What happened?

Did you see it? Did you see MMO-Champ yesterday? A post was made regarding Build 13241 in the Beta. There was a lot of interesting changes listed.

Among them was something all Feral Cats should have seen coming. Our damage since patch 4.01 has been...how should I say...a touch on the high side. Just a little. It's been nice. But I think we all knew that it would be coming back in line with other classes soon.

Yesterday in said post, there was proof of this. In the section about Druid Spell changes, there were some big hits to cat DPS. I don't know what they would have done to the overall actual damage numbers, but the coeffecient number differences were huge. We're talking in the range of "850% down to 320%" kind of huge.

I didn't see it until after I made yesterday's post. And I try to keep to one post a day. So I stopped myself from immediately talking about it. Instead I started thinking about how I could make an awesome fun post around kitties being hammered by the nerf bat.

I came up with an idea and went to work. It was a lot of fun making it happen. I get stupidly giddy about the most random things sometimes. (Ask me about Peepshi.)

So I spend all this time, I have a bunch of fun, and I'm all giddy stupid smiling. I come here to my blog to finally make this post, go over to MMO-Champ to get the numbers to post in here...

And they're gone.

I swear to high heaven they were there yesterday afternoon, but now they're gone.

I wasn't intending to actually complain about them or raise a huge fuss. I just wanted to point them out in a light-hearted way. Maybe get a laugh or two. And then wait to see what it actually did to our overall DPS before weighing in on whether or not I thought it was too much.

I mean, Blizz tends to do a good job of evening things out eventually.

So, anyway, I don't have a post today, but I still have an image. So I'm going to make the image my post. And just keep it around for the next time I can actually use it.


Click for full image

Update:
Ah, this explains it. Via Zarhym:

This is one of those moments where reading data-mined material can be sorely misleading. I talked a bit about these changes yesterday here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=27497534774&pageNo=1&sid=1#14

Most of these abilities have not changed for level 80+, however, they've been changed to scale from 1-79. As an example, Ambush deals a flat 190% weapon damage on live realms. With these changes, it now deals 90% weapon damage when first learned, and increases up to 190% again by the time you hit level 80.

We made these adjustments because healing and damage-dealing at low levels has been way too powerful. These changes will make more sense when you get into the game and see for yourself.

KotJ for Bears?

One of the most crucial talents in a Cat build is King of the Jungle. Without that extra 60 Energy every 30 seconds, you can pretty much forget about being competitive. It's just not going to happen.

Most Bear builds skip right over this talent. Bears generally tend to avoid using Enrage during combat because dishing out an extra 15% damage for 10 seconds isn't worth the trade-off of also taking 10% more damage. At least not in the current content cycle where the main source of making encounters tricky for healers is to hit the tank hard and fast.

The exception, of course, is having your 4pc T10 bonus. Now you have another mini-Barkskin on an identical cooldown. And it's awesome. Enrage all the time!

What I never considered before (because I've never been good with theoreticals¹ until I have a practical application to consider them against) is that while KotJ may not be the best Bear talent in most cases, if you're filling the role of an off-tank on any fights where your tanking skills may not be required for the entire fight (Rotface until a Big Ooze forms, Festergut when you're not tanking, Sindragosa Phase 1, LK Phase 2 and 3, etc.) having this talent can push you from the ranks of kinda-contributing-a-non-consequential-amount-of-DPS to I'd-be-kicking-that-mage's-ass-if-I-was-in-my-DPS-gear.

With the new talent tree design, the only potentially significant dps contribution talent a Cat is likely to have that a Bear won't is Blood in the Water. And that really only counts in the latest stages of a fight. So you can still rip out a pretty significant chunk of a boss's health.

I came to this realization last night on Festergut. At the end fight I checked the damage meters and was surprised to see that I had landed solidly in 2nd place and was challenging our uber-Mage for first. Now, granted, Vengeance and 8 stacks of Gastric Bloat played no small part in this. But it's also worth noting that I was DPSing in Cat form for less than half the fight, I burned a few GCDs on Cower, and Vengeance doesn't apply when in Cat form, so that was only helping out while I was tanking.

Even with Gastric Bloat, I used to end up a (very) distant 6th on DPS in that fight. But since I was able to mimic my normal cat rotation (because my current Bear spec does include KotJ) I fell just short of 11k and 1st place in output.

We'll be working on Sindragosa tomorrow. I know what I used to be able to do against her. I'm anxious to see the difference now.

With Cata around the corner, I'm starting to look at KotJ as a Bear talent in a new light. While I still won't plan on using Enrage very often while in Bear form, it will give me more versatility in the way I contribute to a raid. I'll be able to fill that niche that Ferals were meant to fill, being able to both Tank and DPS without spec swaps. Yeah, I won't put up the same numbers I do when I'm actually in my Cat spec and gear. But they'll be a lot higher than they were before.



¹ : Yes, it's a word. Because it's my blog and I say so.

One Light in the Darkness

Last night we had our first ever attempts at Yogg with anything less than all four Keepers.

The night started off very frustrating, not in the least because of people spawning extra adds in phase 1. Phase 2 was equally frustrating, as it took about half our raiding night before we saw anything that looked like progress.

Eventually people settled in the ebb and flow of the fight and we found a strat that worked inside the portal rooms (a boomkin, 2 feral druids, and a rogue going to town).

We got to phase 3 on our last attempt of the night, but one of our healers went insane and started healing the boss and adds. We were down a couple people at that point, too, and just couldn't deal with it all.

I think we have a good feel for what needs to happen now, and I think next time we go in there, we'll make relatively quick work of it. Unfortunately that's going to be about 2 weeks away as I already have some other raid stuff lined up for next week and I don't want to want to be scheduling raids five consecutive nights. Raid-leading bears need their breaks, too.

The patch so far

It's been about 10 days now since I've been able to play around in 4.01. So far any group content I've done has been as a tank, so I still don't have any insights on Kitty DPS. But tanking hasn't been terrible.

So far I've tanked the headless horseman about a half dozen times, Heroic UP once, most of Ulduar (still working on that Ironbound Proto--only have Yogg left), ICC 10 up through Rotface and ICC 25 through the entire Plague wing and Princes.

The hardest part so far has been learning my new rotations. Although "rotation" isn't really an accurate representation of what I'm doing right now. I'm sort of hitting whatever isn't on cooldown since the only thing Bears do that doesn't have a cooldown anymore is Lascerate. I'm slowly settling into a prioritization system, though. It basically goes like this:

1. If Lacerate is active and close to expiring and, refresh it.
   
2. Get at least one stack of Fearie Fire (Feral) on the target.
   
3. Mangle whenever it's available.
   
4. Lacerate up to 3 stacks.
   
5. Pulverize if the buff has less than 3 seconds on it.
   
6. Get F3 up to a full 3 stacks.
   
7. Lacerate

Also, I'll Maul anytime it's available and I have more than about 40 rage.

If I'm trying to hold more than two enemies, then Swiping any time it's available becomes top priority.

It's a very different style of playing Bear than I'm used to. If I lapse into auto-pilot I find myself making a lot of mistakes, still. But I'm getting better. Pretty soon this will be the norm for me. And then I'll hit 81 and will have to work Thrash into the mix.

AoE tanking is definitely harder now, but it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Swipe does a lot more threat than it used to, so even though I can't just spam it, it's usually enough to hold threat as long as the DPS don't go all out AoE before the mobs even get to me. It's definitely been a little harder in instances than in raids due to Vengeance not building as high or persisting as steadily there, plus the lack of any OTs to help out if my Growl and F3 are both on cooldown.

Bosses haven't been an issue at all. The only time I've lost control of something (even in that 30-45s range that some tanks seem to be having issues in) was when we did Vezax in hard mode last night. But that was to a Mage standing in the black goo of uber spell damage. So it's understandable.

I haven't done any reforging of my gear yet, mostly out of sheer laziness. But it hasn't been a problem so far. Maybe I could be doing better, but through the content I've tanked I've been doing well enough. With less than 6 weeks to go before the expansion, that's good enough for me.

I am anxious to get a few cracks in at the Lich King. I was really worried that defeating him post-patch was going to be really tough, but based on everything I've seen so far, it'll be easier than before.

Hopefully we'll have a few more Kingslayers in our guild before Dec 7.

Picture Day!

Just a dump of random screenshots and stuff I've been collecting over the last couple months (in no particular order).

Strange things happen in guild chat late at night. (Shaetano is a low-level mage I've been spending some time on lately.)

What is this? I don't even...

My partner's been playing a Paladin along with me on said Mage. Look at his shield, though. Kinda wanna jump on his back and steer him around...

<Insert "mount" joke here.>

A robe I picked up while questing. I understand the look they were going for, but it appears to be stitched into my skin.

Now I know how Patchwerk feels.

It's never good when my brain gets ahead of my mouth.

"I kept getting f'n..."

My warrior done got himself a new weapon.

Ratshag would be proud.

This one's for you, Karm.

It's the closest I'll ever get.

I was running along towards Feathermoon Stronghold when I suddenly realized how much the underside of those trees look like a facehugger.

No. Just...no.

Rigor mortis apparently sets in very quickly for DKs.

Either that or dude's got core strength like woah.

A few kitties waiting around to summon the raid.

I won't lie, this would probably intimidate the hell out of me.

Our guild leader is getting desperate.

Maybe we play WoW just a little too much...

Knowing is only half the battle

A lot of interesting stuff from BlizzCon this weekend, don't you think? I know it's hard to put out a lot of exciting WoW info when the Cata beta's been long opened and the full retail release is just over 6 weeks away. But there was still good stuff in there.

The Worgen cinematic they released is the first little bit of anything regarding the starting zone/questing that I've allowed myself to see. It has me salivating. I got those chills again that I missed from the opening cinematic.

While not WoW related, I also really, really liked the Demon Hunter cinematic for Diablo III. Excellent writing on that one. I've watched it several times now.

Anyway, they still managed to pump out a lot of info that I could talk about, but the one thing that really stood out for me is this:

Enhanced Maps

• Detailed boss info will be added to the map, including loot, lore, and abilities! (Yep, in-game AtlasLoot)
  
• You won't have to pull a boss and die anymore to find out what he does.
  
• "We're not going to tell you how the boss works, but we want you to have an idea of what you're getting into."

As a raid leader, this information further enforces ideas that we've been hearing about ever since the first design goals of Cataclysm started being discussed openly. But before I delve into that, I want to share a little anecdote about one of my raiders.

For the sake of argument, we'll call her Tammy. Tammy, overall, is a pretty good raider. She knows her class well. She has good gear, good gemming/enchanting, and good rotation management. More often than not, she's a real asset in our runs. There's just one problem: Tammy won't install DBM. She considers it "cheating" and refuses to use it.

Okay, I can see where she's coming from. At the time of its creation, DBM probably was right on that borderline of "cheating." But here's the thing: DBM's been around for a long time now. I've been using it for 3 years and I'm sure it's been around longer than that, even. For at least that long it's been pretty much a required addon for any serious raider.

Blizz knows this. They knew this when they started raid development for Wrath and on all the way through. And if you don't think they've been programming their encounters around the knowledge that any serious raider is going to be running this addon, you're crazy.

Raid encounters have steadily moved away from testing people's ability to recognize an impending danger and react to it and towards the ability to be preemptive. Take LK. If you're not in proper position when a Val'kyr shows up or when a Defile is dropped, it's already too late.

But DBM only did so much for us. It would tell us what was coming, but we'd either have to run the encounter or go to a site like WowWiki, Wowhead, or Bosskillers to tell us what those abilities actually did. It still required leaving the game and doing some research.

Now Blizz is taking the absolute need to hit those sites out of the equation. Right there, in the game, we're going to be able to see all of a boss' abilities. And who can blame them? Every serious raider is already going to the sites mentioned to read up on abilities and plan strats around them. It's in Blizz's best interest to fully embrace this practice and design encounters around the knowledge that people are going to be checking this stuff out, anyway.

And anyone that's spent any amount of time on LK will tell you that all of this still does not equate to cheating. No amount of "knowing" what's going to happen during the LK encounter really prepares you for it. You have to be in there, experiencing it. Repetition. Practice. You still have to develop the skills required to get through it, and that's not easy.

It sounds to me like encounters in Cataclysm are going to continue to move in this direction. We have DBM. We have in-game descriptions of boss abilities. All this information is handed to us, and Blizz knows it. So they're going to be designing their encounters assuming that you're using this information to its fullest. Waltzing into a raid and face-rolling is not going to be an option. You have to be an educated, skillful player to succeed. Ignorance is no longer a viable excuse.

Be smart and be prepared.

I'm just saying...

If the Deathwing fight at the end of Cataclysm doesn't include some mechanic that centers on ripping the adamantite plates off of Deathwing's body in order to make him fall to pieces, I'm going to be super sad panda.