Okay, so they updated the public test realm build yesterday, and they removed Rake from Primal Gore.

Long story short, this makes Rake scale with Strength and Rip scale with Agility. After a long, LONG, process of trying to explain this to the developers and the more ignorant of the druid community, I have given up on the forums. It seems that my statements have fallen on deaf ears. As long as ferals were pulling entirely too much dps on the ptr, any nerf will do... regardless of how it affects our scaling.

Sure, in 3.1 ferals are seeing nothing but buffs. In PvP, our burst is being lowered but our sustained damage and survivability is getting improved. In PvE, our damage output overall is getting improved via Primal Gore and Savage Roar changes. However, in a patch or two, Rake will be phased out completely because of how inefficiently it scales with agility, the stat that feral druids will now be stacking.

I have posted a solution to this and just about every other problem facing ferals under the sun, and it got mixed reviews:

Remove Shredding Attacks (reduces Shred's cost by 18 and Lacerate's by 2), put Rake back on Primal Gore, and move Primal Gore to where Shredding Attacks was. This accomplishes a few different things...

1) It reduces the overall damage output by ferals, which was entirely too high on the public test realm.
2) It reduces the potential for insane burst damage by forcing ferals to use Mangle instead of Shred, which is a problem in PvP and one which Blizzard has stated many times they wish to do away with.
3) It allows Rake to scale with agility and crit (just like every other ability we use).
4) It removes the positional requirement from fights, which has long been an aggravation of feral druids in both a PvE and PvP scenario.
5) It simplifies the feral rotation while not making it trivial. With this, ferals will spam mangle to build combo points and only use Shred when a clearcasting proc occurs. In this way, it's easier to keep the mangle debuff up for our bleeds and ooc-shreds, and it's one less debuff timer to watch.

Thus far, it has gotten a little bit of positive feedback, and a lot of negative feedback from ferals who are only upset because it would change the status quo. All of the opposition seems to agree that all of my statements are true... those 5 things WOULD happen... but they don't like the idea of losing Shred from their primary rotation because they like the big numbers.

I don't really care... GC posted in another thread:

I understand some of you are just trying to catch a problem before it blossoms out of control. Nothing wrong with that. But we're always going to be pretty cautious on acting based on early predictions that don't have a lot of evidence (even theoretical evidence) to back them up.

I have posted considerable mathematical analysis on my change (and the change to Primal Gore no longer affecting Rake)... so to me this is a "Thanks Rey, we'll take it under advisement, but don't get your hopes up. Love, GC" letter.

Now that Arena Season 6 is on the horizon, we wanted to share some details regarding upcoming changes to the arena rating system in Arena Season 6. With Arena Season 6, arena teams will start at 0 rating instead of 1500, which will allow teams to have more continuous progression throughout the arena season. In addition, we reevaluated item purchases and felt many of them were too difficult to obtain so we will be altering the rating requirements needed to purchase the latest arena items. For example, items with a rating requirement will now be obtainable starting at 1250 rating.

As with the current system, the matchmaking system will attempt to match teams against opponents who are closest to their average matchmaking rating. Starting with Arena Season 6, a team’s average matchmaking rating will be shown in the scoreboard at the end of each match so that you can see where your team stands compared to the opposing team you just faced. All arena teams that are below a 1500 arena rating will always earn arena points as a 1500 rated team. This will allow teams to continue to build up arena points while working on gaining the ratings needed to purchase items.

The most interesting aspect of these changes, in my opinion, is that teams will start at zero rating instead of 1500 now. It raises a few questions, obviously, such as "will teams be able to go negative?" and "how in the hell am I supposed to do enough games to EARN 2200 rating when most teams haven't even earned 1000 rating yet (going from 1500 to 2500 is basically a #1 ranked team)!?"

I think that the latter concern is more prudent than the former. How in the hell am I going to gain 2200 rating? Let's do some math. My team has about a 56% win percentage. Let's say that we win/lose 10 rating on an average match. This means that I would need to play at least 800 games with these numbers before getting up to 2200. While this is doable, it's an aggravation.

I'm going to lunch.

They're dumb... and hilarious.

The latest changes to the Arms tree make the PvE rotation simply amazing... the first thing I thought when reading about it is the crazy cat-lady from the Simpsons (throwing cats at people screaming nonsense). Here's the rotation:

Charge
Slam
Overpower (if proc'd)
Execute (if proc'd)
Rend
MS
RUN AWAY
repeat

So basically, warriors will be running back and forth away and towards their opponents in a PvE setting... it's hilarious. If I can find a youtube video illustrating this nonsense, I'll post it. So far, I have seen some 3.5k parses against the Skull dummy by arms warriors doing this nonsense... when I get home I'll try and record some video of the parses.