I like him. When he fights the trolls, he does it in the way that I do, except his posts are in blue, so they hold a little more weight.

During the beta, I told the active posters that I got 1 gold every time people dragged out certain tired catchphrases or arguments.

Among them were "broken promises" and "slap to the face" of course. But a big one is "It's clear nobody at Blizzard plays or understands my class." That one is making a comeback in recent days.

Aside from being both untrue and irrelevant, it is a logical fallacy. You subvert the process of trying to disprove the argument when you attack the person making the argument instead of the argument itself.

If your thesis is that mana needs to be unlimited in order for the game to be balanced, positing that Blizzard doesn't understand the issue is not a particularly strong way to prove your point.

Later in the thread, he post this gem:

Saying "Logical Fallacy" is a redundancy.

I actually have a philosophy degree (and a mage). I took logic courses.

I just like the way this guy thinks. He is trying to get everyone to shut up and think about the game before complaining, and while I feel this is likely an exercise in futility, he keeps up the fight on a day-to-day basis. In fact, he has gotten into threads that I have started and given me very clear and concise reasons as to why I am an idiot for suggesting such nonsense. For the most part, I tend to agree with his claims (as he often backs them up with numbers, and those are hard to refute), but I keep conversations rolling to try and keep the feral druids at the top of the list for buffs. However, I have been trying to keep feral concerns on the low-down while fueling the fires about Maim. It really does seem like no one is aware of 1) how much damage ferals are putting out on the ptr, 2) how much utility druids have been given on the ptr, and 3) how much survivability druids have been given.

Arena Junkies have posted their data on the various Arena title cutoffs. They claim that Duelist will be between ~75 and ~450. While this definitely illustrates a smaller sample size for 2s (as Duelist cutoff was at basically 850 in s4), it also demonstrates a HUGE rating bubble, as to get into the 450 bracket you need to be at least 2050 team rated. This rating is probably unattainable at our team's current amount of play and our luck. This week we faced 8/10 counter-comps, all of them were pretty bad, so we ended up beating three of them and dusting the regular teams. Most noticeably absent this week was holy+dk, which has been (and currently still is) the flavor of the month, and one against which we excel. If we started playing more than ten matches per week, we might be able to pump our team up enough to break 2k, but getting into the Duelist group will be no small task, it seems (and it really has never been... it just seems that way because I have done it... I would be very sad to lose my Duelist title). Also, we will need to get a little lucky in terms of our opponents. I worry that the new rating system is going to assume that our skill level lives around 1850 and so it will not be giving us any more 2k rated teams (which is where the dk+holy teams live). Instead, we will continually get priest+hunter and other counter-comps which have a LOT of trouble with dk+holy, but mop the floor with our team.

In other news, the Armory has been updated to keep track of arena match statistics and rating changes. It is really neat, it shows you the names (with links) of all your opponents ever faced on your team, who won each encounter, how much damage/healing was done, and how much rating changed. The only thing missing is a layout of how well your team preforms against your opposition's composition. This is something that can easily be done, but unless they do it in the armory, I will probably end up making a little tool to make requests to the armory to pull all pertinent team information, including opposing teams, and show a graph/stats pane illustrating who are your counter-comps and who are your bread-n-butter comps. This is really helpful, as a lot of the time we know the big ones (our team does well against pally+dk, but very very poorly against hunter+healer), but ignore the smaller ones.

Also, Blizzard has implemented an Arena unit frame, which acts similarly to Proximo. This is pretty nice since Proximo is basically a hack that abuses mouseovers and nameplates whereas the Blizzard unit frame is actually updated as one would expect the game to update it. Additionally, and I need to test this further as it may have just been my imagination but it seemed that it would tell you your opponents even if they were stealthed, but have them greyed out to indicate that they are stealthed. This is pretty handy against double-stealth teams, and it also is nice knowing that the unit frame is updated independently of user mouse actions and targeting.

Taking these two facts together, I might be able to make an application which will download your opponent history from the armory, parse it to see who you counter and who counters you, let's the user assign strategy notes to certain compositions, then output a data file that can be read by a WoW addon which will, once the arena unit frame loads both opponents, displays the strategy in party chat (or raid warning, or w/e). That would be pretty neat...

Apparently, Feral dps is ridiculously overpowered on the public test realm. Against Hodir, Lisanna (voted one of the top 3 raiding feral druids in the game) pulled something in the realm of "high 6 to low 7k damage." This stands out most notably against the backdrop that is their best warlock and mage damage was around 6k on the nose, while one of the best PvE rogues in the game (Ohnoes... that's his name) pulled an astonishing 8k sustained...

While I do agree that Ferals are likely doing more damage than Blizzard intends them to, they are probably second in line for nerfs behind rogues at this point... as combat rogues have made their presence known on the ptrs thanking the devs for the changes that turned them back into the 222223222223222224222223-mashers of yore while the feral druids, who are accustomed to being treated as witch-hunt-victims, are trying to fly under the radar. In fact, this report was brought to the public attention by Ohnoes because his guild-mate Lisanna was within 1000 SUSTAINED dps of him...

Nerf Ferals?

Well, I definitely doubt that we will make it to live with the changes as they presently are... but we should get to live with, if nothing else, a buff to our sustained damage and I don't seem them removing Primal Gore (or changing it, for that matter), which is where most of our extra damage is coming from... though people are still complaining about Shred. At this point, I'm hoping they nerf shred so I can go to a Mangle-spam spec in PvP... it's just easier to maintain.

It has been a while... it seems like I have lost the fervor required for daily posting due to either lack of interest or lack of news. Sadly, I fear it is the former. Oh well, we have news and the want to post, so here goes!

We have been slowly climbing the ladder as feral+disc. We have gotten to 1850ish this week and shown no signs of stopping (except for last week when we went 4-6 against a slew of counter-comps... I hate healer+hunter so much). This week we played against:

hunter+shamang
disc+rogue x2
feral+disc (first ever mirror match on this team!)
druid+warrior (a classic comp)
druid+ret (...wat)
uhdk+bdk x2 (...wat)
holy+dk
mage+dk

We lost to the hunter+shamang team, obviously. The first match against the disc+rogue, the rogue sapped me out of stealth which was bullshit given that I have the same stealth level as him IFF he has the cloak enchant AND I have the goggles, so if he picked up Heightened Senses in Subtlety, we should have the same stealth level and steath detect. That match was just a cc-train for me, but the second time we faced them, I caught the rogue in stealth and killed him in pounce+maim as the disc priest just bubbled him (which was promptly dispelled). Honestly, people complain about feral's burst capabilities, but against that team, everyone will burst the rogue as he was wearing zero resilience... he's just going to explode to melees. We beat the double dk team, but it was pretty dicey in the first match. I chose poorly and picked the blood dk to target instead of the unholy (still not really sure how I am supposed to tell the difference). So, I was basically peeling the entire match and attempting to keep it 1 vs. guntir until I could ghost one. It got to the point where guntir was silenced, rooted, at 2000 hp, and limping away from a dk that had gone immune to cyclone while the other (within range of death coil) was waiting for guntir get into LoS. I ended up using tranquility and all their interrupts were on cooldown. At that point, we got guntir back up to ~75% between his healing and my own paltry healing, I finally killed the blood dk, then we won. The second time we faced them, I picked the OTHER dk, and basically kept him locked down while guntir kited the blood away from the unholy's pets.

We lost the mirror match... their druid was just much better geared than I was. He had Black Ice and all PvE gear (he FB crit guntir with Pain Suppression up for 4k...), and the last match we lost was against the classic comp of druid+warrior. Now, this warrior was fury, but that doesn't make it any worse than the old-days version. I was furious over this loss because we really should have won... I mistook guntir's calling out "druid is completely oom" as "attack the druid, he's oom." Not that I heard him wrong - I just hear that a healer is out of mana and my vision goes red and the target changes. The worst part was that we had the warrior at 50%, and guntir and I were at full with guntir at around 2000 mana. If I stuck on the warrior and FFF'd the druid to keep him from drinking, it would have been a win. The other thing about this comp is that warriors do not take enough damage from me.

Which segways me nicely to my next paragraph. Patch 3.1 is bringing change; more specifically, 3.1 is bring balance. Feral druids are having their situational burst damage lowered, but their sustained damage increased. The devs have decided to do this in a few ways. Firstly, they have decided that getting 10k Shred crits when people are stunned is not exactly fair... and to be honest, rogues were nerfed for this exact reason, so they have changed the Glyph of Shred from "20% additional damage against stunned/inc'd targets" to "increases the duration of Rip by 2 seconds, up to 6." This will definitely make the PvE rotation easier to use as cycling these periodics will be less cumbersome. Secondly, they have changed Maim from a 7 second incapacitate that will break after a set amount of damage (usually 1 Shred crit will do the trick), to a 5 second stun that currently shares diminishing returns with Pounce, and while this will pose an interesting problem in PvP (having a talented 5 second stun and then a 5pt finisher stun for 2.5 seconds each of which are reduced by talents of most target classes >_<), it will actually be beneficial against warriors since they could zerker rage out of my incapacitate. It will, of course, be less helpful against mages as they can now blink out of it... but I don't really have much problem with mages anymore.

Well... that's basically it for the nerfs. Let's talk about buffs, since I am so damned upbeat about losing 20% damage to Shred. Firstly, they are adding in some more glyphs for ferals (a welcomed change). Glyph of Berserk will add 5 seconds to your Berserk, which is awesome, and Glyph of Savage Roar... which I'll get to in a moment. Secondly, they have changed the way Savage Roar works: instead of a 40% attack power increase, which has led to some amazing 15k attack power screenshots, SR will now provide 30% increased damage for the same duration. Whoa... 30% increased damage?!? Is this not just another multiplier to be tacked on to Shred!? Indeed, this 30% multiplier will replace the 20% multiplier from the Shred Glyph and then some... and it will be up against all opponents, not just stunned/inc'd, so long as SR is up. Additionally, the Glyph of Savage Roar increases SR's damage bonus by 6%... yeah.

On top of these glorious additions and changes, there is a new addition to the feral tree: Primal Gore. Primal Gore, and I quote, "grants the periodic damage from your Rake, Rip, and Lacerate abilities to critically hit." While this might sound like a luke-warm change, it's actually quite hot below the surface. For one, it increases my overall bleed damage by an amount equal to my critical strike rate, which is about 40-45% in PvP and about 50% in PvE. For two, it actually increases my damage by more than that, as the critical strikes from the bleeds are affected by talents and abilities which increase critical strike damage (such as Predatory Instincts and the meta gem). After some light testing on the PTR, I have seen my Rake (which until November 2008 was the worst of the feral druid abilities) critically tick for 4.5k and my Rip critically tick for 4k. This is going to bring some insane damage in the PvP scenario since it seems like we only face teams with high armor values.

To top all the changes off, Blizzard has decided that bears have too much survivability from talents, so they have reduced their armor gained from Survival of the Fittest from 66% armor additions to 33%, and they have reduced the amount of stamina gained from Heart of the Wild from 20% to 10%. Now... I always take Survival of the Fittest because it gives me 6% crit avoidance in PvP... it's just good. Also, it provides 6% additional stats for 3 talent points... it's just GOOD. However, HotW has ALWAYS sat out like a sore thumb to me. It it 5 talent points that gets you about 1000 extra mana, 10% stam in bear form, and 10% attack power in cat form... it's just NOT that good anymore. 10% attack power is good, but we will be switching to agility-stacking next patch because of the critically striking bleeds... so we will not be stacking attack power anyway, we will be stacking crit. So, because of the nerfs to Bear Form's mitigation through stamina and armor, Blizzard has decided to give us Savage Defense, which is "when you critically strike, you are protected for 1 hit by a shield which will absorb 25% of your attack power." Now... as I have stated before, in PvP I currently have between 40 and 45 percent crit. If I go Bear Form, I can basically keep this up every GCD against most classes who it would matter against (rogues/dks). Also, it will absorb ~1000 damage for 1 hit, which is a healthy chunk of damage to mitigate.

All things considered, given the patch progress and the way that Blizzard is talking... we can probably expect to see 3.1 go live around April, and that will be a glorious day... dual specs going live will make me smile... regardless of these other changes.