The Fluid DruidShapeshifting With Style.

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.

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!

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)

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

Taking a moment to step away from the feral craft that usually happens here, I wanted to take a moment to discuss another great aspect to this game. No two guilds are the same in Azeroth. Determining which guild is the best fit for your situation can be intimidating at first and is a process I just went through recently. Looking into the process in depth I hope to help anyone out there who might be thinking that it is time for a change and give them the courage to tackle a very daunting process.

I know some of you might be thinking “Q?! I understand your decent on your feral, but why do I care what you think about the apping process?” Well I’ve been an officer in both a US 300th guild as well as a US 30th guild. Both times I helped determine which applicants were worthy of a trial position. Most guilds use a similar check list to determine who would be worth trialing and more often then not a personal with less than average raiding experience can still gain trials to impressive guilds if their application is amazing.

Before we can get into the application process we really have to determine why it is you are leaving your current guild. Most guilds will ask you this and there are usually only a small number of answers that don’t raise immediate red flags. In order of things we have no control over, the number one reason would be a guild disband. It goes without saying why you would be looking for a new guild if your old one has officially stopped raids. With the harder tuned fights that Cataclysm has brought forth I haven’t seen so many guilds disappear since Lich King HM.

Another reason is of course lifestyle change, as summer starts up a lot of people step away from the game. This effects many raiding guilds; however, a lot of players like the change of being able to spend more time away from the game. This can lead them into looking for raiding guilds with less raiding hours per week. I’ve personally know many who get their whole work schedule changed and have to find guilds with different raiding hours all together.

The main reason people shift guilds is progression. It seems the longer a content patch is the more people try to move to guilds that have everything on farm in hopes of getting the achievements and gear they would not be able to obtain in the guilds they were in previously. If this is the reason your changing guilds then I hope to help make your application process easier with the rest of this post and be reading through the forums, because it takes a hell of a lot of class knowledge to jump from a 1/7 heroic mode guild to a 6/7 heroic mode guild over night.

Probably bigger then the actual application step is finding the right guild for you. If you are searching for a guild there’s a few things you should do that I don’t think gets done enough when people go hunting. First is make sure your moving up in the world, unless your actually going casual and just want a place to hang out and raid 2 nights a week trading a 6/7 normal mode guild for a 6/7 normal mode guild is never fun. If you are going to be leaving your group of friends the people you have been raiding with for months or years you might as well go up in the world. Using that same logic is remember not to get too ambitious, 4/7 heroic is when you can separate the semi-hardcore progression guild to the more hardcore minded progression guild. basically if your only killing normal mode Firelands and you start guild hunting I would only app to any guild that is 4/7 heroic or lower. Once you get into the 5 or 6/7 guilds your really going to have to shine to stand out, of course you can still get in and do well but in my personal experience this will fail more times then it will work.

Once you find a few guilds you like you need to look over there parses on World of Logs. Using this parse you can determine if your personal dps will hold out in their raid group, you must also look at their raids dps verses your guilds old raid dps. If everyone in their guild is pushing 24k dps and you were pushing 20k in your guild as the top dps, while everyone else in your old guild was only pushing 17k then I can promise you that when you enter their raid group if you play on that same level you will easily push the same if not more dps then their guild members. Any good guild will be able to see this and sort of give a rough estimate where you would be with their decreased fight time involved.

The next thing you really need to look at is their raid comp. If you find the perfect guild for you, you look through their parses and you think you’d fit smoothly, and you look again to see their guild has 4 rogues and 2 other ferals you need to just check that guild off your list. Sure a lot of guilds come with the promise if you can out preform their raiders you can have their spot; however, in truthfulness by the time you put in the time for that switch to happen you could of easily got raider rank in a guild that would be more than happy to finally get that feral they’ve been looking for.

It’s a lot of work but once you’ve accomplished all that you are ready for the hard part. Applying to a guild is both time consuming and very frustrating. Most guilds application processes have way too many questions and often ask the same question in multiple ways in order to see how dedicated you are to really making that lasting first impression. The first topic to note comes as no surprise, spelling and grammar counts. As most of you have poked fun in my blog posts from the past this is an issue for me as my grammar and syntax often leaves much to be desired. However, as long as you don’t write like a complete 5 year old often minor grammar issues can be looked over through the process of standing out.

Separating yourself from other ferals is not as hard as people may seem. When a guild ask for a picture of UI include one, but if you’ve ever fraps’d yourself doing an encounter include that as well. A guild being able to watch how you handle yourself from your PoV in a fight is huge. Sure parses can tell you when you use your dps cd’s but a video will explain the thought process even further. I’ve always enjoined watching other ferals do encounters and would love to make a section on the fluiddruid forums to watch people do encounters and offer feedback on the fight like we already do with parses but I digress. Other forms of standing out is mentioning how involved with the class you are. This website and others like it are great for that, simply adding in anywhere on the app that you do go to a feral theory crafting site and participate on numerous forum discussions is huge in helping you gain the advantage over other applicants. These are the types of things needed if your applying to guilds much higher in progression levels then your old guilds.

The last thing to note is personality. No one wants to read an application from a robot. You don’t talk to your friends with single word answers, so remember to add a lot of you to the way you answer a question a guild gives you. If you can make the person in charge of applications laugh then that raises your chances of getting in by a large margin, unless he’s laughing at how horrible you are with enchants or gemming. In which case I suggest you go to the gearing and execution thread on the forums for help with that ;)

Hopefully this post will help push anyone who thinks it might be time for a change into making it, just remember that applying to a new guild is a bit time consuming and it should be. Why would you not want to take time to find out if a guild is going to be the right fit for you if you plan on spending an average of 12 to 20 hours a week with the same people for quite sometime. Just remember never be scared to fill out an app, at worse you don’t get in but at the end of the day nothing really changes right?

I know post like these aren’t the norm, but it’s been awhile since you guys have heard from me so I thought that this would be a topic that would hit home for a lot of people. I’m always looking for off topic things that would make interesting reads for blog posts so if you think you got something feel free to PM me and I’ll see if I can make it work, just as long as I can tie it into something useful for feral’s I’ll give it all good attempts. Feel free to comment on any tips and tricks you use when looking for a guild and let me know if you like these kinds of off topic blogs so I can write more in the future.

As always feel free to PM me with any suggestion or questions for forums, the youtube page (which will be updated soon), or anything in general I am here for you guys after all.

Until next time

Q