Druids Gaining Maelstrom Weapon

Predatory Strikes now has a 3/3 20% per combo point of removing the cast time of the next less than 10 seconds cast time nature spell. Instant cast cyclone cc anyone?

Feral druids have always been limited in crowd control viable abilities due to the ones that they have while in caster form. The problem with giving feral druids a deep talent CC much like Repentance for Ret paladins was that they would still have access to the other two major CC's of their class. Blizzard could have turned both Cyclone and Roots into low end Balance and Restoration tree talents, but that just looks way too complicated and it still wouldn't solve the issue of ferals not having any.

Blizzard went with the best solution here. Feral druids are allowed to keep their damage and healing and forms while at the same time now gaining the ability to effectively use CC at the cost of additional mana, much like most of the hybrid classes right now. This change will allow feral druids a much greater amount of freedom in 2v2 arenas, and should let them compete near high end in 3v3. I don't see feral druids popping up in tournaments any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the number 1 3v3 teams on a few servers started having them. Because what else does a feral druid bring to the table? Yeah, Innervate. Throw an Innervate on your disc priest after covering him in hots and everything imaginable, or just setting up the recharge, and you have incredible longevity. I may be wrong on Innervate, and feral druids need to use it on themselves... but just having the option of giving it to your healer instead of yourself is major.

Ferals have needed this CC to put them on par with other melee DPS classes. They now have all the necessary tools to be great at arena PvP. High damage, defensive CD's they can burn through, major mobility in both feral charge and shifting out of snares, passive stun defense while in their vulnerable cat form, and instant cast CC at a rate of every 6 to 9 seconds. And they still have Mangle and bash as interrupts.

I wish I wasn't so tired so I could write this up better. Feral druids are about to outclass Rets. There may be more Rets playing at the moment, but power wise, feral druids are now stronger.

Rated Battlegrounds in Cataclysm

The biggest news out of Blizzcon for me was the addition of rated battlegrounds in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. I was pretty much ecstatic. I have long rallied for the arena system of old where by there were no rating requirements, but ratings determined how many points you achieved a week. Those with poor ratings often could not gain more than 200 or points a week, which meant 6 to 8 weeks of arena just to get a pair of pants!

Blizzard got it completely wrong, I'm not afraid to say it. They blame the failure of interest in TBC raiding on the easy access of arena gear. TBC raiding failed because of the massive system shock to guilds, both from the initial cut of numbers from 40 to 25, and then the progression path that involved a 10 man raid. The jump from easy mode Karahzan to SSC/TK definitely didn't help the issue.

Gaining gear through arenas was often called "welfare", but it was damn hard to get at the same time. By their own word, the majority of players were at 1500 rating. The system was a bell curve. If Blizzard felt that players were getting gear too quickly, then all they had to do was raise the cost of pieces of arena gear. Instead they added the horrible rating system, trying to promote raiding by removing access to weapons. The archaic concept of raiding in order to gain upgrades to weapons was pulled straight from someones ass.

Honestly, not much has changed with the inclusion of the rating system. The same players still gain the same approximate amount of upgrades as if there weren't rating requirements at all, they're just limited to gloves and legs instead of getting to choose from the entire 5 peice set. The bigger problem is the removal of accessable weapons to players who don't want to PvE.

Back to the topic though. The rated battlegrounds aren't actually worth... anything. So far there's no conclusion on if players will gain seperate rating for bg's then their arena ratings, but the general consensus looks like it is tied to your arena rating. Many people are throwing around the idea that rated bg's will up your arena rating, and that's how you will gain bonus arena points. I can't believe that that is the system, but knowing Blizzard, these people may be right.

Two huge problems with rated battlegrounds that I can't believe Blizzard is stupid enough to implement. 1) You are only allowed to play around 6 game a week. What? What in the world is the point then? Why only 6 games, the entire point of rated battle grounds was to let players enjoy battle grounds and get back into the PvP progression path that arenas blocked them from. Then there's the even bigger issue. 2) No PuG's. Only full teams of 10, 15, or whatever the number of people play an AV match is, can queue for a rated BG. So close Blizzard, so close yet so stupidly far. All that is needed is the no rating change if you lose concept, coupled with a BG MMR and normal rating system, and you end up in a situation where people can PuG to their hearts content and progress in your game.

Rated battlegrounds at this point in time are nothing more than a gimmick. They aren't meant for the casual player to have a means of end game progression, they aren't meant for BG lovers to have a means of end game progression, it's nothing but hot air to make their expansion look better if you don't do your research. Just reading the info on MMO-Champ about rated BG's will leave you nowhere near the actual idea.

Blizzard, you need to bring back PvP progression for casual players. Does everyone deserve all the best gear? No. Does everyone deserve a chance at that gear? Yes. I still feel that Season 2 arena was the best PvP progression path WoW has ever shown. The old argument that shoulders are seen and worth something is actually really bad these days, with how horrible and small the shoulders look, they just aren't as big as they used to be back in Season 3. Rating should determine how many arena points you gain, the speed at which you can aquire PvP gear. A 1500 rated player should be able to accomplish 2 pieces of season gear through arenas by 80% of the way through the season if they play every day. An 1800 rated player should accomplish 4 pieces by 80%. A 2k+ player should accomplish all 5 pieces by 75%. And that's not even including the weapons. An arena weapon for a 1500 rated player, back in Season 2, would take over 50% of the season to gain enough points.

It looks like I'll be picking WoW back up anyway, and I'll try my best at 3v3 arenas, hopefully my priest will take me back and they'll kick their rogue, but who knows. I can just BG too, and thankfully they're reintroducing a PvP honor weapon this coming season... last I heard anyway. It's always fun wrecking max pvp geared arena players in BG's because they're terrible at anything outside of a box. Just like I'm terrible inside a box.

Empire... again, and some arena!

Well I wasn't able to return Empire: Total War. So... I'm still playing it. Though it's gotten even more boring as I've wrangled the remaining vestiges of fun from it. I recently downloaded a campaign mode mod that lets me play as any faction I want. That actually adds a good deal more fun to the game. Honestly, campaign mode is all about the first 30 years. Can you survive? Can you get a solid hold on your territory/ocean space? And then once you've done that it's rather cut and dry repeat repeat. Each nation in the first 30 years on the other hand is very different, and that's nice. Just the number of territories, starting location, etc. The mod is nice, though I can't remember the name of it at the moment, I want to say it was called "grand campaign"... but I think that's also the name of the campaign setting in the game... so anyway. I even got to play as the pirates. But since all the mod does is make different factions playable, a good portion of the factions still aren't all that playable. The Native Americans don't have access to higher technologies or units as the game progresses, because they were just never put into the game. The pirates can have a maximum of 6 units... and they're melee only... lol, so they're pretty much impossible to proceed with.

Did more 2v2 arena last night. We're up to about 70 games played or so for the season. Maybe it was 60. 54% win ratio. Not amazing, but much better than the first two weeks. Playing Sunday morning at 7am seemed like a good idea... until our 1800 MMR team went up against a 2400 rated MMR team. Obviously we didn't lose any points for that loss, but it was interesting. We lasted a good while, but I wasn't able to put out enough damage on the DK, nor reach his holy paladin healer due to the crazy amount of CC, and when the DK is sitting there doing practically aoe damage through disease spreading it really takes a toll on my healer. Though I suppose the best strategy would be to follow my healer till we get to a corner break, hof myself, turn and rotate onto the dk's healer, and then when hof wears off switch back onto the DK. I think I'll try that next time.

This, that, and the other

So the rogue/priest duo for 2v2 has gotten some slight nerfs. Problems? Probably not enough. The mana burn change should help more than the blind sharing DR with fear change probably. At least for me since I run with a disc priest/ret combo and with two trinkets I can afford to break up CC chains that little bit easier. Will Ret/Priest dominate the charts? I doubt it. There just aren't enough of them compared to rogue/priest teams.

I'm done raiding so I don't have to worry about updating about that anymore. I went and bought Empire: Total War. I'm a little bit disappointed. The combat part is still ridiculously confusing, and honestly not worth my time to try and learn how to play. 1 hour limit on a match against a computer?! No thank you. I spend the entire time stuck in slow mode anyway since I'm trying to order troops around. And no, micro managing is not fun. I should probably just spend a little more time on it, but I love the campaign mode too much. Or at least I did in Medieval: Total War. 3d was a bad idea. Or whatever they call this wax figurine look. Honestly, the campaign map just looks confusing. The controls are still iffy as well. This is supposed to be a strategic game, but when you move a unit, you've moved a unit. Even if you didn't mean to. And there is no quick 'cancel/stop move' button either. You hit escape and nothing happens but the menu asks you if you want to quit the game. I give it a 7/10 honestly. It gains +'s because I love the context, but -'s for how horrible the interface is. The tutorial doesn't explain anything either. So yeah, 6/10, because after 10 hours of playing I still don't know about half the boxes. And what the hell happened to being allowed to tax places separately?! I can either not tax them at all, or I can tax them the same as the rest of the theater... honestly, what the hell were those developers thinking. That doesn't add realism, it adds retarded.

I'll still play the game, but 6/10. Which is sad, because Medieval: Total War was so good, but then they just screwed it up more and more with everything after it. I don't mention naval battles at all because TBH, I haven't felt like trying it after the Land battle is still the same mess it's always been. I'd much prefer a turn based option for land battle, then this real time waste.

New Server

So I'm on Zul'Jin now. No longer guilded, no longer raiding. Just there to do 2v2 arenas of all things. WoW, for myself as well as many others, has lost a lot of its charm over the past couple of years. This is probably at no fault to the developers, as many people I've talked to have come to the conclusion that MMO's can only keep a person entranced for so long. Sure, you'll keep playing them and paying for them, but the game is never what it was the first time you played it. Managing to harness that excitement of New is something nobody has ever really managed to do. Not that I think anyone has really tried. Most games seem to focus on replayability, not a continual growth where you as the player, as well as your character, is going through a never ending eye opening increase of awareness.

That's one thing that maybe makes gamers feel comfortable with games. In the real world the rules are always becoming new, if not changing outright. Sure, the basics are all there, money buys things, death, etc. But the person grows in new awareness every day, their emotions constantly changing. In the game world, my characters emotions don't grow, and if they do, they stop once the story ends. My emotions to the character grows, but the thing about that is that it is obviously artificial life. That's probably a decent argument against video games causing violence. If people thought video games were real then when their character died in it they'd expect it to not come back. And if the person believed that if they died in reality that they would come back... well that's an obvious mental issue as opposed to video games causing violence.

The new Furious weapons, the 2200, look amazing, and they are actually equivalent to Ulduar hard mode 25 man. Which needless to say, is great for me because I don't plan on doing Ulduar, let alone on hard mode. Whether or not I can actually get 2200 rating... well, we'll just have to see. I'm hoping I can hit at least 2000, and then by some stroke of luck Blizzard will patch in the changes to Exorcism and that will push me up 200 points for 2 weeks before they revert the changes. Sad, but that's what I'm going for right now.

Still looking for work. Another reason so little time is spent on WoW now. This isn't the best time to be blogging, while searching for work, but I figure if I put in a plug about what I'm looking for it will be alright. Anything writing, editing, research, analysis, whatever, I can do it. Just need something. I am still corresponding for MMORPG.com. But that's $20 a month... so... right. It is fun writing articles for them though.

Exorcism Nerf

So Exorcism was nerfed. It has been completely removed from PvP, as it no longer functions on players. I believe it still works on totems, and it definitely still works on Warlock pets, so it will remain on everyones bars taking up a spot.

Ret is always falling behind in arena viability, and now with this nerf it only falls further. Ret has the lowest single target damage, and in arenas, that's what you do, damage single targets. Though in a small way Ret Paladins are like casters because their damage output is mostly magical, with the new seal changes it is anyway, so the damage variance between Cloth armor and Plate armor is minimal, while the damage variance for Rogues or Warriors is quite high. DK's are much like Ret in that they can deal a large amount of damage that can't be mitigated.

Removal of Exorcism from PvP lowers Retributions burst even further, and it had already been nerfed leading into 3.1, and then this just kills it. Yes it was a 15 second cool down, but when timed with the right abilities it contributed a good 3k damage to a damage rotation that Ret was able to pump out. Possible even bigger than that, it created a connection. CS, Judge, DS, Exo, CS. A continual 5 part chain as opposed to the often broken 3 piece chain Ret is now stuck with.

Ret is not looking good in 2's. It might end up okay in 3's, though a Shaman is almost going to be a requirement to have any chance against warlocks who will be fearing Rets all over the place. If more warlocks go Destruction over Affliction, then Ret will be a good deal better off, Haunt is a killer, removing the ability for the Ret to cleanse team mates without taking a 5k hit.