Okay... I'm not doing this.

I spent the last two weeks trying to write this up in a way that is both speculative and concrete, but I keep going back and forth. Why would I write anything on here as purely speculative when the answers are right around the corner... and there is no point discussing things as if they are concrete.

Here's an example. Ferals have a Kick-like ability confirmed for Cataclysm. While I am neither surprised or upset over this announcement... it doesn't do much in terms of where we will be when we get that kick. It doesn't really put anything into perspective; it's a piece of the puzzle. Will Kick truly be amazing for Ferals? Well, everyone is going to have tons more HP on the PvP scene so interrupting a heal or stopping a CC is going to be useful. On the other hand, haste is already at the point where you can basically guarantee enough of it to land a cast even if you GET kicked...

ARRRGHGHGHGH

No, see... these is annoying. I'm not going to go into depth over everything mentioned in the preview because the PvP scene is likely to be something so vastly different from what it is now that I will be wrong in 3 months' time. I'll glance over stuff... just so everyone gets it:

1) Feral (Cat and Bear, presumably a shared CD) are getting a Kick (presumably talented).
2) Barkskin non-dispellable.
3) Thrash - oddly named new ability which will either apply a new bleed in an AoE fashion or apply Lacerate in an AoE fashion (Bear).
4) Stampeding Roar - another new ability... AoE (10y) 40% movement speed buff for 10 seconds.
5) Haste and crit scaling with Rake and Rip innately, sweet.

... There's not a lot to discuss here.

BTW: MMO-champ thinks the Cataclysm Beta will be starting soon... and if it does...

Anyway, I've actually got tons of work to do... >_<

Yes, I'm still alive; I'm working on an in-depth view of the proposed Druid changes and I keep going back and forth as to whether I should actually post it or wait for talent trees to also get posted... there is so much up in the air right now.

Also, Guntir and I have been playing Secret of Mana, which we beat last night, for a gabillionth time and enjoying the absolute shit out of it. This has been usurping my free time, and work has actually been pretty busy, so I don't have a lot of opportunities to post this week.

Let's say I'm aiming to get the Cata post up by tomorrow.

EDIT:

Let's mention some stuff worth mentioning -

I have a Mac... I'm in the SCII beta, and they released the Mac client today (finally). Another thing I am waiting for is my Steam (Mac) beta invite... looking forward to playing the HL2 series again but this time on an amazing OS.

Additionally, if you look at MMO-Champ, they are suggesting that they believe the Cataclysm beta will be starting any day now. I don't know whether that's true or not (my source confirmed that if he had info, he'd tell me... but he doesn't have info), but one thing we can say is that Boubouille DOES usually know his stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if the Cataclysm beta DID start soon; maybe around May 4th... rumoring here... but almost certainly not before the end of the Tournament Realm. I wouldn't be surprised if it was ~3 weeks away. We'll see.

Next on the list of neat stuff... if you're into computer hardware (I'm a computer scientist by day... it's hard for me to ignore this) then you might enjoy this:

I have a Mac Pro circa 2008. The main HDD is a stupid 5400RMP drive (big capacity... slow read/write). So, I finally decided to upgrade my boot disk and ordered a OWC 100GB SSD. After about 2 hours of cleaning out my boot drive (lawl, 22GB of uncompressed Feral video moved to a different drive), I finally got my boot drive down to around 75GB, which will leave me plenty of space with the 100GB SSD for new apps and swap space (or Virtual Memory, if you like that term better). This drive has been getting ridiculously good reviews.

The first question you might ask, if you don't have a strong cmsi background, is "Why would you spend so much money on a 100GB SSD drive when you can get a 250GB SSD from another company at around the same price?" The answer is in the particulars of SSD technology. Supposedly, SSDs have a problem with write-speeds since they tend to get "fragmented" sectors a lot... not fragmented in the same way that old Windows 98 used to get fragmented, but some-what similar. Long-story-short, the 100GB drive I bought is ACTUALLY a 128GB drive with a 28GB partition allocated outside of the controller so the drive can make writes correctly to the main disk portion without causing this fragmentation. Two perks from this is that your write-speeds never degrade (BIG DEAL... REALLY BIG DEAL) and there's not additional overhead for read/writes.

The second question you might ask, if you don't have a strong cmsi background, is "Why would moving from a 5400RMP HDD to a SSD drive be something you would bring up on your WoW Blog?" The answer to this is because of how WoW works. WoW has everything in the game (textures, data, etc) inside .MPQ files. You can find these files in your WoW folder if you dig around a bit, and with a little googling, you can even find applications to open these files up.

** NOTE ** DO NOT ALTER YOUR .MPQ FILES; BLIZZ CAN DETECT THIS AND BAN YOUR ACCOUNT

Okay... I have written a Java Application to read/write these files. They are archive documents (somewhat like .rar or .zip). They differ in some important ways, but the gist is the same - they are giant houses of data. You can see pretty readily that they are on the order of at least 1-2GB in most cases, and there are a few that are even bigger than that. What does that mean? Well, every time you try and load something in game (zoning in particular, but also just logging into Dalaran for instance) you have to get all those sweet graphics, objects, map details, etc out of the .MPQ file. That means that you have to read that entire file into memory and extract what you're looking for.

As it turns out... 5400RMP drives do this pretty well; the 7200 drives do it faster... and so for and so on. SSD stands for "Solid State Device" meaning that there are no moving pieces (look up how regular HDDs work on Wikipedia if you aren't familiar here... not enough time to explain). In addition to this, SSDs have RIDICULOUSLY fast read/write times when compared to even the EXTREMELY expensive 10k RMP HDDs. SO, the idea here is that I'll be able to load all my WoW textures (and everything else) MUCH faster and reduce the load on my CPUs when loading this nonsense.

Very cool.

It's SUPPOSEDLY going to ship in a day or two, so when I get it all set up I'll write a review on it as it pertains to WoW. Additionally, I'm going to try some video capture to see how long a cold load into Dalaran takes on my 5400 versus the new SSD.

Alrighty... I'm pretty confident I'll have that Cata review up tomorrow... check back and mock me if I don't.

Yes, today the powers that be will announce the druid changes... and while I expect the majority of the content to be useless for my needs (read: 1/3 will be boomer stuff and another 1/3 will be resto... leaving 1/3 of the information as interesting). HOWEVER, this is the first glimpse into the Cataclysm changes as they pertain to Ferals. While I understand that LIKELY blizz will try and come up with unique changes, here is a list of things I would NOT mind seeing for this preview:

1) Ferocious Bite changed to deal stupid damage when the target is "in execute range" (I would say below 20/25% hp... but all the executes work differently... so that's dumb...)

2) Feral Charge (Cat) changed to be less terrible (though I doubt this will change much given that it was a replica of Heroic Leap... which they're adding BACK for warriors). Something with a Root/Stun would be nice... taking out the "takes you to your opponent's back" portion would do a lot as well. I half-believe they will add a root/stun portion to the spell OR lower the cooldown. From the Heroic Leap discussion, the devs mentioned that it would likely "stun the opponent so they will be there when you get there."

3) Kick... dear lord do we need a kick-mechanic.

4) Feral DoTs will scale with Haste/Crit innately (just like SPriests and Locks preview mentioned). I want to be able to stack both of those stats and make Rip and Rake powerful in PvP.

5) Bear Form is made LESS squishy in PvP than Cat Form... I want a reason to use Bear Form again. Bear Form is supposed to be our tank form; make it so!

6) I would say dispel resist for Infected Wounds... but Abolish and Cleansing totem are getting removed... that SHOULD be enough.

7) Barkskin dispel resist moved higher in the resto tree... but I'm guessing that that won't be announced until the trees are released.

I have a meeting right now with some big-ups in the UK, so I'll be detained a bit. I will add to this post if I think of anything else I would like to see for the notes, AND OF COURSE I will create a new post concerning EVERYTHING that gets posted about Druids after it happens (unless it's the last post of the day... aka Midnight, I'll be drunk likely. If it's the last post of the day... look to my coming on Monday).

EDIT:

First, they have post the first preview of the day and it was Hunters. At this point, I am going to go ahead and predict that Druids are going to be the last preview of the day because I play a Druid and Blizzard hates me. Second, the following is a list of abilities I don't personally feel we need but are 50-50 on getting announced anyway:

1) Vanish - we don't NEED vanish. We don't really get any boon from being stealthed outside of Pounce... which is going to share DR with every other stun (just like CS, presumably).

2) Premeditation-like-ability - we don't need this either... it doesn't matter how many combo points you start with when your ramp-up is stupid AND Maim isn't super amazing.

3) A deep-wounds like ability - we don't really NEED more bleed damage, but I certainly wouldn't complain if they gave us something like this.