First, let me explain last week because I had planned on writing a post, but I ended up getting a stomach bug that kept me out of commission until Tuesday, and I had so much work to catch up on that I never ended up writing it. I checked up on my analytics and saw that I had huge traffic on Tuesday, and no new post; I can only assume everyone leapt to the conclusion that I had been hit by a bus. Again, sorry to keep you all waiting!

However, on to the good stuff:

Predatory Swiftness now allows your next Cyclone, Entangling Roots, Healing Touch, Hibernate, or Rebirth to be castable in all forms.

I am continuing my trend of blatantly stealing the colors of the MMO-Champion site, which I hope they will not mind (though they stole the white+blue combos and only added the greens as their own, so I cannot see how they would).

Wait, what? Does that really say what I think it does? Predatory Swiftness will FINALLY allow me to cast abilities IN FORM? Thank the devs! As the title suggests -- It is About God Damned Time! Feral is finally moving in the direction for which I have been begging for years and should, after this change, no longer require shapeshifting for anything but breaking roots. In fact, if Blizzard aimed at balancing Feral entirely, they would only need to look no further than removing root-breaking from shapeshifting (again), and switching up the immunities from being shapeshifted. I doubt that this will happen because of the backlash felt from the original rootshifting nerf, but one can never tell with Blizzard.

This change is going to make Feral a lot easier to play well in practice. No more having to time your gcds and movements appropriately, no more trying to Cyclone someone and lag causing you to get a "Not in line of sight" and being caught in caster form, and no more extremely smart Shamans waiting for you to fall out of form to NS-Hex you (while I consider this good play, it was completely unfair when playing against Feral+RSham early in the expansion because I would eat CC after CC with nothing Guntir could do about it and none of them sharing DR).

In addition, it means that Ferals can finally start using Cyclones offensively. I truly feel that this buff will likely result in a Feral nerf in the near future simply because of how strong Cyclone is as a CC. Cyclone was roughly balanced for Ferals in that the 6 second CC was only half-felt because the Feral spent 3 of those 6 seconds actually able to deal direct damage to a target: it would cost a 1.5s GCD to cast the Cyclone, and another 1.5s GCD to shift back into Cat Form, and usually it would require a non-zero amount of time to get back on the target because they were moving away to survive (warriors were the worst with their handful of mobility buttons). Against extremely good teams, I could land a full duration Cyclone and only get 1-2 Shreds on the kill target before the Cyclone ended.

In the 3v3 scene, it would mean that Cyclones had to be used either early or chained with a longer/better CC in order to get enough damage out during the duration for it to matter. For instance, if you are running Kittycleave and you land a Cyclone on the healer, your Warrior is going to continue dealing damage (hopefully a lot) while you are doing the Cyclone position-cast-shift-get-back-in and then you can start dealing damage again. You essentially made the match into a very odd 2v2 for a short duration (3s in the best case) and then a 3v2 for a short duration (3s in the best case). I have seen Warriors solo-kill something before, but not at the upper tiers of play. With this change, we will be better equipped to move toward our CC target, instantly Cyclone them, and Wild Charge (15s cooldown, recall) back to our kill-target and get the most bang for our buck (4.5s of CC plus damage-dealing in the best case).

In fact, in 2s, where Guntir and I spend the majority of our time, this change will play huge in conjunction with all the changes that Priests are getting. It looks, at least at a cursory glance, like Discipline Priests are going to end up playing very aggressively and nuking a lot for healing and supplemental damage. Additionally, the newest talent flip has Guntir potentially picking up Power Word: Solace for mana longevity and low-to-medium-low damage. The idea being that I will be training a healer non-stop with Guntir following me as closely as possible to bring the other DPS with him. I, then, have free range to insta-Cyclone without leaving form to peel for Guntir while he barrages the opponent with Solaces to restore his mana while the opposing healer has to heal afterwards and spend his. We could play the comp as an outlast like we do currently (although, 'currently' means '2-3 months ago') except that Mana Burn has been removed from the game.

On the other hand, Disc has an extremely potent kit of damage-dealing abilities that may end up mattering more in the long run. Holy Fire hits like a truck, and with Evangelism being part of the spec baseline, he will end up getting 20% bonus damage to all his spells almost all the time. I probably sound like a broken record here, but I cannot fathom how Feral+Disc is going to be balanced in MoP for 2s. The change to dispelling coupled with the hilarious amount of CC that Feral+Disc brings to the table is going to make teams hate themselves: Cyclone, Entangling Roots, Psychic Scream, Dominate Mind. None of these share diminishing returns with one-another, a single dispel of one means eating a full-duration of another, and with Cyclone being the undispellable one in the bunch, it will allow us to reset DRs and the dispel cooldown of our opponents.

I am getting very excited for MoP ^_^

That's right folks, it is a Monday and this is a new post for the second straight Monday. What is even better is that I am not even posting for the sake of posting, but something interesting was actually revealed over the weekend! Before I get into that, let me just get this out there: I have not played on the live servers for probably over two months because of the wedding, for one, and because of how hilariously broken the game is at present, for two. I still subscribe to Squanky's YouTube channel and as such I receive email updates whenever he posts a new video. He recently came back to the WoW scene of late to run some triple-dps Hunter games, and I have to say that they really illustrate how broken PvP is on live at present. His Ret Pally can heal just about anyone on the team for ~80% of their total HP, Squanky can (in decent gear) drop 30k crits regularly, and Rogues are still a broken bag of control, damage, and survivability. That being said, I have been sticking to L4D and DIII.

Enough of that! What did the Devs post over the weekend? Well, it did not make much of a splash on MMO-Champion because it was posted on the European site, but there was a developer blog entry entitled The Future of PvP in Mists of Pandaria. In this post Tom Chilton, the original and current game director, answered questions posed from Nethaera regarding the direction and design of PvP in MoP. While the majority of these questions are fed from Tom, it seems, we get two small pieces of truly interesting PvP insight.

First, the new arena is called ToL'vir Proving Ground and is located in Uldum. Interestingly, the arena is hyped as a new Nagrand-style arena with less gimmicks and more balance, but has a definite lopsided feel given that there are only three pillars.

From this view, one can see that there are two definite entrances with two pillars are the (what I will simply call, for now) southern side of the map and a single pillar finishing the triangle at the mid-north. What will be most interesting about this map, besides the interesting pillar count and placement, is the extra angles gained from each southern pillar against a vantage that remains in the starting zone. Think about tournament 3v3 matches on Lordaeron; almost always one team or the other will decide the best positioning possible is in the jaws of the starting area. On Lord, this is more due to the fact that the mid-pillar is so ill-designed and the teams who utilize this technique are nigh-unkillable and put out insane damage when LoS is not an issue *cough*RLS*cough*, but on this new map, I could see the allure for moving from a pillar to a starting area for LoS purposes.

The second interesting piece of information from the blog post is that arena matches are getting an update. Particularly, Tom suggests that prior to the start of an arena match, every player will know the class and specialization of their opponents. Apparently, the UI will be updated to show the classes and specialization names of each opponent before the gates open, giving teams a bit of time to strategize before being tossed into the match. This is a boon for teams like mine who usually do not have a set strategy for a lot of odd comps, and take a few moments before acting, but it is also a huge boon for less experienced teams who might make the mistake of seeing two players and a stealthy and not see the buffs at first leaving them caught off guard when what they thought was an RLS turns out to be an MLS and the mage was Invisible. Similarly, it gives teams ample time to pick a target and get a strategy ready for facing triple-dps teams where surprise is usually part of their success.

Sadly, there was acknowledgment from the devs regarding the 'blacklist' (being able to set two maps to 'never play this map ever' on randomly queued BGs) as it pertains to arenas in a different post:

At this time blacklisting is not a part of the arena queuing system, but maybe this will change in the future.

There is a very subtle hinting at the understanding that players only want this implementation so that they can effectively turn off RoV and Dalaran Sewers (though I would rather play on Dalaran than on Lordaeron sometimes).

Lastly, another bit of sad news from the devs suggests that while they understand that players want the ability to spectate arena matches, they have no plans to implement such a feature at this time. I am afraid that this speaks largely to the death of competitive arena play supported by Blizzard. There is simply no future for Blizzard supporting such a feature because they could never utilize it properly since they no longer have arena tournaments in their conferences. Sure, it would be neat for the players to be able to spectate a given arena match, and it would certainly make broadcasting third party tournaments that much easier, but it would be of no use to Blizzard (much like the skirmish system that was removed to make way for the arena challenges).

There was some interesting discussion over at the beta boards regarding Feral Incarnation (and Force of Nature as well), so I thought I would give it some spotlight:

So let's pick the best scenario possible. By getting 18 Ravages off you'd get a 890 DPS increase with Incarnation. Sounds like a very solid DPS increase, huh? Well.. not really. As soon as i started testing Force of Nature, i realized that Incarnation is a really poor choice. Let me elaborate.

Force of Nature will summon 3 Treats to fight for you for 15s and it's on a 1min CD. This means that i can use FoN 3 times in the 3min Incarnation window. So all we have to do is figure the expected value for the DPS increase on that 1min and then multiply it by 3. By doing that, we can compare these two abilities with respect to DPS. To do that, i simply had to measure the average damage and how often each of the Treants would attack my target. After some time, i saw that each of the Treats would attack my target ten times in that 15s window.I also noticed that Treants attacks are classified as white hits and are affected by Glancing. The average damage based on a 68 normal hits sample was 4790. Since each of the Treants will attack ten times, we get a total of 30 hits over 15s. To calculate the expected value i considered my 30% crit chance and did the following:

From 30 hits - Expected 9 crits, 5 Glancing and 16 normal hits. So the damage would be:

9*9580 + 16*4790 + 5*3592.5 = 180822.5 expected damage.

This is a straight 3013.70 DPS increase.

This is basically inline with what I experienced on the Beta boards and have been trying to convey to Druids: Incarnation is hilariously weak when compared to Force of Nature from all aspects. Force of Nature is one-third the cooldown of Incarnation for three times the burst damage, a huge increase in sustained damage, does not cost resources, and gives a free 5s stun to boot. The only problem with Force of Nature, now, is that it is on the radar for the developers thanks to this maths:

Your analysis of Incarnation looks about in line with our expectations; we expect that the fact that you can line Berserk and Tiger’s Fury up with it will be significant. Force of Nature’s damage for Ferals looks rather out of line; we’ll investigate that.

The problem I have with this GC quote is two-fold: first, it ends up suggesting that he did not actually read the maths from the post because Berserk and Tiger's Fury were included in the calculation; and second, it shows that the devs think that Force of Nature should not be so strong for Feral. Bah!

Getting back to Incarnation for a moment, even if one lines it up with Berserk, the ability is lackluster and on a long cooldown. I am not sure why this is considered acceptable; Incarnation (for Feral, anyway) might as well read "Improved Berserk" and simply be a tie-in to that ability... which is boring. Personally, and I know that I am in the minority on this one, I do not want all my damage and burst revolving around a single ability which can be avoided via CC. There is something to be said for skilled players who know how to counter burst with control, but when all of my meaningful damage can be avoided by a trivial CC train, then the game gets annoying.

Specifically, when I played Boomkin for fun at the end of Season 8, I really did enjoy the cooldowns I had; there were basically a bunch of mid-length cooldowns to manage/use and if I got CC'd through one of them, I still had the potential to apply some pressure with the others. I am still hoping that Force of Nature remains a viable burst cooldown, but it looks like GC did not realize how much damage the trees were putting out, so we are likely to see that "toned down" in the next few patches.

Another thing that changed in the last patch that I did not bring up is that Displacer Beast has been getting more and more buffed. Keep in mind, the devs have no intent on making DB into Vanish+Blink, so it can only be improved so much, but the cooldown keeps getting lowered. As of the last patch, Displacer Beast is down to a 1min cd that teleports the Druid forward 20 yards, puts him in Cat Form, and attempts to Prowl the Druid. I write 'attempts' because any DoT will immediately break the prowling, so it has extremely limited use. Additionally, if there are any effects on the Druid which prevent stealth abilities (such as Faerie Fire), then Displacer Beast cannot be used at all.

This brings up he question of talent-balance again (I thought I had a quote to put here, but I guess I don't). The devs have expressed in the past (again, I cannot find the quote, so this is from memory) that if a particular talent is the 'obvious' choice at a tier, it probably means that the other talents at that tier are undertuned or the 'obvious' choice is overtuned. When I look at the first tier of the Druid talent tree, I feel like the other two talents simply do not exist. I will never look at Feline Swiftness as a viable talent unless it is buffed rather extraordinarily; 15% bonus movement speed just is not very strong in any context as a talent.

Similarly, I will likely never see Displacer Beast as a viable talent choice, either. Being able to blink and stealth would be useful, but only if it were given the same treatment as Vanish. Giving Displacer Beast the same implementation as Vanish will never happen because Vanish is a powerful ability that is a Rogue-flavor ability; it is a staple of the Rogue's kit that will never be shared entirely with another class. What is more is that Displacer Beast also has the blink function built in, so it would actually be better than Vanish (in some sense) in that it would position you away from the fray and activate Prowl. Saying nothing else on the matter, if Displacer Beast acted the way described above, then I would certainly consider taking it on a 1m cd. However, it would be blatantly overpowered for Restos and Boomkins, as it would given them a 'get out of jail free' card once per minute, making them non-viable targets (and Restos already are pretty non-viable for Ferals).

No, the real issue here is that a 15s cooldown Wild Charge is so blatantly overpowered that anything else at this tier is really a second thought to the matter. Why on earth would I want an ability like Displacer Beast which will put me 20y in whatever direction I am facing once per minute when I could use Wild Charge to get back to Guntir who is 40y away and safe at a pillar once every quarter-minute? It is just bonkers! Many will claim that it will be used to close gaps on the kill-target more than anything, but at a 15s cooldown, I can easily stay on my target with Wild Charge and mash my "get out of dodge" macro to charge out when things get dicey. Mark my words - if Wild Charge goes live as-is, there will be SOOOOOOO much complaining about how mobile Feral is in a PvP context.