Ghost Crawler has finally addressed our fears.
Per THIS thread…
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.
4.0.1 Released
First let me say that I am sorry for my Debbie Downer post. When I saw a ping back this morning from Feral Instincts with a reference to my patch post described as “a sad piece” I felt a little bad, almost irresponsible to trash us kitties before experimenting in the new patch myself.
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.
Gearing up in Cataclysm.
So I am sure a lot of you are wondering, when will I be switching out my 264 or 277 Wrath gear for Cata greens?
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Agility – The new gear rewards come level 83 content starts surpassing old gear stats on more than just stamina and mastery.
- 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.
Can a Brotha get a Beta?
If anyone from Blizzard (unlikely) or anyone that knows someone at Blizzard (still unlikely) reads this could you hook a brother up with a Beta for Cataclysm?
TIA!
I r still around.
Just to let everyone know, I am still around. I have no plans to talk about Cataclysm until we are closer to release or I get my hand on beta and can talk about some odds and ends that I directly experience.
Vallen has a preview up here that is spot on and happens to almost be a word for word post I was debating to make.
While I wait for Thursday night and my 10 man escapades (we are down to 1 night of raiding now), I am converting my DVD collection using DVDFab and Handbrake for use on my Apple Mac Mini which I have connected to my living room TV in order to run XBMC. It works beautifully, keeps my kids from destroying their movies, and is having no problem streaming x264 encoded 720p Blu-ray over wireless… is just plain sick I tells ya. This is what it looks like on the TV…
