I actually got this out on a Monday; who is surprised? Let's just dive on in to the blue post that every is talking about. First, I have to toot my own horn here a bit, since the change that GhostCrawler announced are roughly the same resilience changes I suggested at the end of January in my post How About 'dem Purps!? The exact implementation of my change is a bit different (and I actually think that it is a bit cleaner the way GC suggested it), but it amounts to the same thing - reward players for wearing PvP gear in a PvP context and somewhat punish players for wearing PvE gear in a PvP context (and vise versa).

As a really quick aside that everyone can agree on, Spell Resistance and therefore Spell Penetration are going to be removed from the game [finally]. GC said what has been on the lips of many players for a very long time (unless you played a warrior, then you do not see what the big deal is) - these stats are awful design and implementation. The fact that, as a melee, I am forced to spend  much of my stat budget on a stat to guarantee my CC landing in a PvP context was always pretty dumb. Almost every spell-caster would get this stat for free simply by wearing the PvP cloak with spell pen, but Feral and Enhancement have to gem and enchant for spell pen, which means we are losing out on actual role stats like agility and mastery. I think I speak for everyone when I say that we will all be happy to see it go.

Similarly, Hit and Expertise are finally going to make more sense to everyone. It looks like there will be a baseline 3% miss chance against a target at the same level (a subtle lowering here is nice), a 6% spell miss chance, and a 3% dodge chance. The Hit stat will continue to lower my chance to miss my target, which is good, but in addition to reducing the target's chance to dodge/parry, expertise will also lower my chance to miss with spells. What is really nice about this model is that (in MoP), Feral will be able to stack Hit up to the melee hit cap, then stack Expertise for a double-dip of effect: reducing my chance to miss with spells (up to the cap for Cyclone) and then covering the chance for enemies to dodge my attacks. This is actually quite nice for Feral, specifically, because it will mean that less of our item budget will have to go to hit and more can go to expertise to cover some of what Hit currently covers. Put simply, this will end up meaning less hit required and stacking enough expertise to cover Dodge from Mages/Priests/etc will also go to landing Cyclones.

Now we get to the good stuff: Resilience!

Resilience is being changed into two distinct stats - PvP Power and PvP Defense. Just as it does presently, defense will end up reducing damage taken from other players. Largely, the defensive side of resilience is going to be unchanged in theory, but probably going to reduce damage further than we expect it to currently. I will spend more time on this dynamic after explaining PvP Power.

PvP Power is going to increase the effectiveness of a player's role in PvP: if the player is a damage-dealer, then PvP Power is likely going to play a lot like attack power or spell power and increase damage done to other players; if the player is a healer, then PvP Power is likely going to play like Spell Healing and increase healing done to other players. Implementation is still left to be discussed here in terms of when these stats are used, though we have largely come to understand that when one player hits another, PvP Defense (currently resilience) and PvP Power will come into play; this dynamic will largely be unchanged in MoP. What we do not yet know is how and when PvP Power comes into play for healers, as they are always targeting another player (in either context - PvP or PvE). I suspect that the stat will "turn off" when in a raid or dungeon, but we will not know for sure for a while.

The really interesting change is how the gear will be itemized. Essentially, PvP gear will be a lower item level than the corresponding raiding tier's gear (by that we assume that Cataclysmic PvP gear will be iLvL 390 while the Deep Earth set is iLvL 397). This may end up meaning that the current tier PvP gear will be the same iLvL as the LFR set and would therefore mean that PvP gear can step into an LFR and compete (which we can now). In addition, the stats PvP Power and PvP Defense are going to be "free" in terms of stat allocation. This is a huge change in dynamic since it has always been that PvP gear would take a hit in stats to have resilience on it. As an example, all the PvP gear essentially has Resilience as a secondary stat instead of Mastery, Haste, or Crit which forces PvP plays to maximize one stat and forsake all others. In MoP, it looks like we may have gear that is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the LFR equivalent in terms of stat allocation, but will not have the same bonuses for equipping set pieces. This is a truly exciting change.

Going back to PvP Defense, since we expect that the dps-role stats to be improved, then we would expect that the defensive side of things would also need to be improved. As an example, we have something around 45% damage reduction in a full Cataclysmic set at present, and we still see teams that focus on training something to death in PvP and end up winning with shear force; in essence, the damage output is still extremely high for some. In MoP, when players are going to be wearing 30% damage reduction "for free" and getting a stat that improves their damage against players, we would expect that the defensive stat would have to further reduce the damage just to keep up. What we end up with is a nice balance (hopefully) between damage-dealing and each player's ability to survive the onslaught. Players will improve their defenses and offenses at a rate that roughly scales with gear, and we expect that losing X amount of PvP Power/Defense will be too much for top-tier players and will (hopefully) keep players from using PvE trinkets/set bonuses in high rated arenas/rbgs.

What no one has yet to point out, and I am certainly not going to bring it up on the forums, is that healing is largely unchecked. Take, for example, the situation where both Guntir and I get the same Chest-piece upgrade. I get a bonus to damage reduction the same that Guntir does, and I get a bonus to dealing damage while Guntir gets a bonus to healing done. Where the interesting bit lies is in the fact that while my damage output scales, so does my target's damage reduction - there is now a check (though it cannot keep up) for my damage gained. Guntir, on the other hand, gets more healing applied to a player but nothing reduces the healing done (except for MS-effects), so in the case where there is one dps and one healer, the healer could potentially outscale the damage of the dps player.

Sigh... already this change implies that Mortal Strike effects et al will remain in MoP as a crux of the PvP system. I know I should not be surprised, but I am a bit taken back by it none the less.

Next week marks Blizzard's Mists of Pandaria press event, and MMO-Champion is already suggesting that once the NDA lifts from that (March 19, apparently), we should expect to see Alpha/Beta starting on MoP. I would be surprised to see the Beta start that soon, but the last time we saw anything concerning MoP, we saw a really polished game with some implementation required to get things finished. Maybe we will see the MoP beta start in a few weeks, and if so, then I will be posting none-stop with what I find (recall, I am one of those suckers who bought the annual pass to get a MoP beta invite and DIII). All things considered, we are seeing a LOT of changes in MoP that, I believe, are for the best in terms of balance and increasing the fun of the game.

Sorry for the late post (again). I am simply too tired and do not have enough information to make a constructive post. Yeah, I could take another day or two and probably come up with a good topic, but I will just save it for next week. Instead, I will just post some things that happened of late.

Firstly, I found a Holy Paladin who hates himself as much as we do and we started running H8rsGunH8Cleave again. I tried the comp with a Blood in the Water build and my two-piece LFR bonus, and it worked pretty well at some points, but largely the loss of stats was too hard to overcome once we started getting matched against 2200 teams. We would end up stalemated for a long long time, then someone on our team (usually me) would get sloppy and cost us the match. We lost one to a Rogue+Enh+Disc team that was sitting around 2200 and shocked me.

Secondly, I watched and rewatched a number of Feral PvP videos just to see some play-styles of high-rated Ferals. I always feel like going back to damage-dealing as a paradigm makes for better play overall, so watching great Feral play can almost always teach me something. Notably, this time through I re-learned that I need to pool energy for burst opportunities. One of the problems I have with this is that in order to start a burst opportunity, I almost always want the healer to be CC'd and usually this means Cycloning them, but if I am pooling energy and combo points with bleeds rolling, then I will not really have the opportunity for the Cyclone. What I learned is that even though an early Cyclone can net a kill, it is usually disruptive to burst; almost all the high-rated Ferals I watch allow their teammates to use their CC first when initiating a burst attempt so that the Feral can follow with a Cyclone (since the first thing you do in the burst rotation is usually FB, we should have our instant cast available for the next 6 seconds in case of a trinket, and if no trinket is available, getting the burst window to be a double-FB rotation means that an instant Cyclone will be available against with 1-2 seconds left on a standard 8s CC).

Thirdly, I keep encountering Enhancement Shamans in just about every arena match. I do not know when Enhance became such a flavor, but since more than half the teams in arenas will have a Warlock on them and the other half will have a Priest, I can only assume that Tremor Totem sits behind the issue. In fact, we faced (and got completely stomped by) a Feral+Enhance+RSham team that was staggeringly strong. I know absolutely nothing about Enhancement and how they burst, but I took a screenshot of getting hit by Lava Lash for 40k in my 4700 resilience, so I have to assume that their burst revolves around that. Facing this team truly made me think about running it if I could find a decent Enhance shammy.

Lastly, I purchased a new application for recording video and audio (it handles the Skype recording for me, which is pretty dang cool). It is called ScreenFlow and it works amazingly. It does not cause any visual hangups, hiccups, or slow-downs, and it stores the videos as raw data so that I can create a video with limited compression and have really nice quality. Additionally, it records both the outbound and inbound sounds for me and keeps them as a separate track from the video, so I can include or exclude them on exporting to an editor. So, we may yet see the rebirth of my youtube channel and hopefully get some 3s footage out soon.

... that is is Monday once again. Okay, technically it is Tuesday after a Monday holiday, but I ended up doing quite a bit yesterday and somehow writing up a post did not make it into the schedule. Instead, Guntir and I spent the majority of the day playing arenas with a Hunter we knew. Junglecleave, as it is called, is a silly team composition. It provides a lot of offensive pressure, good spacing for all teammates, and a ton of instant-cast crowd control. We ended up doing very well against all the teams we faced except for RLS and ThugCleave (although, one ~2k ThugCleave was farming us and in desperation we tried the strat "throw everything we have at the Priest" and accidentally killed him before he used Pain Suppression). Interestingly, what I want to discuss has little to do with the match-ups and composition strengths and weaknesses, though that is interesting; Guntir said it best when we were discussing the StealthCleave we were running with Tent as "StealthCleave is a solid comp, but it gets countered by too many of the FotM comps [RLS, VIP, ThugCleave]."

No, composition and matching is interesting, but I want to talk about the Elo system for match-making. Long-time readers will, just now, have said "again!?" rather loudly. It is true, I have discussed this system ad nauseum back when it was first explained to the player base, but with recent MMR changes I feel it is worth another look. For those readers who are unfamiliar, the Elo system of "fair match-making" was originally introduced as a means for rating and matching professional Chess players. The idea is fairly straight-forward and easily understood by anyone who has stepped into the arena: a weighted system that suggests, rather accurately, whether a given player should or should not defeat another player. Specifically, if you are 1800-rated and you face a 1600-rated, you should defeat your opponent if both ratings are solidified.

Interestingly, what becomes contended is when and how ratings become solidified. As an example, I had something like 111 games played in 3s on my current team up to yesterday and we had something around an 1800 rating. In fact, we very quickly got to around 1800 and then sat there for a large number of those games; something like 50-60 games bubbling right around 1800. Yesterday, we decided to give JungleCleave a try and ended up playing 65 games; we went 39:26:0, which is exactly a 60% win-ratio. Again, for long-time readers, bells should be going off. At a 60% win-ratio, our team should be showing signs of improvement in the Elo system. Essentially, we were at ~1800 and getting matched against other 1800 teams (having been firmly solidified at 1800ish), and we were winning more than half of these matches. The Elo system corrects rating by giving out proportional rating amounts to winners and taking (what should be equal but is not any longer) some from the losers.

Okay, so this rehash is sort of boring and old-hat at this point; you go above 50% win-ratio and you move up; I ended up finishing around 1900 yesterday. My concern is the distance traveled, however, in that we ended up playing 65 games over the course of many hours and ended up only gaining ~100 rating with a 60% win-ratio. Obviously, other things factor into the mix; we did end up losing to a fair few 1700-1800-rated teams to whom we should not have lost, but we balanced that out by also beating a few 2k-rated teams. Essentially, our low-losses were about 50-50 with our high-wins (we farmed a 2k Kittycleave down to 1900; they had to be pissed), and we ended up carrying a 60% win-ratio against evenly matched teams.

What I am mainly annoyed by is the rate of change. I ended up having, and I use this term lightly because it was fun doing so, to play 65 games over the course of probably 4 hours to gain 100 rating. I feel a 60% win-ratio is pretty strong, though definitely not gladiator material. In fact, I would have to imagine that a 60% win-ratio, if sustained, would eventually get a team into gladiator range all things being equal. In fact, the Elo system subtly points us towards this fact by showing that once a team sits around 50%, their rating stops moving. Okay, so I guess that if we continue playing this team for weeks and weeks and maintain our 60% win-ratio, we will eventually hit 2.2k, but that seems like an awfully hard grind, when compared to the PvE content. Maybe it should be hard; maybe the MMR-reset that has made 2.2k almost Gladiator-range on my battlegroup was a good thing overall. We are seeing fewer 2400+ teams and basically no 3k teams, and maybe that means taht the MMR system is finally evening out.

I do not know... I just know that it is frustrating playing 4-5 hours of successful arena matches and only gaining 100 rating when I am still 300 rating away from the best weapon I can get. I keep joking with Guntir that if I ever get the shoulders in an LFR, I am going to respec to Blood in the Water and find a Resto Shaman to run double-healer Feral again. Recall, I made the double-healer Feral team work with a Holy Pally who did not speak much English and it was before the days of Vengeance being hilarious overpowered; largely, nothing has changed for that comp from season nine to season eleven except that the PvE gear available is much more easily attained and much less of a detriment for me to wear. I have trouble giving up two pieces of iLvL 403 for two pieces of iLvL 384; twenty item levels is quite a bit of stats to give up, but the increase in damage and pressure from a 60%-range Blood in the Water is extremely appealing.

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On a different swing, the fine folks over at MMO-Champion are of the opinion that the internal alpha has started and is likely pretty far along over at Blizzard. The reasons for this belief are pretty lacking except that the community managers have been answering questions on the forums, which is unusual, and posting in-game screen shots of tooltips with the spellbook opened in the background with texts like "NYI [not yet implemented".

I tend to agree that this evidence looks strong enough to support a claim that the internal alpha has begun. Usually, this means that while things are being nailed down, information will start to trickle out more and more; however, since Blizzard is planning a press event, rather than BlizzCon, in mid-March, I have to believe that the Friends and Family Alpha will not begin until then. The FaF-Alpha is always the time when information, that is supposed to be under a strict NDA, starts to leak out and Blizzard always has a hard time keeping such things under wraps. In fact, the NDA-breaking was so rampant and rough with Cataclysm that Blizz eventually lifted the NDA early and pushed the Beta a month earlier than planned (according to my source who got me into the Beta last time).

I would not go so far as to say that Blizzard likely will give us no more information until the press release, but I certainly would not be surprised by that should it come to pass. I am, of course, hoping for additional information like everyone else, but I suspect that Blizzard has given us our large information "hay bale" and expects us to live through winter until the press release.