Lets take a look at the new talents available, and let me start by saying it’s weird to have a bunch of talents to choose from that don’t necessarily give any kind of advantage to my main role as a damage dealer. Here is a LINK to the full descriptions of every talent.

The first choice is between Feline Swiftness, Displace Beast, and Tireless Pursuit. I think the constant 20% increase to speed while in cat form is a no brainer here, the others look more useful for PvP. Granted there might be particular PvE boss encounters that might favor one of the others but in general I think FS is the way to go.

The next level we choose between Nature’s Swiftness, Renewal, and Cenarion Ward. Let me say that I like the last option the best as it gives us the ability of an instant cast HoT while in Cat form. This screams raid utility to me and from a kitty that prides himself on helping the raid beyond just dealing damage I like the difference this could make in a PvE encounter.

Next we choose between Faerie Swarm, Mass Entaglement, and Typhoon. I think here Typhoon will be what I choose, an in Cat form knockback… SWEET! Faerie Swarm is replacing FF and depending on raid comp might be needed instead but I raid 25 man I am going to wager the debuff can be applied by someone else. The ME talent might be useful in certain encounters but is not castable in Cat form so I kinda don’t like it.

The next level we have Wild Charge, Incarnation, and Force of Nature. From a shear DPS vantage point I kinda like Force of Nature if the trees do high damage. It’s castable in Cat form and easy DPS. The other 2 talents sound similar with one having a charge component and the other one not. Wild Charge seems pretty dumb actually, It puts me behind the boss and lets me ravage without a positioning requirement… ah… yeah, ok. Incarnation looks the best, which allows ravages from behind without the need of being in stealth. It looks like with this talent we would open with berserking and ravaging our butts off with the 50% increase to crit with ravage at boss health above 80%…. interesting.

The next level is my first disappointment. 2 of the 3 choices are basically for bear as using them puts us into bear form automatically. So we choose from Demo Roar, Bear Hug, and Ursol’s Vortex. I am so picking UV here, not that as a kitty we have much choice. It’s an AoE grip usable in Cat form. That is just sick OP if you think about it. In PvE we get to suck mobs to us and swipe… I freaking love it. It makes us an adds magnet (or lets us pick a spot for the magnet) for 15 seconds. Honestly this is probably an awesome raid utility on fights with a pesky add phase.

Our last selection at level 90 is a complete disappointment. Heart of the Wild, Master Shapeshifter, Distanglement. HotW is most likely the given as it takes Hit to 100% and gives us an INT boost from agility which will improve our utility heals. The other 2 look very PvP centric.

The last cool thing to note, and I don’t know how the heck they are going to actually get this to work in game is Symbiosis. Basically we get to target another player and grab an ability belonging to that targets class within the limits of our specialization. This has buggy written all over it imho. Our target gets one of our abilities, also based on our spec. It sounds pretty cool as we get the special for an hour and it lasts through death so basically we will be doing this before a fight starts but I might see where a mid fight application might prove useful. If we get to use this attack in kitty form I say cool, Kitty Pyro? Kitty Chain Lightning? Ok, probably not since we would have to be in boom spec for that I would guess. So Kitty FoK / Swipe AoE craziness? Lots of possibilities here and I am sure some leet guild will figure out some way to exploit this running a party of half druids to down some heroic boss.

All in all, I guess these changes have the ability to drastically change the way we play our kitty. The question is do we use this stuff? Does it matter in terms of DPS? Will it make playing more fun? My guess is at first playing might be more entertaining but in the end if my damage sucks I won’t be happy.

I can’t feel my feet.

I am looking forward to tonight. We downed Magmaw, ODS, and Halfus Tue night and were able to get Valiona & Theralion to I think 20%ish? They will fall tonight and my guess is we will then take a look at Throne of the Four Winds.

Tuesday night Malevolence dropped but I passed to our hunter… (long story). It made me start thinking though about that age old (Ok, only since Wrath) question: Hunter gear or Kitty gear? My thoughts is that with FAP no longer being present on weapons and our damage being tied to weapon damage it should be Kitty first then Hunter. I mean for a hunter it is a stat stick, and they have single handed options (Blizz, be fair and let druids dual wield swords, axes, and the like…. ok, jk… or not, I mean how does a hunter duel wield axes while shooting a bow… seriously.) where for us one of the biggest upsides to the upgrade is the weapon damage itself. Good news, I am sure we will be killing these easy bosses every week at least until we have no upgrades left from them and we start looking at saves… so it’s not like I won’t pick this up sometime soon.

By now most people have most likely heard about the incoming feral/druid PvP nerfs… and PvE nerf… that we can no long shift out of movement impairing effects… and of course all the new cast times, durations, and limits. Honestly I am sick of PvP changes impacting my PvE enjoyment. Not having instant roots with the glyph sucks as I was really enjoying that aspect of feral in 5 man’s and raids. Not being able to shift out of Static Cling fighting Asaad just flat out sucks.

As far as these changes to feral and PvP and the changes to all the classes… it looks to me that Blizzard is trying to shorten the time investment of arena… which is hard to complain about, but I think we just got regulated to CC and bear duty as a feral. We will just get destroyed as a kitty IMHO. Well at least we had some time as viable PvP in feral form, I guess all druids will go back to resto/boom for PvP. Honestly, a good feral in arena (not that I ever was one) had gotten to be quite a bother so not surprised at all of the changes.

• EJ List HERE
• Fluid Druid List HERE

So what can I add to this…. well, not a whole heck of a lot. The list and explanations at the Fluid Druid at first glance look really good to me.

I am sure things will change somewhat post release and pre raiding so stay tuned. I will definitely do my usual tweaking of the list to highlight how to best utilize your time and still gear up as best as possible.

My plan now, with the little time before the Cataclysm release I plan on testing out just how Uber my premade can be in full Raid T11 gear. I have cut the gems (such weird requirements on the meta), enchanted my gear, and choose a bear feral spec.

My plan is to solo some content… Most likely some Black Temple trash, just to see how viable solo grinding the last little bit of rep I need will be. Also probably Utgarde Pinnacle as I still don’t have the Blue Drake. It is possible to solo Utgarde already for the drake drop, but I want to see how much easier it is at 85 with awesome gear.

Ok… so off to BT… Fly to Blasted Lands… go through portal… fly to Outpost…. fly to BT…

“You must be in a raid…”

Damn it.

Hearth.

Fly to SW Harbor… boat to Northrend… fly to Valgarde… fly to UK… set to Heroic and enter UP.

Stealth to Skadi…

Run the gauntlet… kill guys… pick up harpoons… shoot down Skadi…. oh wait…

Bags are full… /damn it

Drop a Heaveweave manual…

kill guys… pick up harpoons… shoot down Skadi.

Kill Skadi, loot… no Blue Proto. /Sigh

Ok, so what did I learn?

1. This is Easy. I went from 130K+ health to about 100K. Fought him standing still, never moved. Used no cooldowns.
2. Bears hit freaking hard.
3. Droprate will have me doing this quite a bit.

Just no getting away from being a Druid I suppose.

I did log on to do the first 2 phases of Pre Cata Content. A bunch of quests, and the feat of strength. You can get good information on the feat from this Tripping the Rifts.

A bit of FYI, you can get the achievement by gaining the buff in Azeroth. You can only loot the item for the daily if you do it at level content. I recommend doing it old world personally.

I stocked up on mats to get a jump start on leveling professions. I personally have to level tailoring, enchanting, jewelcrafting, inscription, and alchemy. After doing some WOWhead research I found only enchanting allows for stocking old mats to level and it is only a guaranteed 10 points.

News came out from a dev that the current beta pace of leveling will persist in Cataclysm release. What this means is that leveling to 85 is going to be VERY fast. Be prepared to jump in 5 man heroics and crafting epics quickly in order to gear up for raiding.

I believe the new Feral DPS rule of thumb is going to continue to be Mastery>Agility>Haste> and going for the Hit and Expertise caps where possible. I see a lot of Strength gear floating around with lots of mastery on it, I am guessing that will be desirable as well.

Cataclysm definitely looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. I plan on jumping right in and I have already purchased the digital download.

Another notable is that in a 10 player raid, only 1 battle rez can be used per attempt. This will impact my 10 man right off the bat as we had 1 lock and 2 druids. Yes, Soulstone counts as a battle rez. After the rez counter hits 1, meaning someone actually accepted an in battle rez, trying another will net you an error that the spell is not available.

Fun Stuff.

As boomkin when you get to an eclipse the spell you should now be casting lights up on your cast bar including your nuke when off CD.

Seriously? Awesome.

Blizzard is making it so DPS spend less time watching procs, buffs, and DoTs and more time watching for fire, void zones, or other game elements.

Will it work and improve the player base so more people can accomplish end game content?

I am going with yes, but just a small increase. I have played with enough people that this alone still won’t make a difference.

Want people to see more endgame content Blizzard? Remove mechanics that are 100% RNG and try to limit fights to skill, gear, and experience. RNG is nice and all but when you have to spend an extra 2 hours or 2 weeks killing a boss because the stars have to align even though everyone is a good player and knows that fight something is wrong.

It’s like playing a football game, winning on the scoreboard, and then having to flip a coin to see if you need to play the whole game over before it counts… lol

I don’t know, maybe that “luck” variable is important too. It adds an element of chance to the game beyond simple mechanics rolls that keeps the addicts coming back for more.

Anyway, didn’t mean to go off on a tangent there. Boom is noobalicious, and from what I hear so are other ranged/casting classes now with the UI change. My RIP does not flash when it drops off or FB light up when I hit 5 combo points and a RIP is still up so I guess we still get to claim to be one of the harder class/spec to play. I think even though they made cat mechanics a little more forgiving there is still a place for the pro kitty and they will get a little higher in the meters for it.

On that note, word has it Fbn is broke and will not be fixed until Cataclysm. Ovale is functional, but looks to have bad suggestion code from what I saw playing around with it last night. I suggest getting something like NeedtoKnow to watch your bleeds and on boss fights just be aware of when to swap out FB to refresh RIP toward the end of a fight.

Good luck Kitties.

We think Fury, Arms, Feral cat and Retribution dps is too low and we will be buffing them.

This is great news, especially after some initial test dummy runs of 9K Boom parses in decent gear, without some gems, chants, or Primary Glyphs. In better Kitty gear I was having a tough time holding 7K however I will say that was with all Crit gems and I was generating way too many combo points at the sacrifice of AP.

I recommend for now until anything changes at the very least work on changing all your gems to agility. You can reforge later to mastery, hit, or expertise based on need.

Slowly move away from Crit and Haste to make sure you achieve a good balance of damage and combo point generation. The key is going to be keeping up your bleeds even after the buff I think. I really see the loss of ArP as moving us back to doing everything possible to maximize bleed damage. My guess is haste, expertise, and even hit can fall a little when making sure to keep up crit and mastery. Haste might be the tricky stat to get a good feel in order to have the right energy generation.

Anyway, at least we finally had someone address the issue, I am climbing down from the roof now and putting away the laptop.

I do have plans on running my own parses and taking a look at a new DPS strategy (now that our damage is back to the BC bleed optimization and lowing the relevance of melee auto attacks and fillers). I need to re-gem first which could take a while since my alchemist didn’t have the ability to transmute, or craft anything else for that matter… not sure what happened there Blizzard but a profession with no crafting possible makes for a bad profession… lol.

I did get a chuckle at THIS over at the Fluid Druid “The same patch that made Cower useful also ensured that we won’t have the DPS to need it.”

So last night I logged in, sans a bunch of addons (Oh QA how I miss thee) and went ahead and learned a bunch of glyphs on my 4 80 toons. I did my talent tree for feral which basically amounts to being able to get every DPS talent you want except for the one you will want over in the resto tree which we will have to wait for as it will take moar points.

I also did my talent tree for my Hunter (BM for now) and took a little trip to Stillpine Hold in Azuremyst Isle in order to resurrect Slurpee.

I had to get rid of Slurpee a while back but now with all the stable pet slots I wanted to get back and pick him back up as soon as possible. Next will be to retrieve Bumble from that cave in Ungoro… if you have not noticed I have a thing for white pets, for example…

Bumble

Equinsu Ocha

Für Elise

Anywho, hopefully tonight I can work on getting gemmed correctly (maybe reforge Crit into Mastery) and start playing with a new optimal rotation of bleed uptime, FB, ravage starter after a leap, yadda, yadda… and will let everyone know how we look.

Or I will go get more pets… only time will tell.

Let me start by saying all your ArP gems will convert to Crit gems, so one might want to stock up on agility gems before the xpac… however, I plan on just leveling in the Crit gems with the knowledge that greens and blues before or by level 83 will be replacing my Wrath gear.

Let me tell you why you will be replacing gear rather early.

1. Mastery – Old Wrath gear has none, most of the quest rewards has lots. Look below for the Mastery tooltip in the character screen for an idea of what this means to DPS.
2. Stamina – All the new gear has a lot of added stamina. If you plan on tanking new 5 man content early in the xpac you will be harder to heal with your old gear.
3. Agility – The new gear rewards come level 83 content starts surpassing old gear stats on more than just stamina and mastery.
4. Leveling not Raiding – For leveling, pure stats not set bonus or procs tend to be more beneficial. Fights are short and usually trinket procs are wasted as you run between mobs.

This being said I am at level 83 and I still have not seen a weapon worth switching out my Heroic Wrath weapon for (though I hear a blue polearm at the end of deepholm questing fits the bill). I think there was a weapon or 2 with tons of mastery but I wasn’t sold on the stats over my current staff.

Note also that Idol’s are becoming uninteresting in the xpac and are expected to no longer be limited to certain classes. For example I was surprised when I headed to the bank hoping my old idol would be better for leveling….

Note the new gems sockets. Notice the lack of interesting procs. Meh.

So, level 83 and here is my new look…

Sexy huh?

I geared myself in greens and blues to max stats like Hit and Mastery… see below…

Notice you can now get a quick answer to your hit chances in your current gear, this is the new Hit Tooltip.

With all old Wrath Epic gear Mastery was at a base of 20%.

Here are my melee stats in old Wrath Epics. It doesn’t tell the whole story as you don’t readily see procs but as I said, leveling wastes them more than not and the lack of stamina will hurt when running instances especially as bear.

I wish I could do some test dummy parses but with no recount and the chance that some things are not working (not sure Mastery is functioning) I can’t do much. Notice I lose about 7% Crit. Not sure yet if that loss is worth the added damage from higher AP or the mastery bonus, but as I start leveling again I will report back on my findings.

I am in a holding pattern atm in beta since I am at the level cap, as soon as they break that open I will start leveling Jacemora again. My plans are to start leveling my hunter in beta… I need to find the new foxes.