The Fluid DruidShapeshifting With Style.

First, a quick reminder. Haste’s value comes from two things: it boosts the amount of damage you do from your white attacks (because you get MORE…duh) and it increases the amount of energy you have, both passively (via small increases to energy regen rate) and actively via additional Omen procs.

Sounds good, right? Well, there’s a few problems with that.

Haste is useless if you’re not attacking something. Again, common sense, but it bears repeating. If you have to move off-target, your mastery/crit continues to affect your bleed ticks, while your haste just sits there.

Haste is terrible for bears. May not be an issue, but if you plan on bearcatting, then you want something that can affect Savage Defense, which means mastery. (Crit used to be nice, but is now devalued in bear due to the 2pT13 set bonus.)

Extra energy regeneration increases rotational difficulty. Ah, here’s the most important one. The cat rotation is very dynamic; you’ll have times where NOTHING is up, and you have to quickly execute your priorities to get everything going. You’ll have times where you need to dump energy ASAP to use Tiger’s Fury optimally. On the flipside, you’ll have times where you’re sitting around waiting for energy to regen.

The issue? Well, as haste increases, you have more #1 and #2 situations, and less #3. In these situations, fractional time matters. (What do I mean by this? Well, if you’re just waiting for energy to regen, you can use that Shred at 60 or 80 energy, it’s not really a big deal. If you’re trying to start or restart bleeds, each bit of delay starts to take away from uptime and thus damage.)  This is where in-game reality starts to diverge from simulations; Mew doesn’t have to deal with raid mechanics, crazy raid leaders, or out–of-game interruptions; all of which will end up causing you to spend more time at energy cap, which also makes haste less than useful. Ultraxion is a good example of this; relying on Mangle instead of Shred requires a few more keypresses, since Mangle uses less energy.

So, what am I saying? Yes, in sim theory, all the stats are roughly equal. In actuality, though, the priorities that make it easier to play perfectly, such as capping hit and expertise, and minimizing haste, will increase your DPS the most. What do you think?

I know, I know, LFR, big fish, little pond, etc. etc., but topping meters on Ultraxion (the fight biased against ferals) makes me smile. (No flask or pot either.) Man, I miss raiding.

Of course, this group also managed to wipe on Spine when we somehow triggered a barrel roll killing the third amalgamation, so…perhaps not the best representative sampling.

Last one of these for a while, I promise. Here’s a quick list of what I’m planning for TFD in 2012:

Short-Term (pre-MoP):

• Get back to regular updates. With my schedule, that wasn’t possible before, but I plan to start writing a weekend recap post, even if nothing else is going on.
• Add some merch. As I mentioned before the holidays, I’ve had several requests for shirts/etc., and I’d love to put something together.  I’ve done some looking around on Cafepress, etc., and at the moment I still feel a bit overwhelmed.  I’m a writer, not an artist, and I don’t want to sell something crap. If anyone has experience with Cafepress or similar sites of that ilk, please shoot me an email.
• Update the guide. Yeah, the feral guide that’s still labeled 4.0.3, that’s about a year out of date. That one. :P
• Participate more in the forums. Not much to say here, but I like to be accessible.
• Remember that I have a Twitter account. Uh, yeah.
• Refresh the site theme. The theme is getting a bit stale. I like the overall presentation of information, but there’s lots of little niggling things that I want to fix.
• Add some solo-specific content. This is our last and greatest opportunity to experiment with soloing content, to see what we can push. The item level “squish” and the removal of hybrid speccing is going to make old raids more difficult.

Long-Term (for MoP)

• Video Guides. Yes, I’m entering 2007. Go me. I will still do a fully-written guide for Mists of Pandaria, but I will supplement it with a video guide as well. There will be a small charge for the videos (still determining what a fair price would be), but everything else (text guide, blog, forums, etc.) will remain free. I plan to cover both Guardian and Feral. I will probably do some smaller videos pre-MoP to make sure I have a good product; those smaller videos will be free or almost free. I don’t do scammy; refunds will be available, sample clips will be available, etc.

Feel free to jump in and tell me what else I should cover (or tell me I’m crazy for trying to do videos, either works). This is still just an idea at the moment, so there’s lots of flexibility.

So, things have settled down for me again, and I’d like to take a little time now to look back at the site for 2011. (I’ll do some looking ahead to 2012 in a future post.)

Website Stats

People were excited to finally dig into Cataclysm content, and it showed. The site had a huge spike in popularity, going from ~50k monthly views in Nov/Dec to ~150k in January, then slowly fell back to the 50-60k level. (Of course, we also had a lot less to talk about in the later half of the year.)  Subscribers to the RSS feed (as measured by FeedBurner) jumped from 500ish to about 800 in January, and are now hovering around 1k. I don’t have good stats for the forums, but we’re up over 6k total posts, so obviously something’s going right there. :)

Popular Posts:

• January: The gearlists, obviously. We discussed Unheeded Warning quite a bit, as well as the 4.0.6 patch notes; most notably, the loss of our free root/snare break, which had everyone predicting the death of ferals in arena.
• February: My 4.0.6 trinket list was big news (short version: UW sucked, then was great, but see below). My post discussing my negative outlook for the feral class also made the rounds and got LOTS of comments. :)
• March: My posting started to fall off here. No super-popular posts this month, but I really liked Syl’s UI post; lots of great information.
• April-June: Swipe damage was doubled for 4.1, taking us from near-worst in AoE situations to near-first. We had our first glance at the FIREKITTY. 4.2 re-nerfed Swipe a bit, but buffed a few more abilities. My 4.2 gear list was popular, but I forgot to link it on the front page until after 4.3, making it somewhat useless. :)
• July-September: Not too much happened.  UW finally got nerfed, as we had all predicted.
• October-December: Some cool stuff came out at Blizzcon. 4.3 buffed us a bit; things look pretty decent in normal gear, though the final verdict is still fairly mediocre at the heroic gear level. (That said, sub rogues/UH DKs’/Enh at the top, arcane and mut rogues at the bottom…Neo says whoa.)

Personal

WoW Insider offered me a columnist slot back in January, which I accepted (first column for WOWI). Admittedly, the timing wasn’t the greatest:  I completed my training in Georgia in February (CISSP passed! Yay!) and moved to Texas in March to deploy to Iraq in April. Whew. Sylvaneart, Qbear, Tinderhoof, and Leafkiller did an excellent job filling in with guest posts while I was occupied, and they of course continue to contribute in forum discussion, which I am slowly dipping my toe back into. Due to a highly unlikely set of coincidences, I was actually able to keep raiding in Iraq, even though I had to wake up at 0330 to make the 8PM CST start time. Due to a lack of healers and low FPS, I ended up raiding as Resto.

September saw me leaving Iraq for Kuwait; no more incoming fire (good) but, ironically, worse Internet and housing arrangements meant no more raiding. Yay. I wrote a story for the Blizzard writing contest, which didn’t win anything. I’ll post it, in case anyone is interested in reading my first attempt to write fiction since high school. (TLDR: Not very good.)

Now that I’m home, I’m playing through all the great games I missed (got Portal 2 on my 360, with Arkham City waiting as soon as I finish Arkham Asylum on the PC). Raid Finder is cool, but ultimately boring in the lack of difficulty. I feel like I’m cheating somehow; I’ve still got a lot of 359 gear, but I’m hitting top 5 on the DPS meters for every fight. (UPDATE: Wow, Happy Winterveil: I’ve done RF twice now, both parts, and come away with 3 pieces of T13, Kiril’s, and the Wrath trinket. I actually topped the DPS meters on Ultraxion.)  I may come back to normal raiding, but I’m not ready to commit time to a schedule yet. We’ll see on that one.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing. (At least till my next post, where I discuss where I want to take TFD for 2012.) What’s your favorite moment of 2011?

Okay, I give, I give. I don’t like posting things before they’re done, but I’ve gotten several requests for a gear list, so here you go:

The Draft 4.3 Gear List

The full version (with better explanations and text) will be going up on WoW Insider sometime next week (when I finish it), but this is a good starting point. Feel free to leave any comments here; I’ll try to respond quickly, but no guarantees as things are crazy around here with packing.

(Wowhead’s list is good as well. If I had known they were doing one, I probably would have skipped doing one myself. Also, here’s my Firelands/ZA gear list, if you’re just getting started.)

It’s official: I’m leaving the Middle East in a week, and heading home.

I apologize for the lack of blogs lately; as more and more people have stacked up here in preparation to depart, the civilian wireless network has gone from bad to horrendous. (You’re only reading this now because I’ve prewritten it and gotten up early in the morning to log in and publish it.) It’s been all I could do to keep my columns going for WoW Insider, and I’ve only been able to keep those up because their blogging software doesn’t get filtered by the work firewall. *cough* Of course, my laptop recently died as well, which didn’t help matters any.

Anyway, enough complaining. I’ll be going dark for the rest of December, as I have a lot of catching up to do with my wife and son. Come January, however, I have a lot of changes in store; thinking a blog style refresh and update is long overdue. Couple people have asked me for Fluid Druid shirts, too, so hell, I’ll see what I can do. Anything else you want to see, feel free to ask in the comments!

Awesome, as always. Don’t forget to check out my latest column on WoW Insider for (slightly) more serious discussion.

Hey cats n’ kittens I know it has been all too long since you’ve last heard from me; however, thinking back on all the times Deathwing has cooked me while afk in Twilight Highlands I knew I was going to have to come back for my chance to finally kill that dragon.

As always Fluiddruid is all about making sure you have all the information needed to succeed in the new-raid zone. With that being said the Raid and Strategy section of our forums will be updated to include the new encounters over the turkey weekend. For those of you who have not been sniffing around the official forums Tangedyn wrote up a very clean summery of everything you will need to know to stay competitive in Dragon Soul, for those who have not read it I highly suggest taking a quick peak here. Included in the post are trinket ratings for Dragon Soul that have already been evaluated by Yawning and Mihir (the druid responsible for maintaining the feral dps guide on MMO-Champion.)

With 4.3 I do hope to bring back The FluidDruid YouTube Chan, however; I did come back in a much more casual raiding guild then before with 9 hours per week I promise to get content out as fast as we’re capable of creating strats for it. I did want to make special mention that if you have videos of yourself doing exceptional on a boss in Dragon Soul and wish to add it to this site’s channel feel free to PM me on the forums. I’d love to get other people then just myself up on the channel and I think with me progressing much slower in 4.3 this opens up a prime opportunity to get more video content out. Who knows maybe I could do a month by month contest where the feral who submits the best video for me to release gets a Blizzard Store pet of their choice, wink wink.

Lastly I do wish to make mention of the FluidDruid Forums where we have been and will continue to discuss all aspects of feral dps. With the release of the MOP Talent Calculator we are already locked in discussion on what the changes to the tooltips mean for both single target and aoe dps.

As always if you have any questions or suggestion feel free to PM me on the forums

Until next time and my hopes for a Happy Thanksgiving to all,

Qbear

So, since my last post and now, the desert sand has manged to render my laptop fan inoperable. Glorious. This means for any personal-type stuff, I get to walk across base to the Internet cafe…which is always packed. Yay. Almost the end of the year.

Okay, enough bitching. Wanted to highlight some nifty feral-type posts I’ve seen recently:

• My last Shifting Perspectives column on the hybridization debate sparked some excellent posts in the comments, with very little trolling and other tomfoolery. It’s really all speculation until they decide to reveal what the new “Symbiosis” ability will do, but it’s a good read.
• The wonderful folks with the Team Waffle podcast has released a feral cat roundtable. Three hours from some of the best of the business. (I’d like to listen…anyone want to mail me a CD? :P)
• Reygahnci has returned from his posting hiatus with some excellent thoughts on the new talents and possibilities for feral PvP.
• Kalon at ThinkTank also poked his head up for the first time in a while (grats on the new baby!) with, as always, some well-written thoughts on the new talents.
• Tangedyn at TIB threw out a quick cheat-sheet on changes you’ll need to make when the patch drops in his 4.3 survival guide. I will be featuring this in a future SP column.

As always, if anyone’s reading any great new feral blogs, I’d love to check them out; just drop a comment here (gets auto-forwarded to my email, may not be able to reply though).  I still have Gmail and GReader at work, so I can function. :) (Also, WTF is up with the new GReader design? Ugh.)

Wow. Well, the announcements this year were a bit more shocking then last, weren’t thay? (Of course, Blizzard did a much better job of controlling leaks this year.) Let me take a look at how my predictions from yesterday fared, then I’ll go over my thoughts (briefly) about today’s news.

There will be pandas, but they will not be playable: Well, I almost totally whiffed on this one. I couldn’t see a fair way they could give Pandaren to one side or the other (they couldn’t either, so chose both). Call it a quarter-point for being right on pandas.

No new classes: I figured the balance changes for adding a new class would be too much work (apparently not). No points here.

Talents significantly overhauled; trees eliminated, three talent families to spend points in, limitations on leveling players, specializations kept: Overall, I mostly nailed the changes here. They were a bit more radical then I thought; I figured you’d still be choosing talents within a spec, not a common talent choice for all specs. Three quarters of a point.

LOTRO-style skirmish system, merc that you can customize/equip: Well, I got the “new thing you can customize” right, though the actual thing was wrong. I never would have guessed WoW pokemon, but this is a genius move by Blizzard. I also was sort of right about skirmishes. Half-point, with a bonus point next year if I’m right about it being cut before launch. :)

Dance studio announced, not as impressive as expected: Maybe still an incomplete, but I figured they would have featured it at Blizzcon if they were at least planning on it, so, no. No points.

Total: 1.5/5. Go me!

Anyway, on to the other news I found interesting, in no particular order:

No flying until max level: Big ups here. You don’t really experience the content if you can just skip it with flying mounts. It’s probably worth further discussion, but I’d argue that unrestricted flying has been a net negative for the game.

Monks: Probably the most predicted idea for a new class. Love the idea, especially the idea of no auto-attacks. I’d love to see them take the leap to removing auto-attacks for all classes. As it stands now, autoattack is just a persistent DoT that requires melee range to function.

New talent system: Love the idea, but there will still be “cookie-cutter” builds, they’ll just be a lot easier to type out. :) I have a further discussion coming on the talent system in this week’s Shifting column on WoWI.

Challenge mode dungeons: Very cool idea, though I wish they’d implement solo Challenges. I also am STRONGLY against the idea of challenge mode dungeons being accessible through the Dungeon Finder. Why? Imagine you start an 5v5 arena team. You find some other people who want to play, work hard, get beat up a bit, and eventually rise to a rating roughly equal to your level of skill. Now imagine a different person who clicks a queue button and gets put on an arena team filled with a bunch of other good players, and he is instantly rated the same. You get the picture, I hope. Thankfully, there’s no gear rewards, and you have to specifically queue for Challenge mode, which should help prevent, um, “motive mismatches.”

Pet battles: Meh. It’s WoW Pokemon. If you like Pokemon, great. If you don’t, don’t. Hopefully, there’s no in-game reward to make me feel like I have to do it.

Four specs for druids: No more bearcat. I’m quite sad, though I expected it (I expected it for Cata, actually). Those level 90 talents look very interesting, though…

Pandas: My first reaction? Nerdrage. “THEY REALLY DID PANDAS OMG THIS GAME JUST JUMPED THE SHARK!” Now that I’ve thought about it a little more, though, my thoughts have changed a little bit. I started playing WoW in earnest almost three years ago. I was a geographical bachelor (long story), and looking for a community. I became a hardcore player. I would have HATED Pandas then.

Now? A little over a year ago, my wife and I had a large fight over where my priorities lay. I walked away from the game that day, and came back, much later, as a *cough* “casual.” Today, I have a three-year old son, who I haven’t seen in several months…and according to my wife, he’s crazy about pandas. One part of my brain scoffs, “a perk called ‘Bouncy?’ That’s so lame!” The other part, though, is envisioning him laughing over the rolls and spinning kicks.

So….

Go Team Panda! (Except when you roll on feral gear.)

Day 2 thoughts tomorrow.