I am working on a post for this new build; there are LOTS of Druid changes to discuss! I will edit this post when it is done.

Here are the Druid changes in the latest build:

Balance
* Soothe Animal is now named Soothe - Soothes the target, dispelling all enrage effects.


Feral
* Frenzied Regeneration now Increases maximum health by 30%, increases health to 30% (if below that value), and converts up to 10 rage per second into health for 20 sec. Each point of rage is converted into 3% of max health.
* Savage Roar now increases autoattack damage done by 50% instead of physical damage done by 30%.
* Bash no longer interrupts spellcasting for 3 sec.
* Enrage now increases physical damage taken by 10% instead of reducing base armor.
* Survival Instincts now Reduces all damage taken by 60% for 12 sec. Only useable while in Bear Form or Cat Form. Instant, 5 min cooldown
* Heart of the Wild now increases your maximum mana by 5/10/15% instead of increasing your Intellect by 2/4/6%.


Restoration
* Master Shapeshifter bonus increased from 2% to 4% for all forms.
* Furor now gives you a 33/66/100% (up from 20/40/60%) chance to gain 10 rage when you shapeshift into Bear form and you keep up to 33/66/100 (up from 20/40/60) of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form. Now increases your total Intellect by 2/4/6%. (Old - Only increased in Moonkin form)
* Naturalist is back as a Tier 2 Talent. Reduces the cast time of your Healing Touch and Nourish spells by 0.15/0.35/0.5 sec.

Okay... these all have pretty crazy ramifications as it pertains to Ferals; let's dive in!

Soothe is interesting if only for the following reason: Restos/Balance Druids can knock Savage Roar off of Ferals now. While this might seem huge, SR has been changed pretty severely, so we will reserve judgment for a bit.

Frenzied Regen is essentially its old self AND the old Survival Instincts lumped into the same ability. This is baller on the one hand because it means that Bear Form gets two medium survival cooldowns lumped into one huge survival cooldown, and I still think we will be going Bear Form more and more in Cataclysm for survivability, so this is baller.

Enrage now increases physical damage taken by 10% instead of decreasing armor horribly. This doesn't really matter as we never really use it in PvP. Bash no longer interrupts, well that makes sense because now we have Skull Bash. Heart of the Wild has had its Intellect scaling changed in favor of maximum mana scaling... I think this is to keep Boomers/Restos from getting HUGE Intellect instead of HUGE mana... having more mana is the intent of this talent, but Intellect gives crit as well as mana, so it's not really where the devs wanted it. This change won't really matter for Ferals, but whatever... we care about the AP, so we will still take it.

Survival Instincts is now the equivalent of Shield Wall... all Ferals will be taking this talent for PvP builds... period. This has been something I think Feral (PvP) has needed for a really long time - a defensive cooldown that matters. It would be amazing if this went live before 4.0, but it would make Feral a powerhouse in PvP and the OBVIOUSLY OP-est tank in PvE end-game.

Furor has been updated to do what we all expected it would: work as the Live's version at 5/5. This is awesome... nothing else to say.

Master Shapeshifter has had its effect doubled (4% crit in Cat Form now), but it still is a talent which reads: "Increases you critical strike chance in Cat Form by 0/0/0/4%." It is for this reason that I believe this talent (and hopefully NSS) will be completely removed before Cataclysm ships... no one will be taking this talent if they can avoid it.

Naturalist is back, but no longer mandatory for Ferals as it no longer increases physical damage done; beautiful!

Savage Roar
Savage Roar deserves a heading as it has gone through the biggest change we have seen yet. SR has gone from "increases all damage done by 30%" to "increases autoattack damage by 50%." The main thing to note here after much testing is the following:

using SR does not affect ANY Yellow damage at all. It makes your paperdoll damage go up, but it does NOT affect abilities which are supposedly based off of your paperdoll (Mangle/Shred/Ravage).

So what does this mean??? What direction is Blizzard taking SR!?

Well, it is going to be more like Slice and Dice for Rogues. Currently, you use SnD for added sustained damage, which is something one would keep up 100% in the PvE environment, but is only "nice to have up" in PvP. If you watch high-end Rogue PvP vids, they very rarely have SnD up in PvP except for scenarios where they are bursting hard with Bloodlust and going for a kill inside a stun (read: RLS, hRLS). Therefore, we can lightly assume that Blizzard wants a similar play-style for Ferals.

The implication here is that we are no longer going to be penalized for NOT having SR up before dealing damage, thus our ramp-up time has dropped SIGNIFICANTLY from Wrath->Cataclysm. Instead of playing the game as "Pounce, Mangle, SR, Rake, Shred" and keeping SR up 100%, we can play more along the lines of "Pounce, Mangle, Rake, Shred" and only use SR when we plan on doing extra sustained damage... say after we have ramped up entirely and have extra combo points to spare. Here is an example:

Pounce, Mangle, Rake, Shred, HOLY-CRAP-OUR-FIRST-FINISHER-IS-NOT-SR Rip/Maim

The first rotation allows us to get ALL our damage dealing out into play. Now, you can easily Shred again, and apply SR if you want some more sustained damage while you wait for energy to regenerate, OR if energy-regeneration is something that feels natural, maybe you continue your rotation and just keep Rip/Maim rolling and neglect SR entirely!!!

It is entirely too early to tell whether SR will still be mandatory for PvP-damage, particularly given that the focus in Cataclysm is going to shift FROM Burst TO Sustained. If that shift is minor, and we still need to deal burst damage more-so than sustained but no one will be getting killed in a blanket silence, then maybe we won't use SR in PvP except during kill-windows when we have ramped everything else up... say you applied Rip/Rake/Mangle and now you're pooling to 100 energy and 1cp, you use SR, then ShredShredShredTFShredFB for some really strong burst WHILE your DoTs are ticking and your white swings are doing way more damage. However, if sustained is KING in Cataclysm, then SR will most certainly be required, but not necessarily 100%. I could very easily see out-last being more important, so if you are playing Feral+Priest, you would do something more along the lines of your opener, get some mana burns out there, hit him with Maim, get some more mana burns out there, apply Rip, then as he gets out of LoS you apply Rip, then get a 1-2 point Savage Roar going for sustained damage while he heals up and you try to get your position back in line to land some more stuns for Mana Burns.

Another interesting aspect of this is that it makes Fury Swipes that much more appealing. If white damage is going to be such a large portion of our overall damage, then being able to swing again every 6 seconds would be pretty beneficial.

I'm super-swamped at work... but I'll try to get more updates in as I can!

No srsly... who stole my headers!?

Sooooooo, a fat lot of nothing is going on on both Live and Beta right now, so I figured we would talk about some data-mined nonsense. First and foremost, they have introduced the engineering helmets (though no one on the beta is an engineer, as far as I can tell) and their stats are somewhat insane. For instance, the Agile Bio-Optic Killshades (probably the funniest name ever, btw) have 341 Agility on them as well as ... wait for it ... 512 stamina. While we do not see any secondary stats (haste, mastery, etc), we sort of assume we WILL see those stats on there before too long. However, the main point of bringing all this up is to make mention that they have 3 sockets in them: a Meta socket (like all helms), a "cogwheel" socket and a "hydraulic pump" socket.

Those last two might be weird sounding, but the idea is simple: Engineers are going to have the ability to make helm-only-gems which fit, presumably, only in helm sockets. Cogwheels give you useful secondary stats (such as Crit, Haste, Mastery, or Dodge) and Hydraulic Pumps give you less-useful secondary stats (such as Hit, Parry, Expertise... and spirit randomly... though we may see Spell Penetration here as well). What is really interesting about all this is that these bonuses are roughly twice as much as epic-quality JEWELER'S-ONLY gems of the same stats (think Dragon's Eye of Cataclysm); for instance, the Haste gem for jeweler's only (we're talking the "limit 3" gems here which are better than epic-quality gems) is worth 67 haste rating, whereas the "Quick Cogwheel" gives 132 haste rating.

I don't know how they plan on implementing this permanently, given that non-engineering gear will not have a Cogwheel and/or Hydraulic Pump socket, but I assume it will be something like an enchant that Engineers get which allows us to add one of these sockets to a piece of gear in place of an enchant. In this way it will be very similar to Leatherworkers and their "Fur Lining" or w/e.

In addition, the epic-quality Blacksmithing weapons have been data-mined as well. Normally, I wouldn't talk about this, but since Feral is getting DPS FROM DPS on weapons finally and we care less about Feral Attack Power (since it won't exist in Cataclysm), we might as well get the polearm, right? The Elementium Poleaxe has 623.3 dps, 341 agility, 512 stamina, 228 critical strike rating, and 228 mastery rating. Would we have enjoyed Haste more than Critical Strike Rating; sure, but this gives us a balance-point to talk about with stats.

What do I mean? Well, the Wrathful Greatstaff has 325.8 dps, 167 agility, 275 stamina, 2 sockets, 106 critical strike rating, and 122 resilience rating on it. We can see while we are gaining 82 item levels, we are also gaining almost 300 dps on the weapon itself, as well as nearly doubling the stamina and critical strike rating. While it is true that the Greatstaff has two sockets... we're talking about the entry-level blacksmithing pattern here; this item looks nutty. I guess I should become friends with a main-spec'd Blacksmith...

Anyway, I'm really getting excited for Cataclysm. I am roughly DONE with Wrath; there is really nothing much left to do. I decided yesterday that I would work on a Resto set just to say I had 5/5 of all three specs... I can't wait for Feral to be somewhat more viable in PvP and at least be back to a point in time where balance-patches come out with some regularity. The last patch we had was Ruby Sanctum... the last patch that affected game-play (particularly as it pertains to PvP) was ICC. This expansion has gotten stale and we still have a few months to go...

Notice how my post-titles don't have that black/green background anymore? Why!? Also, the comments are in the wrong spot... I dunno... fucking with this I guess... UHHHHHH, nothing really happening on Live, nothing really happening on Beta. There's a bunch of broken going on on Cataclysm right now, this is somewhat infuriating, but whatever... who cares, it'll get fixed eventually.

... sigh ...

Yeah, there is straight up NOTHING going on on Live. Half the arena community on our BG has simply stopped playing; I half-attribute this to the fact that Starcraft 2 was released recently, and I have-attribuet this to the fact that this is the longest arena season ever in the history of PvP. Honestly, if you have looked at my armory at all, you will notice that I have two separate full PvP sets now, and I'm working on a third. I have the full Feral set, obviously, and the full Balance set... I'm only now working on a Resto set because I keep getting arena points and I have nothing else to spend them on.

Seriously, it's the most annoying thing about this game. We aren't going to get Gladiator titles (well... we're unlikely to, anyway. The lag on our BG has gotten ridiculous!), so we have been jumping teams over and over again; we are playing a spell-cleave 3s team with an alt of a 2400 Hunter. At first, it was Owlplay (Shadow+Boomer+RShammy), but we are going to try out PingPongCleave (Boomer+Ele+Disc) instead just because Guntir is better at healing and actually enjoys it more... which I find hard to believe, but whatever. Also, PPC actually has more burst since Ele+Boomer can set up for crazy nuke-sprees and if Disc isn't super-pressured, it can turn on a dime and drop Holy Fire, Smite, SW:D, etc.

Guntir finally got bored enough to run daily heroics with me (and do an ICC25 or two for Rep, Gear, and Badges... I won a 277 neck and a 277 ring as Boomer on Heroic Lootship and ended up giving Guntir the neck because it didn't have any haste... and it actually worked really well for him!) and so he got enough badges to pick up a Purified Lunar Dust. We ran some 2s skirms last night with tons of lag as Boomer+Disc and he basically never uses mana. He was eating Mana Burns against this one Mage+Priest team and it basically boiled down to me killing the mage at the end and Guntir still had 12k mana while the opposing priest was nearly OOM after Fiend and Hymn. This leads me to believe that during match-ups against teams that AREN'T double-dps (which are 50% of our matches, it seems), we should have a better mana-advantage. Teams like War+RDruid where mana-longevity really comes into play since we need to out-mana the Druid to win will be where this trinket really shines. Anyway, we're looking forward to running some 2s to see what it's like.

Other than that... I've just been farming money assuming that Cataclysm will have some amazing mandatory gold-sink. How have I been doing this? I mentioned there's nothing to do now, right? We have been running BGs for funsies all the time and basically I just take every 10k honor I make, buy an epic un-cut Yellow gem, and sell it on the AH for around 100g. I have been doing this multiple times per day for the last couple weeks... I'm up to something silly like "4k gold earned in 2 weeks work!"

Bah... I'm hoping something INTERESTING happens on Beta... as of now, Feral doesn't scale, doesn't have defensive cooldowns, has tons of mobility, but is otherwise boring to play. We shall see...