You ready for 4.3

 Feral  No Responses »
Nov 242011
 

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

 

 Posted by at 12:00 am

Link Roundup

 Feral  No Responses »
Nov 152011
 

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.)

 

 Posted by at 12:33 pm

Blizzcon 2011 Prediction Review and Day 1 Thoughts

 Blizzcon  11 Responses »
Oct 222011
 

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.

Quick Predictions for Blizzcon

 Blizzcon  3 Responses »
Oct 212011
 

As I write this, Blizzcon starts in a few hours, which places me in the wonderful position of being able to go to sleep, wake up, and digest all the news at once. (Yay. I think.) As I did last year, I’ll post quick roundups of the news and my impressions, but here’s some quick-hit predictions. (Yes, I now write for WoW Insider; no, we have no confidential information…not that I would reveal it if we did.) Apologies in advance if this is poorly formatted, my Internet is currently set to turtle speed.

- There will be pandas. If there’s not, than Blizzard has pulled off the greatest cover-up in MMO history. (I read a spy novel once where the CIA takes an aircraft engineer working on a prototype stealth bomber project, pump his head full of fake bomber info and interrogation resistance techniques, and arrange for him to be ‘kidnapped’ by the Russians. The Russians interrogate him mercilessly and eventually break him, where he spills everything he knows, real and fake. He comes home, despondent, and is told ‘oh, we’re not focusing on bomber tech at all, we just had to make you
believe it so they would. /ramble) Playable? Gut says no, but they’re a major focal point. Remember Dalaran? Think “Pandaran.”

- No new classes. Yes, people will complain that there are no new playable classes or races.

- Talents will be overhauled in some significant way. This will be the biggest news of the day, even bigger than the pandas. Exactly how they will be redone is anyone’s guess, but I’ll go out on a limb and say all prerequisites will be eliminated…instead of a “tree,” you just have three talent families, where you can freely spend points. There will be some kind of limitation for leveling players to decrease complexity; talents that are tied to specific abilities will be hidden until the character gains that ability. Specialization will also likely stick around, meaning you’ll still be limited in the number of points you can drop in an off-spec tree. Many people have floated the idea of additional roles being added; I don’t see it happening (no rogue/shaman tanks, etc.)

- Announcement of a LOTRO-style skirmish system. I’m not sure why I think this, but I still don’t see player/guild housing happening, and
transmog will be old news by 5.0, so they need a new customization system. Similar to Diablo 2, you’ll get a merc (you choose the class) with his/her own clothing tree and talents that you can choose/equip. This becomes an alternate means of endgame progression for those who don’t raid. The big
sticking point with this is how it will work in non-skirmish zones, since Blizzard is fond of things working the same across the board (PvE/PvP).
However, I think they’re starting to move away from that (crowd control). Eventually cut before 5.0 releases because they can’t get it balanced right.
(This last sentence is said in jest…somewhat.)

- Dance studio is finally released, though the eventual experience (picking from a few canned animations, instead of something more free-form)
isn’t very great.

I know the prediction thing’s been done to death already, but had to get mine out there so I could laugh later about how wrong I was. Looking forward to waking up to exciting news!

Tweaks to T13 set bonuses, other stuff

 Feral  6 Responses »
Oct 062011
 

Feral, 4P — Frenzied Regeneration also affects all raid and party members. This effect cannot be triggered if you have been in Bear Form for less than 15 sec. In addition, using Tiger’s Fury will cause your next Ravage to cost no energy, not require stealth, and have no positioning requirement for 10 sec.

Well, so much for the free Rallying Cry. A bit of a kneejerk change; I think this is a reaction to the claims that people would “stack ferals,” yet you didn’t really see people stacking DPS warriors in 4.2, did you?
The tweak to Ravage, though, is MUCH more interesting. Apparently, they got some good feedback that FC->Ravage was one of the fun parts of the class, and want to build on that. I agree; this is an nifty and dynamic way to do it which also bumps the skill cap a bit. (Don’t want to use Ravage immediately after TF since you’ll presumably be close to energy cap, but you want to use it before the DPS increase from TF runs out…)

It definitely increases burst damage, though. I’ll let someone more skilled in feral PvP discuss the implications there, but I know there were already complaints about feral burst.

Site updates have been slow, literally. (See below for what a typical night, connection-wise, looks like.)

I’ll be updating my gear guide when we get more definitive loot tables. In the meantime, check out Antony’s list on Eao’s Excursions for a breakdown of feral loot from the 5-mans. I’ve also been semi-promoted from a guest columnist to a full columnist at WoW Insider, so you’ll see a bit more of my writing there. Fear not: I still plan to make this the one-stop feral shop for 4.3, when it gets here.

(Three months left in my deployment yaaay)

 Posted by at 2:44 pm

First look at Tier 13 set bonuses

 Feral  15 Responses »
Sep 252011
 

WoW Insider’s got the full list of set bonuses: I’ve replicated the feral ones below.

  • Feral, 2P — While Berserk is active, Savage Defense absorbs are 100% larger, and your Blood in the Water talent now causes Ferocious Bite to refresh the duration of your Rip on targets with 60% or less health.
  • Feral, 4P — Frenzied Regeneration also affects all raid and party members, and your Stampede talent now grants two charges after using Feral Charge (Cat).
The Feral 2piece is a significant buff to DPS for cats. 2/2 BITW is worth roughly 1.6% DPS currently (yes, it really is that lackluster); boosting the BITW threshold to 60% will more than double its effectiveness, resulting in a overall ~2% buff to DPS. It’s roughly equivalent to the 2Pt12. The bear version is good mitigation and essentially gives bears another cooldown.
The Feral 4piece is highly highly situational for cat DPS. For fights like Ragnaros where adds have to DIE NOW, it’s amazing. For sustained DPS on a single target, it’s pretty worthless. I wouldn’t be surprised to see 2p/2p for a while. Jury will remain out. More important, however, is AoE Frenzied Regeneration. This is a HUGE raid cooldown if it includes the healing; my guess, however, is that it’ll only include the +15% health (and of course, its a DPS loss since we’re stuck in bear for the duration). This makes it a slightly weaker but longer-lasting Rallying Cry.  It will be PRICELESS, however, if it works solely on other rage-based classes (FuryWar: “WTF where’s my rage?”). This will give DPS ferals two significant raid-wide CDs, which is a huge dollop of utility.
Feel free to speculate in the comments!

 

 Posted by at 4:29 pm

Direbrew loot – the feral perspective (also: Firelands nerfs)

 Feral  6 Responses »
Sep 202011
 

IT STINKS.

(Anyone remember The Critic? Anyone?)

Coren’s Chilled Chromium Coaster looks great, but without having any of our primary stat (agility), it’s pretty useless as a cat trinket. Eyeballing it, I’d put it around 333 level trinkets. Bottom line: useful if you’ve just hit 85 and need to raise your ilvl, otherwise skip.

The bear trinkets are much better, though. They’re very specialized (unlike the JP/MF trinkets) which means you can mix and match them effectively. If you plan on tanking at all, I’d grab all three.

EDIT: Just saw the Firelands nerfs were posted. Nothing unexpected, though I prefer the ICC gradualist model to the one-time difficulty switch. One thought: Nerfing both damage done and health makes bosses with soft enrages (like Majordomo) extra easy.

 

 

 Posted by at 3:50 pm

New 4.3 details

 Feral  9 Responses »
Sep 192011
 

MMO-Champion has the full roundup, but a few things I wanted to comment on:

So another thing that came with Cataclysm, well even in other expansions, was that some fights favored some types of DPS that led to some classes being kind of sat out on certain encounters. Do you think that in the Deathwing fight this might happen as well or are you trying to balance that?
Ghostcrawler: We try to keep in mind, I mean on one hand we really want to encourage all available players to play. It’s tough not to go in and try to change things when you find that someone is too weak on a fight and a more competitive guild risks sitting that player out. We really don’t like that, but at the same time if we aren’t careful then the fights will all kind of feel the same because we’ll have to say “Okay, where’s the AE moment so that my Demonology Warlock can shine and where is the movement component of this fight because that is really good for my Fire Mage” or whatever. So we kind of give… it’s hard enough coming up with new encounters where players don’t immediately say “Oh, you’ve done that already; we’ve seen it all before”. We make so many hundreds of bosses that we like to give our encounter designers a lot of room to maneuver.

It becomes a problem when it feels like consistently the same types of characters aren’t competing. We’ve seen a lot of concern about the melee classes just can’t compete with the ranged classes. Part of that is class mechanics; part of it is that we just have a lot of encounters that really favor ranged. So for the Deathwing tier, what we’re going to do is just a straight up buff to the melee classes that hopefully helps them a little bit. We’re going to do that in such a way that the raid buffs will just end up buffing melee a little more than they’ll buff ranged. So hopefully you won’t have a lot of widespread effects in PvP or things like that, but melee characters who are just stabbing away on a boss in optimal situations will feel like their DPS is very competitive.

Hmm, I wonder who said that melee needed a buff across the board? Very good to see this being looked at. Not sure exactly how it’s going to be implemented via raid buffs to hit melee harder than ranged without splitting stats up again (if they just buff strength, I might cry) but I’m sure they’ll figure something out.

Where does the gear fit in terms of the new 5-mans? Will they be like ZA and ZG were or will they be a bit lower… where will they fit?
Ghostcrawler: A little bit higher… we’re still debating the exact numbers but I think they’re probably slotting it maybe between Normal Firelands and Heroic Firelands. It will be slightly weaker than the Looking for Raid tier and obviously weaker than the remaining Deathwing raid tier.

Interesting. I’m still unsure if LFR will be open for all tiers or just the current tier. Assuming just the current tier for discussion purposes,this means roughly:

  • 346: 4.0 5-mans (H)
  • 353: 4.1 5-mans
  • 359: 4.0 raids
  • 365: 4.2 daily quests
  • 372: 4.0 heroic raids
  • 378: 4.0 final(H) boss, 4.2 raids (Yes I know Sinestra is 379, close enough)
  • 384: 4.2 final boss, 4.3 5-mans, new profession items (guess)
  • 391: 4.2 heroic raids, 4.3 LFR raids
  • 397: 4.2 final(H) boss, 4.3 normal raids? (likely)
  • 404: 4.3 normal raids? (less likely)
  • 410/417: 4.3 heroic raids
I’m astonished that LFR will have that high of an ilvl. With all the comments that “this was expected to be something to get people used to raiding, we don’t want to make it too attractive,” …this looks really attractive to me, and is a half tier higher than what I was expecting. I bet the “don’t make it too attractive” faction and the “if you make it too low, nobody will do it” faction are arguing. Anyway, LFR sounds pretty sweet, though it shows that Blizzard is firmly moving into the “multiple difficulties for one encounter” camp, instead of the “multiple difficulties for multiple encounters” model of classic/BC. People already complain that killing a boss on heroic doesn’t feel special since they’ve done it on normal…what if you’ve killed it “two” times before?
Also, time until LFR gets called “ez-mode?” 3…2…1…

 

 Posted by at 1:25 pm

Hmm, well, that didn’t work out like I’d planned.

 Misc  4 Responses »
Sep 172011
 

So, lots of plans for more writing went by the wayside. Ughh. Nothing much of note, just RL soldier stuff. (I’ve packed up and moved to a new base…another fellow officer was injured, so I’m temporarily pulling extra duties…that kind of thing.) Tonight is the first night in a few weeks that I’ve been able to actually catch my breath and type out thoughts. Running down the past three weeks-

Void Storage/Transmogrification:  Nice for compulsive hoarders (which is probably a trait that overlaps a vast majority of the MMO population), but doesn’t really do much for ferals, for obvious reasons. I’ve never really cared for looks, tbh, except for staff/polearm models.

Tank Changes: Blizzard can’t seem to make up its mind on whether they want to make tanking less challenging or more challenging (excuse me, “interesting.”) I think Dungeon Finder has proved by now that incentives for tanks simply aren’t cutting it; unfortunately, with incentives being primarily tied to random groups, there’s a high barrier to entry, (There needs to be a skirmish system with NPC’s, so players can get used to fulfilling their roles in a group context. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this featured in the next expansion pack.)

New Darkmoon Faire: Looks great, though it seems more designed for alts than mains.

Rogue Legendary Dagger: Apparently, the vast horde of daggers that dropped in Firelands weren’t enough to suit. (I’d already given up hope for a feral legendary;  was hoping for a legendary 1H axe/fist for our shamanistic brethren. Ah well.)

Looking for Raid tool: Well, here comes the attempt to prop up 25 man raiding. I’m very interested to see the direction this goes, and if current (i.e. Deathwing) will be offered as LFR functionality, or just “older content.” (4.1,4.2, BH, etc.) It seems the majority of the playerbase is looking for easier (zerg-type) content to begin with, so I”m not really surprised by this.

On a personal note, someone asked me what my new living conditions were like, so here you go:

This is the sum total of my living space (plus an unpictured wall locker and camping chair that my tentmate stole earlier tonight) Probably about 50 sq. ft. or so. Hell, this is great, compared to what the soldiers in Afg get.  I have it easy…I don’t even have anyone in the top bunk.

 Posted by at 2:20 pm  Tagged with:

Druid Class Feedback (Feral DPS)

 Cataclysm, Feral, wow  8 Responses »
Sep 142011
 

I have seen several posts from other Druid bloggers about the feedback they gave on this thread.  I figured I would throw my own 2 cents in.

  • What type of content do you focus on? [PvE/PvP/Both]
    • PVE
  • If PvE, what type of PvE? [Heroics/Raids/Other]
    • 25 man heroic raiding
  • What are your biggest quality-of-life issues?
    • The inability to change targets quickly/efficiently.  When Ferals have to quickly change targets we are often energy starved with lots of combo points sitting on the pervious target.  While we can use SR before we begin building points on the new target it is very expensive (25 energy) and we may have just refreshed it.  This leaves us in a hole when starting on the new target and will make our long ramp up even longer.
    • Feral Faire Fire is on the spell hit table still.  It kind of takes the flow away when being melee hit capped during our opening ramp up and I have 2 FFF misses in a row.  This just steals GCD’s when they are needed most.
    • The inability to switch between AOE and Single Target rotations.  Because Swipe is so expensive (45 energy) just 2 swings will deplete a full energy bar.  Don’t get me wrong I don’t think swipe needs a buff, it’s just fine.  I would just like to see the damage and energy scaled down a bit so I have a little more freedom to choose between the rotations given sudden encounter changes.
    • Skull bash costs too much energy.  Pooling 25 energy lowers my dps output considerably while all other melee classes can use theirs for free or with considerably less resources.
    • Positional requirement.  There were some changes to the Fixed location bosses to widen the degrees that we could shred in.  While this was nice, the benefit is completely negated any time the bosses moves or targets someone other than a tank for an ability.  Mangle isn’t a good back up ability as it cannot extend Rip and does considerably less damage.
  • What makes playing your class more fun?
    • I love the flexibility that Feral DPS gives.  I have been able to do several jobs including off tanking and a few Hero bear moments.
    • Awesome mobility.  I am able to get places faster, help others get there faster and I very decent gap closer.
  • What makes playing your class less fun?
    • It sometimes feels like our mastery is at odds with the rest of our tool box.  With several nerfs to bleeds and buffs to direct damage there sometimes feels like a disconnect between physical damage tools and bleed damage tools (ie mastery)
    • See quality of life issues
  • How do you feel about your “rotation”? (Rotation is the accepted order in which abilities are used to maximum efficiency.)
    • I like the rotation.  It is complex and enjoyable to maintain as well as to tweak for different situations.
  • What’s on your wish list for your class?
    • I had an idea about making use of combo points before a target switch.  Rogues have Redirect on a 1 minute cooldown to let them move combo points to a new target.  What if Ferals could activate an ability that would consume all the current combo points on the target, but would proc the Stampede buff.  A free ravage on a new target to give a little short term burst and get quick combo points up on the new target.  Damage for the Ravage could scale based on how many combo points were consumed.  This ability can only be used on life targets.
    • Move FFF off the spell hit cap.
    • Modify Brutal Impact to also lower the energy cost of Skull Bash.
    • Allow Mangle to extend Rip if attacking from the front.
    • Reduce the damage and energy cost of swipe proportionally.
  • What spells do you use the least?
    • Claw

 

Links to Other blogger/theorycrafter feedback posts (Thanks to Lissanna from Restokin for the list):

 

  1. Murmurs (Tyler Caraway of wowinsider) – Moonkin post: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3123249662?page=11#201
  2. Reesi (of the Inc Bear & Team Waffle) – Feral post: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3123249662?page=2#28
  3. Arielle (of the Inc Bear & Team Waffle) – Feral Post: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3123249662?page=1#19
  4. Beruthiel (of falling leaves & wings) – Resto Post:  Resto post: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3123249662?page=31#616
  5. Derwent (of  Feraltree) – Resto post: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3123249662?page=7#132
  6. Garnaph (of Restokin) – EU Feral Post: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2624978483?page=16#302
  7. Talon (of Think Tank) – http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/2011/09/druidfeedback-for-devs.html
  8. Lissanna (of Restokin) – http://www.restokin.com/2011/09/druid-class-feedback-resto-edition/ and http://www.restokin.com/2011/09/druid-class-feedback-moonkin-edition/
  9. Konungr (Our forums) – http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3123249662?page=7#134

 

 

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