-gritty, those "choices" are more like what I mentioned before - most of the talents from which a player chooses are considered "mandatory and boring" and nothing is truly a choice. For a PvP Feral, the first tier is "take them all", the second tier is 2/2 Primal Fury and 2/2 Infected Wounds, tier 3 is 3/3 KotJ, Feral Charge, and 2/2 Stampede, tier 4 is "all of them", tier 5 is SI and 2/2 Endless Carnage, tier 6 is 3/3 Rend and Tear, and FINALLY the player gets to make a true choice. Two points are now a free choice to the player, and for a PvP Feral, it is between talents like Feral Aggression, Fury Swipes, Blood in the Water, etc. None of these are quote fun end-quote talents.

These types of "choices" are the bane of the talent system for the most part, and in Cataclysm Blizzard aimed at making talent trees more "fun" by reducing talent count and giving out fewer talents over all. This allowed Blizzard to condense the trees into more "fun" talents, but it still left filler that was necessary, which is why talents like Fury Swipes and Thick Hide still exist. Blizzard could not properly break down specializations into roles in Cataclysm, but not for lack of trying.

This is why I am excited for Mists of Pandaria (or MoP - an awesome acronym) - Blizzard has finally said "those boring talents are not truly choices". Blizz is right in this revelation! Choices should be fun and game-changing rather than "increases/decreases X by Y" regardless of the flavor (Fury Swipes, for instance, is just a confusingly worded "increases your damage by X% over long fights"; it is done in an interesting way, but not reactionarily or thoughtfully as it pertains to the player). So, Blizzard has gotten rid of the talents trees entirely and instead gives the player these types of interesting-but-boring mechanics at level increments, which is how they should be doled out anyway. Additionally, the "new" talent system is just a revamp of the old one, but in a much more interesting way.

I have been waxing a bit here; let me just speak frankly. When one looks at a talent tree like Feral, they see a HUGE assortment of talents, but ultimately there are a handful of 2-3-point talents from which to choose and one or two really neat 1-point talents that will be buttons to press in the game. These talents are the interesting ones; players do not remember talent trees by name as much as by the defining ability of said talent tree: Feral is known for Berserk; Assassination is known for Mutilate; Discipline is known for Penance; etc. These are the types of things that define the class but also end up being "boring". Again, these are not choices; there are no Ferals out there who simply do not take Berserk, nor are there PvP Ferals who do not take Feral Charge.

Outlined in the last paragraph is the biggest problem facing Blizzard for MoP - at what point do you label an ability a "choice" over a staple of the class? For instance, Mangle used to be one of those staples in the talent tree, then it was made into a baseline ability when one specialized as Feral and got it for free at level 10. Presumably, Feral will be getting Berserk "for free" having specialized in Feral at level 30 (or whenever). Okay, so all those "boring-but-mandatory" buttons will likely be "spec-free", but what about the non-mandatory but interesting talents which currently change up rotations and what-not? Where does Blizzard draw the line? Will Feral(Cat) be given Blood in the Water at level 50, or is Blood in the Water going to get axed? What about Primal Madness? How about Nurturing Instinct?

Obviously, this question will be answered before too long, but it does make one sit back and say "okay, so I get all this stuff for free now... where does choice come in again?"

Okay, the new talent trees are where choice is made. Six tiers of options as opposed to six tiers of mandatory boring background noise. Here they are in detail at a tier-by-tier layout of choices (or alternatively, here is a link to the screens) -

Tier 1:

Feline Swiftness - Passive - Increases your movement speed by 10% and by an additional 20% while in Cat Form.
Displacer Beast - Instant 3min CD - Teleports the Druid up to 20 yards in a random direction, purging all periodic damage effects and providing stealth for 10 seconds. Attacking or using an ability cancels this effect. Using this ability activates Cat Form.
Tireless Pursuit - Instant 3min CD - Removes all roots and snares, and increases movement speed by 70% while in Cat Form for 15 seconds. Does not break Prowling. Using this ability activates Cat Form.

Tier 2:

Nature's Swiftness - Instant 3min CD - When activated, your next Cyclone, Entangling Roots, Healing Touch, Hibernate, Nourish, Rebirth or Regrowth becomes instant, free, and castable in all forms. The healing and duration of the spell is increased 50%.
Renewal - Instant 2min CD - Instantly heals the Druid for 30% of maximum health. Usable in all shapeshifted forms.
Cenarion Ward - 7680 mana, instant 30s CD - Protects a friendly target, causing any damage taken to heal the target for 2600 every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. Gaining the healing effect consumes the Cenarion Ward. Lasts 30 seconds.

Tier 3:

Faerie Swarm - Instant - Decreases the target's armor by 12% for 5 menutes and reduces the target's movement speed by 50% for 15 seconds. While affected, the target cannot stealth of turn invisible. Deals 49 damage when cast from Bear Form. Useable in all forms, but incurs a 6 second cooldown while in Bear Form or Cat Form. This talent replaces Faerie Fire.
Mass Entanglement - 4480 Mana, 30y range, 2sec cast, 1min CD - Roots all enemies within 12 yards of the destination for 8 seconds. Damage caused may interrupt the effect. Cannot be cast while in Bear Form or Cat Form.
Typhoon - 5120 Mana, instance 20s CD - Summons a violent Typhoon that strikes targets in front of the caster within 30 yards, knocking them back and dazing them for 6 seconds. Useable in all forms.

Tier 4:

Wild Charge - No official CD listed, probably instant 3min CD - Grants a movement ability that varies by shapeshift form.
Caster Form: Fly to an ally's position and your next healing spell costs no mana.
Bear Form: Charge to an enemy, immobilizing them and granting you 30% haste.
Moonkin Form: Bound backward and gain 20 Lunar or Solar Energy, whichever is more beneficial to you.
Cat Form: None listed [maybe FCC is baseline for Feral spec now?]
Incarnation - Instant 3min CD - Activates a superior shapeshifting form appropriate to your specialization for 30 seconds.
Feral: King of the Jungle - Improved Cat Form that allows the use of all abilities which normally require stealth, and allows use of Prowl while in combat.
Restoration: Tree of Life - Tree of Life Form that increases armor by 120% and enhances Lifebloom, Wild Growth, Regrowth, Entangling Roots, and Wrath spellcasts.
Force of Nature - Instant 3min CD - Summons 3 treants to assist in the Druid's current combat role. Treant capabilities vary by specialization. Useable in all shapeshift forms.

Tier 5:

Demoralizing Roar - Instant 30s CD - The Druid roars, disorienting all enemies within 10 yards for 4 seconds. Using this ability activates Bear Form.
Ursol's Vortex - Instant 30s CD - Conjure a vortex of wind that pulls all enemies within 15 yards toward your own location. Useable in all shapeshift forms.
Bear Hug - Instant 1m CD - Melee attack that stuns the target and deals 10% of the Druid's health in damage every 1 second for 3 seconds. Effect canceled if the Druid moves away, attacks, or takes any other action. Using this ability activates Bear Form.

Tier 6:

Heart of the Wild - Instant 6min CD - Dramatically improves the Druid's ability to serve combat roles outside of normal specialization for 45 seconds.
Balance: Healing spells generate Lunar or Solar Energy and benefit from Lunar and Solar Eclipse. In addition, grants 50% of Intellect as Agility, 100% of hit rating as expertise rating, and increases armor by 95% while in Bear Form.
Feral: Grants 50% of Agility as Intellect, increases hit rating by 100%, and increases armor by 95% while in Bear Form. In addition, regenerates 2% of maxmum mana every 5 seconds.
Master Shapeshifter - Passive - Improves the Druid's effectiveness at briefly switching between forms. Your melee abilities increase your spell damage by 10% and your non-instance spellscasts increase your attack power by 10%. Both effects stack up to 3 times and last 15 seconds. Each ability used which benefits from one of these effects consumes one application of that effect.
Disentanglement - Passive - Shapeshifting now removes roots. In addition, shifting into a form heals the Druid for 20% of maximum health. This heal cannot be received more often than once every 30 seconds.

Okay, let us take a moment to breath, reread, soak it all in... that is a lot of new stuff. The first thing to note is that under this new system, one does not have "points" to spend, per se. Instead, a player will have to truly make a choice at each tier (which is every 15 levels) between the three talents at that tier. So, for the first tier regardless of which specialization the Druid has chosen, he will have to choose between Feral Swiftness, Displacer Beast, and Tireless Pursuit. The second thing to note is that each tier has a "flavor" as to how the talents are divided. Notice, the first tier is a "mobility" flavor as each one of the options has to do with some form of mobility. Similarly, the fifth tier seems to be a CC tier as every talent choice is some form of control. The third, and last, thing to note is that no tier is some top-tier amazingness; no tier has that one ability that every player of Feral spec (or any other spec, for that matter) will say "that is the OBVIOUS choice!" as in the case of Berserk... while Berserk is the only "choice" to be made at the 31-tier currently, there are still 3 choices at every tier in the new talent system.

Okay, now that we got all that out of the way, how awesome are these talents? I admit that I was unimpressed at first, but after talking with Guntir about some of them I became really excited. This is where the "God Damn It Blizz" comes from: they are going to get me back in the next expansion. These talents are so small-scale that balance changes can be made without too much ado, and no more min-maxing through player selection of mandatory talents (Blood of the North anyone? That talent has had its percentage changed 100 times because it was the balancing point around which all abilities scaled for DKs).

This post has been pretty significantly long so far, so I will hold off describing what I expect my Feral setup will be, but for now color me excited!

The Continued Decline

2011-07-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

I have not posted in a while, but I came across this on Reddit today and felt it deserved to be brought up. Swifty (a long time wow-er) was banned rather recently for accidentally causing a world server crash due to his popularity and streaming live causing people to log on and find him in game. In this YouTube video he goes into detail over how it is not "just a game" to him or his online friends. He even mentioned that he could roll a new toon and it just would not be the same. I think this was the biggest tell concerning how WoW's player-base has changed over the years. Many well known players feel attached to their characters beyond the basic game-play elements; they are part of whom they play.

I tried playing different toons a number of times. I had fun on my Warlock, enjoyed my Rogue a lot, and thoroughly enjoyed being overpowered on my Hunter. There is no denying that the game is still FUN for these reasons... if I had an end-goal for which was worth striving, I would play one of my other toons. Unfortunately, I only played WoW from the get-go to PvP. Early on, I played it for World PvP, and when BGs were introduced I started hating the game. BGs are just another system of control; more grinding to keep us paying our $15/month. When Arenas came along, they were in their simplest design and arguably their best at an infrastructure level.

Let me be extremely clear on that last bit: the arenas, initially, were extremely unbalanced. They provided a crucible for finding everything imbalanced in the game amongst all classes. I can remember War+HPal from season one, and let me tell you, that was the penultimate overpowered team (War+Druid from season three edging it out slightly). HOWEVER, the arenas were NOT another grind system in place to keep us paying. The arenas were honestly a fun environment which pitted players versus players to attain a higher goal. Be it a title, a mount, fame, or just having fun for hours on end, there existed a goal that was outside the scope of gear or grinding ratings (in most cases; the r1s had to grind, but that was part of their goal and the best loved it).

It was for this reason that Guntir and I picked up and continued playing the game. Guntir has always been something of a grinder; he actually enjoys grinding up new alts and grinding honor under the old system (his undead priest hit r10 as did his pally on a different server... as ret... when it was awful). I, however, have always been a "fun the lulz" kind of player. I played Counter Strike back in the 1.5 days and well into the 1.6 setting, and the game started to fall apart for me when I started doing the Cal league competitively; the goal was not to be the best or have fun - it was to rank the highest and to hell with friendship. I remember having screaming matches over Vent at the time about strats and who missed their rotation and everything else... it simply was no longer fun.

Similarly, the first season or two of the arenas, I had fun trying to climb the ladder as high as I could. The "rewards" were simply part of the balancing system. We got gear the more we played and eventually we were geared out and playing on the same level as our rivals. We were not the best, we did not have the best comps, but we were having fun competing regardless. We did not need an overly complicated system to keep abusers in line, we did not need restrictions on who could attain what gear, we did not need everyone to know how awesome we were with titles. These things came, in time, but that was not the reason behind us playing the game.

It was fun.

At this point, I feel I have exhausted this topic. I know, I know... I have said all this before, but I feel that as time goes on the more notable players will continue being removed from the game, either under their own volition or by the "man". Swifty was a lot of fun to watch and argue with on the forums. I already miss him (and I will throw shout-outs to Elle and Datah while I am naming names) and I am saddened by Blizzard's banning because I felt he was a kindred spirit toward the game at heart; that is, he enjoyed the game as his toon and a newer-and-better one simply will not suffice.

--------------------

I am still a subscriber to Squanky's (squanky9) YouTube channel because he had not posted anything for a long time, then posted TONS of videos over the weekend (it seems). The first of which was a Survival+Feral unedited 2v2 session, and I could not resist the old urge to see Feral in action on the latest patch. I was so tempted to re-up my account to test it out after hearing some of their skype conversations, but after the dust had settled and I thought about it a bit, I decided to not. I heard something along the lines of "I dropped a 47k Ravage on that Rogue" and thought "WoW, maybe Ferals are actually at a decent spot, now!" However, the more I thought of this, the more I was reminded of season eight and how simply doing more burst damage is just a way to win, not necessarily a fun way. Additionally, I continued hearing things that dissuaded me further: "I only do 2s to help my friends get points; I do rBGs for mine", "I hit 2750 and only got a Duelist title", and the like. Once again, I was reminded of why I stopped - the goal is gone. No one plays 2s anymore except when helping their friends, and everyone must do rBGs for points to get the gear they MUST have to compete.

When the goal is to attain everything you need to compete but there are no rewards for competing itself, competition dies. The game becomes another grind-fest no worthy of participation.

Old Habbits and All That

2011-06-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

I still find myself clicking on MMO-Champion in down-time at work. It is entirely out of laziness that I have not yet removed it from my delicious link feed, which was how we kept our bookmarks synced in my day. I liken it to looking up people you knew in high school on Facebook - it is not exactly something you care about any longer, but it was something you were attached to at one point and you still have a thread, however tiny, connecting you to it. I feel this way about WoW; I like to think that I keep track of changes for whatever reason and can comment on them, even though I really do not have a stake in it any longer.

I have been playing Minecraft like a fiend. Whatever was put into my water supply to hook my on WoW all those years ago seems to have been shifted to Minecraft. I have a server... wait... let me start from the beginning. I am a computer scientist; programmer by trade. I have always had some fancy with hardware and software and setting up machines. For the longest time I hosted the "of Calamitous Intent" website from a server I set up and ran beneath my desk. It was nothing entirely fancy, just a simple PHP app to host forums and a web site and what-not that I built. A custom character profile page that would allow someone to upload gear and the like in the days before the armory. Lately, it had become my testing zone where I would test out anything Linux-running to see if it worked and keep up to snuff on my shell scripting (I use Windows at work, so writing shell scripts is rare but amazingly useful).

So, we got new hardware at work and they were selling the old kits (mobo/cpu/memory) which were not exactly old and dated, but definitely not top of the line any longer. Plus, it was a Sandy bridge chipset and that particular model had a defect keeping it from being truly 64-bit (and therefore being able to have more than 4GB of RAM; it only has 2 at the moment, but that was still a concern for being non-upgradeable in practice). So, I bought one of the old kits and built out a "new" server for myself: Intel Core2 Duo 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB SATA HDD. Keep in mind that this was a hefty upgrade from my 800MHz/256MB/8GB HDD. In any case, when one upgrades a server in this way, one looks for a use.

I had been running a minecraft server from my main machine and just starting it up when Guntir and I were going to play. It made sense at the time - I had RAM and CPUs to spare on my desktop (quad core and 3GB of RAM; you only need a gig for Minecraft client and a gig for the server). However, now that I had a proper server built up, I thought "Why not... just run Minecraft all the time and let Guntir and Ender (GF's brother) connect whenever they want." So, I set it up as a service on the machine, built some backup scripts, setup some crons to fire them off every couple hours to back up world state, and fired the server up. It is actually pretty fantastic not running the server on my own machine because I can allocate more RAM to the game itself, and since the server has more RAM dedicated to it, we get fewer lag-holes.

I am still waiting for Notch to announce how one applies to become a modder for the game. I am a Java developer by both schooling and trade, so I am ready for him to hand out the source so I can look it over in depth. I have a few simple ideas for mods that I want to get out there.

Oh yeah - after getting the server up and running in a way which I am happy with, I ended up checking out mapping programs to see if I could get a topography of our world for reference. I ended up going with something called Pigmap after trying and failing for a number of other options using the Google maps api (all of which were written in Python and required the most asinine setups ever). I ended up feeling pretty good with the results:

www.teamclerks.net

This may not be up for long - I found out yesterday while playing that basically any request on this costs something like 100MB of downloaded images >_<. I am going to see if I can off-host the images elsewhere and simply link them up on the page so the user still makes the request against them, but on a different server. I am not sure, as of yet... but I have to say that I am impressed with the results even at the cost of so much data.

Couple of things about my server - it is whitelist only (not publicly accessible), it has no mods, very very few /gives (I gave Ender a sword and a pick when he joined the first time since we were in a cave and surrounded by baddies... but he dug straight down into lava last night and lost them, so meh).

Sorry Guys...

2011-06-10T14:42:00.001-07:00

I know I haven't updated in a while... life has gotten rather hectic. I proposed to my girlfriend and she has agreed to become my wife (yay us!) and we have been using almost all our free time looking at venues, inventing stuff to use as decorations, going over the invitee-list, etc.

Additionally, and this is where the "sorry guys" comes into play, I have decided to quit playing World of Warcraft. I do not yet know whether this is a permanent withdrawal or just a short-term hiatus until things are fixed, but either way I have canceled my account. My reasoning for doing so is rather simple to explain:

1) I have a wedding to plan and that takes the majority of my time, leaving me maybe an hour or two per night to get some gaming in, and that is if I am not super-tired from the day's labors.

2) Blizzard has taken the fun out of PvP and turned it into a grind-fest for gear, titles, etc.

There was a time when Guntir and I would queue for 2v2 games and play 50-100 matches a week just because of how much fun they were. We were point-capped and not gaining rating and sitting at a 50-50 ratio...

but we were having fun

I have not been able to say that about WoW PvP in a long time (probably since season 6). It seems that Blizzard has been continually working at a lot of things: game balance; PvP incentives; match-making fairness; and a slew of non-PvP-related changes. I have to say, while I think that Ghostcrawler has done an amazing job in the game balance and match-making fairness categories, there is definitely something to be desired for PvP incentives.

It is no surprise for any long-time reader that I have trouble with the latest changes to the arenas. I hate being forced to play 50-60 games per week to advance my character's gear progression. I hate being forced out of the only fun bracket as it is no longer supported or focused in the balance avenue. I hate the length of time that classes remain overpowered or underpowered and the general unwilling to fix things in a timely manner by Blizzard. I hate that after years of feedback and suggestions, almost all of my bug reports have been ignored on the PTR only to be resolved a couple hotfixes later on Live realms.

...

It is with fond memories and a heavy heart that I look back on the past six years and feel that it must all come to a close, but again - I no longer wish to pay for or play a game that I no longer enjoy.

...

I have said these words before, but in the past there have been last-minute changes that have brought me out of my funk to play again and rekindle my passion for the game. I find a way to get past the flaws and imperfections and enjoy some small facet. I do not think that this time will be like that. My subscription has run out and I have all but uninstalled the game from my hard drive. I have not been keeping up with MMO-Champion much anymore; though, I do admit that some mornings are slow and I check the latest PTR notes - occasionally, I have to stop myself from IM'ing Guntir to discuss the latest round of changes. As far as I know, Ferocious Bite is back to 25e up-front with a 35e extra-consumption for double-damage... and that is still broken, but I find it harder and harder to care.

Who knows... maybe Blizz will announce something that re-hooks me and I write something about Druids in a month or two's time. It would surprise me, but I cannot tell the future. I plan on keeping the blog for a while, maybe making some entries about my games du jour just to keep it fresh - I have been playing a lot of Minecraft lately with Guntir and it is horribly fun, even for an hour or two a night.

There is a problem when we can go into an arena, get fewer rewards than a battleground, and spend 2 hours on 2 loss-draws which each took 45 minutes to complete. There is a problem when every healer in the game has infinite mana and the only way to score a kill is to either have ludicrous burst or minutes of CC-options. Generally speaking, there are problems with the game which are not be acknowledged, let alone addressed.

I promised to quit the day that the 2v2 bracket was removed. 4.2 is all but removing the 2v2 bracket for all the reasons I mentioned above.

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Reygahnci was my first and only main. I have always loved being a Druid, and nothing will ever change that. I want to thank Blizzard for providing me with such an amazing gaming experience over the years, and I look forward to many more years spent playing Blizzard games. I am sure that in years to come, I will end up playing it through again for some nostalgia factor (like I did with Ultima Online), enjoying the music, the questing, the general exploration, and the like.

I will always remember the thrill of competing in the arena, the enjoyment of exploring a new zone, the warmth of a reader learning from my posts of videos, and the tiredness felt during and after an amazingly long night defending Tarren Mill whilst drinking IBC Cream Soda with Guntir and Komnyy. I will forever miss these days, but think back on them fondly.

Moreover, I will always remember that World of Warcraft may have single handedly cemented my relationship with my brother as a friend.

Thank you all.

New PTR Build (14133)

2011-05-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

I will make this one brief - there is not much to say about this PTR build except for a few things gleaned. As I mentioned in the last post, it seems that Blizz is actually attempting to fix Ferocious Bite into an ability that will be used in the PvE rotation, but they ended up making the glyph heal for 1% of our total HP for every 10 energy consumed by FB. This somewhat made sense, but was simply not the greatest glyph in the world as a max-energy Ferocious Bite would only heal for 5% of our total hp (while LotP procs roughly every 6s and heals 4%) and take up a glyph slot.

Well, now it makes even less sense. Ferocious Bite, based on the tooltip from this build, no longer consumes additional energy but heals for 1% total hp for each 10 energy consumed. This means that Ferocious Bite is a 25 energy ability that heals for 2.5% total hp and does basically bad damage. I have not run the numbers or had a chance to test it out yet, but my initial guess is that Ferocious Bite is still going to be doing less damage than Shred at 25 energy... and cost 5 combo points.

I don't know exactly what Blizzard's plan is here, but they have effectively taken away the only bit of burst that Ferals had in PvP. We used FB against clothies when they were low and we had 5 combo points and 70 energy; the additional burst was amazing. Now we will be doing less than half that damage at about 1/3 the cost in energy, but the exact same cost in CPs. Yes, we are energy-starved a lot, but CP-gen is the more painful of our costs... I don't see this getting FB into the rotation OR helping Ferals in PvP at all without some further changes.

On a related note, this patch doesn't seem to have done anything to Glyph of Ferocious Bite, so there is at least a small chance that Blizz will be doing something on that front as well. At the moment, if nothing else were to change, FB could be glyphed to a 25-energy finisher that would heal 5% total HP.

PTR Build (14107)

2011-05-16T07:17:00.000-07:00

I will be keeping this short and sweet and just touching on some of the changes in the latest build. First and foremost, I need to update the change to Ferocious Bite; previously, the devs had said it would be buffed roughly 15%, but in reality the PTR went up with it only getting a 12% buff to the base damage of the ability, while the scalability remained the same.

Ferocious Bite now costs 25 Energy, down from 35. Now consumes up to 25 additional energy, down from 35. Base damage increased by 12%, from [380 + 54.5% of AP]-[615 + 54.5% of AP] to [410 + 54.5% of AP]-[680 + 54.5% of AP] at 5 Combo Points. (Check tooltip for less combo points)

So, that is a little bit less of a damage buff than I had originally assumed it would be. Additionally, with the scalability of every other direct damage ability we have going up, I would not be surprised if FB remained out of the PvE rotation simply because Shred might actually outscale it in damage before the next tier of gear. This is Blizzard's sad attempt, again, at balancing an underpowered class by throwing more damage at it randomly. While a 50-energy FB is definitely going to do more than a 40-energy Shred in PvP, it is unclear whether it will be worth the damage-difference in PvE; it will do more damage, but how MUCH more.

Okay, this build they changed Glyph of Ferocious Bite:

Glyph of Ferocious Bite has been redesigned. It now causes Ferocious Bite to heal the caster for 1% of maximum health for each 10 energy used.

So, if you were to use a 50-energy FB and have devoted a Major Glyph to it, it would heal you for 5% of your total health. This is, to put it bluntly, terrible. For example, Leader of the Pack gives us 4% of our total hp roughly every 6 seconds for simply white-swinging at a target. They made FB give us roughly one additional LotP proc for using 50 energy and 5 combo points? This change just means that no one will ever take the Glyph of Ferocious Bite... ever.

There are some other changes worth mentioned (sadly, non-Druid changes), namely Denounce was changed to no longer give instant/free Exorcisms, but instead cause Exorcism'd targets to be unable to crit for 6s. While this new debuff is dispellable, one can see pretty easily that this is a rather bold change for Blizz. Holy needed some utility, but I don't think it was in the way of more offensive pressure; being the only healer in the game to be able to keep OTHER healers from critically healing themselves (particularly with the change to crit-heals becoming 200% from 150%) is HUGE!

In addition, Retribution is making its way back as Selfless Healer will reduce the cooldown on Word of Glory by 10 seconds. The thing I do not understand about this change is how Blizz is even thinking about this. For one, having a 20s cooldown heal that heals others for RIDICULOUS amounts (we are talking 20-30k crit heals here... and with that being made into a 200% heal bonus we're talking more) is silly in and off itself, but making it a 10s cooldown means that it will ALWAYS be up when they need it. Secondly, if every other spec has a perk that lowers to the cooldown to zero, why even tack this onto a talent... why not just make the baseline cooldown 10s and be done with it? It makes no sense to me. In my opinion, dps classes should not be able to throw out heals anyway, but I am in the minority on this train of thought.

Priests have got some interesting changes, most notably that basically all of the Shadow DoTs have been nerfed, and basically all of the Shadow burst has been buffed. Devouring Plague, Vampiric Touch, and Shadow Word: Pain have all been nerfed by 12% damage while Mind Flay, Shadow Word: Death, and (most surprisingly) Mind Blast have all been buffed 12% damage. This makes SOME sense, I suppose, since in PvP Shadow has trouble with getting and keeping their DoTs on a target without a Warlock present to provide UA, and their damage suffers so terribly when they cannot get their DoTs up. The funny thing about all this is that this just makes Disc even stronger as a utility-healer. Disc has always played the game of "absorb some damage, land some CC, turn and burn, if they didn't die, top everyone off, rinse and repeat!" Being given 1) more damage from Mind Blast, a 1.5s nuke that already HITS for 7-8k on resil'd targets, 2) more damage on SW:D, an instant-cast nuke that already HITS for 5-6k on resil'd targets, and 3) still having Holy Fire as a 1.5s nuke (talented) makes Disc very bursty. Additionally, Guntir is still rocking the glyph of SW:D which makes his kill-attempts pretty mean (if a bit a expensive).

Drain Life is getting nerfed 25%... good. I think that Warlocks need a bit of a kick in the teeth when it comes to solo-survivability. I mean, Blizzard nerfed Ferals for being "too independent" but leaves all these other classes which do not require a healer/dispeller sitting around to function well. Do not misunderstand me, I am not trying to imply that Warlocks are unbelievably overpowered while solo, but their self-healing for small windows when their healer is CC'd is absolutely staggering, and it makes 2s retarded.

Lastly, stacking 2/2 PvP sets will no longer award double-resilience. This is essentially the last slap in the face that Resto Shammies need to receive (well that and their mana pool still probably needs looking at... but w/e).

Just a Tiny Rebuttal

2011-05-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

As a few of you have pointed out, there is a large group of highly notable Ferals on the boards speculating that the changes to Shred, Ravage, Mangle, etc. were all made to offset the effect of Cat's scaling from Strength being cut in half. I would like to take this opportunity to clear a few things up.

First, this blog is nigh-entirely about Feral PvP. I do not really care about the impact in PvE; I use it occasionally as a point of leverage for the claims I make about Feral's damage output (either lack or abundance of). That being said, the great maths guys who run these numbers have speculated that the loss of Strength in the PvE environment will be anywhere from 700 to ~1000 attack power lost for Ferals, and a 15% damage buff across the board will roughly cover that difference with a little to spare (one reader suggested as little as a 3% dps boost). However, looking at these changes from my point of view, I have 101 Strength, I do not roll with a DK, Warrior, or Hunter, so I will end up losing 101 attack power from the 4.2 patch and gain roughly 15% damage across all my specials - that is, quite unmistakeably, a buff and a large one to boot.

Second, while many are noticing that Ferocious Bite's damage is being increased 15% as well, many are simply ignoring (or not noticing; maybe I should give them the benefit of the doubt) the fact that Ferocious Bite was changed from 35-70 energy cost to 25-50 energy cost. This change alone makes Ferocious Bite better DPE and burst than Shred. The opportunity-cost of the ability goes down rather significantly by us not dumping a full bar of energy into the ability and it continues to do the same (read: 15% more) damage as before! Again, in PvE this will likely not matter all that much, but in PvP this is a huge burst boost. Essentially, FB was only for kill-shot-attempts in PvP before, and one would usually only use it against clothies as the damage is rather lackluster against high-armored targets; however, the damage is being increased (by more than 15% if you take Feral Aggression; think of it as a 16.5% damage buff instead of 15%), the cost is being lowered, and the burst is still useful.

Conclusion:
From the PvP point of view, this patch is simply buffing Ferals (when they don't run with a DK/Hunter/Warrior for the Strength buff, and even then it's only a 500ap loss or so). From a PvE point of view, it will be a slight damage buff and it will hopefully push Ferocious Bite back into the rotation a bit more.

4.2 Patch Notes Updated

2011-05-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

It's about god damned time! Feral has finally got a damage buff, and at least some of it makes sense. The first thing I would like to mention about these changes is that Blizzard is actually doing two things at once that are simply needed. The first thing is that they are acknowledging Feral's lackluster dps output in PvE and buffing it directly. The second thing is that they are (possibly accidentally) increasing Feral's burst damage while also increasing Feral's sustained damage; this is HUGE for PvP. Let's look at them in detail:

Ferocious Bite damage has been increased by 15%. In addition, its base cost has been reduced to 25 energy and it can use up to 25 energy, for up to a 100% damage increase.

This is HUGE. Ferocious Bite has long been ignored in the PvE rotation outside of the kill-zone simply because of its huge cost. This makes a full-damage FB cost 50 energy (down from 70) and it now does 15% more damage baseline. To put this into perspective, I land 25k FB crits at 70 energy against Mages with 4k resilience pretty regularly currently; therefore, I should be able to land 28k FBs against those same Mages with only 50 energy after the patch. I do not know if I can definitively say that FB is going to be a button I end up using on a more regular basis, but it definitely looks more appealing with this change.

Mangle (Cat) damage at level 80 and above has been increased to 530% weapon damage, up from 460%.

This is certainly a welcomed change. While the PvE rotation simply does not use Mangle very often (maximum is once per minute with the minimum being zero with an Arms/Subtlety present), the PvP rotation ends up using this button occasionally because one cannot always be in a position to Shred. Being able to deal more damage baseline will just be dandy!

Omen of Clarity clearcasting buff from now lasts 15 seconds, up from 8 seconds.

This one actually kind of confuses me; it does not really matter how long the clearcasting buff lasts because we are going to wait a maximum of 6-8 seconds to get to around 80-90 energy to use it (when dropping burst). Keep in mind, if you use a clearcasting proc on Shred at 90 energy, you can land a total of four Shreds before running out of energy... and you can use TF to get another two in there. I am guessing that this is just a quality of life buff where we can proc a clearcasting, then eat a full Fear, then still get some use from it when we get back on the target.

Ravage damage at level 80 and above has been increased to 975% weapon damage, up from 850%.

Man, someone must have been asking for BURST for Ferals. This is ALMOST 1000% weapon damage against zero resilience and armor... as far as I know, this should be the hardest hitting attack in our rotation (with the only exception MAYBE being a 50nrg FB). Those FCC-R-S-S-FB combos just got meaner.

Shred damage at level 80 and above has been increased to 520% weapon damage, up from 450%.

Ah, the coup de grace! Shred already hits rather hard against non-plate classes... and now it will just hit that much harder. This is just going to be amazing with Rend and Tear and Mangle... the multipliers just keep stacking to the moon.

Glyph of Berserk duration increase is now 10 seconds, up from 5.

This is one of the weird ones I was talking about. I am truly wondering if Blizzard does not have some unmentioned changes up their sleeve. At present, Berserk lasts 15 seconds and has a cooldown of 180 seconds. This change would put Berserk at 25 seconds duration, which is almost 1/6 of the cooldown. It is still rather weak in terms of up-vs-cd when compared to other 31-point talents (namely Shadowdance, Vendetta, Brostorm, etc), but lasting 25s means that eating two CCs in a row after popping Berserk will not spell a necessarily entirely wasted cooldown; you will still have 9 seconds left to Berserk.

All told, these patch notes are improving Ferals quite a bit. In fact, I do not see a single nerf to Ferals in the patch notes yet, and that is just fine by me. Looking to other classes, I see basically only nerfs with the only exception being Elemental Shammies who are getting rather crazy buffs.

Mages are having Ring of Frost with a 1.5s cast time, and a cooldown has been placed on Spellsteal (6s) to keep it from being an i-win button when RNG does not favor them the first time against spells like Hand of Freedom or Innervate.

For Hunters, they get a quality of life buff that has been LONG overdue in my opinion: "traps now scale with hunter stats such as hit, expertise, spell penetration and attack power as intended." Even though Blizzard came out of a Q&A post basically saying that Spell Pen would never work with traps because of some made up reason. Good on you, Blizz! This was definitely a good change to make.

Holy Pallies basically get nothing except spell costs increased across the board. Keep in mind, these increases are small (35% base from 30% base, etc), but they add up over time and this was one of the problems with Holy Paladins in PvP (particularly in 2s) - they simply never ran out of mana while spamming spells.

Restoration Shamans have got a bunch of tweaks to nerf them ever so slightly. Lightning Shield and Water Shield can no longer be dispelled which might sound like buffs initially, but in practice these abilities act like dispel-buffers when one is trying to knock off something like Nature's Swiftness or some other buff that NEEDS to be removed (Innervate from a Balance Druid or something). Unleash Elements is now properly in the nature school, so when I Skull Bash a Healing Wave the shammy will not be able to continue healing himself with his instants.

Water Shield's internal cooldown is returned to where it was prior to 4.1 (3.5s icd) but the proc is cut in half on the mana return. Improved Water Shield (renamed Resurgence) now procs off of critical direct heals which will restore basically 150% of the live Water Shield's proc mana return on a slow heal, and less mana on a fast heal, but will only proc when Water Shield is active. In essence, this changes the dynamic of Shammy infinite mana play from passive to active. Essentially, the MORE the Shammy heals, the more mana he will return to himself, but it will almost always be less than the cost of the spell cast. This is VERY reminiscent of how Arch Angel works for Disc Priests in that it is a nice mana return, but it is basically a wash for the DPS. Lastly, Mana Tide Totem is now 200% spirit instead of 400%. I think that Blizzard is really figuring out that with Shaman in PvP, it really comes down to their effective throughput healing while also having plenty of passive tools for sustaining infinite mana. Hopefully, this patch will correct that and make it so that running a Shammy out of mana will mean that you have won (all other things being equal).

Let me speak boldly about Elemental Shamans for a moment. Elemental is a terrible spec on Live, and the reasons for such are rather straight-forward. Their burst damage is somewhat low, the sustained damage is terrible, and their mobility is awful. If you ever see an elemental shammy, your best bet is to simply train him to death because he cannot really handle a melee on him when interrupting big damage spells. Eventually, TStorm has to be used as his only escape mechanic, and if you have a gap-closer (like FCC) you will just negate TStorm and come back in guns-a-blazin!

However, Elemental Shammies have always had the element of "turret up and burn down" if given even an inch of breathing room. In 3s, if we ever saw an elemental shammy, we would essentially CC him hard and break LoS on him throughout the match because if he ever got into turret mode, he would explode someone. Following that trend, the backlash from dispelling Flame Shock has been tripled...

Lava Flows now grants a 30/60/90% haste buff when a Flame Shock effect is dispelled, up from 10/20/30%.

Essentially, this means that their 2.0s Lightning Bolts will cast in basically half the time BEFORE calculating in any of their Haste from gear. This is a HUGE buff to being able to turret up, and I can see traditional LSD comps coming back into favor next patch from this change ALONE... but there is still more.

Thunderstorm now reduces the movement speed of players it knocks back by 40% for 5 seconds.

While this is not huge, ANY snare tied to something that knocks players as potentially far away as TStorm is going to play strong. The only thing holding this change back is that sometimes when you get hit with a TStorm, you are in the air longer than 5 seconds. This will improve Elemental's viability on comps where control and burst are more paramount (less LSD and more MSD or MSP where the Mage would provide additional control and the Ele would provide a knockback and crazy burst). Once again, however, there is still more.

Glyph of Unleashed Lightning (new Prime glyph) allows Lightning Bolt to be cast while moving.

Sweet dancing jahova! They have finally done it... now there will be a dps ranged class with cast-time nukes on the run. This change is going to revolutionize Elemental Shammy play simply by virtue of being able to stay on targets who are moving or pillar-humping hard. This will make bad Elementals easier to control via interrupts, but good Eles will be much harder to control in this way and they will be able to play positioning while dealing damage. Keep in mind that if you dispel Flame Shock, they can basically knock off 4-5 of these lightning bolts in 5 seconds WHILE chasing you... scary!

Filing under "random changes" we have:

The game now separately tracks different Conquest Point caps for Battlegrounds and Arenas. The cap for Arena rating will always be 2/3 of the cap for Battleground rating at any given Arena rating. Players may earn a total number of Conquest Points per week equal to the higher of these two caps, but once players have reached the cap for either Arenas or Battlegrounds, they can no longer earn Conquest Points from that source. Conquest Points from Battleground holidays only count toward the total Conquest Point cap.

Near as I can tell (and take this with a grain of salt), this means that earning Conquest Points from Rated Battlegrounds will be unchanged, while earning Conquest Points from Arenas will be nerfed. Currently, I have a cap around 2700-2800 simply because I am around 2270 PR on 2v2s. What I think this means is that next patch my cap will be ~1800 from arenas, and I will have to earn the remaining ~1000 Conquest Points by doing rated bgs... no thanks, Blizz.

Oh yeah, and lastly we have this little gem:

All healing critical strikes now heal for 2 times a normal heal (+100%), up from 1.5 times a normal heal (+50%).

Remember a while back we had this discussion... well the time has finally come and healers are again going to be dominating. Guntir can already drop 40k healing crits on me in Cat Form; after this he will be pushing 50-55k heals. Woof!

4.2 on the PTR already???

2011-05-03T07:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right, but it will be a few days before the PTR actually goes up. Blizzard is at a point where they realize the colossal fuckup that was 4.1 can only be overshadowed by a new content patch, a new arena season, and new chances to commit various new colossal fuckups. Touching briefly on the announced changes, there is simply not a lot to discuss, but what few changes were announced are actually somewhat interesting.

* Druids will now only gain 1 AP per 1 STR, but will continue to gain 2 AP per 1 AGI.

This doesn't really surprise me; we were double-dipping for a while on buffs like MotW and Horn of Winter. Oh well, I never ran with anyone who could provide those buffs, so it means very little to me.

* Entangling Roots and Nature's Grasp no longer deal damage.

Duh, this has been something that I have been suggesting since TBC. Finally, Blizzard has left Entangling Roots as a CC ability. Now, if only dispels cost mana and were a choice instead of something mindlessly spammed...

* Innervate now grants an ally target 5% of his or her maximum mana over 10 seconds, but still grants 20% of the druid's maximum mana over 10 seconds when self-cast.

Hmmmm, this MIGHT be a decent little buff for Feral utility. At the moment, my Innervate returns 20% of my ~24k mana, which is ~4800 mana returned. I still use it basically on cooldown on Guntir (when I have a free GCD or two) because free mana is free mana. This change means that Guntir's ~110k mana would regenerate roughly 5500 mana. Well, that's not MUCH of an improvement, but it is an improvement.

* Ring of Frost now has a 1.5-second cast time.

DOOF... now there's a nerf to the Mage class. This will likely be met with tumultuous applause from everyone but Mages, and the river of tears from them will be amazingly clear, crisp, and cool. Essentially, this completely forces the DeepRing techniques used currently (Deep Freezing and placing a RoF on the ground under them) to actually land a RoF. Frankly, I think that this change will make Mages use Deep Freeze to try and bait out trinkets by Deep'ing the target, fake-casting RoF, and expecting that the target will trinket the DF to have enough time to avoid the RoF. Maybe this will not happen... hard to tell. Definitely an interesting change and a very interesting way of nerfing Frost Mages (the sad thing is that this will make RLS that much more dominant).

* Overpower now has a 1.5-second cooldown and global cooldown (Taste for Blood's Overpower cooldown has not changed).

This is just a nice little nerf for Warriors. Currently, Overpower causes a 0.5s CD and GCD and allows Warriors to burst rather hard with it. Now, I know that most will tell me I am crazy for suggesting that a 1.0s difference will not be the end of the world, but let me tell you - dropping a 24k MS 0.5s after a 20k Overpower ROUGHLY translates to a 44k GCD... spreading those out EVEN A LITTLE will make a big difference in the long run (especially when it comes to every 5s via Taste for Blood).

* Retaliation, Recklessness and Shield Wall no longer have stance requirements.

These just make sense... Survival Instincts does not require Bear Form, so Blizzard is removing that requirement from Warriors. To be completely honest, I did not know that Retaliation and Recklessness had stance requirements since I think they are both usable from Battle or Fury. Oh well, this just means that Warriors might hit Shield Wall in Battle Stance and NOT get that free 10% damage reduction from Defensive Stance... no skin off my nose.

No word yet on whether Stampeding Roar has yet been fixed on Live (it will consume between 30 and 60 energy depending on how much you have when you use it... gfg Blizztards).

4.1 is Live!

2011-04-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend wanted to watch the Laker game at a friend's house last night, so instead of Arenas, that is what we did. I am pleased that this was the call. For one, Guntir is nearing the end of his masters semester and has a lot of work on his plate; for two, there are tons and tons of bugs in the game that made it to live! Time to list some of the more fun ones (UPDATED):

1) DK Runes were not going on cooldown (SPAM THAT NS FTW)
2) Omen of Clarity (Druid) sometimes isn't consumed (hilarious; I'm hearing Ferals doing something like 7-8 Shreds before OoC falls off, then they have a full energy bar)
3) Warriors had an error with CS where they would get HUGE multipliers against low armor targets (screen shots of 200k MS crits, etc).
4) DKs can use their newly created Battle Rez in the arenas.
5) Cycloning someone in the arenas sometimes teleports them to the nearest graveyard to where they queued.
6) MMR is different per person now and shifts wildly from one win/loss to the next.
7) Wins and losses don't always result in Conquest Points or rating change.
8) Warlocks have no push-back protection (which I find myself caring very little about because...)
9) Warlocks can get Shadow Bite (Felhunter) to HIT for ~25k.
10) PvP gear is "refundable" in the sense that if you hit "Yes, I'd like to refund this item" it will take the item from you and not give you any Conquest/Honor back.
11) Resilience might not be working *NOTE* I haven't tested this, but people with 3800 resilience are showing MS crits doing ~50k in arenas, which seems high.
12) Guntir tells me that Lifegrip will work on a Cycloned target even though it claims to fail and the target says "immune".

I will continue adding to this list as I find stuff.

These sorts of things should really be pruned out before hitting live, but what are you going to do? Anyway, they hotfixed numbers one and three, but the Omen of Clarity bug seems to still be happening for people. To be honest, I have not logged on for 4.1 yet because I figured I would end up training Stampeding Roar and the devs would immediately hotnerf the Feral Swiftness change to only be Dash (paranoid much!?). I plan to hop on today and take a look around and maybe do some BGs or something since Guntir will be indisposed with schoolwork.

Another change that Blizzard finally announced that really chaps my ass (although maybe not... more on this later) is the following:

In patch 4.1 the amount of Conquest earned for both Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds has been changed to a flat amount regardless of team rating, to 135 and 335 respectively. This change should of course have been in the patch 4.1 notes, but due to a fairly straight forward error, was not included.

The current reward now in 4.1 for winning an Arena match is 135 Conquest Points, and for Rated Battlegrounds it's 335 Conquest Points. We're currently evaluating these amounts as we believe they are potentially lower than they need to be, and we'll of course let you know if they need to be changed.

So, my Conquest cap is something around 2700 Conquest Points per week. If my maths are right, and they usually are, that means that to hit the cap, I will need 20 wins. What the hell Blizz... 20 wins? Even if I manage a 2:1 ratio that is going to be 30 games for the point-cap on one toon. Bah... and our bad weeks end up going 1:1 which would mean around 40 games per toon. This MAY force us to start running only Feral+Disc again and leave that Shammy by the wayside for a while; presumably, we would leave him where he is at until they change the amount of points generated per win to something a little bit higher.

The one thing I like about this is that Blizzard is actually forcing me to play more arenas, which is somewhat odd but not all that unwelcome. I actually enjoy playing Feral+Disc quite a bit because at the very least those matches never go to the stalemate; we either win rather quickly or we lose rather quickly. This may all be something in the past given that we are going to try out the Evangelism build for a bit to see if it is viable, and while I thought that a build where Archangel was second to a five-stack of Evangelism for burst damage, Guntir believes that he will be nuking once or twice in a burn phase and if that does not land a kill, Archangel will be there to restore some mana on a 2-3 stack. We will not know until we play some games, but I am thinking that landing a Holy Fire every ~15s to keep a 5s rolling for nigh-free will be somewhat trivial particularly when he is also trying out Atonement which will provide all that damage as a heal on the lowest hp friendly around the nuked target (usually me).

Let me talk a little bit about maths here... I feel that I have not done this in a while. Guntir and I were testing out Smite to see just how hard Holy Fire would end up hitting a resil'd target once they buffed it. We took from the patch notes that HF would end up dealing roughly 30% more damage than Smite, and Smite was hitting me and my ~3300 resilience for right around 5500 (plus or minus a few hundred; my memory is waning in the morning). We did some napkin-maths and figured that Holy Fire would end up being around a 7-8k nuke against a resil'd target after 4.1 dropped. As a 1.5s (talented) cast for basically no mana at all, that is some rather strong damage, and we were considering the matter closed and test-worthy for 4.1.

However, some things that I never really took into account are talents. I was in a thread with Mackenzii (again, sorry if I butchered the spelling) who runs FMP around 2900 on BG-Rampage and he had a spec that had taken Archangel. I inquired and he responded that he was going to try it out in 4.1 to see if it is viable. So, I got to looking into Priest specs and came up with an Evangelism spec that looked decent to me. The one thing I had forgotten about is that Evangelism increases the damage of both Smite and Holy Fire, even though prior to 4.1 it was only proc'd by Smite, which was why no one spec'd it for PvP; it was too difficult to keep a 5-stack rolling when you were relying on a 2.5 or 2.0-talented nuke that cost a lot of mana and you were being trained. Incidentally, most Priests had given up on Evangelism prior to a lot of the buffs they had received in 4.0.6 and 4.1, which has greatly increased their survivability and mobility while healing and therefore opens them up more often to nuking.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand - Evangelism is a good talent now because it procs off of Holy Fire (simple to use regularly) and Smite (good damage when bursting), and it is easier to get and keep up. So, Guntir is also going to try Glyph of Smite in his build to see how strong of a nuker he can become. Again, I looked at the maths to see what we could expect. So, if Guntir can get up a 5-stack of Evangelism then his Smites and Holy Fires will be hitting for ~6600 and ~9000 respectively. Well, now we are talking about real numbers, and if you factor in that Glyph of Smite after dropping a 9k Holy Fire HIT, then you are talking about 8k Smite HITS as well. Additionally, Guntir has also put the Glyph of Shadow Word: Death into his arsenal for red-zone help (with which I am usually in need of desperately). Lastly, he is taking 2/2 Veiled Shadows (which I thought was called "Improved Fade" until I looked it up for the tooltip just now) in the shadow tree to get his Shadowfiend down to a 4m cooldown (which seems long to me... but those two talent points account for roughly 20% off of Fiend's cooldown... so that's not too bad).

We probably will not get games in until the weekend, but I will try and keep the information rolling as I come across it.

Oh my...

2011-04-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

---UPDATE---

Thanks to reader Fade for pointing me at this AJ post. Affx, a long-time WoW board hero, did some testing of various aspects of 4.1 that went above and beyond that I found interesting.

First, he suggests that RoV only has the fire for the first few moments of an arena match to try and quell zerging. While I can get behind this idea, the implementation is awful.

Second, he also reminds us that guild rep and xp are rewarded for arena wins as of 4.1. I had completely forgotten about this and it is a reason to do more than the base arenas again (which he hinted at may require 10 wins a week instead of the current 5; hard to tell, but I'm sure I'll have an update on Wednesday).

Third, he suggests that the new defensive cooldown, Soul Link Totem, is essentially the best cooldown in the game. A 3min cd that is essentially a guaranteed no-kill for a short period that also scales with the number of players affected. If you are in a 2s situation where you are about to die at 1% hp and you are standing next to your partner at 100%, you pot SLT and you are both instantly at basically 50%, and it rebalances your hps every 1s for 5s... woof.

Third, he suggest that FMP and RMP are going to be two of the strongest comps in the game as long as the DR category change to Cone of Cold does not end up being really painful because Mages can actually play an outlast style with glyph of frost armor.

Last, he makes a bunch of speculations about the classes affects in this patch. Mostly, he talks about Warriors not really having changed except against plate classes (which I think is an overstatement; armor scales strong early and weak late - you might go from 40% damage reduction on a pally to 0% with 100% armor ignore, but after the patch you will go from 28% dr against leather to 10%).

---END-UPDATE---

When I see comments like I got in the last post, I know I am not doing an adequate job here on my blog discussing changes. I will get more into that in a moment, but let us discuss the patch notes being as they are likely locked in place and will be going live tomorrow.

Take a look at this video. I am filled with rage; essentially, Blizzard said "man, RoV is awful; let's remove it," saw that basically no one was upset by RoV being removed from the rotation, then said "okay; let's break RoV even more and reintroduce it in 4.1." Here are my list of gripes: first, it starts you at opposite ends of the map and no longer brings you up via elevators (which is good), but starts the match with all the pillars down; second, the pillars still move up and down; third, what the fuck... fire... it is back and deals damage and is random again. I honestly am unsure if this is just Blizzard trolling me or what, but this shit has got to stop.

Okay, something that has crept by unnoticed, or perhaps merely unmentioned, is the fact that 4.1 means the end of battle-group matching in Arenas. Apparently, and details are hazy on this so bare with me, this means that we will be able to be matched with teams from battlegroups other than our own for the arenas in an attempt to shorten queue times. My biggest concern about this is that Blizzard will have said "fuck it" entirely and made no effort in trying to set you against a team with reasonable latency to an arena server. I really am worried that I will end up playing against someone in New Jersey and have 1000ms against a 1700 team who gets a lucky kill while we are waiting for Guntir's heal to register. I am at least reluctantly hopeful that Blizz may have done some research on this and made it so that we can only be queued against the same data-center when match-making (which would make sense because that would simply mean that we're physically in the same building as our opponents so the number of teams queuing will have increased at roughly no cost).

Let me tackle a misconception that people are seeming to have - resilience is not going to have a soft cap. The way resilience works now is that at any point except 32.5% damage reduction, the scaling of resilience rating versus damage reduction is non-linear. That is, if you gain 100 rating at 25% damage reduction, you will gain less damage reduction than you would had you been at 35%. Today, if you gained 100 resilience at 25% damage reduction, you would go to maybe 26%, but if you gained 100 resilience at 35% you might go to 36.5%. The only thing changing with 4.1 is that non-linear scaling. Tomorrow, you will have 32.5% damage reduction if you have 32.5% damage reduction today. If you have less than 32.5% damage reduction today, you will have slightly more tomorrow, and if you have more than 32.5% damage reduction today, you will have slightly less tomorrow. If you have 4,000 resilience today, for example, you will have something around 38% damage reduction tomorrow instead of 41%. THERE IS NO CAP.

The class changes going out are pretty much where they were weeks and weeks ago when I first talked about them. Frost Mages are getting some "much needed" burst damage buffs; DKs are getting some changes that will make Blood specs less prevalent (though I remain unconvinced that these changes are enough); Warriors are getting hyper-mobile but losing a lot of stun control via Charge (but it won't DR with anything... so who knows) and losing a ton of burst in CSmash; RShams are getting nothing but nerfs and a survivability totem which might actually be decent in 3s or 5s (it scales with the number of players affected, so it might not be amazing in 2s); Priests are getting more burst via Holy Fire.

Holy Fire being buffed is kind of interesting. There was a thread on the Arena boards where Mackenzii (sorry if I misspelled the name) came in and gave pointers on how his team played FMP (Monster's 2900 feral+mage+disc team). At one point I noticed that he had a spec with Archangel in it and I asked him about it. He said that he was going to try out Archangel to see whether it is decent for PvP given the new Holy Fire. Essentially, the reason that no one takes Evangelism and Archangel as Disc is because it is extremely difficult to land offense in 2s (for one), and that is three points spent in an already tight-for-points spec. Additionally, Holy Fire is pretty awful today, but with the change tomorrow it will actually be some really nice damage.

It may be a non-issue in 2s, still, because of how much pressure most opposing teams can put out while keeping Guntir in his healing role. Currently, the only times it seems like Guntir can get offensive is once or twice a match when we are going for a kill. Now, maybe it is only because we are going for a kill and we usually get said kill that I only see it once or twice a match, but unless the Priest is keeping a 5s of Evangelism rolling throughout the entirety of the match, that talent is largely useless. It will be interesting none-the-less to see Holy Fire back into the role of damage-dealing once again. Since it is extremely cheap to use, it might actually bring back to the use of the Glyph of Smite for 2s; I can already see Rogue+Disc taking off again simply from the additional pressure that Priests will be able to dish out next patch, and with RShams and RDruids getting nerfed ever so slightly, we may see this comp take off again.

Tomorrow, I have to find a new keybind... since Stampeding Roar might actually be worth training since it will have the capacity for breaking roots and it will actually provide a speed buff. Bah... it may have to be ctrl+z since my Dash is bound to shift+z at the moment. Hard to tell... I'll let you know what I find tomorrow.

Nothing But Bads

2011-04-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

As far as the eye can see, there are nothing but bads. We went 10-1 this week (with a tie that doesn't get counted) and ended up climbing the 2v2s team back to 2260ish. The sad part is that we face teams who are 2200 and are absolutely awful. I mean, these guys are atrocious and they are rated similarly to us. We went against a Rogue+Mage team who blocked in my opener, Cloaked FFF, then proceeded to get Nature's Grasp kited the entire match while I killed his Mage, and they were 2250. We beat a 2350 FrostMage+Disc team who were actually decent but had no idea how to control Guntir's shammy or me. They would line up burst, get me to 25% hp while their Mage is in dire straights and I'd just keep dps'ing until Guntir topped me off... it's really not hard.

I haven't been posting much... I know. I haven't put up a video in a month... I know. Here is my big problem: the game is broken right now and I have no reason to play. Yeah, Guntir and I could try and squeeze in more games every week and get some decent points under us (and rating to boot), but there is no point to hitting 2500 in 2s except it makes you feel like a big man. I have all the best in slot PvP gear (as does both of Guntir's chars) and I am sitting on 7k conquest points wondering what to do with them. At first, I was disenchanting PvP gear for Maelstrom Crystals and selling them on the auction house for 1.4k, but now the prices have fallen out since 4.1 is likely dropping next week and they will be attainable via honor. I could still probably stock up and get 14k or some from all my conquest points... but I already have ~17k gold and I maxed out my professions... I don't know what else to do.

I do not enjoy grinding up my alts... that bores me pretty badly. Supposedly, next patch I will be able to trade in Conquest Points for PvE gear, so I might end up looking for OP trinkets or some such to buy. However, this is all beside the point.

Why do I do arenas?

Because they are fun.

Why aren't I doing more arenas now?

Because the game is so broken that arenas are not even fun.

Basically, I am tired of going against DK+Healer or Warrior+Healer and they play like crap with zero coordination, but end up either globaling someone (more the warrior) or simply outlasting our mana pool (more the DK). We played a Marks+RDruid team this week and it went to length. These guys ended up being on our server and they whispered me and said that the Hunter's bow went to 0 durability mid-way through the match and he started using his S8 bow instead... we couldn't land a kill because of the ridiculous peeling from the Hunter coupled with infinite mana on the part of the Druid and they couldn't land a kill on us with or without a good bow.

The state of the game at the moment is kind of silly. The 4.1 patch will make some thing better... obviously, Warriors will have a much more difficult time 100-0'ing someone after the Colossus Smash nerf, but DKs are getting more sustained damage and none of their survivability is going down. I really do not understand how Blizz does these things; it is like they see a problem, fix it, and then deliberately break something else.

Speaking of Blizzard, they had a post from GC (around the water cooler or w/e it's called) where he was discussing healing effects and critical hits. As a summary, critical heals have always been a 1.5 multiplier whereas physical critical hits were always a 2.0 and in Cataclysm, all casters were given 2.0 critical multipliers as well. This leaves healers in a position where they simply do not value critical strike rating very highly because it would only amount to, at best, a fifty-percent return on investment whereas it is a roughly double return for damage-dealers.

With me (him) so far? Okay, so he says that the devs have been toying with the idea of giving healers double-healing criticals to make them value crit as a stat. This change would do a lot for burst-healing in general as well as empowering healers by giving healers who rely on actual heals that can crit (non-shields) a boon over those who do not (Disc uses PW:S etc which cannot crit). Okay, well every healer would see more healing for "free" from this change.

Then GC goes on to say that they think that healing might be too powerful in PvP and that the tooltips for talents like Mortal Strike have been left intentionally vague for 4.1. The idea here is that a 50% MS was entirely too powerful and was obviously "required" in every previous arena season (except 8 where burst was king). The devs do not want to go back to the "MS is required" PvP scene, but states that "healing might be OP in PvP" and "what if MS was 20% to counter this?"

Are you serious?

You just stated:

1) You don't want MS to be mandatory for PvP
2) Healing might be OP

and your conclusion was "maybe we will buff MS a little bit"??? Are you trolling me GC? You take those two premises and come to the conclusion that goes against both of them... healing would continue to be a bit too powerful and MS would again become mandatory in PvP. WAHMP WAHMP. Hopefully enough stink will have been raised on this issue that it would never happen... the healers critting for double makes some sense to me, but then I would worry that healing would become even more powerful if that should come to pass. These really seem like design changes that should have been brought up during Cata's alpha period...

Just sayin'...

Oh yeah, no word from that Frost Mage yet concerning 3s. /shrug

4.1 should drop next week (hopefully), and that might mean I record videos again, but we will just have to wait and see.

Let's Have an Update

2011-04-11T12:16:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I posted anything; please allow me to explain. First, I had LASIK surgery performed on March 31, so I had been in recuperation mode for a bit; second, I have been playing less and less because 4.0.6 is simply broken. I could go into great detail over why I believe the current instantiation of the game is broken, but these reasons are fairly self-evident: warrior's gross damage; DK's ability to never die or be snared coupled with NS (the most blatantly OP ability ever - more so than MS at the height of its reign, imho); etc.

Guntir and I have been playing less and less and basically have been rocking 10 wins a week, and for the last couple weeks we have not even managed a 50-50 record because of our skill atrophying coupled with the aforementioned brokenness of the game. My problem is largely one of a lack of motivation. As with everything else, I find myself asking "why even bother?" I have tons of gold now (thanks to DE'ing PvP purps and selling Maelstrom Crystals for silly amounts), I have all the best gear (save for the PvP trinkets, which I figure I will buy when 4.1 hits since I'm still making money on the MCs) available, and I have never been fond of alts. On top of the fact that I have no tangible motivation for playing, I have no subtle drive either being as every other team we play these days are cheese-dick comps abusing the imbalances of the current game (blood+blood, war+hunt) or a 2500 comp that we have a shot against (and we only go 50-50 against these most the time anyway). We did 4 wins on Tuesday, but then got pitted against a DK+Disc team 5 times and my morale was shaken to the core (can't train the DK because he's unkillable and can't train the Priest because the DK will kill Guntir).

I find myself hating 2v2s more and more each day I play the bracket. The imbalances just jump out at me. We faced a 2600 Hunter+Warrior who 100-0'd me in Guntir's GCD from his trinket... clearly we were outplayed. The silver lining, of course, is that 4.1 aims to correct a LOT of these imbalances (or at least calm them down a bit). Warrior burst damage is getting gutted via Colossus Smash's effect being halved and their control/mobility is being reduced somewhat via Charge going back to a 1.5s stun (which means their stupid "charge stuns 2 additional nearby targets when used" is less effective as well).

Additionally, Blood DKs are being tweaked to only allow Blood Shield to work in Blood Presence... which I am told means that their survivability in PvP will either go down or the damage output will go down. It makes SOME sense to me, since Glyph of Dark Succor suggests that the heal from Death Strike only happens in Unholy or Frost Presence, so they will either deal damage, or they will survive, but not both. I simply do not understand DKs, but I do not really see this changing much except the stance in which PvP-Bloods dps in... they will drop Glyph of Dark Succor in favor of keeping Blood Shield up as much as possible and spam Death Strike when they are getting trained... right? All this does is make them miss out on 15% haste... which does not really equate to amazing damage for DKs anyway... so, I'm still extremely hesitant to believe that this will fix everything.

Warlocks and Mages keep getting buffs; I see a buff for Warlocks or Mages every build on the PTR. It seems like LFD is going to probably come back in full force (though it's pretty decent right now anyway) when 4.1 arrives. However, Frost Mage control has been hit pretty hard and their ability to nuke on the run has also been hit by Fingers of Frost no longer proc'ing from defensive chill effects (Ice Armor), which means that Frost Mages will have to use one of their root effects to actually use a Deep Freeze again. This is kind of a big deal when going against melees because Frost Mages often use their root effects to set up damage while kiting rather than just setting up burst attempts. In 4.1, using a root effect will mean proc'ing FoF which will mean that Deep Freeze can be used either on the healer or the kill-target, and if it is used on the kill-target, then that is at least two CC DR categories being started. /shrug

Feral+Frost+Disc will still be an amazing comp next patch. It will revolve (as usual) around keeping the Feral or the Mage alive long enough to land a GOOD combo of CC on the healer and root+rape on the kill target while whatever is training the priest gets peeled well enough for him to nuke. I envision this comp playing a LOT like Hydra plays RMP: balls-to-the-walls offensive out the gate and nuke something till they dead.

I really want to find a great mage to start running this comp; I am sick of 2s at the moment.

Guntir is a Baws & PTR Build (13812)

2011-03-30T12:29:00.001-07:00

Reader Fade asked the following question in the comments on the last post:

rey can guntir recommend any good priest blogs? I run 3s with a priest and both he and i are struggling to find anything and our post on the eu board has been quiet.

I asked Guntir and he said "I don't follow any pvp blogs, priest or otherwise." This is technically a lie, as I know for a fact that he goes to Hydramist to read and subsequently rage at the moronic posts from Ming and the like; however, I asked Guntir if he would not mind too terribly answering any questions raised here. He agreed!

SO, just go ahead and leave comments in this post for questions you would like to throw Guntir's way about either Disc or Resto Shammy healing, starts, etc, and I will compose a list and get his responses. Try and keep them concise - things like "How do you handle a Warrior training you against War+Druid teams" are perfect; questions like "how can I play better" are too vague.

------------------------------------

There was a new PTR push today, and while changes are limited in scope and Blizzard will likely not post an updated patch-notes page, we have to go on the data-mined information from MMO-Champion.

First and foremost:

* Cleansing Waters now has a 6 sec cooldown, up from 0.5 sec.

Lmao, RShammies get kicked in the teeth finally. However, the BIG TICKET change so far has to be the following:

* Savage Defense now absorbs damage equal to 35% of your attack power for 10 sec instead of reducing the damage taken from the next physical attack.

If the tooltip is to be believed, this is a HUGE buff to Feral PvP in turtle-ability. Previously, readers will recall that Savage Defense only blocked the next incoming attack rather than simply giving a shield which lasts 10 seconds. The other aspect of this change (again, if the updated tooltip is to be believed) is that it seems that Savage Defense will finally absorb ALL damage, not just physical damage.

I absolutely love this change. 35% of our attack power is something like a 3-4k absorb, but we also have to factor in mastery. I can check for sure when I get home as to just how much this value will be, but I am hazarding a guess that it will be something around a 6-8k absorb. Again, we get this absorb currently, but if we absorb a 2k attack, the rest of that shield is entirely wasted and disappears. In 4.1, we will actually be able to turtle a bit in Bear Form simply due to our ability to shield while landing Mangles/Mauls/White Swings/etc. Other aspects of these changes need to be explored, obviously, and I definitely have some questions remaining about the implementation:

Does this mean SD has an internal cooldown to keep it from being OP?

Does SD's shield persist through shapeshifting, or will it go away if I leave Bear Form (with the implications being that I could get that 6-8k shield, swap to Cat Form and get offensive)?

As always, I will post updates here as I find them.

New PTR Build (13793)

2011-03-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

No significant changes OFFICIALLY posted yet, but data-mining has unearthed a new tooltip for Cyclone:

"Cyclone now lasts 6 sec, up from 5 sec."

Weird; though thoroughly appreciated. I had been wondering if Blizzard simply made changes just to see how much they could make Druids rage. I have no idea if this was a mistake or intended, but when the PTR comes back up, I will make sure and get confirmation (or if a Blue confirms it sooner you'll hear about it here).

Other than that, there are no changes announced yet that matter to Ferals. If we can make 4.1 go to live with a 6s Cyclone and Dash/StR breaking roots, we will be in a VERY nice position.

----------EDIT March 29----------

So, it is now Monday and the various quirks have been weeded out of the data-mined patch notes, though there is still no update to the official Blizzard notes so whether Cyclone is intended to return to form as a six-second duration is still yet to be known for sure. There are a few actual changes which require additional speculation (as pointed out in a comment to this very post). For instance, Enraged Regeneration is now considered an Enrage effect (according to the updated tooltip), meaning that it can be dispelled via Soothe (and the like). Furthermore, it has the updated text of "and new Enrage effects cannot be gained while [Enraged Regen is] active", which leads me to believe that Wrecking Crew and Deathwish cannot be proc'd/used which would effectively make Enraged Regeneration into the defensive/grinding cooldown it is supposed to be.

As I mentioned before, the majority of the "changes" in this push are actually tooltip corrections. There were a LOT of hot-fixes and whatnot after 4.0.6 which never had a patch to fix tooltips and it looks like the bulk of this push is going to do just that. However, there were some changes like Enraged Regeneration worth noting here:

* Cheat Death now absorbs up to 80% damage (down from 90%) and has an internal cooldown of 90 seconds (up from 60s). This means that Subtlety will be most easily killed since Cheat Death becomes a "cooldown" that might not be "up" next time you need it.

* Glyph of Soul Swap gives Soul Swap a 15s cooldown (up from 10s). This was something that was originally in the 4.0.6 notes, but then was taken out. Guntir tells me that it is still a 10s cooldown glyphed on live (his warlock is seventy-something) so this is actually a nerf to Warlocks... I'm shocked.

* Seasoned Winds was supposed to be (at least, according to a blue post) a defensive talent for Elemental Shammies, but it has shown up in tier-4 for Enhance, which is a bit odd. Additionally, the numbers have now shown up and it will be something like 174 resist to the school which got locked out, and the last time I heard anything about it, it would stack with resistance buffs and auras; that's right, Enhancement shammies can effectively get 50% damage reduction to a school of magic by glyphing Healing Stream Totem and shearing something... whoa... DK2.0 incoming.

* Gag Order can now be proc'd by Pummel. I think that this is going to be a dark-horse talent that ends up playing interestingly at the top-tier of PvP'ers. For instance, Arms can (by forgoing the Fury tree entirely) get Gag Order. This is probably never going to be an issue, but a Warrior could conceivably give up some damage from the low-tier Fury tree for a 3s silence on Pummel guaranteed as well as lowering the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3min.

* Frostbolt base damage increased 10% (non-scaling, not a big deal).

* Ice Barrier scaling increased to 87% from 80.7%. This is a decent change, but ultimately a small one; you can still eat up an Ice Barrier with basically a Mangle.

* Fingers of Frost now increases Ice Lance's damage by 25%, up from 15%.

I really want to touch on that last one. I pulled up the old 4.0.6 patch notes because I thought I read something about this last patch...

* Fingers of Frost can no longer be dispelled and now also increases Ice Lance damage by 15%.
* Frost Specialization now only grants 2 base points of mastery (instead of 8), reducing all Frost damage to frozen targets by 15% from previous values. However, Frost Specialization now increases base Frostbolt damage by 15%.

Okay, so if I'm following this correctly, then they nerfed all Frost damage by 15% except Frostbolt from the Frost Spec perk. Additionally, they made it so that when you have Fingers of Frost proc'd, your Ice Lances will do the same damage as they did before the patch. Okay, so 4.0.6 was a nerf to Ice Lances outside of FoF procs, but a wash when FoF was up. NOW, they buffed Ice Lance another 10% damage when FoF is up.

Maybe I just do not understand Blizzard, but did they not just have a developer Q&A session in which they suggested that casters probably were too reliant on instant-cast abilities? Why, then, would they continually buff instant-cast abilities over and over again? It simply boggles my mind... I am boggling right now.

Anyway, with Frost Mages getting a "much needed" damage buff to Ice Lance and the chance of Cyclone being unnerfed (though it will have never got to live), my guess is that Monster's team (currently #1 on Rampage-US running Frost+Feral+Disc) will continue dominating; that will be interesting to see.

No Video This Week

2011-03-23T08:34:00.001-07:00

Guntir and I started doing our weekly 2s matches yesterday. First and foremost, we have been a bit on edge of late because of a SPriest+FMage team on our server who farmed the sweet love of god out of us a few weeks ago, so we have been queue dodging them when they are online. We ended up in a queue for three minutes when they signed on, apparently queued, and instantly popped against us on Lordaeron. BAH... Guntir and I played extremely well against them and had luck against us (as it simply has been of late), but we edged out a victory... then proceeded to queue-dodge them.

I do not know how much longer we will be playing 2v2s; Blizzard has been negligent of the bracket for entirely too long now, and it is starting to show. We faced a 2400 Hunter+Warrior team the other day a couple times in a row which went like this "opened on the warrior, popped all my defensive CDs, died in 2 globals". I like to try and keep these posts civil, but I think that the following needs to be said: "It's shit like this, Blizz... you make me want to kill myself and everyone around me". Then yesterday, as if I needed the proverbial cherry on this sundae of disappointment and agony, we faced the legend:

Blood DK + Blood DK

Fan-mother-fucking-tastic. The match went 38 minutes (I have the screenshot at home, but I was too angry to put it up; I'll try tonight if my rage doesn't overwhelm me and cause me to go on a shooting rampage) and they eventually won because they OOM'd Guntir's Shammy and had more healing done than him. Again, "Blizzard, it's shit like this that makes me want to kill people brutally..." This has been played out via bleating in the forums pretty regularly, and until yesterday I thought to myself "how much healing could they possibly do"? Until you go up against a solid one of these comps (they were 2400mmr btw) you simply have no idea how frustratingly dickish they can be. Their damage output is not strong by any sense, but neither is it weak. They do roughly twice the damage of a Feral-spec'd Bear Form, for instance, and obviously when you are attacking one he is stacking Vengeance and ends up dropping trucks on people. Combine that with the unpeelability of a DK and you have one seriously screwed up scenario: AMS every 45 seconds, IBF every 3 minutes, 2x Death Grips to peel me off a kill-target whenever needed, 2x Silences, 2x Mind Freezes... the whole thing is utter bullshit... in fact - DKs are pretty bullshit at the moment any this is just indicative of that fact.

Back to the point...

I really do not think that 2v2s will survive much longer. Blizzard's obvious lack of awareness (or perhaps it's just general apathy) keeps the 2v2 bracket rather gimmicky. We often run into comps which should not exist and should have their various gimmicks pruned, but because they have little-to-no baring on 3s or rBGs, they simply will not be touched. Blizzard's latest Q&A suggests that Glyph of Dark Succor (which currently is either a 15% total hp heal or a 22% total hp heal depending on how it works with the glyph, with no cooldown save for Frost+UH runes on Death Strike... which does pretty decent damage itself) will be nerfed to keep it "from being abusive", but I think that that ship has sailed, personally. Meanwhile, other niche comps continue growing in strength with basically nothing being done to reel them in at all (KFC comes to mind rather readily).

Warriors are getting a DPS buff and a burst nerf next patch; it is extremely hard to tell exactly whether this is going to play as a PvP nerf or not in the big picture. Ultimately, having less burst is going to make them less potent in PvP, but their sustained damage is still extremely strong, and their mobility and control are going up-up-up next patch via the changes to Intercept and Charge (though all PvP Warriors will be Arms next patch anyway).

I think that I am going to start looking for a third member for our 3v3s team (sitting around 2250 at the moment) with 2300 experience and try to push that a bit more. I think that an Affliction Warlock would fit nicely into the comp with Guntir's RShammy, but I do not think he enjoys playing him much. I have heard extremely good things about Marks+Feral+Disc, but finding an above-average-skilled Hunter who is willing to run with a Feral is always difficult. Ultimately, we will probably be able to find a decent 2200-experienced Warrior most easily... but these are usually bad players on the whole who simply can not play without being baby-sat by a Paladin. We shall see...

I do not know when my next video will be; I am, as I have pointed out, become rather disenfranchised with 2s of late and have not even been recording them. We were so annoyed and demoralized by the loss to the double-dk team that we ended up losing to a Ret+RSham team and I immediately rage-quit... the stress simply is not worth it to me right now.

Additionally, I have been selling Maelstrom Crystals on the AH (buying the cheapest PvP epics and DE'ing them) for basically 1400-and-change a pop; I have made something like 12k gold in 2 weeks and I am hoping to knock out a few more weeks before 4.1 drops and have a rather large cache of cash (hur hur) before the new BoE trinkets come out (of which I expect plenty to be borderline OP). Oh, I picked up the Unheeded Warning and it is indeed overpowered for Ferals. You get a proc, and if you use TF at the same time (and macro it to Synapse Springs, as I do) you get something ridiculous like 15% bonus damage from TF, 20% more damage from the proc on Shreds, and ~500 more agility from the Synapse Springs; I landed two Shreds on a Priest with 3900 resilience yesterday which crit for 23k and 24k... it is simply ridiculous.

Ballocks... Video Dilemma

2011-03-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

Oh look, a video!

SOOOOOOOOOOO, yeah. I have a video that is a little unorthodox today; it is Guntir and I beating a 2500-rated FrostMage+Rogue team. The only difference with the usual getup is that it is actually from Guntir's perspective for once. Oh yeah... and it's not up yet. Yeah, jees, Guntir sent me the video at work so I could check it out, but then I forgot to send it to myself at home and therefore it was not there yet.

I started writing this post yesterday, just for a frame of reference, but I got super-busy at work and could not end up finishing it. As you can rather plainly see, the text is somewhat sloppy, the flow feels jerky and unedited, and it has the "rough outline" look and feel that goes along with first draft material. All that withstanding, I did intend to get a video up last night, but then the craziest thing happened: I actually got Skype-recording to work.

Yes, recording our skype conversations to publish with the videos has been a longstanding hurdle that seemed insurmountable to me, but yesterday I found an extension, of all things, for Skype on the Mac which would automatically record both input and output of skype and compress the sound to a file anywhere you want. As I was telling Guntir, I think that the crux of the problem stemmed from my originally trying to record our conversations on Vent, and that leading to my searching for ways to do the deed generically. Ultimately, I think that it is an issue that I have largely ignored for a few months now, but when I searched yesterday I found my solution almost instantly. Installing it at home and testing it out proved simple, straight-forward, and exactly what I wanted, though the first video or two may have me trying to adjust the levels; I'm rather quiet while Guntir is somewhat loud. I expect the difference in volumes is one of defaults as recording a phone conversation, for example, would be heavily leaning on the ability to hear the person on the other end more so than yourself; I know what I said, I am the one who said it.

About that dilemma... RIGHT! Well, here is the thing: I did have a video that I thought was pretty good; the 2500 Rogue+Mage we defeated while Guntir was recording. This video shows how frantic playing a Priest is when you are getting trained unmercifully and your partner is peeled for days. It also has some absolutely amazing footage of Guntir going from 1-100 inside a beautiful peel from myself which is entirely unseen because Guntir ducks around a pillar. On the other hand, I have a few matches from last night with Skype recordings. The choices are... hard.

We usually eat dinner with my GF's family on Wednesday, but tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day and with them being Irish, we plan on doing dinner tomorrow instead. Therefore, I should have the ability to get the video up tonight without much hassle (providing no other curve-balls come down the chute).

Well, it's Thursday

2011-03-03T09:07:00.001-08:00

----------UPDATE 3-------------

* The root effect from Shattered Barrier now shares diminishing returns with the root from Improved Cone of Cold.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

Blizzard has officially ended the reign of Mages. This is beautiful... I actually might start crying from joy.

----------UPDATE 2-------------

* Glyph of Rake is now Glyph of Pounce, which increases the range of Pounce by 3 yards.

Well now... this is interesting. This takes the range from 5y (melee range) to 8y which is reasonably close to the range on Sap (10y). This might actually be a major glyph worth taking. However, unless Blizzard has some plan to make Pounce usable more than once per arena match, I don't see this being SUPER necessary; again, we will have Pounce and a few other glyphs to choose between, but none of them are very good.

I'll probably take this one just because sometimes I can't get openers on people without using FCC... and that's bogus.

----------UPDATE-------------

WoWHead.com (of all places) listed some interesting spell changes in the latest post; this one most notably.

Feral Swiftness

EDIT: Bah, it doesn't seem to link to the correct text, I'll quote here for rank2 -

Feral Swiftness Rank 2
Requires Cat Form
Increases your movement speed by 30% in Cat Form and increases your chance to dodge while in Cat Form or Bear Form by 4%.

In addition, your Dash and Stampeding Roar have a 100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects from affected targets when used.

... yeah ... okay. Now, I am definitely thinking about training Stampeding Roar.

--------END-UPDATE-----------

Thursday is usually a day when Blizzard feels like pushing a patch to the PTR. They do not do it every Thursday when the PTRs are up, and they only do it when there are changes to be made. I have no idea if there will be a push today, but I can certainly hope that there will be one and it will have some Feral quality of life changes. Do I expect there to be a push? My answer is "...yes...?" Do I expect there to be any quality of life changes for Ferals? No, not in the slightest.

I know, I know. It is somewhat depressing to think that Feral is where the devs think it should be. However, there are a fair few Ferals doing somewhat well in the arenas. Datah and Miirkat are both rocking 3v3s teams with ratings above 2700, so there must be something of note happening there, and as long as there are at least a couple of gladiator-contending Ferals, I think that Blizzard will be fine with them. Sure, there are a number of things that should probably be changed with Feral, and yes, I have listed them here a number of times, but I think that Blizzard has made their view rather clear, regardless of whether the community agrees with it or not.

1) Feral has 149% movement speed in Cat Form; no other melee moves nearly as fast as Feral does. We move so fast that when afflicted with a 50% snare, we move roughly the same speed as DKs with Death's Advance. DKs are the only other melee who can claim this level of mobility.

2) Feral is one of two melee classes in the game who can break snares at will with one GCD with no cooldown or true cost (the other is Ret). While shapeshifting to break snares is useless against a number of classes, there are definitely situations where it is extremely useful to break out of a snare and start making ground at our improved speed. Rets can do this as well, and even have an extremely short-CD Sprint-esque ability to boot, but they have no snare and so until such a time as a snare shows for Rets, Feral stands alone.

3) Feral is the only melee in the game with a CC that is undispellable.

4) Feral is the only melee in the game with a CC that does not have a cooldown; in fact we have TWO CCs which do not have cooldowns (Cyclone and Roots). In fact, against other Ferals we have THREE CCs which do not have cooldowns (Hibernate).

5) Feral is the only melee in the game which is not susceptible to disarm effects.

The point I am trying to make here, in case it is not painfully obvious, is that while Feral does suffer from a lot of quality of life issues (and even some play-style facets which are simply clunky), we have advantages over other melees in some ways. On the other hand, a lot of our issues stem from these quasi-advantages:

1) We are one of two melees in the game who has to gem for spell penetration (Enhance is the other) because our CC is a spell rather than a physical attack (interestingly, Repentance is on the physical hit table as well as HoJ).

2) We are the only melee in the game who has to spend half (and next patch - more than half) our CC duration burning GCDs because we used our CC. Instant Cyclones cause us to have wasted Cyclone-time because of shapeshifting GCDs.

ETC.

As you can see, for the past few days I have been mulling over suggestions to make on the PTR in the context of Feral quality of life improvements. I have actually found a group of non-Ferals who understand the game pretty well and can make counterarguments which actually hold up to rational thought. For instance, I had never fully appreciated that Feral was the only melee in the game with a CC effect that does not have a cooldown; this absolutely blew my mind when I thought about it. In fact, one of the key reasons that these people were suggesting the nerf to Cyclone (6s to 5s) in 4.1 is a fair change is because Cyclone is overpowered regardless of who is casting it. Resto is definitely overpowered, but Feral is arguably in the same boat when played well because it can be used nearly as often and nearly as effectively.

It was this type of argument that made me think about the shapeshifting global cooldown. The reason this has likely never been changed is two-fold: first, it keeps Restos from having on-demand control via Skull Bash and Bash; second, it keeps Ferals from being super-powerful as the only melee with a zero-cd CC effect. I made the suggestion the other day about allowing Predator's Swiftness to allow a zero-cost nature spell to be used instantly in Cat Form. Now that I think about it some more, this would be a powerful change because of the up-time it would provide Ferals directly. For instance, it would change Cyclone from, 4.0.6 versus 4.1, a 6sec duration which we spend 3sec of GCD-locked before being able to attack again, to a 5sec duration which we spend 1.5sec of GCD-locked from simply having used an ability. That would make a 6/3s into a 5/3.5 (duration:uptime). This change would seem rather weak to most people, but it would play rather strong, in my opinion as it would allow Ferals additional dps-time (not much, but a little) even in the light of Cyclone being nerfed.

Anyway, I will continue making suggestions like these as I come up with them and the patch is rolling along on the PTR.

As a last little bit of love, I finally did it: the video is up. I must warn you all, this is not my finest work and in fact I threw it together somewhat quickly because we had to go to my girlfriend's parents' house for dinner ~45m later, so the editing is rather "meh". Additionally, on a sad note, I was IM'd by Lev (our Pally) last night saying that he was transferring servers, so we will be done with our 3s team for a while (we got our 2200 weapons, so it is not as if we need to do 3v3s; probably just sit on the team for titles). I have a few more videos of our 3v3s in action which I might put up over the coming weeks just for fun, but we will likely be focusing on 2v2s again soon.

I would like to conclude this post with a tribute to Lev. He was a great Holy Paladin to play with; potentially one of the best with which I have had the pleasure of entering the arena. We may have gotten into some arguments once or twice, but more often than not we were having lots of fun farming bad and good teams alike. He knew how to use his utility, he knew how to heal, and only once did I have to tell him "don't sit there eating mana burns!" We are going to miss you, Lev; good luck in your future en devours wherever they may lead you.

Let's Talk About 4.1

2011-03-02T09:14:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the Druid changes being made in 4.1 (so far):

* Lifebloom now costs 11% of base mana, up from 7%. Base healing reduced by 20%, from 2306 to 1847.
* Cyclone now lasts 5 sec, down from 6 sec.
* Stampeding Roar (Cat) now increases movement speed by 60% for 8 sec, up from 40% for 6 sec.

Before we go any further, there was a post from Nethaera suggesting that they decided to revert the mana cost change on Lifebloom, but leave the bloom effect in nerfedville. Personally, I do not see a nerf to base healing hurting anyone but Feral, but since we do not really use Lifebloom at all in the arenas except in extremely rare circumstances, I do not really care. If nothing else, this will reduce Resto's healing a little bit, and I am always up for that.

Cyclone getting nerfed hurts; I will not deny it. It hurts particularly for Ferals because we end up spending half of our 6s Cyclones locked to GCDs, so in practice they only play like a 3s CC effect as-is. Reducing the duration to 5s means that Feral will spend 3/5 of that time locked out of dealing damage, which is just too much in most cases to land a kill. To me, this means that Feral either needs some special treatment in this context or I will need to start using Regrowths on my Predator's Swiftness procs and hard-casting Cyclones on healers when trying to land a kill. The main problem with this is that under normal circumstances, I will end up chasing healers to try and throw out the instant-Cyclones as they round a pillar; good healers are hard to insta-Cyclone. The other problem with this is one that we have suffered with for a long time: Feral has no knockback protection, so hard-casting a Cyclone with a dps on us (let alone two) is extremely difficult and prone to getting kicked.

Personally, I would favor a revamped Predator's Swiftness by way of reimplementing it to allow us to use one instant-cast free nature spell in Cat Form. This would free up a GCD from shifting and make our 5s Cyclone play like 3.5s, which would actually be a buff for us (sort of). Another option would be Feral having a perk that took shapeshifting off the GCD (or made it an extremely short GCD like 0.5s or something).

Lastly, I wanted to talk about Stampeding Roar. This change is a buff, to be sure, but it is still an ability which I will not be training... yet. The cooldown is longer than Dash's, it costs 1/3 of our resources, and will never be useful on a teammate in practice simply because it requires melee range and our teammates are going to be at max-distance from us more times than not. This is definitely something that will be loved by the dragonfighters (PvE'rs), but in terms of utility in PvP, it is still severely lacking. It ends up being an 11% stronger movement speed than our normal and only lasts 8 seconds while leaving us energy starved... it has no place on an arena-Feral's action bar. Blizzard simply is not listening to Feral PvP'ers at the moment, or they disagree with the belief that they should be viable dps.

Switching gears for a moment, we usually do 3v3s on Tuesdays, but our Holy Pally friend was strangely absent last night. He logged onto Skype, but would not respond to my private messages and never logged into WoW (that we could tell), so we ended up running 2v2s instead. A comp we faced (and beat every time) a lot last night was ShadowPriest+RetPally, and this team's burst was kind of scary. I think Guntir summarized them best with "they can reset 2-3 times and keep each other up through CD defenses, then they pop all their offense and kill something." This is definitely the strategy they tried against us, but being the 2s gods that we are, we managed to pressure the Ret enough (while CC'ing the Priest) to keep them from ever lining up good CC and damage at the same time. Another reason this comp is powerful is because of the double-dispel that Shadow has until 4.1. Being able to dispel-train his Ret Pally against teams with Mages (or any magic CC'er, really) is pretty powerful, and is largely the reason that Shadow Priests are on a lot of the top teams at the moment (heroic Shadowcleave is a mean one - DK brings insane pressure and damage while the SPriest brings strong damage and dispels for the healer).

We also played against two different variants of DK+Healer: DK+Pally and DK+Priest. After watching a video that Miirkat put up, I was curious about his tactic of "train the healer till he dead." In truth, I have never had much luck with this because of Feral's lack of offensive pressure against Plate-wearers. So, the first team we got was DK+Pally on Blade's Edge, and I sat the Pally while CC'ing the DK. Essentially, we would put out tons of pressure, make the Pally use a cooldown to survive, he would top himself off, and we would reset the fight. At the end of the match, the Pally was basically at 10% mana while Guntir was at 35% or so, and we ended up killing the Pally inside a Berserk+Maim combo (I know... and me complaining about Maim all the time). The second time we played them it was even easier. It was on Sewers (and I still have no idea why people hate this map; I actually really enjoy it and it has some really neat positioning facets to take advantage of) and we employed the same strategy of "sit the pally". Again, after he would come close to death and use a defensive cooldown, we would reset and continue CC'ing the DK. It was actually easier to CC the DK this time because he decided that his Pally was eating too much pressure from me, so he needed to sit me.

The problem with sitting a Feral, as a DK, when you are running with a healer who is scared to death of said Feral is that the Pally is trying to get away from the Feral and by proxy - you. So, we would catch up to the Pally at the boxes, lay some damage into him, and he would make the mistake of dropping down and start gunning for the stairs, presumably to break line of sight on Guntir for a moment so he could not land damage abilities (but almost certainly the Pally thought Guntir would be mana burning). This is a problem because, as I said, the DK was training me now to keep me off his pally, so the Pally and I would get to the stairs, the DK would grip me back to the corner, and I would be mashing Nature's Grasp while in the Deathgrip. So, the DK and his pet would hit me and get rooted while I shifted out of the single Desecration laying there and got back on his Pally. Once, Guntir (who stayed up top) followed my Entangling Roots with a Mind Control of all things and just left the DK sitting down there in the corner, then brought him over and hit him with Psychic Scream to follow. All told, the DK must have eaten something like 20 seconds of CC while I was beating on his Pally.

So, we ended up going 5-0 running Feral+Disc and our Pally friend was still no one to be seen. So, we figured "meh... let's keep it rolling" and Guntir hopped onto his Shammy. We basically got the same comps: Shadow+Ret, DK+Healer, and two double-dps comps. The DK+Disc team was on Lordaeron, and we said "let's try the same tactic and see how it goes". Aside from one or two scary moments, we basically were winning that fight from beginning to end. The Priest could not keep me off of him and his DK could not pressure anyone, and because it was Lordaeron, the Priest never got more than a second or two to himself without me keeping him using mana, so eventually he went OOM and we killed him.

We fought a FrostMage+Ret team that gave us some trouble (more than the Shadow team, interestingly) because our defacto disposition against Frost Mages is usually "train them till they dead", but the Ret was extremely good about using Word of Glory on him whenever trouble was brewing. Additionally, their CC is more effective against a Shammy than a ShadowPriest (Tremor does nothing to Poly, and Shammy does not have SW:D to break first Poly). We got into a very tight position where I hit something like 2k HP in Bear Form with Survival Instincts only having about 3-4 seconds remaining, so I hit my Frenzied Regeneration (which I have glyphed because... why not, right?) and Guntir landed about a 60k heal on me to shift all the pressure in the fight to our advantage. 30% bonus healing received with Earth Shield and a Frost Shock primer for extra healing just means TONS of burst healing.

The last comp we played against was a Feral+Arms double-dps comp. I have no idea what these guys were doing at 2100 MMR, because they were absolutely atrocious. I obviously sat the Warrior the entire match long because the Feral is so god-awfully-cc'able. So, I landed a 5pt Rip on the Warrior and the Druid hits me with Cyclone, which I trinket and follow up by going Bear Form. I hit the Druid with Bash and both him and Warrior with Demoralizing Shout before the Druid trinkets, but I still have 2-3 seconds left on my Predator's Swiftness proc. Had I been thinking clearly, I would have hit him with Hibernate, but I was a little distracted by the damage the Warrior was pumping into Guntir's shammy, so I hit him with a full DR Cyclone. I had every intention of following that with a Hibernate, but he left form, and once again I looked back saying "why did I not simply use Entangling Roots for the guaranteed CC?" So, I hit the Warrior with Rake, he hits Retaliation, so I back off and start casting Entangling Roots on the Feral. He breaks line because Guntir's Shammy broke line... doh. The Feral comes back into line and I start hard-casting Entangling Roots again and he Skull Bashes me (lawl). Fine... I will just get back on the Warrior. The warrior, at this point, was at 5% hp from Rake/Rip and he just now decided to use Shield Wall. So, I hit Berserk and just DPS through Shield Wall and he dies. It was the easiest match I have had in a long while, and I played it pretty badly.

Guntir is going out of town for a few days on Thursday, so I might have some bonus time to actually get the video up. Booyah. I will keep posting as 4.1 changes keep emerging.

Still no video today...

2011-02-28T10:38:00.000-08:00

I had to deal with the stupid Time Warner Cable people this weekend because I am basically eating unplayable lag starting around 7/8 PM every night. They fixed nothing and told me that it would have to happen on the software side and that it would take 2-3 weeks to resolve... if they decide to resolve it at all. So yeah, I spent the entire weekend on the phone with these morons trying to get this taken care of. BAH!

Additionally, I did not have a chance to discuss something Nethaera brought up on the boards concerning Feral PvP on Friday (got busy late in the day), so I just wanted to repost my post on that topic. Neth's original post first followed by my rebuttal and suggestions:

On the second point, we’ve been over this issue quite a bit, but the core issue is that Ferals used to not have a lot of utility in PvP, but were also really hard to control. We watched as players told us over the years that they wanted more utility so that they could actually be a valuable member of their team, so we gave Ferals a lot of utility they didn’t have before, but in turn we thought it was fair to make them slightly easier to control. We realize there are a few different ways we could have gone on this and that some players would no doubt have preferred to keep the iconic ability to not be crowd controlled instead of gaining things like an interrupt and better crowd control of their own. (source)

If I am reading this correctly, then I am to understand that Feral was given a CC effect, an interrupt, and the like despite being difficult to control, and when that was deemed to be too much, the difficulty in being controlled was removed. Instead of toned down, nerf, or balanced in other ways, all Feral mobility was removed in a blanket trade for everything every other melee has? In essence, I am fine with being given a CC effect and an interrupt as a trade for losing SOME mobility, but in truth, the CC effect we got was lackluster in its implementation as is the interrupt.

Let me explain, further, why some Ferals are still peeved about the decision to remove all Feral mobility against root-reliant classes. First, let us discuss the problems with removing all of the anti-root effects that Feral had (shapeshifting). This was discussed rather lengthily in the PTR boards while testing was still going on before being deployed to live, but the facts have not changed: Feral is still the only melee spec in the game without any cooldown or non-cooldown buttons to press when we get inevitably root-CC'd without a dispeller (or if the dispeller cannot afford the GCD to dispel us or is out of LoS, etc). The list of abilities which can be used to break or preemptively immune (or both) root effects is long and boring and linked nigh-daily so I will not repeat it here; suffice to say that removing all Feral root-breaking would have been acceptable if, and only if, a cooldown were added or altered to give Feral a button to press once every thirty to forty-five seconds that would get us out of roots (do a search on the Druid boards for Stampeding Roar and you will find the front-runner of the ideas for such a cooldown).

It seems prudent to explain why Feral is still upset about this "phantom trade" of our mobility for utility in terms of the supposed utility we have gained. First, Predator's Swiftness is an amazing bit of utility; it would be a lie to suggest otherwise. Being able to use Cyclone effectively and on short demand instantly can be a devastating blow to the opposing team. However, the main issue here has to do with our quality of life with regard to Predator's Swiftness. Particularly, training a Feral is, has been, and forever seems to be the best strategy when facing one; there is no downside to strictly training a Feral until he has died. As such, dispel-training the Feral is doubly effective in this regard because it will keep him from utilizing his instant-cast procs because Predator's Swiftness is still dispellable. This entire setting is a vicious cycle: training the Feral is the best strategy because he cannot deal damage and survive at the same time, and as a bonus the opposing team is rewarded for training a Feral because it becomes trivial to keep his instant-cast procs off of him thus keeping his pressure at a minimum.

Further to this, the interrupt (Skull Bash) that was given this expansion is another amazing bit of utility; again, it would be false to suggest otherwise. However, Skull Bash is plagued with the same problem(s) as our other utility: it suffers from quality of life issues by the implementation. It harkens back to how Feral Charge (Bear) worked prior to Cataclysm (and I assume it was for the flavor of that design rather than anything else) in that it charges an enemy and interrupts them if they are casting. Feral was given a talent to make it unique from the other specializations to get the cooldown down to ten seconds and the up-time to four seconds (previously, 5/10), and it applied a debuff to increase the cost of spells by 10% (previously 30%). The first issue is that the interrupt lags behind the charge effect; that is, if you are attempting to interrupt someone and you hit Skull Bash, they will see you charging and can cancel their cast before the interrupt occurs and avoid the lockout. The second issue is that because the interrupt is tied to the charge effect one cannot use the interrupt on a target in melee range while rooted; this particularly adds insult to injury because we previously had a means to escape roots to attempt to interrupt our target and while more often than not no caster will be within melee range of us while rooted, it does occasionally occur and we can do nothing about it, currently. The third issue is the 10% increased cost of spells effect simply not scaling at all; it seems to have been an attempt to add uniqueness to the Feral utility arsenal, and while I am sure all Ferals appreciate the sentiment at face value, in practice it simply comes up short.

As healers get more and more spell power and their healing grows stronger and stronger, they will be forced to use fewer and fewer heals. Not only will they be using fewer and fewer heals, but they will likely start moving from their expensive heals to their inexpensive heals which drops the cost of spells an order of magnitude... not some piddly amount. While 10% reduced healing scales against the improvements healers see in their output, the Brutal Impact debuff scales against the cost of the spells being used, which are static in mana cost. Again, this is a quality of life issue; had the debuff been extremely useful and/or powerful, then it would have required Ferals to keep it on the target a majority of the time rather than using the interrupt as it was intended to be used (as an interrupt), but if the debuff is weak (as it is currently), then the debuff becomes something of a joke and the interrupt is used solely as an interrupt. This is not a problem that can be resolved on one side or the other, but it does cause Ferals to ask the question "if the debuff is useless, then why must I spend two talent points on an interrupt that every other melee gets for free?"

In other aspects of utility, there are stuns. Feral has access to, in reality, two stuns: Bash and Maim. Both of these stuns suffer the same quality of life problems as the abilities I have mentioned above. Bash is particularly clunky to use on anything but an off-target because of the GCD required to swap into and the subsequently out of Bear Form; attempting to use this in our DPS rotation is simply out of the question because by the time we got back into Cat Form to deal damage again, over half the duration of the stun would have transpired and it would have been a waste of a cooldown. I believe that this was left this way intentionally to keep Feral from getting an on-demand stun that would allow them to land damage which could be followed by Maim (recall, Maim used to be a funny incapacitate effect that would not necessarily break on damage and lasted seven seconds at five combo points) to land a rather large on-target control combo during which a huge amount of damage could be dropped. Again, I believe that Bash is perfectly fine as-is in that it will not be used as an on-target control effect but more likely an off-target CC effect.

However, this brings us squarely to Maim as an on-target control effect. This suffers from what is, in my humble opinion, the worst quality of life issue yet named. Precisely, Feral as a play-style is not that of a Rogue; Feral does not have the access to energy regeneration like Rogues do, Feral does not have the ability to generate combo points nearly as effectively as Rogues do, and we have more finishing moves which are required for full damage output. All these facts being presented as givens leaves Feral in a bad position being forced to decide between dealing meaningful damage output or controlling a target to whom they are trying to deal meaningful damage. The counterpoint being that Rogues can deal 100% of their damage output while maintaining a Kidney Shot rotation without a loss in damage save that Eviscerate or Envenom depending on spec they could have used instead, but the damage output during the Kidney Shot trumps said finishers and likely will refund a combo point and some energy and will allow the use of Eviscerate or Envenom usually during the Kidney Shot.

Again, let me emphasize this point: Feral is not the same play-style as a Rogue. They have similarities, but ultimately are entirely different classes and specializations; however, they both attempt to fill the same role of melee dps. Back to the point of Maim - because of its high cost in both combo points and energy and its extremely high opportunity cost (it usually costs us refreshing Rip for 10-15 seconds outside of cooldowns which means our damage output gets cut in half for twice to three-times the duration of the stun just for using it), it simply cannot be used in most situations in PvP outside of Berserk (where energy and combo point generation are at their pinnacle). The quality of life issue here is that under normal conditions, Maim cannot be used in PvP because of its extremely high opportunity cost.

Another quality of life issue that Feral has to deal with is the extremely up-and-down aspect of Ferocious Bite. For all the reasons that I have mentioned about Maim not being able to be used in real PvP situations, Ferocious Bite suffers for all the same plus a bit more. It is true that Ferocious Bite has that once-in-a-while utility of being able to actually land a rather large critical strike against a low-armor target that may land a kill and therefore it has a place on the Feral PvP action-bar (landing kills is important), but it also has a great number of drawbacks in addition to its extremely high opportunity cost. Firstly, it does less damage than Shred at the base 35 energy; this problem was thought to have been resolved in Cataclysm when Shred and Mangle's damage was normalized around being part of the arsenal, but leaving Bleeds to do the bulk of the dps-work. However, with the buffing and nerfing of Shred/Mangle and Rip/Rake (in that order), Shred and Mangle are back to their WotLK states and dealing far more damage than Ferocious Bite could ever hope to do.

Again, in PvP, Ferocious Bite can be used at 75 energy which will cause it to deal 200% damage before critical strike multipliers and therefore can yield a MUCH bigger hit than Shred, but the cost (both energy and combo points) comes back to bite us again. 75 energy to deal a strike that consumes all of our combo points and leaves us energy-starved every time is only useful in one situation: landing a killing blow against a low-armored target. Against a high-armored target, the 75-energy Ferocious Bite critical strike does something (against 3k+ resilience) on the order of 7-8k damage. Using three-fourths of our resources and all of our combo points to land less than one-fifteenth of our target's health pool is simply unacceptable; we are always better off using those combo points to keep Rip or Savage Roar up.

Another example of poorly designed abilities based on nothing more than their effect on the Feral quality of life is Tiger's Fury. For the most part, Ferals are in love with Tiger's Fury because of the talent King of the Jungle, which has given us a cooldown to aid us in our perpetually energy starved condition. The quality of life issue creeps back into play with the change to Tiger's Fury that came with Cataclysm. Tiger's Fury used to give a base-damage upgrade which would directly translate to better Shred damage (since Shred's damage is based off of our base-damage); however, Tiger's Fury was changed to be a strict 15% damage buff over the same duration with the release of Cataclysm. While many Ferals do not really see this as a problem, it becomes one with the way it affects our bleed damage.

Cataclysm meant many sweeping changes, and of these changes was that of addressing the "rolling trinkets with HoTs/DoTs" change. This update simply made it so that when the effect of a trinket or ability fell off, the HoTs or DoTs applied would recalculate their healing/damage accordingly and no longer be affected by those temporary buffs. This was done in order to keep HoTs/DoTs from "rolling" or being reapplied infinitely with the trinket effect for an unintended full-fight duration (as long as the HoT/DoT did not fall off). So, to recap, with the release of Cataclysm, HoT and DoT abilities would no longer remain with temporary buffs once those temporary buffs fell off. The sole exception to this rule is, of course, Tiger's Fury. Tiger's Fury applies a 15% bonus damage buff that will cause Rip and Rake to deal 15% bonus damage for, if applied while under the effect of Tiger's Fury, their entire duration - well after the six-second duration Tiger's Fury has fallen off.

A lot of Ferals will claim that this is working as intended, or that it is okay for the purposes of PvE, and these same Ferals largely rely on this implementation for dealing damage and being included in raids. The larger problem then becomes that our other abilities end up getting attacked for this implementation; namely, Rip and Rake were nerfed because of them dealing too much damage, and the amount by which they were nerfed was right around 10% making it painfully clear that Rip/Rake could have more easily been changed to be NOT affected by Tiger's Fury and hit the same desired outcome. Going back to the quality of life discussion, Tiger's Fury is an ability at odds with its own implementation: it is designed to be used as a means to return energy for burst damage, but also to be used as a primer for our Bleeds to allow them to deal their maximum damage.

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1) Predator's Swiftness - Trivially dispelled.
2) Skull Bash - Interrupt issues, issue while rooted, high cost.
3) Bash - Designed to be extremely difficult to use as anything other than an off-target CC effect.
4) Maim - Extremely high opportunity-cost.
5) Brutal Impact - Debuff lackluster and/or counter to design; 2 points required, only 1 point a boon for half the talent.
6) Berserk - Cooldown too long.
7) Tiger's Fury - Designed for bleed damage improvement and burst, but cannot do both.
8) Primal Madness - Extremely lackluster by design.
9) Ferocious Bite - Extremely high opportunity-cost; extremely lackluster damage against high-armor targets.

My suggestions for each of these are as follows (not condensed at all; sorry for the great wall of text):

1) Predator's Swiftness being easily dispelled is a problem, but it may be one of balance; having instant-cast Cyclones with every finisher, which means roughly a 10-15s implied cooldown in the absence of dispels, can be quite powerful. That being said, I do not believe that simply making Predator's Swiftness undispellable would be a great solution, but it may be the best solution. In addition, a deep Feral talent could act somewhat like Shadow's Sin and Punishment in that if Predator's Swiftness gets dispelled, perhaps a shorter CC effect would have a chance to proc (something like a 3s mini-Cyclone that was a magic effect instead of physical and was on a different DR category). Again, I do not have any great suggestions for this one, and likely just making it undispellable would be the best route, but it would do nothing to qualm the fact that training a Feral from start to finish is the absolute best tactic available to any team.

2) Fixing Skull Bash is much simpler than that of Predator's Swiftness. Firstly, making the interrupt the first part of the effect would do wonders; that is, making it so that the target was interrupted when I started my charge as opposed to getting to my target would resolve a lot. Secondly, making the ability work while rooted but not charge seems like the right move to make. Thirdly, even with the glove bonus the cost of this ability is around 15 energy for a melee who spends the majority of his time energy-starved, and so I suggest that the base cost be made 15 energy and the glove bonus be left as-is to make it only cost 5 energy.

3) Bash - I do no feel that Bash requires any buffing, but I bring it up because of the discussion of opportunity-costs for Maim. That is, if we could use Maim effectively on-target, then it would not really matter that we could not also use Bash on-target; it would hit DR and would not have a place here... which I believe is the intention behind the design currently. In addition, because of the change I will suggest in item #5 (Brutal Impact), I feel that Bash should be made into a 3 second duration stun baseline; there is little reason why any other spec should be assuming that they will have any better than a 3s stun when they have access to Cyclone and are ranged by design.

4) Maim - Fixing Maim is extremely tricky... the problem with it lies at the core of the Feral mechanics; we cannot generate combo points easily enough to use Maim effectively while keeping Rip and Rake up, which means that using Maim is tantamount to cutting our dps in half for 10-15 seconds while we ramp-up another Rip. Everything that Maim provides in terms of control is entirely countered by the fact that it completely destroys our damage in most cases. For my part, I think that Maim was introduced as an ability to aid Ferals without giving any thought to the utility we still required; it used to be our quasi-interrupt effect (interrupting with Maim would lock the target out of their school for a few seconds); it used to be a longer duration than 5s that might not break on damage, allowing us more time to re-apply Rip (used to be 7s at 5cps); it used to be a good way to land a long CC-chain on-target (5p Maim + Bash + Cyclone = 18s of CC). None of the original implementation is left with Maim any longer, and I think that it is time that something changed.

I believe that having the ability to stun your kill-target in PvP is something that Feral needs. We currently have this in Maim, but it requires a huge opportunity-cost outside of Berserk, which is a 3 minute cooldown and therefore is not very useful. For my part, I believe that Maim should be removed from the game. I say this understanding full-well that removing abilities from the game is a rather large change to make on short-notice (like a patch) and is usually saved for expansion releases and the like, but we have precedence of such things happening in Drain Mana being removed, and while Drain Mana was removed because of the nature of it being entirely too difficult to balance around, Maim should be removed because of its extremely poor nature and profound failing at performing its intended job, which has (as I pointed out) become muddled over the years.

Instead, I suggest that Stampede be amended to allow the use of either Ravage or Pounce after using Feral Charge Cat. This would allow Feral some on-target control once every half-minute without entirely destroying the damage-output of the Feral in question. In addition, it would allow the Feral to choose between either dealing full damage or on-target control (the choice between Ravage or Pounce; burst vs. control).

5) The debuff needs to be improved in some way that makes it worth applying, but not so heavy that it should always be applied regardless of whether the target is interrupted by it or not. Adding something like 30% slower cast times (Curse of Tongues) feels too heavy-handed, for instance, and would likely be deemed required up as much as possible against casters rather than waiting for the interrupt opportunities. Perhaps a reimplementation of the debuff itself to make it scale against healing received instead of mana cost; something like "burns 10% of the effect of any spell effect used for 10s" which would cause a heal that cost 1000 mana and healed 2000 hp to "burn" 200 mana (instead of increasing the cost by 100 mana). This way it would scale against the effect of the spells rather than the cost (it would work similarly against casts; if someone used Wrath and it cost 1000 mana but did 2000 damage, it would "burn" 200 mana on the cast).

Further, I feel that Brutal Impact is a required 2 talent point expenditure for all Feral PvP builds at the moment, but only used as a way to get access to a 10s CD Skull Bash. Largely, the other aspect of Brutal Impact is trumped and therefore ignored because of how much more important the Skull Bash portion is to Feral play. Currently, Brutal Impact increases the duration of the stuns Bash and Pounce by 1 second for 1 talent point, and 0 seconds for two talent points; that is, taking 2/2 Brutal Impact does not increase the duration of Bash or Pounce by any more than taking 1/2 Brutal Impact. As I suggested in the last three bullet-points, I feel that most of the issues above can be addressed here (in conjunction with the changes I suggested above). Simply change Brutal Impact to increase the stun duration on Bash and Pounce by 1/2 seconds at 1/2 combo points. This would improve Pounce (newly made into the on-target control stun) to a 5second stun (to properly replace Maim) and leave Bash as-is for Feral tanks who have become somewhat reliant on the 5s stun duration.

This change coupled with the above changes would leave Ferals with an on-demand on-target control stun instead of burst damage (Pounce instead of Ravage) that would not severely impact the normal dps rotation, thus lowering the opportunity cost of trying to stun your kill-target and allowing combo points to be used on the other finishers.

6) Berserk was designed to be a long-duration, long cooldown to land powerful burst damage. Because of this, it was given the The Beast Within treatment (toned down slightly) and made to be difficult to peel during this burst opportunity. With the removal of the Fear-break and immunity, Berserk has become a long cooldown and long duration which is easily countered by many many specs, so the burst opportunity is lost in a large number of cases; for example, it can largely not be used against a Mage because of our weakened up-time via not being able to shapeshift out of root-effects. To this point, it still maintains its disposition of not allowing Tiger's Fury to be used at the same time, so it has to be used at a energy-pooling or with Tiger's Fury used just prior (which happens in the majority of the cases) which is easily spotted, expected, and CC'd through.

I feel that Berserk, since it no longer provides any immunity to CC effects for its duration, should be made into a 6s duration and a 1min cooldown. The idea being that the opportunity to land meaningful burst damage will be much lower, but happen more often so that Feral can use this cooldown and if CC'd through it in its entirety, will not feel that they have wasted such a long cooldown. At 8s duration, it will mean 5 seconds of up-time (since Berserk is still on the GCD) at a 1min CD, which would be 15s at 3min when multiplied back out (which would be spot-on) and the glyph would then be changed to accommodate this new duration by going from an additional 5s to an additional 2s (which would make the up-time 7s at 1m and would translate to 21s at 3m; 1second longer than live versions).

This change would, essentially, reward strong players who following diminishing returns and therefore know when it would be safest to use this cooldown on a kill-target. In addition, it would make the existence of the on-demand on-target control stun (via FCC+Pounce) not as powerful since that could potentially be used as a rather large DPS combo, and with this change would still be a viable tactic, but not nearly as uber-strong.

7) Tiger's Fury is a good dps cooldown at the moment, but it is, as I pointed out, at odds with itself in design. It is supposed to be a strong source of burst via King of the Jungle and also a strong source of bonus damage to our bleeds via its innate bonus damage component. I feel like originally, and up until Cataclysm truthfully, it was designed to be a source of additional burst damage as opposed to a bonus to our bleeds. In Wrath of the Lich King, for example, one of Feral's biggest issues was that of our damage output being entirely dependent on Savage Roar being up 100% in part because it increased all our damage by 30%, but primarily because it increased our bleed damage by 30% and was therefore a prerequisite to proper damage output. This was eventually publicly decried as a rather expensive and clunky mechanic that was holding Feral back in PvP (and PvE somewhat).

This dependency no longer exists on Savage Roar, but was moved to Tiger's Fury for hitherto unknown reasons. It is the same can of worms all over again with having to prime our bleeds with another dps ability, and one which is seemingly meant for burst damage. Admittedly, Tiger's Fury is infinitely easier to use in conjunction with our bleeds than Savage Roar was/is, but it is still a prerequisite to dealing sufficient damage and as such is a hindrance to Feral play.

Therefore, I suggest dropping the 15% bonus damage in its entirety from Tiger's Fury. This would result in basically an 8-9% damage loss across the board in PvE (as Rip is basically only reapplied with Tiger's Fury at the moment) and a little bit less in PvP. To offset this, I feel that Tiger's Fury should be returned to its position as an ability to improve direct damage rather than bleed damage. Therefore, Tiger's Fury should provide some innate armor ignore for the duration (which is short at 6s). I believe (from my napkin maths) that something on the order of 35% would be sufficient in re-balancing the 15% damage lost on Rip/Rake applied via Tiger's Fury to damage improved on Shred/Mangle/Ferocious Bite.

8) Primal Madness is, by its current design, an awful AWFUL damage-dealing bonus. I do not have the numbers (which have been worked out by the best-of-the-best in Feral theorycrafters and simulation-writers) on hand, but it is pretty renowned for being not worth any points unless there are simply no other dps talents to take (which usually means 1 point in a PvE build). With the change I mentioned above to Tiger's Fury, Primal Madness may be a better use of talent points in terms of damage output supplied per point invested, but I believe that it would still come up short as a dps talent.

Therefore, I suggest that Primal Madness be changed to a bonus to Tiger's Fury as opposed to a bonus to King of the Jungle. That is, I suggest it increase the effect of Tiger's Fury by 50/100% which would make the Tiger's Fury buff give 35% at base, 53% at 1/2, and 70% at 2/2 in Primal Madness (note that the values are basically rounded, the idea being that 2/2 PM would mean 70% armor ignore while TF is active). This would bring Primal Madness into a position of actually increasing damage output by an amount that is non-negligible and would improve Tiger's Fury as an ability used when trying to land direct damage.

9) To improve Ferocious Bite as an ability is tricky; it must have a high opportunity-cost or it would become the defacto finisher in place of Rip in the context of dealing damage, and it cannot therefore have its damage improved much further without risking just that. By improving Tiger's Fury to ignore armor, we have made FB into an ability which, at the very least, will have a window of opportunity were the damage will be decent against high-armor targets, but it still almost certainly still be better in all cases above the kill-zone (~15k hp) to simply use another Shred instead of Ferocious Bite. Additionally, attaching more utility to Ferocious Bite (by way of returning combo points when it fails to kill a target or some-such) is worrisome because it would mean even more utility for a spec which has just been punished for gaining utility and having high mobility (we can still shapeshift out of snares, for example, and giving us further utility might incur yet another nerf to an underwhelming specialization).

On the other hand, because Rip does so much damage as a finisher, it might be the intention of the developers to leave Ferocious Bite as an execute-esque ability to be used at high energy to attempt and land a kill rather than to be used as part of the normal rotation. If this is the case, then making FB the clear-choice when deciding between waiting to reapply Rip or go for burst should be the first step. Therefore, I would suggest amending Blood in the Water to make Ferocious Bite act more like a "finisher" than an ability which refreshes our true "finisher". That is, change Blood in the Water to allow the Rip-refresh on targets at-or-below 50% HP and have it affect Ferocious Bite directly by giving it 30% armor ignore on targets at or below 25% hp. This way, a Ferocious Bite used on a target at or below 25% with Tiger's Fury active would have 100% armor ignore and therefore be the best-button to press for direct damage as opposed to Shredding again. Additionally, this would fix the issue that is players being in a "wounded" state (sub-50%) for most the match, but not in a "very wounded" state (sub-25%) and thus leaving Blood in the Water useless outside of PvE.

EDIT:

To be quite clear on the matter, I am NOT asking for Feral to get more damage. In fact, I am suggesting that Feral have its damage adjusted so that it is less favorable when used against low-armor targets, and slightly stronger against high-armor targets while at the same time fixing some of the glaring quality-of-life issues facing the specialization today. The hope is that the damage output would remain roughly the same while the issues facing the class are resolved by these changes I have suggested.

Recent readers may recognize some of these suggestions as condensed versions of the LONG list of suggestions I posted about a month ago. I basically trimmed down my suggestions and tried to make them as balanced as possible in terms of actual changes. I really wanted the idea to be that I was suggesting not DPS buffs, but rather play-style changes which would make Feral more easily played as a DPS class without totally undermining the rotation. Take from it what you will.

I will try to get the video uploaded tonight if time persists; Guntir still needs points on his Shammy so we will end up doing 2v2s, and if we face nothing but DK+Healer, it could take a LONG LONG time, which would mean that the video will not be up tomorrow. Cross your fingers!

I.... uhm....

2011-02-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

... STILL haven't uploaded the 3v3s footage yet. I have been wrestling with my ISP (Time Warner Cable) over some issues of late. Essentially, at 7:00PM or so, someone on TWC in my building (stupid condos) decides that THIS is the time to start bit-torrenting and basically destroying any chance for reasonable pings... so we end up losing matches because I cannot kick an opponent or what-have-you and I am filled with rage and instead of collecting myself and putting the video together and online, I go to bed in a huff and have nightmares about Mages.

Let's talk about those so-far released 4.1 changes a bit.

* All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown will now always hit the target. This includes Pummel, Shield Bash, Kick, Mind Freeze, Rebuke, Skull Bash, Counterspell, Wind Shear, Solar Beam, Silencing Shot, and related player pet abilities.

To mean, this can be read two different ways: interrupts can no longer miss (as the action in-game meaning 0 +hit will never result in a missed interrupt); interrupts can no longer fail to land (meaning dodge/block/parry/miss). I have no idea which is the correct interpretation, and Blizz is keeping a lid on the changes since the PTR is not even up yet (as far as I can tell). The only thing that is nice about this is trying to Skull Bash a Cyclone on a Nelf Druid... and having it miss due to their racial; one way or another I do not think this will happen ever again.

* Word of Glory now has a 20-second cooldown.

This is just a self-healing nerf to Retribution Pallies. I know that Blizzard does not want Rets to use all their Holy Power on healing themselves, but this was unneeded before Recuperate and Siphon Life nerfs (and Bloodthirst).

* Dispel Magic can now only be casted on yourself to remove harmful effects, and now only removes 1 beneficial spell from enemies, down from 2.
* Absolution (new passive) enables priests to use Dispel Magic on up to 2 harmful effects on friendly targets.
* Power Word: Shield duration has been reduced to 15 seconds, down from 30.

I have to admit, the first two I definitely saw coming when they decided to nerf Purge recently, and I was expecting Shadow to not even get defensive magic dispel on Live Cataclysm; I am surprised it took so long. The PW:S nerf is somewhat odd; I just do not understand the point of this except as a PvE nerf to keep it from being raid-spammed, but they have not reduced the cost yet, so it is still relatively expensive. I do not know... I expect more to be released on the Priest front.

* Intercept and Charge no longer share diminishing returns with other stuns.
* Intercept now stuns for 1 sec, down from 3 sec.
* Juggernaut now reduces the cooldown of Charge by 3 sec but no longer increases the stun duration.
* Colossus Smash now bypass 70% of armor instead of 100%.

The first three make no sense to me. Blizzard cannot seem to make up its mind on this... now Charge and Intercept are both 1 second stuns baseline, but Intercept is a 20s CD and Charge is an 11s CD (glyphed). So, Warriors have an 11s CD gap-closer? There will be no more Fury Warriors in PvP with this change... Charge->Throwdown is back for good... and 1s stuns every 11 seconds??? This is just bonkers. Colossus Smash being nerfed makes sense to me.

That is basically all I have for now... there will, undoubtedly, be more and more as the PTR goes up and MMO-Champ mines more, and I will try to keep up. I think I am just going to put up the 3v3s footage this weekend and call it "next week's video". I know, that is the lazy way out, but I simply will not have time to do it until Saturday... bah!

I know, I know...

2011-02-22T13:07:00.000-08:00

It is Tuesday; where is the video I promised!? Short answer: I do not have it up yet. Long answer: it probably will not be up today either (maybe tomorrow). I ended up having a pretty amazing weekend, but it was so jam-packed with goings-on that I never got an hour at my computer to splice it together (even a really crappy one with barebones music and editing). We are planning on running 3s tonight for a while (depending on my latency issues) and therefore will not likely leave me any time to do the video tonight. Tomorrow, Guntir will be at school and I will have dinner with the gf's parents, but I ought to be back around 8pm or so, so I should be able to put something together to have it up on Thursday morning (again: no promises).

In regular news, Blizz was extremely slow in getting the 2200 vendors online this morning which lead to a few problems: first, it led to a massive whine-fest in which people threatened to quit if their weapons were not put online as soon as humanly possible (laughable empty threats, imo); secondly, it lead to people whining about how they did not see the weapons online 3 hours prior to them being put up, so they bought set pieces instead and now cannot refund the set pieces to get the points for the weapon. All scenarios were hilarious, in my opinion. I cannot understand people thinking that Blizz would not release the 2200 weapons today when they said they would and there was absolutely zero dialog between the blues and the community up until this morning... I would have (and correctly) assumed that the weapon vendors simply had not been "turned on" yet on Live realms and Blizzard was busy in a meeting discussing how overpowered DKs are (again) and how underpowered Ferals are (again).

EDIT:

If it was unclear, the weapons were indeed turned on after some time. I have one; it's awesome. DKs are still OP, as are Frost Mages... just about everything else is manageable.

We went against a HPal+RSham+DK team last night that went to full duration... it was pretty lame. Oh well, the rigors of running a double-healer comp in a time when no one uses mana is that sometimes you might end up facing a double-healer comp where no one uses mana. We actually got the Shammy to oom 3 times, but it didn't matter because HPals have infinite mana and eventually Mana Tide is back up and the Shammy can heal again! Don't worry, though, RShammies are getting a cooldown to help with zerg-attempts next patch... er...

Bit of a Delay

2011-02-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

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.

BAH!

2011-02-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

I meant to get this post up yesterday, but Valentine's Day had me run ragged. Anyway, here is the video I promised you:

These guys started the night as a 2k-rated SPriest+Rogue combo, but unfortunately they ran into us a bunch of times and we farmed them down to 1900. Here is some things that I find funny:

1) They don't really ever blind me...
2) They don't really train me unmercifully (which they should)
3) They don't use half their control
4) They were 2k-rated

I guess it just speaks leagues about the sad state of PvP now-a-days when anyone can hit 2k. It used to mean something, but now it is just "do you have overpowered control and damage if your front-load your cooldowns? Insta-2k!" It really detracts from the good players who simply do not play often (we do 10 matches a week in 2s, for instance, while we are gearing up and we tend to go 80% or better against 2200ish mmr).

Maybe that is the point, however - if you really are good, you should have to grind your rating up to play people at your level. I mean, we occassionally get matched against a 2400 team, and we love beating them simply because it forces people to go to the boards and complain, but lately we have been getting nothing but 5-pt wins against 2k scrubs who had overpowered comps prior to 4.0.6 and are just kind of weak now.

Here's a great "for instance". If you watch last week's video again, you will see it is a mash-up of matches against double-dps (primarily mage comps) which all play decently and have rather strong "out the gate" damage output. Once we force them into the long game we tend to gain a distinct advantage, though we were largely on our heels in a few of them. Since 4.0.6, however, these teams were pretty substantially nerfed in terms of their up-front pressure (and our resilience has MAYBE increased by 100 between those matches and these matches) and they simply cannot compete with a healer over the short-game.

This is, in my opinion, a good thing. If you go back and look at my posts from years past, you will notice that I have NEVER been a fan of the existence of double-dps comps. I feel that they are the reason that Blizzard removed the 2s bracket from competitive play. I want my matches to go a little bit longer and require some "dig up, stupid" moments or flawless CC-work to excel, and I feel that 4.0.6 did a lot in that direction for 2s. 3s is another story entirely...

We have been running Dispelclaw for a while now and are pretty fantastic, though we did face a comp twice that we simply could not touch: ARogue+ALock+Disc. To be fair, we had them on Sewers and Blade's Edge... two maps that are HEAVILY in favor of Lock mobility and removing him as a kill-target in many cases. Essentially, it was a case of "whether your healer is here or not, both DPS classes can self-heal until he returns" and unfortunately, the healer was smart enough to know that he never really was in any danger of letting anyone die, so he only used his efficient heals to get pressure back up on us. Additionally, the Rogue+Lock combo knew the trick: train the Feral until he dead.

Aside from that unhappiness, we are hoping to never face that comp again, but we will try training the Rogue unmercifully next time and see what happens. Another problem we had with that team was that the Priest would pull us into the open (because I'm trying to train the lock) and land mana burn after mana burn on my healers. Blizzard spoke briefly when discussing the removal of Drain Mana from the game and suggested that they MIGHT remove Mana Burn as well. For our part, Guntir and I are hoping that they do just that. Mana Burn has always been somewhat of a cheesy effect and in situations where you could effectively control an opposing healer, it would mean a win in the long run (anyone recalling my Wrath videos against War+RDruid can attest to this). We can only wait and see at this point, but with the amount of QQ in the Arena boards over Mana Burn coupled with the amount of QQ from Warlocks in general feeling jaded about losing Mana Drain while Mana Burn is still in the game makes me think that it will eventually be removed as well.

At some point, and it MIGHT be this week but do not hold me to it, I want to get some video of our 3s play and show off our amazing CC rotations. Full Cyclone->Psychic Scream->Hammer of Justice is just a mean combo, and since none of these effects share DR and none were hit by the "great CC reclamation" of 4.0.6, it feels more powerful than pre-patch. We are, by no means, amazing... but we play rather well together (emphasis on "together") and have a lot of fun doing it (though we did have a tiff over that RLP we lost to that forced us to end early in a hurumph). I would LOVE to get some skype recordings, but I have been unsuccessful up to this point in redirecting my sound appropriately and getting it to record. If I do, I will definitely overlay it with the videos and get some out that way because I think it is definitely interesting to hear the sounds of the game as they happen (by that I mean me and guntir yelling about what we are doing). Also, our Pally is French-Canadian and speaks rather interestingly good/bad English, so we often say things like "no idea what you said; Cycloning Druid" etc.

EDIT:

I almost forgot - we were running this and came across some of our Pally's guildmates, which we heard were comprised of prior Gladiators. Anyway, here is a screenshot of us defeating one of those guild teams:

This was a triple-dps team at 2400 MMR after the patch (that's right, we beat this team with me sitting in Frost Novas all day). They immediately started talking in GChat (from what Lev told us) and calling him a noob for running this comp and everything else you would expect. We ended up beating another of his guild's 2350 teams running a Shadowcleave variant (UnholyDK+Afflic+RShammy) and they hopped on the bandwagon as well. Another match or two later we ended up beating some random team from another BG that was 2450 rated and Lev got his 3v3 2200 achievement and that essentially started a tirade in his guild with comments like "2200 running double-healer Feral = noob!"

We decided that we MIGHT end up calling the team "Haters Gunna Hate Cleave"... for obvious reasons.

DISPELCLAW

2011-02-11T12:08:00.000-08:00

I have decided that the name of my comp (HPal+Disc+Feral) is forevermore Dispelclaw. I know I said I would try and post something the other day, but work has been absolutely insane. Anyway, here is my run-down on the comp:

1) Our sustained damage output is strong so we can pressure one of the dps, particularly if the DPS is a caster.
2) Our burst damage is INSANE if we can peel everyone off (read: a full-team Psychic Scream usually results in Guntir dropping 30k damage before the healer gets out of it).
3) We simply do not feel pressure when we understand our opponents.
4) If our Pally could keep from having his computer freezing, we would have gone 13-1.

The first two (and the fourth) notes are pretty self-explanatory, I think - Keeping up Rip, Rake, Mangle, and SR is pretty easy against most teams because I am getting dispelled so often that up-time really is not a problem and Guntir's nukes are amazing supplemental damage. Additionally, even with two melees with insane burst just training Guntir non-stop, we do not feel huge pressure because of the double-heals, PW:S up-time, and the peels I can provide. All the while, because we have two healers spamming all the time, they do not really have to use their hyper-expensive heals and instead focus on the long-game.

For instance, we played against a 2300-rated Ret+Fury+RDruid team, which is going to be the "TSG" of this season, I believe. Their burst is really rather insane with Templar's Verdicts critting Guntir for 15-20k while the Fury Warrior can easily drop 40-50k with his 2-3m CDs. Most teams would have a lot of trouble with this kind of damage output along with Cyclones flying around, but in practice we were training the Warrior and had the Druid healing almost none-stop because of the pressure I was putting out. Now, because RDruids never run out of mana, and we were getting no-where rather slowly, I tried swapping to the Ret Pally... and things got MUCH better. Ret Pallies have to decide between healing themselves or using Templar's Verdict... so he kept trying to DPS Guntir instead of self-healing, and we started making huge progress. Eventually, Guntir landed a Psychic Scream on all three (I opened with Cyclone for 6s on the Druid, Guntir hit PW:S on himself and ran at 100% speed to him, followed with Psychic Scream) and started helping me nuke the Ret while Lev (our pally) followed the Psychic Scream with a full duration Hand of Justice. The Ret went down like the Hindenburg and Guntir didn't drop below 50% with the Fury still training him because our Pally kept him up.

I was playing a spec that was more on the conservative side (2/3 Thick Hide, 2/2 Natural Reaction) because with Guntir's Shammy healing, I was getting trained for the most part. However, with Guntir playing his priest on the team, I am almost always ignored outside of swaps and the like. Therefore, I decided that the next time we played, I would try a new spec out. Essentially, it is all the same minus the defensive-minded talents and adding in a couple of dps-talents.

Here is my conservative spec.

It is pretty standard; like I said, it picks up the defensive talents (for the most part) and does not give up any mandatory dps talents. Additionally, I took Glyph of Mangle because I found that when I am getting trained, I end up landing more Mangles than Shreds simply because of positioning, and dealing more damage is the name of the game.

Here is my more offense-oriented spec.

In reality, nothing much has changed except that I have dropped my defensive talents, Thick Hide and Natural Reaction, and picked up supplemental and sometimes situational dps talents. Most notably showing up in this spec that I think most will be caught off guard because of is Blood in the Water. I have spent a lot of time talking about how this talent is so useless in a majority of situations, and I know that most people do not pick it up, but after playing a few matches as Dispelclaw, I have to say that I found myself on more than a few occasions saying "man, if I had Blood in the Water right now, our pressure would be INSANE." There were at least a few times in almost every match where I would get a target to 15% hp with 5CPs and 4-5 seconds left on Rip while the healer was CC'd. The problem here is that if you use FB and you do not have BitW AND you do not land the kill, your pressure is destroyed for the next 10-15 seconds, which is more than enough time for a healer to top off the target after he finally gets out of the CC-chain.

The main thing is that this spec is less about burst and more about pressure and control. If you have good pressure, and I feel like Blood in the Water will really improve our pressure in a lot of situations, then the opposing healer is forced to heal and use tons of mana. If you get into the situation I described above and you do not have BitW, you usually wait until Rip ends and reapply Rip... which means your pressure went way down because you could not get the target basically any lower and the healer does not really have to spend much time or effort filling up the HP-pool again. Rip, Rake, and SR'd white swings make up the majority of our constant pressure. Shred/Mangle are what we use when we need to burst someone down, and in this comp we end up usually doing that with CCs on the healer. However, a lot of the time you end up applying Rip and needing to use that instant-Cyclone on the healer to get ahead to set up the CC-chain, and by the time you are in the kill-zone, you are energy-starved and/or CP-starved. Essentially, this is why BitW will work, when we land our CC-chains properly, it is (without trinket) going to be 20 seconds of CC while we try and dps. That is more than enough time to try and get a guy into the red zone with Rip up, and to keep the pressure going I need to land an FB AND refresh Rip.

Another aspect of this spec that should be apparent is the addition of 2/3 Fury Swipes. I have gone on and on about how I think this is a bad talent and needs to be redesigned, and I definitely still feel this way, but I have to admit that having a free ~3k hit (6-8k crit depending on armor value) every ~4-5 seconds is decent supplemental damage. I think it would be better if it gave my bleed ticks a chance to proc an additional bleed tick instead, but whatever. Free damage is free damage, and really - what other dps talents are there to take? Primal Madness... ha.

The last bit to notice about this more aggressive build is that I dropped Glyph of Mangle for Glyph of Shred. This really should be instinctive with the idea of using a Disc priest instead of a Resto Shammy: they are training Guntir more and more, which means that I have to go toe-to-toe less and less. Therefore, I end up getting more Shreds in reliably, and since we are working to get more pressure, having more Rip duration for "free" is basically a no-brainer. This one is really the game-changer, in my mind.

Take the situation from earlier in which I suggested I was dps'ing a target, hit him with a 5pt Rip and was going to use the Cyclone on the healer to initiate some pressure. Instead, I can use the Cyclone on the off-dps to reduce some incoming pressure and Guntir can potentially start dropping nukes while getting trained by a single dps. If he is nuking, the healer is working harder to keep up with the damage and thinking less about CC and positioning and what have you. Additionally, if there is only one DPS training Guntir because I peeled the other, then Lev will be able to single-heal Guntir while he's acting as a DPS for a moment. All the while, I am still landing Shreds on this dps target and increasing Rip's duration by as much as 6 seconds (a 22 second duration Rip is absolutely insane).

NOW, when I get 5 CPs, the target is at anywhere from 60-90% hp with likely 10-16 more seconds left on Rip's duration. I can actually use Maim here to stop the DPS, instant-cyclone the healer, and if the target is low enough I MIGHT be able to get an FB in the red zone during this CC chain, thus refreshing my Rip to 16 seconds, resetting my Glyph of Shred (meaning I can extend Rip again by as much as 6 seconds), and NOW I am energy and CP-starved but the target has a full duration Rip up again and just took a rather large FB hit, or more likely - crit.

We will just have to see how it plays out, but again I feel like the name of the game on Dispelclaw will be constant pressure and additional burst. Glyph of Shred and Blood in the Water will give me situational burst improvements and definite sustained damage improvements. I will post back when I have played it more, but I am looking forward to running it again soon.

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Just as a note: I am trying to get back into releasing a youtube video every week or so of arena matches (2s or 3s... we'll see how 3s goes before I start recording it all the time like 2s), so be looking for that next week (probably Sunday, but who knows; it's Valentine's Day on Monday, so I might be busy).

We ruined some poor 1950-rated SPriest+Rogue team's night yesterday. We went 9-1 and 5 of those matches were against the same SPriest+Rogue team... and we won every match rather handily. They were not the best team in the world, and they simply did not know how to sit the Feral and CC the healer. I might do this week's video on us rolling them. We shall see...

Feral comps

2011-02-08T14:29:00.000-08:00

Okay, let's talk a little bit about the patch. YES, the patch dropped today, and yes, as my previous post suggests - I do not believe Feral is dead in PvP. I think that we will definitely be at a disadvantage as compared to how we used to play against Frost Mage teams, but in the long run everyone really got some bad nerfs and Ferals got just a few. That being said, Guntir and I were on last night and trying to find something to do. I tried hitting up the Frost Mage we had been doing 3s with, but he was not online. So, I put this is trade:

LF Holy Pally for 3v3s team; must have 2k exp; pst

Almost immediately I got a response from a Holy Pally who fit the bill. He asked me what comp I was planning on running and I said "HPal+Disc+Feral". He said "Disc is pretty bad, it would be better with a RShammy", and I replied with "The Disc also has a gear RShammy; let's do dis!" So, on complete impulse we joined his 3v3s team at around 1900 team rating or so and started playing double-healer Feral. It became obvious after the first match or two that this was a definite contender as far as 3v3s comps go. We ended up going 11-3 (most of those losses was against a 2150-rated Aff+Unholy+RDruid team that just ended up bursting down Guntir's Shammy inside of Strangulate+Gnaw combos; we feel we will do better after the patch and with a Disc Priest) and got the team rating above 2k (and grinding up our personal ratings from 1000 to around 1950).

Tonight, we are going to try Disc+HPal+Feral. I completely believe that this comp will be insane. Reports (I am at work; I haven't had time to test) coming out of Live right now are suggesting that Shred is hitting mages with 3500 resilience for around 12-14k and critting as high as 28-30k with only Mark of the Wild. Dear sweet limey jebus... if Mages were QQ'ing about Ferals before this patch, I cannot wait to see some of the QQ that comes about because of the direct damage buff. While it is true that most classes damage was brought down (Rogues, Warriors, and DKs most notably), Ferals was left basically the same except against classes with Shields. However, the double-healer comp for Feral essentially NEVER has the Feral attacking a high-armor target, so this is actually a somewhat damage buff for Ferals. Obviously, dealing with Frost Mages is going to be huge, but with dispel-cleave (Disc+Hpal) behind me, I can see popping Barkskin (undispellable) and just getting chain-dispelled while trying to eat the Mage to force a block.

Last night was a "last hurrah" of the golden age of Ferals. We went against a bunch of Mage teams, but one in particular stood above the rest. It was a Shatterplay (Frost+Shadow+RDruid) on Dalaran Sewers and I was just sitting the Mage. I ended up getting a pretty clutch Cyclone on the Druid as he appeared before he could put up HoTs on the Mage, which was immediately trinketed, followed by a full duration Hammer of Justice into a full duration Hex. However, the funny bit was when I got Psychic Horror'd off of the Frost who got about 20 yards away and started winding up a Frostbolt on me. I had 5 combo points and had JUST hit Tiger's Fury in an attempt to apply a really mean Rip, but the Mage was at around 50% HP and I did not want to lose that momentum to Iceblock, so as soon as the Psychic Horror got dispelled, I Feral Charged him, hit him with a 33k FB crit and followed it with a 24k Ravage crit for the kill before Hex ended on the Druid.

The funny bit is that this does not really change today. That is, Ferocious Bite and Ravage are still going to do tons of damage against Mages with Barrier down, but Shred is going to do WAY more damage than yesterday against Mages (and low-armor targets in general). Forcing these opportunities to land HUGE burst is actually going to be better because of our limited up-time from root-breaking being removed from Shapeshifting.

Think about it, because we cannot guarantee 100% up-time via shapeshifting, it means our positioning will have to be more conservative, which means that we will not be able to simply change into the fray and try to sit on a Mage, which means that when we actually DO get on a Mage, we will ALWAYS have energy to spend. I can envision something like opening with Pounce, hitting FFF, the Mage Blinking, me using FCC, landing a Ravage followed by a Mangle followed by a Rake. Okay, he's got me rooted now and I'm eating some dispels to try and stay up, so I land a Shred (huge damage potentially) and follow with Rip. Now, I'm basically energy-starved at this point, and I have been rooted 2-3 times at this point, so DR is coming into play. Most teams will be trying to peel me right now and/or dropping Deep Freezes on me to do damage. I can play line pretty hard because I have 16 seconds of Rip to use.

Here's where it gets interesting: I'm thinking of dropping the Glyph of Tiger's Fury for the Glyph of Shred, which means that once my healers have topped me off, I can get back on the mage who should still have Rip, Mangle, and possibly Rake up, land a Shred or two (having regenerated energy while not dps'ing), which will add 2-4 more seconds to Rip, and maybe even land a 5p FB to try and keep pressure up via insta-Cyclones.

The other thing that I like better about Disc+HPal+Feral is that the CC is better now that Tremor Totem got nerfed in the face. There will be a point in the match where Psychic Scream lands on a healer and will last full duration. This point is when Guntir will yell on skype "NUKE NUKE NUKE" and we will all drop trucks on the kill target. Mind Spike has ALWAYS been good damage, but it is hard to land as a Priest until today because of how weak you were as a healer. Today, Disc is much more self-sufficient, and with another healer, you can always turn-n-burn a kill target without much worry of getting pressured in the mean time. Additionally, PW:S is actually quite good now and can be used on the Priest himself to try and stave off damage while he's dropping Mind Spikes into the kill target. The Pally should be spamming Exorcisms as well while I am Shredding. The last bit that is just the cherry on top is that Mind Blast will be a guaranteed crit with 3x Mind Spike debuffs up and will do 18% more damage than Mind Spike normally. During these CC windows, we might very well just turn into a triple-dps team and nuke someone down before the healer comes back into the match (and we'll follow Psychic Scream with Cyclone and HoJ for good measure).

Oh what's this!?

2011-02-07T07:39:00.001-08:00

That's right, I threw together a quick compilation video of some 2s matches we had recorded. Nothing super special, but they are all against Frost+Spriest teams except for one (affliction+frost) and I thought it might be nice showing an instance where Blizz got something right. No, I'm not talking about hard-counters or anything (I have several videos... well perhaps not 'several' but a few... of Spriest+Frost teams beating us), I'm talking about some of the other changes mentioned in the patch notes that will actually benefit Ferals and the game as a whole.

Particularly, you might have noticed that during the first couple matches, the damage I was taking is absolutely ridiculous until Barkskin and Survival Instincts fall off. This is actually pretty counter-intuitive at a high level; one would not really expect to be taking more damage during his damage-reduction cooldowns than after them, but you have to trust me on this one. The reason for this seemingly crazy damage drop-off (and also why you see Mages using Coldsnap before Iceblock in half the matches) is because these teams essentially need to net a kill during Bloodlust or the SPriest's damage becomes negligible. Honestly, if you watch the matches, as soon as Bloodlust falls off I stop playing line quite so hard and actually sit Mages until they die. Admittedly, next patch this strategy is likely to change, but it is also one that will require a little bit less defensively-minded play during certain windows.

Aside from the video, I do have something I want to talk about: the patch tomorrow. DUN DUN DUUUUUUUN! Yes, the patch is dropping tomorrow, and yes a lot of Ferals will be moving on to bigger and better things, but rest assured: I hate myself just enough to continue playing Feral in the arenas and I plan on putting out more videos before my time the time has come to stop playing WoW. I know that a post or two ago I was a bit melodramatic and suggesting quitting the game forever, but any long-time reader should realize that this was an idle threat. Saddened though I am over the change to shapeshifting as it pertains to Ferals, I remain resolute in my belief that Blizzard will not, can not, allow Feral to move on from this point without some additional cooldown support. It may take them months, it may take them a few patches, but at some point Blizzard will have to acknowledge the precarious state they have left Ferals in with regard to magic-users training them down.

Okay, enough of my naïve view of the world; let's talk about some of the things that are coming about with this patch that may have flown under the radar because of all the shapeshifting discussions. I think the best way to approach these is class-by-class with small-scale bullet points.

DK
* Unholy Pet damage down roughly 20%
* Death Coil damage down 10%
* Strike damage down 9% (Rage of the Rivendare)
* Strength reduced by 5% (Unholy Might)
* When Unholy Runes are spent, cannot be reduced below 100% movement (OP, imo)
* Virulence changed to 10/20/30% bonus disease damage (instead of +3/6/9% spell hit)

Overall: I would say that DK damage has been hit rather hard this patch. The RotR and Unholy Might nerfs basically leave Necrotic Strike in a rather odd position in that it will hit for something on the order of 4-8k on Live while it will be more like 3k-6k tomorrow (I'm adding the DD component and the absorb on both of these, btw). While DK anti-control got improved, most notably Icebound Fortitude (now breaks stuns in addition to immuning them), their damage was basically kicked in the teeth. I expect that DKs will indeed be flavors for a long time to come, but I do not really expect them to be unstoppable juggernauts anymore. I read this patch as a reasonably strong buff to mobility, but a rather decent nerf to damage.

Druid
* Barkskin no longer dispellable (awesome)
* Rip/Rake scaling component and static damage down 10%
* Shred scaling component and static damage up 22.22_%
* Mangle scaling component and static damage up ~22% (little less)
* Skull Bash lockout reduced to 4 seconds from 5 seconds (just a mean change)
* Berserk no longer grants fear immunity or breaks fear (this seemed unnecessary)
* Glyph of Entangling Roots redesigned (now lowers the cast time by 0.2s; no one will use this)
* Feral Charge: Cat should always turn the druid around to face the back of the target (faaaaaaaahk... this was a bug I was enjoying... sometimes actually getting to my target and not getting flipped around)
* Druids can correctly cast Barkskin while silenced (this is a HUGE buff).

Overall: I feel like Resto got hit pretty hard in the mana-longevity department, Boomkin got hit with unneeded nerfs, and Feral was hit with a number of mean nerfs while getting some increased damage output against low-armor targets. What is rather interesting here is the fixes to Barkskin. Essentially, Barkskin was auto-dispelled in a number of situations in 2s (you can actually see in my video this week, a mage spellsteals barkskin because I got stripped first) and definitely 3s/5s when you needed it and good teams would actually hit you with a Silence effect when trying to score a kill and your healer was CC'd to keep you from using it. Now, Barkskin cannot be dispelled AND it can be used while Silenced... this is a huge buff to Feral survivability (and Resto/Balance but it's hard to get excited about them). Additionally, the direct damage buff we got will make us quite a bit meaner with some up-time on a target if the target does not have high armor and a shield (read: anything but RShamm and HPal).

Yawning and a few other high-up number crunchers on the Feral side of things have also been posting interesting side-effects of buffing Shred back to its former glory. One interesting thing is that in PvE, it is no longer useful to use a Ferocious Bite until the target reaches sub-25% health (because of Blood in the Water); the damage of a 35-energy FB essentially mirrors that of Shred, but FB consumes Combo Points. In PvP, this matters less since FB is still about burst attempts against low-armor targets, but it is interesting to note that Shred will be hitting harder than FB again and it does not seem like Blizz even cares. This puts Ferals into that odd spot again where the target has 5-cps on him, you have 50 energy, and he has Rip/Rake/Mangle up for another 10 seconds; what to do? Using a Ferocious Bite against a Mage or Warlock might be a good answer, but if the damage is comparable to Shred then there is little point. One could use Maim more in an attempt to control incoming damage via stuns, but being energy-starved while your target is stunned is not really useful. SR is still a good finisher, but definitely not worth more than 1-2 points in PvP.

Another interesting side-effect of this patch is that many high-ups in the mathematics community have started commenting on the state of our damage output as it pertains to bleeds versus direct damage. With the nerf to bleed damage and the buff to direct damage, Ferals are actually at an interesting position where Critical Strike Rating is basically the same worth as Mastery, in terms of damage-per-point. The interesting thing is that while Mastery only increases one aspect of our damage table, Crit essentially increases it all as well as improving our combo-point generation. Many high-up Ferals have suggested that after the patch, reforging all our gear to Crit rating instead of Mastery rating (same socket color and all) may actually be more beneficial in terms of being an actual dps class. The idea is rather simple, at the moment most Feral PvP'rs with decent gear have anywhere from 33-36% crit after reforging nearly everything to Mastery and gemming Mastery after hitting the hit/spell-pen caps. The idea is that while stacking that amount of Mastery will give you something like 15-20% additional damage to your bleeds, the same amount of stat-points spent on crit will give you roughly 5-10% more damage on EVERYTHING including bleeds, and increase your CP-gen, thus allowing you more control throughout the fight. I might end up trying this tomorrow.

Hunter
* Aimed Shot damage increased to 200% from 150%
* Arcane Shot damage increased 15%
* Auto-shot now usable while moving (huge buff)
* Deterrence now IS Iceblock except it doesn't remove debuffs
* Kill Command damage increased by 20%
* Kill Shot's scaling component increased by 50% (huge Killshots inc)
* Chimera Shot damage increased by 50%
* Wild Quiver increased roughly 17% per point (making it something like 2.1% per point up from 1.8)
* Glyph of Concussive Shot turns Concussive Shot into Judgment of Justice (limits maximum speed to 100%)

Overall: I think that Survival got a heft damage nerf, but there simply were none of these in PvP before anyway. Marksmanship hunters see a nice damage buff across the board and continue to have their decent control. The interesting aspect here is that Marks hunters will see a rather nice improvement to their white damage having it available to them all the time, even while on the move. In addition, they can line up some pretty sick damage combos via Steady Shot x3 to proc Master Marksman (insta-Aimed Shot), Chimera Shot to proc Marked for Death (another insta-Aimed Shot), and possibly a killshot depending on the HP of the target. Stacking 3x Steady Shots is not impossible in PvP and happens with enough regularity that I would not be surprised to see Marks Hunters becoming more prevalent in PvP, particularly to heavily destroy Mage teams. The AS-CS-AS combo does something on the order of 30-50k depending on gear and target (armor is a factor) and while this cannot happen except once every 10s, I wouldn't be surprised to see African Turtle Cleave and PHDk coming back in full-force after this patch.

Mage
* Fingers of Frost can no longer be dispelled and increases Ice Lance damage by 15%.
* Frost Specialization nerfed (15% less damage to frozen targets baseline, but increases Frostbolt damage by 15%)
* Ring of Frost fixed (not nerfed; read explanation)

Overall: Mages are untouched. There are a few big changes here that will definitely affect Frost, but overall nothing has changed. The Ring of Frost "nerf" is actually a fix. The problem is that the affected area is actually quite a bit bigger than the ring itself (as you will notice in my video... that clearly didn't hit me but I was frozen none-the-less). Additionally, the inner portion where you should be safe is actually quite a bit smaller on live that it looks like. Essentially, nothing is changing for Ring of Frost except that it will actually only be as effective as the effect on the ground looks like it is. When you walk around it, there will not be a good chance you will get hit by "nothing" and get frozen. Additionally, there is now a debuff on a target after the frozen debuff is removed (either runs its course or is dispelled) keeping you from being frozen again for 3 seconds. All things being equal, good Mages will continue to be good, and bad mages will continue to faceroll.

The damage nerf is an interesting one since in PvP Mages simply do not stack Mastery (though it seems like an amazing stat when compared against Crit or Haste). However, the baseline amount of Mastery they were receiving was too high. The devs essentially reduced how much Mastery they got for free by being Frost so that all damage against Frozen targets from 20% to 5%. The idea here being that against Frozen targets, they will do 15% less damage. To compensate this, they improved Frostbolt's damage by 15% on the Mastery talent, so Frostbolts will do the same damage against all targets tomorrow as they do today against only Frozen targets. This is actually a Frost Mage buff, if you notice. However, the Mastery change also affects Ice Lance, so Ice Lance basically lost 15% damage against Frozen targets (which was the lion's share of its damage), but gained 15% damage when used while Fingers of Frost is proc'd. This is a rather steep Frost nerf given that Fingers of Frost is often used in conjunction with Deep Freeze while Ice Lance is almost always used against Frozen targets regardless of FoF procs. That being said, this will lower Frost Mage damage pretty heavily outside of FoF procs.

Paladin
* Divine Light cost increased 10%
* Divine Plea buffed against dispelling (lasts less time, but returns a little more mana)
* Flash of Light cost increased 10%
* Holy Light cost increased 10%
* Protector of the Innocent healing reduced 30%

Overall: Ret and Prot are basically at the same place they were before. Ret saw a few damage buffs, but because they cannot generate Holy Power well they will still be somewhat short-representation in PvP. Holy had essentially every heal either nerfed in healing or cost, which was necessary in my opinion. The Divine Plea change is actually a rather strong buff because it lowers the amount of time that the pally spends with the old Mortal Strike effect (-50% healing on targets) and it makes it so that if you only get 2 ticks of Divine Plea before it gets dispelled, you got the equivalent of 4 ticks on the previous version. I think that Holy Pallies will continue to be the best PvP healers in top-tier teams in 2s and 3s simply because of their great survivability, mobility, damage output, generally infinite mana, and utility. In addition, they get Rebuke on their bars for those very seldom opportunities where they actually get into melee range with a caster.

Priest
* Power Word: Shield is roughly twice as strong
* Mind Blast now deals 18% more damage than Mind Spike (as opposed to about 30% less)
* Grace is no longer limited to one target (24% bonus healing received; good against swapping teams)
* Pain Suppression is no longer dispellable (huge)
* Penance healing increased 20%
* Strength of Soul makes Inner Focus give the Priest 3/5 seconds of immunity to interrupts/silences and dispels.
* Strength of Soul now also reduces Weakened Soul when Greater Heal and Flash Heal are cast in addition to Heal (awesome).
* Chastise cooldown increased to 30 seconds (from 25) and it now properly breaks on damage.
* Focused Will now procs when critically hit (huge)
* 4-set bonus changed to giving the Priest a Hand of Freedom for 4-seconds after using PW:S on himself.

Overall: Holy Priests a little bit worse off after this patch because of the nerf to Chastise. Disc is going to be absolutely amazing tomorrow. I simply am astounded that these changes are actually going to come to pass. Disc will be a machine and nearly impossible to stay on (except for DKs) and one of their horrible problems at the moment is being addressed via Inner Focus and Strength of Soul: training a Priest and landing a kick will not necessarily spell death for the Priest anymore. This is just a hugely great buff to Disc.

Rogue
* Combat Readiness now lasts 20s (down from 30s) but the Combat Insight buff lasts 10 seconds up from 6s.
* Smoke Bomb now lasts 5 seconds (down from 10s)
* Stealth (and Prowl) no longer broken from Demoralizing Shout/Roar.
* Elusiveness nerfed from 15/30s off of CloS to 10/20s reduced.
* Preparation no longer resets Evasion
* Shadowstep's cooldown increased from 20s to 24s.

Overall: Rogues actually got some nerfs this patch. Essentially, they are more easily locked down, their control has been nerfed a bit via Smoke Bomb, and you can actually target them as another melee since Preparation will no long reset Evasion. In addition, ShS going up another 4 seconds on the cooldown is pretty rough. Bad opponents of Rogues who don't understand Combat Readiness will still have trouble killing them, but essentially, the new strategy against RLS will be "make the Rogue evasion, swap to the Lock, make the Rogue CR, swap to the lock, kill the rogue". This might seem similar to the old version, but the old version also had "Live through bloodlust" and "make the Rogue evasion again, swap to the lock".

Shaman
* Lava Burst damage increased 10%
* Purge now removes 1 Magic effect (down from 2)
* Cleansing Waters only heals once per cast now (down from two when it removed two effects)
* Earthshield can no longer be dispelled.
* Tremor Totem redesigned to now be a group WotF on a 1min CD (instead of a spammable anti-fear button).

Overall: Resto Shammies are a lot worse off tomorrow in PvP because of the removal of Bloodlust, the nerf to Cleansing Waters, and the general nerf to Tremor Totem. This will also make RLS a weaker team in general, and with Purge being nerfed so heavily, all shammies are going to end up struggling to fit roles on teams.

Warlock
* Curse of Exhaustion nerfed to 30% (from 50%)
* Devour (Felhunter ability) nerfed from 8s CD to 20s CD and is no longer auto-cast (HUGE against bad locks).
* Drain Mana removed from the game.
* Fel Armor redesigned from 2% hp every 5 seconds to 3% direct damage done returned as health (huge nerf to double-dps locks)
* Unstable Affliction's silence reduced to 4seconds (down from 5s)

Overall: Warlocks are a much less face-roll class tomorrow. Devour is a HUGE nerf in all PvP scenes, and Drain Mana being removed makes them much less of a threat in 2s on Afflic+Healer teams. Curse of Exhaustion was another point where Warlocks were nerfed in 2s since only two healers in the game can remove Curses. Fel Armor being nerfed was just the cherry on top; you might notice the end of that video I posted is roughly twice as long as it took to kill the Mage and we were still fighting the Lock because of Fel Armor's self-healing component (in addition to Siphon Life, which is alive and well and still OP, imo). Again, this is another rather large nerf against RLS tomorrow... this team FEELS like it will be quite a bit weaker than today.

Warrior
* Charge and Intercept now share diminishing returns on the stun category (Throwdown's category)
* Drums of War no longer reduces the cost of Piercing Howl (used to make it free; huge nerf)
* Lambs to the Slaughter changed to a stacking buff giving 30% extra damage from yellows (used to be next Overpower was 30% stronger only, but proc'd off of MS and Execute... this is much stronger now).
* Mortal Strike cost reduced by 5 rage (meh).
* Heroic Strike damage nerfed on a couple of talents.

Overall: Warriors are now going to be similar to Ferals in terms of precarious positioning. Instead of having HUGE amounts of up-time on targets and being able to stun them for forever and a day, they will have limited up-time with peels and end up clipping their own DR if Charge is used on CD. Many Warriors are considering going Fury simply for the increased damage and since Intercept will be a better stun on a slightly longer CD that will not DR itself. However, Throwdown simply gets kicked to the curb and cannot realistically be used for full duration anymore except by the best of players; expect good Warriors to use it as a CC on a healer or off-target when bunch-ups happen.

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Whew... that is a lot of changes.

Overall, if you look at all the nerfs, it seems like a balancing act is actually happening. Warriors, Warlocks, Mages, DKs, and Rogues are all being pretty nastily nerfed and these classes hold the lion's share of top-representation above 2400. Ferals got their mobility nerfed in certain edge-cases and will have to relearn a lot of how to play their class (expect playing very conservatively as compared to the past against Mage teams), but also got some buffs to direct damage which will play heavily against low-armor targets. Additionally, the buff to Barkskin is huge now allowing the Feral to use it when it is needed regardless of the opponent's uses.

Yeah, I think this patch is going to hurt Ferals quite a bit, but the overall nerfs to other classes was probably large enough to mitigate a lot of that pain. Again, I fully expect that Ferals will, at some later date, get a cooldown or two to aid with magic effects (since we're the only melee who doesn't have any), but we will just have to wait and hope on that one.

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My aim is to release videos like this every week (most weeks) again and hopefully get some good footage and eventually make an actual PvP video from some of the clips. Guntir does not want me to use any of the clips from today's videos; we have been rusty and he said he did not play very well (might even be a little upset about my posting this video). Oh well, we shall see!

Overall (last time I use it today, I promise), I am excited for tomorrow's patch.

Let's ask some questions and give some suggestions

2011-02-03T09:59:00.001-08:00

Feral Questions:
1) What's the point of Berserk lasting 15-20 seconds if you're only ever going to have ~5 seconds of up-time on a target with it rolling?

2) What's the point of Berserk having a 3min cooldown given how terrible the damage output will be in PvP with it up (given the stuff from #1)?

3) How is Feral still the only melee in the game with zero cooldowns to stop, dispel, reflect, etc magic effects? We have damage reduction cooldowns like everyone else... but if we're getting nuked or have two rows of dots, we're done... there's nothing we can do.

4) Why do Shred, Ravage, Ambush, Backstab, and Garrote still have directionality components?

5) Why is Stampeding Roar so abysmal/useless in PvP for the Feral using it?

6) Why are we the only dps spec in the game with a set bonus with an effect which is reduced by our enemies (snares reduce the effect of our bonus multiplicatively)?

7) Why do we have talents that are terrible? Fury Swipes and Primal Madness top the bill on this one.

8) Why is Feral's kick OP when a) it has a lag component because of the charge effect, so it's easy to juke, b) it cannot be used while rooted because of the charge effect, and c) Rogue's kick (which is the same but without lag) is okay?

9) Why is Berserk's Fear immunity and break OP when Berserker Rage isn't?

10) Why is Feral Charge Cat (our only gap closer) a 30s cooldown that sometimes takes us to our opponents while Charge (Arms' only gap closer) is going to be a 14s CD and Intercept (Fury's only gap closer) a 20s CD and both of these abilities stun the opponent and thus work on HoF'd targets or mobile targets etc?

11) What are Ferals supposed to do for burst damage against high-armored targets with resilience? HPallies and RShammies are nigh-invincible WHILE having infinite mana against Ferals because we have NOTHING that scares them through their high armor (shields) and high resilience.

12) Why does Hibernate not share DR with any other Druid CC effect? Druids are a Feral's worst enemy having 3 different DR-category CCs with no cooldowns.

13) Why does Nurturing Instinct give us bonus healing but not spell power... and why so little?

14) Why was LotP considered OP at 8% returned every 6 seconds with 100% crit when Recuperate is 4% returned every 3 seconds AND a 6% damage reduction component? If the Feral had 100% crit, Recuperate and the old LotP would have been the same... but no Ferals had 100% crit rate, so Recuperate is obviously better AND LotP is the OP one??? That don't make sense...

15) Ferals, Rogues, Locks, Priests, and Mages are all the cloth/leather-wearing classes in the game; why do Rogues, Locks, Priests, and Mages get either a) a LOT more armor than Ferals in Cat Form or b) talents which provide tons of flat damage reduction while Ferals get neither?

16) Why is Savage Roar so lackluster when compared to Slice and Dice (follow-up question+answer: because Feral's white damage is so poor; why is Feral's white damage so poor)?

17) What good is there in being able to break slowing effects via shapeshifting if every slow in the game is either auto-applied or trivially reapplied (Crippling, Desecration, everything a frost mage casts, Hamstring, etc)?

18) Why is Predator's Swiftness still dispellable while Fingers of Frost is becoming non-dispellable?

19) Why does Predator's Swiftness force us to leave Cat Form to use a nature spell? Since we can't break roots anymore, wouldn't it make sense to allow us to use these IN FORM?

20) Why is Pounce a 3 (4 talented) second opener when Cheap Shot is a 5s opener?

21) Why is Maim a 5s stun when Kidney Shot is a 6s stun?

22) Why is cp-gen so amazingly bad for Ferals unless they have 100% crit?

23) Why is being energy-starved the defacto position of Ferals?

24) Why does Shred hit harder than Ferocious Bite (again) on the PTR? (follow-up again: because Shred got buffed and FB didn't... follow-up again... why would I use 75 energy to do what Shred can do for 40)?

25) Why does Blood in the Water only work on targets at or below 25% health while Cut to the Chase (rogue assassination talent) works regardless of target's HP.

26) Why does Tiger's Fury apply a 15% bonus damage buff for 6 seconds... or for as long as Rake and Rip are on the target if they were cast in that window?

Feral Suggestions:
1) Fury Swipes changed to also give 3/7/10 energy when the proc'd bonus hit lands.

2) Tiger's Fury changed from 15% bonus damage for the duration to 50% armor ignore for the duration.

3) Primal Madness changed (Bear version stays as-is) to increase the duration of your Tiger's Fury and Berserk by 1/2 seconds and the effect of your Tiger's Fury by 50/100% (making TF 50%/75%/100%).

4) Berserk changed to a 6 second duration and 1 minute cooldown.

5) Glyph of Berserk (Prime) removed but Glyph of Shred renamed to "Glyph of Hemophilia", but has the same effect as before but includes Mangle (Cat) as well as Shred.

6) Blood in the Water changed to give your Ferocious Bite and Rip abilities to have a 50/100% chance to refresh your Savage Roar to it's 5 combo point maximum duration in addition to causing your Ferocious Bite to refresh Rip on a target at or below 25% hp.

7) Maim removed from the game entirely.

8) Stampede changed to allow one Ravage or Pounce for 10s at 50/100% reduced energy cost.

9) Feral Charge changed entirely... now just one ability: charge an enemy immobilizing them for 4 seconds, 20s cooldown, can be used in Cat or Bear form.

10) Bash's stun duration lowered to 3 seconds.

11) Brutal Impact FIXED... wtf. It currently is a 2-point talent that increases the duration of your Pounce and Bash by 1/1 second. Fixed to increase the duration of your Pounce and Bash by 1/2 second (both would be 5s with 2/2)

12) Natural Reaction changed to read "Reduces damage taken when in Bear or Cat Form by 6/12%, increases your dodge while in Bear Form by 3%, and you generate 1 rage every time you dodge while in Bear Form."

13) Stampeding Roar changed to a 1min cooldown, cost removed entirely.

14) Glyph of Stampeding Roar (major glyph) causes your Stampeding Roar (Cat) to grant you immunity to movement impairing effects for the duration but no longer affect friendly targets.

15) The bonus healing component of Nurturing Instinct has been replaced with "and causes your Barkskin to remove all non-physical harmful effects on you when used in Cat Form."

16) Feral's 4-set PvP bonus changed to "15% bonus movement speed in Cat and Bear Form", but it will be applied additively after the calculation.

17) Predator's Swiftness is no longer dispellable.

18) Predator's Swiftness now allows that instant-cast nature spell to be used without leaving Cat Form.

The explanations:
Okay, so you might browsed this list a bit and said to yourself "Self, I see a bunch of changes here, but nothing really fixing the shapeshifting nerf." This is true. I am operating under the assumption that the shapeshifting nerf will indeed come to pass as-is and these suggestions will aim at improving Feral in the following patch (which will take 2-3 months, likely). Yes, this is a dismal view of the world (of warcraft) to come, but I simply do not believe that any more changes will be included in this patch, and I do not think that Blizzard cares that the removal of shapeshifting to break root effects will destroy Ferals. All that being said, the spec is moving in a new direction and what else can I do but try to ride that pony to the finish line and hope to place.

Might as well address each on a line-item basis, right?

1) Fury Swipes is bad, we're constantly energy-starved... give it some minor energy-boost when the hit lands. There... we aren't ALWAYS energy-starved now.

2) Tiger's Fury is a cooldown, and a good one (60 energy is nice). The 15% bonus damage is OKAY, but it gets prioritized to Bleeds because it still lasts full duration. Even if it were changed to affect Bleeds ONLY while TF's buff was active (as it is supposed to), then it would force Ferals to prioritize burst damage during the TF window... good. HOWEVER, the problem Ferals are currently having is that we cannot do ANYTHING to high-armor and resil'd targets. Holy Pallies and RShammies have 20-30% more physical damage reduction than Disc Priests and Resto Druids... that extra 15% simply doesn't equate. Change it to a decent armor-ignore effect so that we get a good damage boost against ALL armor-types, not just low-armor classes.

3) Primal Madness is awful as-is... but it's because TF isn't super-great (and Berserk is going to be awful next patch if nothing changes). However, with #2, TF is a good cooldown that lasts 6 seconds... make Primal Madness improve TF and Berserk's duration and increase the armor-ignore component of TF. Bam... meaningful talent revolving around cooldowns.

4) Berserk is awful as a 3min CD... we're going to just get CC'd through the majority of it anyway and/or not have enough up-time to make it count. Lower the CD to 1min and lower the duration to 6 seconds. Boom... burst damage that you have to time in accordance with CCs and it isn't the end of the world if you DO get CC'd through it because it's a 1min CD (similar to shadow dance in these regards). From a PvE point of view, this would actually be a slight buff because it would last 8 seconds talented on a 1min CD (the CD would be cut down by 2/3, but the up-time would be increased to ~1/8th up-time from 1/15th up-time).

5) With Berserk being a shorter cooldown and getting buffs from Primal Madness, we'll just drop this glyph entirely with the idea being that players will take Glyph of Hemophilia instead and improving it to allow Mangle-spammers to gain the benefit.

6) Blood in the Water is a PvE-only talent because of how hard it is to time using Ferocious Bite on a target at or below 25% hp without wasting 50 energy on a 1-point FB just to refresh Rip. Additionally, if a HoT (or Recuperate... BAH) ticks and gets them to 25.001% hp, then Rip does not get refreshed and you wasted energy, combo points, and damage output by not just ramping up to 5-cps and reapplying Rip. Changing it to ALWAYS refresh Savage Roar is a step in the right direction in that it will always keep your SR up by using EITHER of your DPS finishers.

7) Maim is useless... it's a 5s stun that takes WAY too much energy and combo points, and usually leaves us energy-starved and cp-starved... so it kills our damage output. Just remove it and work with #8 instead...

8) Stampede is good... the devs basically got this right. Ravage doesn't require you to be behind your opponent, it doesn't cost energy, it doesn't take CPs... this is just a good talent. With the removal of Maim, Ferals will still need some control, so we'll just make Stampede the "after FCC, you can use an opener when not stealthed" talent by appending "or Pounce" to the Ravage bit. The idea is that a Feral would choose between using FCC to a target and a) dealing damage or b) using control without destroying his damage output by dropping CPs and Energy into the target.

9) There is no reason, with the root-breaking nerf to shapeshifting, that Feral Charge (Cat) should be a 30 seconds cooldown... that's just ridiculous. Instead, all the Feral Charges should share CDs (just like Charge/Intercept) and they should all have a root component (just like Charge and Intercept both have stun components) and they should both have a 20s CD to keep from DR'ing themselves (as opposed to Charge, but just like Intercept).

10) Bash should only be a 3-sec stun by default because...

11) Brutal Impact is bugged (imho) at the moment... it gives 1 additional second to Bash and Pounce for 1 talent point, and 1 additional second to Bash and Pounce for 2 talent points. BAH... 2/2 Brutal Impact should increase the stun duration on Pounce and Bash by 2 seconds making them both 5 second stuns.

12) Natural Reaction should just give the Feral damage reduction regardless of the form he is in... we need some additional survivability at the moment.

13) Stampeding Roar is pretty awful... it should have been a 1min CD from the onset, and the cost is laughable... just remove the cost entirely.

14) Glyph of Stampeding Roar would replace Glyph of Entangling Roots (since it will be useless next patch) and allow the Cat version of Stampeding Roar to be used as a poor-man's Hand of Freedom for the casting Feral only. It won't give a bonus movement speed buff to everyone else, so it will not be picked up by PvP Ferals, and it won't be used by flag-running Ferals because it will only work for Cat Form. The 1-min cooldown keeps it from being overpowered.

15) The bonus healing component of Nurturing Instinct is just bad filler from TBC. There is no reason for this talent to exist as-is. We don't need to heal... we don't want to heal... and our heals are terrible even WITH this talent. Just remove it and allow Barkskin to blank harmful non-physical effects as well when it is used. This is, again, like a poor-man's Cloak of Shadows in that it will blank the abilities, but not immune us to them for the duration. The tradeoff being that Barkskin can be used while under the effects of Stun, Fear, etc (but not silence, interestingly enough).

16) For example, if a Feral (moving around around 149% speed with 4-set and 2/2 Feral Swiftness) gets hit with Crippling, he would be moving at ~45%. After this change, Ferals with the 4-set and 2/2 Feral Swiftness would be moving 145% (exactly), and getting hit with Crippling Poison would make us move at 54% speed (1.0 * 1.3 * 0.3 + 0.15).

17) This is a no-brainer; training a Feral in PvP is the best course of action... you don't need to decide whether to attack the Feral or not... you just train him because he can't do anything about it. On top of that, you're dispel-training him, too, because the healer is trying to keep him up and dispelling is a great way to cancel that... so Predator's Swiftness (a defensive proc to try and peel a guy off you via Cyclone) gets insta-dispelled. Just make it a physical buff already.

18) Since we cannot shapeshift to break roots anymore, and we don't really shapeshift to break snares either because they get auto-applied back onto us, we no longer have any reason to go back to caster form... we shouldn't have to spend an extra GCD on using our instant-cast ability. Rogues don't have to spend 2 GCDs to use Blind, DKs don't have to use 2 GCDs on Hungering Cold, Warriors don't have to spend 2 GCDs on Intimidating Shout, etc.

----------------------

These are just some things I think are worth looking into for patch 4.0.7, codenamed: "Oh shit we dun goof'd on Ferals."

Uhmmm...

2011-01-31T08:34:00.000-08:00

Okay, Boubouille over at MMO-Champion does not believe that the 4.0.6 patch will be deployed to live realms tomorrow. He is basing this on the fact that his inside sources have not told him that this would be the case, that he has a yet-to-be-deployed PTR build, and that there is no extended maintenance scheduled for tomorrow. Based on these facts, I think we can say without much doubt that tomorrow is not patch day. Horray! At least one week's reprieve from the cruel nerfbat. I can hold out hope that perhaps there will be a Hail Mary type patch where the shapeshifting nerfs are entirely reverted or some defensive cooldowns are added for Ferals. We shall see.

We picked up a Frost Mage yesterday for some 3v3 funsies. I haven't started recording yet, but I probably will soon. Feral+Frost+Disc is horribly fun and the control is pretty strong. I really like this comp more than run-downs like Kittycleave or DK+Feral+Healer just because your control is what defines your victories, not your ability to crunch unhealable damage into an opponent. I will, hopefully, have some videos of us grinding our rating up soon.

OH, FUCK ME RUNNING!

2011-01-28T13:36:00.001-08:00

In case anyone was curious, this is what the new one looks like...

EDIT:

To be clear... I MIGHT have deserved this one. Essentially, if you view the image fully (which you should be able to do by right-clicking and hitting "view image" as it's cropped here), you should be able to see that the thread was about "The Frost Mage Mantra" which only had one line in it akin to:

Every class will be balanced, Mages will just be more balanced.

... or something like that. I didn't even post in this thread (I think... don't quote me on that), but I DO remember finding out that there was a button in the upper-right-hand-corner that says "Nominate for Sticky". Curiosity, more than anything, got the better of me and I clicked it. Apparently, the mods were not amused by my antics.

I shall try less dickery next week.

<3 Rey

4.0.6 Going Live Soon

2011-01-27T13:17:00.001-08:00

Probably as-is, too. I suggest waiting until this actually happens, but when it does, I will no longer be playing World of Warcraft. I do not enjoy any other aspect of the game except Player vs. Player, and I only enjoy that as Feral. I have played a Warlock and Rogue to high ratings as well, but they simply are not the fun that I have experienced while playing Feral. I know this all sounds rather melodramatic, but it has been a long time coming.

I really should be better at this, but I am a sucker; what can I say? Blizzard weens me along during the game where I receive no support from the developers and nothing but nerfs to the few abilities which actually make my play-style somewhat work. They follow this treatment with promises of things being better in the next expansion and they will definitely stop hurting me, and like an idiotic housewife who continues to return to her husband despite all the abuse she has suffered at his hands. What is worse is that I come back smiling, every single time. If you look at the posts I make during betas, they are all positive and full of hope and every single first-season into the expansion, everything we have gets nerfed and/or all the specs which counter us get buffed.

It has to stop, now. I simply cannot take this any longer. Blizzard is clearly moving the game in a completely different direction than the one they claimed at the last Blizzcon (every Blizzcon, really). The powers that be simply do not care if Feral or Balance Druids are represented in the arenas or are even a viable alternative to a Warrior or Mage, respectively. Furthermore, it seems that if either of these two actually do make a dent on the arena scene and can actually face off against one of the pure classes with somewhat reasonable representation, they will be nerfed back to where they belong in the developers' collective eyes: Resto. That is an aspect of the game I am simply unwilling to play. I do not like Resto, I tried it for a bit in TBC when Feral was a joke and hated it (though I did hit some decent ratings).

Further, Blizzard has made is clear time and time again that while they say they value their customers' feedback, they do not use it in any way or form. Particularly, in Cataclysm it seems that changes are made entirely at random, and are largely at odds with public statements made by members of the development team. Greg Street said verbatim that "Frost Mage control is too strong and [they] would be looking at Ring of Frost and Frost Nova," but in truth nothing was done to either of these abilities save for the area of effect for Ring of Frost was reduced a tiny amount. Additionally, the original quote from him implied that Ferals were too hard to peel, so Berserk would likely have the Fear immunity removed from it. This is a huge change by itself, but removing the root-breaking aspect of Shapeshifting on top of this with little-to-no time to test these changes in a competitive PvP environment is, for lack of a better word, asinine.

What is more annoying by this is the verbiage used. The development team suggests that Ferals are too hard to peel effectively, so every single thing which we can counter is removed except for our immunity to Polymorph and Hex abilities while other classes are given, or currently have, immunities exactly like those which have been stripped from us:

DK - IBF (Stun break and immune; lasts 12 seconds), Lichborne (fear/charm/sleep immunity for 10 seconds), and AMS (essentially all CC immunity for 5 seconds).
Rogue - Cloak of Shadows (essentially all CC immunity and root-breaker; lasts 5 seconds), Vanish (will break CC casts and roots).
Enhance - Spirit Walk (breaks roots/snares when wolves are up), Earthbind Totem (breaks snares), Grounding Totem (redirects a CC cast), Shamanistic Rage Glyphed (breaks all dispelable magic on you, can be used while stunned), Tremor Totem (Fear break)
Ret - Hand of Freedom (root/snare break), Self-cleanse (root/snare break), Bubble (everything-break except Cyclone), Hand of Protection (non-magic break except Cyclone).
Warrior - Brostorm (talented root/snare break), Heroic Fury (talented root break), Warbringer (talented root/snare break), Berserker Rage (Fear/Sap/Incap-break, lasts 10 seconds on a 30s CD).

Every single melee has a break... except Ferals next patch. We will be, essentially, as dispel-reliant as Warriors were in TBC except that we do not have nearly the damage output of a Warrior, the longevity of a Warrior, the mobility of a Warrior, or the utility of a Warrior.

I am sorry to say it, but if 4.0.6 goes live without any quality of life improvements for Ferals given the shapeshifting nerf, I will not be playing the game anymore.

4.0.6 PTR UPDATE...soon

2011-01-11T08:10:00.000-08:00

*Updated below*

Polymorph and many other CC abilities are being reduced to 8-second durations as well. I showed you the latest shaman changes coming in the next round of patch notes. It's important to note though that the next draft of the 4.0.6 patch notes to be posted are double the size of the notes currently on the home page of our website. There are many new notes for virtually every class yet to be posted.

Great googly-moogly... I never thought I would see the day. We will have to wait and see what Blizz ends up doing, but supposedly tonight the PTR will be updated (as well as the patch notes) and they will be "double the size" of the current notes... which are already quite long.

I will, of course, post my thoughts on all the changes to come, but one thing I have to note here is that all the CCs which are not currently longer than 8 seconds in duration will be seeing a relative buff versus those CCs which are over 8 seconds in duration (Cyclone and Psychic Scream come to mind).

-----------------------------

Well, that was entirely too long a break to not have posted a comment on the changes that went up on the PTR on Thursday night. Essentially, no real changes went up on the PTR except for this bombshell:

Shapeshifts: Entering or leaving a shapeshift no longer cancels root effects. It continues to cancel movement slowing effects.

Eventually, Blizzard realized that this would be a pretty harsh nerf to all specs of Druid, so they added the following two quotes:

Disentanglement (new specialization): Causes shapeshifting to remove roots in addition to snares.
...
We will share additional information with you regarding our plans for Balance as soon as we can, though it'll probably have to wait until after the holiday weekend.

So, we can read this pretty plainly: "Feral's ability to self-break root effects is overpowered." I must admit that I do see both sides of this argument: on the one hand, it is hard to balance a game where Feral can entirely counter a class reliant on roots, so there ends up being an arms race there that is unfair to the other melees; on the other hand, Feral being able to shapeshift out of root effect for the last 6 years has only been considered overpowered for about four days by the devs... why the change?

There is a thread on the PTR boards that I suggest all my readers hit and post their feedback. The post-cap has been bumped a number of times now, and as of this writing we are up to ~95 pages of responses, mainly from Druids suggesting that this change makes no sense or is unfair, partially from morons who make mouth-breather-esque comments akin to "Druids immunity to all forms of CC ends with this patch", and then there are some posts by myself and others (mainly Miirkat, though there are others) who try and make suggestions to further this change to improve balance in the game.

I would like to point out that every melee class in the game has at least 2-3 abilities on top of their trinket to break a root effect and/or stop incoming magic if they do get rooted:

Warrior - Brostorm breaks roots, Spell Reflect can stop roots or magic spells when the Warrior is rooted.
Rogue - Vanish, Cloak of Shadows, Shadowstep (talent), Improved Sprint (talent), Smoke Bomb (will keep them from casting on you while rooted).
DK - AMS, AMZ (talent), Gnaw, Strangulate, Deathgrip (as an interrupt).
Enhance - Grounding Totem, Windshear.
Ret - self-Cleanse (talent), Hand of Freedom, Hand of Protection (for physical root effects only), Bubble.

Feral - Nothing

In this vein, I have decided to be proactive and try to suggest some things that Feral would need in order to continue doing PvP if this change goes through. Let us look, first, to the problem areas.

--------------------

Problems:

1) Feral is the only melee in the game now which has no root break and/or no way to stop incoming magic spells.

2) Stampeding Roar is a useless ability for Feral PvP (again, this is an old topic, but we should bring it up again: Costs 30 energy which is too much, only increases run speed by a 40% non-stacking amount which is less than Feral's normal movement speed, has a 2min CD which is too long, only has a 10y range which is tiny in most PvP scenarios, and only lasts six seconds). To put this into perspective, I decided to perform an experiment: I have not trained Stampeding Roar or Mushrooms (and had Guntir not suggested we run instances while grinding I would not have purchased Thrash either... but here we are).

3) Feral damage is too dependent on ramp-up which is directly proportional to up-time. We need to get bleeds on a target BEFORE we can deal real damage and that takes the majority of our resources. In addition to this, once we have dealt significant damage to a target, we are almost always energy-starved or CP-starved; landing a killing blow on a target at or below 25% HP is nigh-impossible against resilience-wearing targets... particularly ones in Plate with a Shield.

--------------------

Suggestions:

1) Add a new major glyph to the Druid class: Glyph of Stampeding Roar - Reduces the cooldown on Stampeding Roar by 60 seconds and the cost by 20 energy.

2) Add the following text to the Feral-only talent "Stampede" - In addition, the range of your Stampeding Roar is increased by 10y, and causes your Stampeding Roar to grant you immunity to movement impairing effects for the duration.

3) Change Glyph of Mangle - "Increases the damage done by your Mangle by 10% and causes your Mangle (Cat) to award an additional combo point when used."

4) Change Blood in the Water - "Additionally, when your target is at or below 25% HP, your Ferocious Bite will ignore 100% of the target's armor."

--------------------

Reasoning:

1+2) This will give Ferals a 1min CD Stampeding Roar which will ONLY break and immune Roots/Snares on themselves for 6 seconds while improving the range to something more likely in a PvP scenario and reducing the cost to a reasonable price. This makes the ability more like a utility-button like Cloak of Shadows (though CloS is free and doesn't require glyphing). Now, Ferals can break Roots once a minute when their healer is pressured or use it offensively (like CloS can be) and stay in a Mage's grill.

3) Mangle needs to be the button of choice for PvP Ferals. In order for it to do this the damage either needs to be on par with Shred (which it isn't, even when glyphed), or it needs to combat the problem differently. In this case, providing more combo points to use our vast finishing moves on will be a welcomed change. We cannot hardly use Ferocious Bite or Maim in PvP scenarios because we must keep Rip up 100% to deal appropriate damage. Additionally, Shred deals more damage, but when there are multiple targets to swap between, going from a target with Mangle, Rake, and Rip up to a target with nothing up means that in order to deal the best possible damage, 3 GCDs minimum have to be used before full-damage Shreds can be used (Mangle, Rake, and FFFx3... could be worse if you don't have 2/2 Feral Aggression). Obviously, using a Mangle-centric build will allow for faster swaps (you would still hit Mangle/Rake/FFF first, but that first Mangle will have dealt your big damage, and your next attack wouldn't require you to get behind them). Further, the positioning aspect of PvP is always tricky for Ferals, even while we currently HAVE the ability to break roots; this gets much more difficult when we cannot break them... Mangle-centric builds simply mean that we will have to make range on the target and can start dealing damage.

4) Again, we have tons of trouble actually landing a killing blow against someone because the majority of our damage comes from our bleeds, which become rather healable once resilience comes into play (instead of 6-12k Rip ticks, I get something like 3-6k Rip ticks). That being said, Blood in the Water is a difficult-to-use ability in PvP simply because of the timing required, which is why I believe a lot of Ferals do not take it now. Changing this to be a button you can use on a target even if Rip isn't applied would be a welcomed change, and having SOME ability to pressure a plate+shield class when they hit the red zone is something Feral has needed forever.

--------------------

Again, these are ideas that I think should be considered IN ADDITION TO the root-breaking nerf to Shapeshifting. If you have ideas on how to keep Feral from becoming a free kill again in PvP, please feel free to post them here OR (probably the better option, though I will re-post any good ideas on the PTR and give credit to commenters) post the ideas directly in the thread on the official PTR boards. Here is the link again: Please, Blizzard, don't remove powershift!

4.0.6 PTR

2011-01-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

My writeup to come shortly after lunch.

Okay... let's talk turkey!

Balances across the board:

Bloodlust, Heroism, Time Warp and Ancient Hysteria can no longer be cast while in Arenas.

This is an awesome change that has been a LONG TIME coming. It is by far and large the most game-breaking buff in PvP and it is finally being removed from competitive play. HORRAY FOR ALL!

The night elf racial trait Shadowmeld can now be used while shapeshifted.
The tauren racial trait War Stomp can now be used while shapeshifted.

Kittystomp is going to be awesome.

Feral Changes:

Barkskin is no longer dispellable.
Lacerate damage has been reduced by approximately 20%.
Mangle (Bear Form) weapon damage (at level 80+) has been reduced to 235%, down from 300%.
Mangle (Cat Form) weapon damage percent (at level 80+) has been increased to 460%, up from 360%.
Maul damage has been reduced by approximately 20%.
Rake damage has been reduced by 10%.
Rip damage has been reduced by 10%.
Shred weapon damage percent (at level 80+) has been increased to 450%, up from 350%.

Okay, honestly I have done ZERO dungeons or raiding in this expansion (and I love it, btw), so I cannot really comment on the Bear nerfs. We do not really go Bear all that often in the arenas anyway, so I do not think it will impact us. Barkskin going undispellable again is a welcomed sight for facing dispel-cleave teams who train me.

The big hitters here are Mangle and Shred getting basically a 22% damage upgrade while Rake and Rip get a 10% damage nerf. Many people have been going over napkin maths on this and there is still no conclusion. I feel like this will largely be a net-zero change against low armored targets and a slight (read: slight) nerf against high-armored targets. All things considered, I am not worried about this, I feel like this is a perfectly acceptable nerf.

Berserk (instant Mangle proc) now has a new Spell Alert identifier. In addition, Berserk no longer breaks Fear or makes the druid immune to Fear.

This is going to play rather strong; it just means that opening with Berserk is no longer going to be the desired play-style... which I hated doing anyway. A decent healer on your team will be able to keep you roughly un-CC'd throughout the Berserk duration, as well. Smart Ferals will find this nerf somewhat annoying at first, but largely a non-issue later. Bad Ferals will continue the QQ while rolling a DK.

Nerfs:

Ring of Frost: Radius shrunk to 8 yards, and inner "safe" radius is now 4.7 yards (exactly matching graphic). Dispelling the effect of Ring of Frost will now make the target immune to being refrozen for 3 seconds. If a second Ring of Frost is cast by the same mage while the first is still active (via Cold Snap), the first will now disappear and cease functioning.

Bwah ha ha. The duration is still rather long, but being able to actually escape a Ring of Frost via dispel is going to be nice, also the smaller radius will make it less overpowered as well.

Smoke Bomb now lasts for 5 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

Called it. A five second smoke bomb will basically keep Rogue teams from killing non-healers in the opener. I love it.

Curse of Exhaustion now reduces movement speed by 30%, down from 50%.
Drain Mana has been removed from the game.
Unstable Affliction's silence effect has been reduced to 3 seconds, down from 5.
Glyph of Soul Swap cooldown has been increased to 15 seconds, up from 10 seconds.
Inferno no longer increases the radius of Hellfire.

All awesome; I never understood why Curse of Exhaustion was changed to a 50% snare given that it was spammable and had a 40 yard range. Affliction Locks took a bit of the nerf-bat in this PTR, and everything there was well-deserved.

EDIT: There was a question in a comment about what I meant here in terms of "well-deserved". Let me be specific on each of these points: 1) Curse of Exhaustion was too powerful given that the damage lost from using it was not super-strong, and while I feel like having a 30% snare at range is not useless, it probably will not be utilized by most locks after the patch; 2) Drain Mana was an overpowered ability in the 2s setting and nigh-useless in 3s, 5s, and bgs; 3) Glyph of Soul Swap is again a situation where Locks could abuse the 2s setting and keep all their DoTs up indefinitely on both targets when they are not being spam-dispelled (and I contend that really only Shammies can spam-dispel because of Cleansing Waters and they can remove Curses), and the increased cooldown will make that still possible, but harder to do with some interruption; 4) Inferno was stupid in that it would allow you to run around spamming an ability which would knock stealthies out from 20 yards away... it would make sapping a Warlock nearly impossible.

Charge now shares diminishing returns with stun effects.
Cleave damage has been reduced by 20%.
Heroic Strike damage has been reduced by 20%.
Juggernaut no longer increases the cooldown on Charge, but instead increases the duration of the Charge stun by 2 seconds. In addition, Charge is usable in all stances, however, the talent now causes Charge and Intercept to share a cooldown.
Lambs to the Slaughter: Instead of granting 10/20/30% damage to the next Mortal Strike, Overpower, or Execute, it now grants a 10% buff to any Mortal Strike, Overpower, Slam, or Execute that stacks 1/2/3 times.

Charge sharing diminishing returns with other stuns means that landing a Charge followed by Colossus Smash + Throwdown + Overpower + Execute + Brostorm will never happen again, or at least that Throwdown will only last 2.5 seconds. The Cleave and Heroic Strike damage nerfs just make the abilities look like rage-sinks, as they are supposed to be.

Juggernaut is an interesting change. Essentially, Charge gets a 3 second stun duration and the warrior will have it up every 14 seconds (making warriors an even more beastly mobility machine than before), but the extra mobility of having both Charge and Intercept is lost. Guntir believes this is a Warrior mobility nerf, but I believe it only nerfs good Warriors while scrub Warriors actually see a buff.

Lambs to the Slaughter, I have to assume, will have a duration since it was simply "your next" before and will be "while up, you deal 10/20/30% more damage depending on the stacks". I personally do not see how this talent will play out. It seems overpowered at the moment.

Buffs:

Icebound Fortitude now breaks stuns when used, in addition to providing immunity to them.
Desecration is now also triggered by Necrotic Strike.

Okay... so Fear immunity and a Fear break on a 3min cooldown is overpowered but Stun immunity and a stun break on a 3min cooldown that also provides 50% damage reduction is fine? GG DKs. Also, putting Desecration on Necrotic Strike is ridiculous... there are Unholy DKs who simply ignore Scourge Strike because of how powerful Necrotic Strike is, and they should be punished for this by NOT having an auto-apply snare pooped all over the arena floor.

Wild Mushroom is now instant cast, down from 0.5 seconds. In addition, the radius of detonation has been increased to 6 yards, up from 3, and damage done increased by 15%.

WOOOO, still not going to train it.

Divine Plea now lasts for 9 seconds, down from 15. It grants 4% mana per tick, instead of 2%, for a total of 12% mana, up from 10%.

Wat? They are improving Holy Pally mana longevity? In what universe does that make any sense and how do I stay away from it?

The mana cost of Power Word: Shield has been increased by approximately 31%, but its effect has been increased by 208%.
The mana cost of Renew has been reduced by 24%.
The mana cost of Shadow Protection has been reduced by approximately 65%, making it roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.
Focused Will now procs when the priest is critically hit, in addition to its current effect.
Improved Power Word: Shield now also increases the amount absorbed by an additional 15/30% when cast on oneself.
Pain Suppression is no longer dispellable.

ARRRRG, FINALLY! PW:S is going to be more expensive, which is a problem, but making it an entirely useful ability is going to be sweet. This basically means that PW:S will absorb almost double the damage at 31% more mana... awesome!

Focused Will is another buff that should have happened in Beta. Every Priest I knew was making reports along these lines "you only get Focused Will against Destro Locks and Frost Mages... it never procs against melees". Keep in mind that these statements were made before Envenom specs became the way of the world (and they are). Lastly, non-dispellable Pain Suppression... again, a no-brainer.

Last, I leave you with perhaps the biggest buff in the entire patch... and it's for PvP Priests:

The PvP Priest 4-piece set bonus has been redesigned. When Power Word: Shield is cast on the priest, movement speed reduction effects are temporally suppressed for 4 seconds.

... oh man ... 4 second duration Hand of Freedom? Maybe Holy Priests will become something of an awesome PvP Healer. 60% movement speed AND 4-sec snare immunity?

UPDATE:

Here's a post from Yawning (the Feral expert in the field of maths) showing a SLIGHT dps buff overall from the changes:

NB: I do not have exact coefficients and base damage values for Rake/Rip. I assumed a flat 10% reduction to both. This is also subject to change.

10000 iterations of 300 seconds, with encounter duration randomized to have a stddev of 30

Damage breakdown:
With 359 raid gear (Premade from beta).

Before:
DPS: 22012.83665 +/- 10.23135 StdDev: 522.00765
White Damage (%) : 19.8423
Fury Swipes Damage (%): 3.99312
Ravage Damage (%): 0.47929
Mangle Damage (%): 2.09392
Shred Damage (%): 18.62851
Rake Damage (%): 22.18143
Rip Damage (%): 28.3959
Bite Damage (%): 4.38553

After:
DPS: 22024.55286 +/- 10.61514 StdDev: 541.58861
White Damage (%) : 19.81473
Fury Swipes Damage (%): 3.97554
Ravage Damage (%): 0.483
Mangle Damage (%): 2.60498
Shred Damage (%): 23.25153
Rake Damage (%): 19.96006
Rip Damage (%): 25.52282
Bite Damage (%): 4.38734

Stat valuation changes:
Haste goes from being one of our worst secondary stats (Hit/Expertise actually model as slightly better once raid geared, yes Haste on live starts to suck once you have decent gear) to being better than Crit (By 0.4 DPS/point, so saying that Crit ~= Haste is probably reasonably accurate for this gear set. 0.99 DPS/point vs 0.95 DPS/point).

Mastery is still king, though it's devalued slightly (1.23 DPS/point -> 1.11 DPS/point).

Weapon DPS predictably shoots up in value (4.11 DPS/point -> 4.61 DPS/point).

Scaling:
Beta Premade (346 gear): 16773 DPS -> 16813 DPS
Beta Premade (Rare PvP gear + 359 weapon): 15390 DPS -> 15424 DPS
My live gear: 21251 DPS -> 21166 DPS
Beta Premade (359 gear): 22012 DPS -> 22024 DPS

Preliminary conclusions:
Haste should be consistently good now as opposed to "ok till you have enough energy regen/cp generation to maintain full bleeds, then it totally sucks".

Sustained raid DPS is virtually unchanged across several gear points (+- 100 DPS). Rake/Rip still have massively higher DPE over Mangle/Shred so there's no reason to alter the basic priority list.

No massive re-gearing after these changes, and the priority system should be unchanged. You could reforge again to prioritize Haste over Crit, but I doubt it would be noticeable.

A New Year!

2011-01-03T11:08:00.000-08:00

Let me get the basics out of the way first:

Happy Christmas/Holidays I Cannot Spell and New Year!

I took two weeks off from work and subsequently ignored any/all emails and this blog. The latter of the things I ignored was somewhat unintentional, but I took the time off as a brief window for getting things done that I had been putting off for far too long. I did manage to get some arena in and play some WoW over my break (it was a vacation after all), but I think I could have largely gotten more done. First things first, Guntir and I (if I already wrote this much up, just move on to the next paragraph, I didn't bother rereading my last post as I just wanted something fresh up) started running the 2v2s bracket as Feral+Disc right as we had left off in season eight. The one thing I will note about Feral+Disc in this expansion, so far, is that even with the amazing about of peels and damage that Feral and put out, Disc is by far and large the weakest healer in the game and absolutely the most trainable. If a melee decided that Guntir needed to die, there was little that could be done to deter that melee's efforts. Because of this sad truth, Guntir decided to see if Shadow was a decent spec worthy of grinding us up to a respectable rating while we could sit on points until Disc was fixed.

Being as we had run a bit of Shadowclaw in season eight when we got bored, we knew the general idea of the comp and how to play it and since most of the teams we face these days are double-dps with about 1000 resilience, we were merely curb-stomping the vast majority of them. However, Shadow and Feral still have a great deal of problems dealing with Paladin healers who know what they are doing. The main point to make here is that Holy Paladins are essentially invincible until their melee of choice downs an opponent (in double-dps setups anyway). We faced a HPally+DK team which took about four minutes to kill Guntir after we had dropped the Pally to 1000 hp at least a few times. Holy Pallies are, and always have been, the only healer in the game wearing Plate, wearing a shield, and given 3-4 "oh shit"-buttons. Whenever we got the pally into a near-death situation, he had a button to press which would guarantee his survival.

In that same vein, I would like to make a small comment on the state of survivability as it pertains to armor class. Blizzard had stated early-on (as well as late) during development of Cataclysm that they wanted armor value to play a smaller roll (or rather, there should be a smaller impact from wearing cloth versus plate) in PvP, and while I think Resilience is going to end up being the largest determining factor in damage-dealt by all classes, armor value remains a rather large leg-up for Plate-wearing classes. The damage difference between a Shred critical against a Holy Pally versus a Disc Priest is still rather astounding with no reasonable end in sight.

While dancing on the topic of promises not kept, I have to express my distaste for the decision to give Mages yet another form of unbelievably overpowered crowd control. Ring of Frost has got to be the "last straw" in terms of obviously broken abilities given to obviously overpowered classes. With the addition of this and Smoke Bomb, I have to say that the 3s game (more on this in a second, but "the only blizzard-recognized bracket of arena) has become "do you run RMPally? Freewins!" I watched a 2900's video of running the new flavor of RMP and it boils down to "Rogue opens with Garrote on a caster then immediately drops a Smoke Bomb, Mage un-invises in the middle of the Smoke Bomb and uses Ring of Frost, Pally spams Exorcisms into the kill target while Rogue and Mage do their thing." If the healer wants to heal the kill-target, they have to come into the Smoke Bomb, which means going through the Ring of Frost, which means a guaranteed 8seconds of being Frozen which shares DR with nothing and that is if they trinket the 10s first one. The mere fact that these two abilities were put into the game with essentially zero arena-testing is staggering... it has essentially solidified my stance on "Blizzard is officially trying to silently kill off arenas in favor of rated bgs."

Rated BGs, of course, do not matter as much about killing as much as it does about completing objectives. In my opinion, BGs are not so much player-versus-player combat as much as they are multiplayer strategy-based questing, and I simply am not amused by this aspect of the game. Please do not misunderstand my meaning as "BGs take no skill," as BGs certainly require skill and coordination, but so does flash-mobbing, and I have no interest in that, either.

Alright... so Feral+Disc did not end up working out all that well, so we tried Feral+Shadow and found a better stay in this comp while people have low resilience and admittedly poor coordination. Guntir, however, loves being a healer and would not stand idly by while Disc (and we tried Holy as well, but it's arguably worse-off) could offer no healing prospects, so he decided to continue grinding his Shammy (who had hit 80 just prior to Cataclysm going live). Almost as soon as his Shammy hit 85 and got a PvP trinket, we stepped into the arena as Feral+RShammy. Without any pretense of over-hyping of this particular makeup I can say this much: once his Shammy gets some resilience gear, we will be nigh-unstoppable.

Feral+RShammy relies on a couple things that Feral+Disc cannot: first, RShammies essentially never run out of mana if played well; second, Feral puts out rather strong damage and provides enough peels for the Shammy to escape any melee except another Feral; and third, RShammy healing absolutely leaves Disc/Holy in its dust. Other aspects of the comp are amazing as well in the "Bash+Cyclone+Hex" combos lining up reasonably strong CC rotations while the kill-target is taking strong Bleed damage, and the fact that Feral and RShammies both bring interrupts against casters/healers which almost always pays off (interrupting UA against Afflic+Healer essentially nullifies their damage output), and RShammies keep the team nearly immune to Fear all the time (which is totally foreign feeling, but ultimately awesome).

Okay... so after the first few weeks of PvP play being available, I have to comment on Ghostcrawler's latest commentary on the state of the game and proposed upcoming changes. I suppose the easiest way to address these things would be on an item-by-item basis, so here we go (PvP-only stuff, btw):

The larger health pools, decreased impact of Mortal Strike debuffs, and slower healing are all having the desired effect in PvP. Burst damage has its place, but doesn’t determine the outcome of every encounter. There are several individual abilities that we aren’t happy with in PvP.

Hopefully, this is referring to Frost Mage and Warrior burst... they can do 80-90% of an HP pool in a 5s stun.

We’re keeping a close eye on dispels. We still like the design of making dispels more of a commitment rather than liberally sprinkling around dispel resistance or consequences for every class. Defensive dispels (removing a debuff) generally feel good, but we think offensive dispels (removing an enemy buff) feel too powerful, especially for DPS specs. In particular, Purge and Spellsteal will probably get nerfed.
We’re also looking at crowd control, interrupts, and self-healing in PvP. It’s possible we’ll reduce the durations of some crowd control effects, especially the area effect ones, and decrease the duration of interrupts.

Reducing the durations of some crowd control effects is a good thing, and suggesting "especially the area of effect ones" means Hungering Cold and Ring of Frost (are there any others? I guess you MIGHT be able to consider Frost Nova one...).

Priests are a little weak in PvP, especially at mobile healing. We have made some changes to glyphs and talents to enhance their survivability and instant healing.

This is almost entirely Priests' problem at the moment. Guntir believes that GC is missing (or misstating) a key point in that it isn't Priests' mobile-healing, but mobility that is lacking. Having played both Disc and now Resto Shammy (as well as a Holy Pally in Wrath), the problem seems to be that while every healer can make distance on melees, Priests simply have to tank damage rather than escape. Having the ability to heal better on the run is nothing to scoff at, but neither is it the entire problem. Additionally, Guntir feels that Penance will be made "able to be used while moving" with these changes.

Even after we fixed their mastery, Feral druid bleeds still do a lot of damage and are undispellable. We plan to shift some of that damage back to main attacks. They are also a little too hard to control. Given that they are already hard to root, snare, or polymorph, we think the fear immunity from Berserk is too much.

Ouch. I agree that Feral bleeds still do a lot of damage and I agree that they are undispellable. What I do not understand is how they plan on "shift[ing] some of that damage back to main attacks" (presumably White Swings, Shred, and Ferocious Bite to name a few). I feel that one possible change that is most certainly coming is that the Feral Mastery is going to change. Likely, a 50% reduction in the capacity of bleed damage is going to be removed from the Mastery bonus for Ferals just to keep the bleeds in line. One possible change I could (but do not expect to) see as well is tacking on some amount of direct damage component to Feral Mastery so-as to not unbalance the stat in the weak direction.

The Fear immunity being removed from Berserk is, in my opinion, going to hurt at first, but ultimately make for a more balanced game. The only hope I have is that abilities like Hibernate and Scare Beast are made to no longer work on Feral Forms, but I would not be surprised if the only thing in the patch notes is "Berserk no longer grants the Feral Fear immunity." Although, for such a long cooldown, I would expect it to grant us something to allow our up-time to remain good, given that other 31-point talents for dps classes work this way already *cough*brostorm*cough*.

Arms warrior burst damage might still be too high in PvP, while we don’t have a great way to adjust their sustained damage for PvE. The Lambs to the Slaughter talent is a good place to address this. We also might nerf warrior stuns.

Lovely! Warrior stuns are a bit insane... I have no idea why they were given Throwdown when they already had a number of stuns via gap-closers, Improved Hamstring (which is not a stun, but might as well be for healers), and Pummel now being useable in Battle Stance. Nerfing Lambs to the Slaughter is a good place to start, given I continue seeing MS+Overpower combos dealing 20-25k damage every 6 seconds or so thanks to Taste for Blood.

We think Arms and Fury warriors are getting too much damage out of Heroic Strike. We want it to be clear that it’s a rage dump and not make it the hardest hitting ability.
For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now benefit from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

Meh.

We’re making some additional buffs, such as Pain Suppression and Barkskin, undispellable.

This is only funny because for the entirety of the Cataclysm Beta up until it was closed down, Barkskin was undispellable. Once Cataclysm went live, we noticed that Barkskin was magically dispellable again, and I think we all assumed it was a bug given that there were no announcements that it would be changed back and (again) it was undispellable the day the Beta was taken down. Oh well... yay "buffs", right?

We’re buffing Wild Mushroom. It’s a cool spell that isn’t getting enough play.

I have not trained this ability because of how amazingly terrible it is... I do not see a change they can make that would entice me to spend the gold. On that same note, I have still not trained Stampeding Roar, and based on it not being mentioned in this post, I assume I never will.

Empowered Touch will now benefit from Regrowth as well. We’re also buffing the Glyph of Regrowth.
We are looking at Holy Concentration (after our most recent buff) and Omen of Clarity to make sure they don’t account for too much mana savings.

Meh.

We are probably going to remove Drain Mana from warlocks. It is incredibly situational in PvE but causes problems in PvP. This might mean we need to evaluate Mana Burn as well.

It is about god-damned time. Giving a DPS-class a mana-drain is unfair, much like giving a DPS-class an offensive dispel; good riddance to the both of these problems (hopefully). Removing Mana Burn is more tricky given that Priests are in such terrible shape at the moment and Shadow cannot afford to give up damage for mana burning. To quote Guntir "I hope they remove Mana Burn from that game; I am tired of having my mana longevity [or lack thereof, in my opinion -Rey] balanced around my ability to land Mana Burns."

Inferno will no longer increase the radius of Hellfire.

Duh. I think we all saw that QQ-train coming when this one went live; Warlocks can knock you out of stealth without line of sight simply because Hellfire would hit you from 30 yards away.

Shadow and Flame can now proc from Incinerate in addition to Shadow Bolt.
We want to redesign Improved Soulfire.
Censure will no longer break Repentance.

Meh.

As part of the Marks and Beastmaster buffs, we’re buffing Aimed Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot, and Kill Command.

That makes sense as basically everything but Survival is in terrible shape at the moment.

To reduce mage control, we are discussing reducing the duration of Frost Nova and Ring of Frost.

I think I speak for everyone on the planet when I say "you had better be doing more than 'discussing' reducing the duration of Frost Nova and Ring of Frost."

We want to make it clear that Combat is intended to use fast off-hand weapons. We also want to polish Revealing Strike a bit.
We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.
We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.

Duh.

Necrotic Strike needs to be affected by resilience.

Understatement of the expansion; woo, got hit for 8k and it's going to absorb 9-10k more healing... ya!

For Cataclysm, we changed Death Strike almost completely into an ability for Blood DK tanks, which is a bit unfortunate. We want to make sure it is still a useful button for Frost or Unholy DKs who need healing.

Did they not say (above) something akin to "we want to lower self-healing for dps classes"? Maybe I am just not getting it here, but it seems like that classes with the best self-healing are also the ones getting more self-healing love... just sayin'.

We also want to address DK mobility in PvP.

In terms of mobility for melees, the ranking looks like this:

Feral > Warrior > DK > Enhance > Rogue > Ret Pally

If they want to "address" DK mobility, it better be in the context of how popping AMS and IBF at the same time is nigh-equivalent to using Bubble in terms of being able to be stopped or slowed.

We think we overnerfed Every Man for Himself, and are reverting it back to a 2-minute cooldown again. We might evaluate other racials after we’ve seen more PvP.

... maybe ... It really depends on how strong the trinkets are from PvE. The main problem was when you would go against a human mage (or something) who had two amazing trinkets from heroic lich king encounters dropping ridiculous burst damage because of them. If the PvP trinkets actually upgrade from season to season, then at the very least EMFH will not be so game-breaking because the stats should be a wash.

“GC, is this the final list of changes? Does this mean I can expect no changes for my class? Does this mean you don’t care about me?”
No. This is some stuff we are looking at so that you’ll have some context if you see changes on a future PTR. The final list of class patch notes for the next patch will doubtless be much longer.

I hope so... there is something to be desired amongst these brief glimpses into the next big thing. Again, I still have not trained Stampeding Roar for how awful it is, and I do not plan to unless completely overhauled.

NEW ARENA SEASON

2010-12-14T10:20:00.000-08:00

Finally...

Okay, season nine; we need to talk a bit about this stuff. First things first - the basics we need to get out of the way. In Cataclysm, the arena points system has had an overhaul (and a much-needed one, in my opinion). Instead of playing your ten matches and getting points based on your final team rating (and personal rating), you have a points "cap". The way this works is by being assigned at the beginning of the week. So, let's say you end the week at 2000 team and personal rating. As soon as the server resets go through and the next week starts, your point-cap will be determined via that 2k team rating. Next, you have to actually play and win arena matches to get to the cap; each win is worth a certain number of conquest points and (I think) they are given out after each win up to the cap. The idea is that you can actually get your week's-worth of points TODAY if you were so inclined (and you win that much).

Okay, another aspect to discuss here is that there are two different sets entirely to purchase, and presumably this will remain the case throughout the entire expansion. The first set is purchasable via honor points (which you should have 4k of today if you had grinded properly before Cata was released), and it is an entire set of gear including Boots/Belt/Bracer/Back/Rings/etc. This is not really a change, but if you take this entire model and notice that there is also an arena/ratedBG set of gear with Boots/Belt/Bracer/etc then you start to see the difference. That is, you can acquire an entire set of gear based solely upon your success in BGs and you can acquire an entire set of gear based solely on doing arenas or rated bgs. This is something that is entirely appealing to me because I absolutely hate doing BGs in order to gear up for the arena. I may have to do so this week only, but at the very least, I will be able to do arenas with Guntir to kill time and earn points.

The last thing I want to point out is that Ferals and Frost Mages have largely gone under the radar in terms of receiving the nerfbat. That leads me to believe that we (Guntir and I) need to get into the threes bracket hard and early to climb before the inevitable nerfbat swinging sets in. Likely, there will be a week or two (or in case this is the DK system of season five; a season or so) where we are overpowered, and so we need to just grind like madness to be at or near the top. Sadly, I have not even hit 85 yet... my social life is getting in the way of my grinding life over and over again. I am half-way to 85 right now, but stuck at work, so likely I will hit 85 tonight and start looking for a decent Frost Mage to accompany Guntir and I on a 3v3s team to roll to the top.

I think that early-on in the expansion, double-melee+healer comps are going to be the best simply because of the lack of resilience on gear; however, as people get more and more gear, I expect that trend to die down a bit in favor of hybrid-comps (ranged+melee+healer). I am only thinking of starting the season as Feral+Frost+Disc because of the relative strength of both of the DPS classes involved and the arguably insane control this comp brings to the table. Rest assured, I will be spamming Trade tonight with:

"LF 2200+ experienced Frost Mage for Feral+Frost+Disc, PST"

SO DAMNED BUSY

2010-12-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

The reason I haven't been posting... well, okay there are a few reasons: first, I am now grinding in all my free time; second, I started going to the gym (again) about three weeks ago right after work, so I don't get home and done making/eating dinner and cleaning the dishes until around 7pm (which doesn't leave much time for grinding given that I wake up at 6:30 >_<); third, I have been extremely busy at work, so posting during the day is difficult as well; and fourth, it is the holiday season and in such fashions my girlfriend and I have been attending and throwing a number of parties and shopping and whatever-else during most of my free time. I think (read: hope) that after I hit 85 and plow through some BGs for honor gear and what-not the holiday party scene will have died down a bit and my schedule will become a bit more regular meaning I can actually fit in an hour to compose a post (usually it takes that long; today it will take 15m because that is what I have).

Today, I want to talk about gemming. First things first, however: Rake is bugged at the moment. Rake is ticking for me (81) for around 10k (crits) on mobs and closer to 6k (crit) on players. I do not expect this to remain permanently. That being said, Mastery is still by far and large our best stat against targets who can live longer than 10 seconds (for grinding I would still very much suggest stacking agility until you are blue in the face). It is important to note, however, that agility is ALMOST as good as Mastery, so you will not want to end up skipping socket bonuses for the most part.

Yellow - Mastery
Blue - Hit (to cap); Spell Pen (to cap); Stam+Mastery (green gem)
Red - Agility

Easy-peazy, right? If you cannot meet the hit and spell-pen caps via solid colored gems, replace red gems with purple gems of agility+hit/pen. The reason for this is as I explained before as Mastery is just the stronger of the two.

I would also like to point out that there exists a piece of PvP gear (shoulders) with expertise on it... I know that this is stupid, but I petitioned against it while on beta pretty vigorously and Blizzard did not seem to care at all. Reforge as much of it as you can to Mastery. Also, as far as my testing went on the Beta, the PvP Gloves do NOT have a bonus attributed to them, and if that remains true into S9, consider using your Wrathful Gloves instead; the stats are a lot lower, but that reduced cost to Skull Bash is imperative.

EDIT:

Oh... here's another thing that's been bothering me: people are already talking about how we are going to have "less critical strike chance in PvP" in Cataclysm because we will be reforging everything to Mastery. First off, this is simply wrong for the reason of not being able to reforge ALL our critical strike rating to Mastery, only a small piece of it and only if that piece of gear does not already have Mastery; second off, we still stack agility pretty hard and that aids our critical strike rating rather directly; and third, even if we are walking around with 30% critical strike chance, that is actually MORE than most Ferals had effectively in PvP settings in Wrath since Resilience USED TO reduce your chance to strike critically by as much as 15% (and most PvP Ferals were rocking 45% crit in full Wrathful), but it does not any more... so effectively we should have roughly the same effective critical strike chance in Cataclysm that we did in Wrath.

I think it's that resilience bit that keeps getting people. There is definitely going to be some lowered critical strike chances in the PvE environments, but that's a good thing in my opinion. Ferals were (arguably still are) too dependent upon critical strikes for building combo points to use our finishers, but in Cataclysm we seem to have enough critical strike chance to build our finishers in a good amount of time and keep them up long enough to land more. Additionally, we have more cooldowns to use and our damage is spread more amongst our bleeds than our direct damage abilities, so it will matter less about Shredding and more about Ripping/Raking (and they're our two least expensive and best damage-dealing abilities).

Been a Minute!

2010-11-22T11:55:00.000-08:00

Man... work has been super-hectic. I have not been able to find the time to play WoW, let alone write posts about it. Okay, well now it is Thanksgiving Week, which means that my workload has diminished a bit so I can crank this post out.

Tomorrow, the world ends! The Cataclysm is officially happening tomorrow; no, not the expansion, but all the stuff that leads up to the expansion: the world cracking, Deathwing escaping, the world changing, etc. While this is kind of cool, there are still no skirmishes (as far as I know), and therefore there is no PvP. No grinding as well will amount to no WoW worth playing. Let us face facts here, battlegrounds pale in comparison to the Arena in terms of actual PvP. The Arena is just more intense and more bang for your buck in terms of time committed and fun gained.

We have had a while now for people to play the new 4.0 build on Live and determine some understandings about the change of the game. The funny thing is that I played some Battlegrounds as Feral a bit to test some things out, and while the healing has been drastically nerfed and many healers are feeling underwhelmed with the changes, Guntir is still a dominant healer with me around. We walked into BGs with healers in those bgs complaining about how hard things were and yet Guntir and I were facerolling everything in our path. So badly were we beating these guys that we just stopped doing them... there was no challenge.

Here is a funny little post out of Arena Junkies that I thought was worth putting up. It has a poll amongst Arena Junkie members (that is, people who have hit 2400 in any bracket) as to which class (dps) will be the most overpowered in Cataclysm. Right now, the number one class is obviously Mages since Frost is essentially "Proc Fingers of Frost, spam Icelance, collect points." However, the interesting bit is which class is #2 on the "OP-Meter." That is right; it is Ferals claiming the cream-of-the-crop voting for #2. I can see a number of reasons why this might be, but it basically amounts to "Rip and Rake do TONS of damage with Mastery being our best stat, and now we don't need SR up 100% AND we were given a kick to deal with casters." In my opinion, the big change there is the Kick... although it is hard to argue about SR not being mandatory for reasonable damage given that it costs so many combo points. As a prerequisite for damage, it was a hindrance, but as simply extra white damage, it can be used at 1 point after the full ramp-up of Rip/Rake for basically 50% more white swing damage for nearly free.

Let's see... changes... changes... oh, Leader of the Pack is being nerfed from 8% healing to 4% healing on the proc, which I think everyone saw coming. At least the mana portion stayed the same (8% base mana returned; I wish this was total) so we still have powerful shapeshifting (ss'ing is cheaper than in 3.3.5 even at 85; it's awesome). Although, Natural Shapeshifter is still in the Resto tree, and for the life of me I have no idea why. OH, Vengeance is going to remain on the Feral after leaving Bear Form (might be canceled if you enter cat form though) so we can actually shapeshift out of Bear Form in PvP to drop snares or throw a Cyclone or what-have-you and keep our additional attack power; that'll be nice. Other than that, there is not much to say on this front.

Comps-wise, Guntir and I keep talking about threes comps to run in Cataclysm... we LIKE the idea of having a DK with us, but all signs out of the Beta so far is that DKs will be less than amazing at 85 even with Necrotic Strike. Only time will tell, but we are keeping our options open, and with Mages getting the #1 slot on that list, it isn't outside the realm of possibility for us to run Feral+Frost+Disc, which might be a strong comp.

Sweet Sassy Mollassy!

2010-11-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

Update:

Exactly as I predicted, these numbers are in reference to the first level versions. The tooltips have been updated to their level 85 equivalents which largely mean no changes whatsoever for max level.

I will not put them up here, as it would take a bit of scrolling to get my synopsis, but Blizz has just reported a new Beta build (which I will devote another post to when I have tested it out) which basically hacked EVERYONE'S damage down by a huge amount. Everyone's direct damage, that is.

I will be hard to tell, but here are the Feral notes thus far:

* Mangle (Cat Form) now deals 184% normal damage, down from 360%.
* Mangle (Bear Form) now deals 95% normal damage, down from 230%.
* Bear Form now increases Stamina by 10%, down from 25%.
* Survival Instincts now reduces damage taken by 50%, down from 60%. Cooldown changed to 3 min, down from 5 min.
* Shred now deals 267% damage, down from 350%. Additional damage reduced by 25%, from 1156 to 882.
* Savage Defense now reduces damage from the next physical attack that strikes you by 35% of your attack power, down from 65%.
* Swipe now deals 232% weapon damage, down from 335%.
* Ravage (Cat Form) now deals 505% damage, down from 850%. Additional damage reduced by 40%, from 2809 to 1669.
* Ravage! (Stampede) now deals 505% damage, down from 850%. Additional damage reduced by 8%, from 1817 to 1669.
* Claw now deals 77% of normal damage, down from 155%.

The interesting thing to note here is that these are all in reference to another blue post which suggested that this build had changed the way that all abilities are scaling with level now, and get stronger as you level up.

This is LIKELY to be a holdover from those changes. The damage components listed here seem entirely too low to be level 85 numbers, but we shall see once the patch gets deployed... but I think that these are the initial numbers for when these abilities are first learned, and the "down from X" is what the numbers will be at 85.

Druidify - Bored Druid Musings

Whoa, Monday Happened!

How About 'dem Purps!?

MoP is a Helluva Drug

Whoa

Mondays Are Hard

The Second Monday

The Honor Grind

It's Monday!!!

About the SOPA Thing...

Oh Dat MS...

Better Late Than...

It is Not Monday, I Know!

Those Were the Days

On an Issue of Stats Continued

On an Issue of Stats

Class Balance Q&A

Let's Talk Turkey!

God Damn It Blizz...

The Continued Decline

Old Habbits and All That

Sorry Guys...

New PTR Build (14133)

PTR Build (14107)

Just a Tiny Rebuttal

4.2 Patch Notes Updated

4.2 on the PTR already???

4.1 is Live!

Oh my...

Nothing But Bads

Let's Have an Update

Guntir is a Baws & PTR Build (13812)

New PTR Build (13793)

No Video This Week

Ballocks... Video Dilemma

Well, it's Thursday

Let's Talk About 4.1

Still no video today...

I.... uhm....

I know, I know...

Bit of a Delay

BAH!

DISPELCLAW

Feral comps

Oh what's this!?

Let's ask some questions and give some suggestions

Uhmmm...

OH, FUCK ME RUNNING!

4.0.6 Going Live Soon

4.0.6 PTR *UPDATE...soon*

4.0.6 PTR

A New Year!

NEW ARENA SEASON

SO DAMNED BUSY

Been a Minute!

Sweet Sassy Mollassy!

4.0.6 PTR UPDATE...soon