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.
Of Rubies and Betas
Ruby Sanctum was released, I plan on doing it in 10 man Thursday night, I missed it in 25 last night.
After I run it Thursday night I will post up some feral strats and thoughts (Yay for something new to write about)
I have to update my gear list, I am running all Sanc T10 264 now and was lucky enough to get Heroic hurt stick Distant Land. Incredible how good this staff is that it essentially unbeatable until a Heroic LK weapon. I think someone messed up when they let this drop off a boss not LK, Sindy, or Putricide.
The closed beta has started… I am hoping to get invited. If I do, expect ALOT of posting as I am VERY excited about the changes in Azeroth.
Please Blizzard, don’t hold it against me that last time the invite ended up in my junk mail bin… by the way, watching my junk mail bin is not fun but I am watching it hard core this time.
Cataclysm Raiding Changes
So… if you have not heard there are changes coming to raiding in Cataclysm.
- The same gear will fall in 10 man and 25 man raids (exact same Ilvl and stats)
- 10 man raid bosses and 25 man raid bosses will share the same lockout. You can’t kill the same boss in both in the same week.
- 25 man raids will drop more items and reward more gold.
- Difficulty should be equal in both 10 man and 25.
- Progression is awarded for a boss kill only once and can be done so for either raid size.
To sum up, here is a blue quote… Overall, our goal is that you make the decision between whether to raid with 10 players or 25 players based on what you find fun and not because of the reward structure.
Of course there has already been a large amount of discussion on the subject, here is my 2 cents…
I like the whole idea of 10′s because you have a better chance of playing with the same people week in and out which improves the team as a whole. Now if your guild runs 3 10′s instead of 1 25 you might actually as a whole guild stay on pace with gearing up. That and you can have friendly competition within the guild between raids which could be fun.
I bet a lot of guilds ditch 25 honestly, even the better guilds are no where near some of the top world guilds cause they still carry at least a person or 2 in 25′s on any given night for whatever reason (connection, fps, stand in fire syndrome). Combine that as well with the better fps in 10′s and I think you see a lot of guilds switching it up at least in the beginning.
I would have thought Blizzard would at the very least kept special mounts (Mims Head for example) limited to 25′s… but if you really think about it that alone would still not make a difference. By the time a guild can farm Mims head they have moved on to another raid. So that alone is not a good enough reason to get 25 people to cast aside 10′s just so one… maybe 2 people in guild can get a special mount.
I think Blizzard will see more of what is already happening… dedicated 10′s and dedicated 25′s… the only difference is the difficulty in 10′s will not be from lesser gear and 25′s can’t dip into the 10′s pool and be successful from gear differences alone… a great change IMHO.
Couple this with little to no advantage in PvP from PvE gear with the new rated battlegrounds rewards and the changes to Resilience and it all makes sense.
Strong uber 25 man guilds will stay 25 to continue to compete with the same folks and against the same folks… this is more a Blizzard community thing than an in game thing. Other guilds not at the cutting edge of world progression will at least consider 10′s just to see if they can be more competitive in that bracket than they were in 25′s… or if anything else to have a friendly competition within the guild.
The bottom line is, if Blizzard can keep the difficulty the same across the 2 raid sizes, guilds should fair no better in progression than they do now… however, it might be easier to create a more successful synergy in 10′s in “non hard core” guilds which would lead to better progression.
If all guilds in Blizzard ditch 25′s… and are happy… you could see them doing away with larger raids altogether and sticking with 10′s going forward.
I guess people will now choose raiding sizes based on things like social factors and cpu performance than gear… I don’t see how that is a bad thing. Sure, if 24 of my best friends raided with me 3 nights a week without fail, my FPS was 60, and vent chatter with 25 was fun… I would raid 25′s… all things being the same why wouldn’t I? But if I only had 20 friends I could now be in a 10 progressing against my other friends 10 within the same guild and that in itself could be more fun than world or server progression.
Feel free to discuss more in comments…
How to keep having fun with an expansion looming.
So a little update…
My 10 man raiding has completely stalled as of the first week in April…. so we have dropped to 2nd on the server… /sigh. Our MT had to take a series of trips and now our OT is out of town as well… what can you do, RL crit us worse than Sindragosa.
Our 25 man raids have been hurting too… Spring Break… people looking ahead to the new expansion and playing less… bads… people jumping ship thinking it’s different for other guilds… same old, same old. 25′s is quickly on the way to getting fixed thanks to some hard work by 2 new officers in our guild and a blogger or two advertising beyond our website and trade chat. Looks like we are getting some real talent and people with good FPS and Latency.
So with raiding stalling like it has been here are some suggestions of things you can do in order to still enjoy playing WOW…
- Achievements – I know this isn’t for everyone but they can be a ton of fun with friends or alone. Personally I am trying to get to 9K and I am 16 more 10pt achievements away. This leads to my 2nd suggestion…
- PVP – As far as gear goes we have heard that rated battlegrounds are the thing of the future. Start getting good now and beefing up your PVP set and resilience. Queuing with friends (Premades) can be lots of fun and there are a lot of PVP related achievements to be had. PVP as feral is much better than it used to be. When you start off and don’t have PVP gear just burst down a caster… I recommend locks as an easy start, Pounce, Mangle, Shred, Berserk, Maim, Shred… just kill them. The key on that series on locks is Berserk so you won’t get feared away. Once you get comfortable start going after priests and shammies. Hunters are a little more challenging and I recommend putting mages last on your to kill order, especially those of a frost variety… let the DK’s kill them. Once you have a decent PVP gear set you will be able to do more than burst down an enemy in exchange for your life… something to look forward to. For some real good pro tips head over to Starmist, though most tips are for arena he has a lot of good PVP advise and some sweet video that can be a lot of help.
- Farming mounts, pets, gold, and other fun stuff – A good place to start is Rarren’s blog where you can learn how to pimp your druid. If gold is your thing you better be selling now before everything becomes worthless after the expansion, head over to the Greedy Goblin for some tricks of the trade.
- Level and gear alternative characters – You never know what an expansion will bring, have your other toons ready to go just in case druids are no longer fun. They took away tree form and boomkins got an invisible mushroom… I guess it can only get better. It also helps to learn other classes to better understand the game and lingo. It will improve your raiding and give you a PVP edge the more experience you have playing other classes so give it a try or a little bit of your time if it is something that sounds like fun.
- Start a blog – We have lost quite a few druid bloggers and there are even less blogs of classes that don’t have pets for some reason. It can be a lot of fun learning how to create and design your website. Joining the Warcraft blogging community has other perks like helping new players, spreading good tips to experienced players to better represent our class, and even in some cases if you really contribute getting items in game named after you like the BRK-1000, Phaelia’s Vestments of the Sprouting Seeds, Astrylian’s Sutured Cinch, and Toskk’s Maximized Wristguards. Jacemora’s Helm of Reason anyone? Named after my lack of over theory crafting for just a few DPS here and there… ok, so maybe not…
- Run 5 mans – With the new random system in place this can be a fine way to meet new people, possible new recruits, or just get a good laugh at the various noobs and crazies that also exist in our online world. You can also get emblems for PVP gear, second spec gear, or to buy and sell items for gold.
Anyway, that is just a start of some of the things you can do in game if raiding is slowing down.
Have fun!
