In a holding pattern, for the moment

It’s Thursday, and I haven’t touched my WoW toons since Sunday, when I agreed to hop on and help my girlfriend with her Tol Barad dailies. My last real activity happened late on Saturday, when I was involved in a furious Warsong Gulch match, which we lost but where I was able to scratch and claw my way to 11 killing blows on six deaths, with six flag returns.

I got an achievement for returning five flags in a single match, and earlier in the day I also became exalted with Baradin’s Wardens. The first (flag) achievement was the more gratifying of the two. The second (reputation) was about as anticlimactic as just about any achievement that I’ve ever gotten.

It happened at the wrong time. I was in the middle of doing my Tol Barad dailies, which is generally a horrible, teeth-grinding experience fraught with deadly respawns and accidentally killing stuff that someone else tagged, or being beaten by another player who is collecting the same item as you. So, there was a sense of relief, but it was muted, because I am so frustrated with my playing experience that I’m just about completely numb to the game at this point.

Here are some of my issues:

Easy leveling (early levels)

See my post from last Saturday for my feelings on this subject.

Easy leveling (80-85)

It took me 3.5 days to move my main toon from the old level cap to 85. It was a fun experience – probably the most fun that I’ve had in the game so far, other than different moments in PvP and the general camaraderie that we have in the guild. But it was too short. I did not rush – I just played and enjoyed it, and it still only took me half of a week.

Yes I’m more experienced and had nicer gear this time… but, to compare, it took me almost three months to get Anacrusa from level 70 to level 80. At this point, a month into the expansion, I have one toon (druid) that has been 85 for almost four weeks, one (paladin) that has very casually been 83 for almost two weeks, and a third (hunter) that is, almost as casually, one bar away from the cap.

It feels that, with the revamping of old zones, the “leveling through the expansion” part of the game got the short end of the stick this time. Perhaps that’s what most people wanted… but, in retrospect, it’s not what I wanted.

PvP

Tol Barad is a mess. It has been a mess since before launch, with a massive lack of competitive balance (it heavily favors the defending team, for those who don’t know). Blizzard introduced a hotfix last week that made it ten times more lucrative to win by attacking in order to try to balance this, which resulted in game-wide win-swapping between factions. Tol Barad became an absolute joke at this point. Blizzard “fixed” that this week by reducing the attack-win honor bonus by 80%, but by that time it was all over. The zone has all of the same problems that it has always had, and we’re a month into the game.

Otherwise, while my PvP experience has varied, I’m tired of battlegrounds. I was interested in arenas for a short while, but at this point I’m not all that interested in even playing the game, so I may never try them.

Dungeons

And raids, I guess. I don’t know – I haven’t raided yet, and I’ve only managed to complete three heroics out of the seven or eight that I’ve attempted.

After we killed the Lich King in my old guild, I was burned out on raiding, and I guess that I’ve never gotten my mojo back, so to speak. Currently, my guild has one full-time tank, but he has a life to live, so he’s not always available. The experience can vary widely when pugging tanks… and I don’t like committing hours of time to frustration.

On Friday, I ditched my unused resto spec and picked up a tanking one, reforged and re-gemmed all of my gear, and swapped around my glyphs with the idea that maybe I could relearn to tank. But… I don’t want to tank. I don’t particularly like tanking, and it’s also been a while for me since I last tanked anything of consequence. And with my current attitude, I feel uninspired to actually carry out the task of learning to tank in Cataclysm.

A final note on dungeons: Being melee in these new dungeons is rough. As a cat druid, I have to balance the following: staying out of bad while being close enough to interrupt (and it’s sometimes impossible to do both), doing competitive damage, and watching people’s health (yes, I have thrown many, many heals in dungeons). Bringing in a pug tank means that, in spite of communication beforehand, the boss often doesn’t get kited, or nobody else interrupts, or whatever.

I’m fine with “staying out of fire,” concentrating on having enough energy available to interrupt each time, or throwing heals, all at the expense of topping the meters. I actually like that. However, when staying out of bad = not interrupting = Non-Kited-Boss one-shots Non-Kiting-Tank (and so on) as often as it does right now, I begin to lose what little desire that I had to be there in the first place.

Admittedly, my tolerance is low…

Going back to my points above about easy leveling through the five new zones, I have to say that being “not-capped” for less than a week also doesn’t feel good. Woot! – a few days of leveling, and then back to the old… yes… dungeon grind.

Reputation grinds

I worked hard to open up all of my dailies. I am exalted with three of the factions now. However, I have to say that I hate them. Between all of the people who are leveling and doing the quests, and all of the people grinding rep, the dailies range from pain-in-the-ass to nightmarish.

The nearly instant respawns in some zones, as noted above, are punishing. When I’m not fighting for my life, I’m competing with others for those mobs or quest items that, oddly enough, have poor respawn rates. As Darkbrew noted recently, if you need to kill ten things in Tol Barad, you’ll kill 20 by the time you’re through. It’s generally not a fun experience.

Closing

I’m in a holding pattern, for the moment. I haven’t quit the game, but I don’t know if I will be playing much at any time soon. This is a long break for me, even if it has only been four days. My heart hasn’t been in it for a week or longer. I’m saddened by the way that I feel about it. I love the potential for good times and interesting lore, and I like that the game seems more challenging at this level. It seems like I should be happy with WoW, but I have a lot of problems with it right now.

Perhaps I’m changing, or perhaps it’s just dawning on me that the game doesn’t offer what I’m interested in anymore. I’m not sure. At any rate, we’ll see what happens. I’m spending more time playing guitar, blogging a bit about sports, and I’ve picked up Fable 2 and Half-Life 2 again after months of not playing them. I’m enjoying Fable 2 – Half-Life is a game that I can only concentrate on once in a while, but Fable 2 has a fun story and an interesting NPC community that I’m enjoying right now. I’m hoping to finish it this week, and begin playing Fable 3 shortly thereafter.

As far as WoW goes… well, I’ll let you know.

[Cataclysm] Feral PvP: first impressions, a modified spec, and glyphs

Shortly after I hit level 85, I made myself the complete set of eight leather PvP pieces and decided to jump into a battleground.

I drew Arathi Basin, which is one of my favorites (along with Eye of the Storm and the new Battle for Gilneas – I like cap-and-defend BGs, I guess). As “preparation” wound down, I browsed my team members and noticed the health levels with buffs: “Wow, I have 107K health… and that puts me right in the middle of the pack!”

The experience was an eye-opener. Many things were the same, including all of the battleground objectives. However, at that point, one thing was clear: enemies weren’t going down nearly as fast as they had during the week before launch.

I don’t remember whether we won or lost, but I do know that the individual encounters, as well as the game itself, lasted a while. At the end, I was prematurely tired of PvP for the night. I finished with two killing blows and two deaths. Two killing blows! Looking at the summary, I noted that there were no spectacular kill counts, so I didn’t feel that I had performed poorly. I left with a new respect for the fact that, while we’re certainly more powerful at level 85, we’re also way more healthy, which means that our abilities to quickly decimate enemies’ health bars have been muted.

On the other hand, I survived a couple of encounters that I never would have lived through at level 80. One notable encounter was after a failed attempt at capturing the Gold Mine. There were two Horde at the flag, but when three of us made our way down to take them, they were joined by three others. My teammates died, and I, bleeding, ravaged, and loaded with DoTs, all cooldowns blown, ran for it (yes, running for it is completely acceptable in situations where you are otherwise definitely going to die!). I dashed up the hill, and when Dash expired about halfway up the hill, I popped out of cat form and threw myself a Rejuve and three Lifeblooms. The entire time, I had two mages blasting me with Frostbolts (etc.) and blinking to stay up with me, which hampered my escape speed. And there was an enemy warrior coming after them, trying to catch up with me. The heat (and cold) was on.

I thought that I was dead. I had accepted it, put my affairs in order, made peace with Elune, thought fondly of my loved ones, and closed my eyes with a smile and a tranquil heart…

…except I didn’t actually close my eyes: I kept running, Lifebloom kept ticking, and I refreshed it when it bloomed. I switched forms whenever I got hit by a slowing debuff, which meant that I was switching forms almost on the GCD. I ran, and ran… straight toward the Stable graveyard, from which a fresh set of newly rezzed teammates was charging in my direction.

The mages died, eventually. And I lived.

I never would have survived that assault at level 80 – my 36K health and the insane damage-dealing abilities of the mages would have killed me way before I crossed the half-way-up-the-hill point.

Damage/Survivability spec (going off the beaten path a bit)

I’ve been playing around with my spec. I’m at the maximum cost for re-specs now, which is, I think, 66g, and I’ve been there for a while because I’ve re-specced at least a dozen times since I hit level 85.

Currently, on the new armory, I am listed as having my off-spec as feral and my main spec as balance. With heroics on the horizon for our guild, I am playing with the idea of having a balance or resto spec, and my feral/raiding UI on that spec was a bit of a mess anyway, so I decided to scrap it and play around with that one for a while. I had leveled in my PvP/leveling spec, which ended up being one and the same, and was pretty comfortable with the way I had my UI set up for that. So my second spec is actually my main spec.

Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about my options with feral builds, and the idea that I’m currently running with is that I will use this spec for everything that I do as feral for a while – PvP, heroics, and quests.

Here it is:

Anacrusa's damage/survivability spec, 12/22/2010

At level 85, I have five more talent points than I had in any of my previous spec-related posts, so I have a little more to play with.

This spec differs from other excellent spec recommendations from Alaron (The Fluid Druid) and Kalon (Think Tank). It is not truly optimized for generating maximum DPS, and is also not a textbook hybrid spec for bearcats.

This spec does include almost all of the stats that will increase damage, though. The only talents that I left out that are generally accepted as “required” for a pure DPS spec are 3/3 Fury Swipes and 2/2 Blood in the Water.

My thoughts behind this spec are as follows:

• The guides linked above list 0/32/6 builds, leaving three points free. I put those three points into Perseverance. The less spell damage taken, the better, no matter the environment. This goes for heroics, too. With mana conservation more imperative now, reducing spell damage can do a little bit to contribute to the healer’s Mana Savings Fund. And for PvP, I felt that this was a good choice.
• The two points from Blood in the Water went into 2/3 Thick Hide, for the same reasons as my Perseverance choice (except that it’s physical damage this time). Blood in the Water isn’t a huge contributor at this point, because Ferocious Bite isn’t. If I want to reapply a Rip at the end of a boss fight, I’ll choose to do so. Ferocious Bite isn’t doing that much average damage since I’m not getting critical hits very often (and because I have it glyphed in dungeons to save energy). I did use BitW in a few early dungeons, and it’s neat, but I don’t really miss it.
• The three points from Fury Swipes went into 2/2 Infected Wounds and a second point of Furor. Fury Swipes has a negligible impact in PvP, and only marginally more of an impact in dungeons. Infected Wounds is necessary for PvP, and also comes in handy during the odd messy pull when I’m interrupting and locking down an add that I have aggro on. 2/3 Furor is nice when I need to pop out of cat form to throw a heal – switching back and having two thirds of my energy pool available is nice for getting right back to business.

I’ve used this spec in dungeons and PvP, and it seems to be working out fairly well. I’m not at the top of the damage meter, but that has nothing to do with the fact that I have no points in Fury Swipes and Blood in the Water. Our warlock routinely does quite a bit more damage than the rest of us, and I’m fine with that. My utility and survivability comes in handy, and makes encounters more fun for me.

Glyphs

Since I have only one feral spec, I handle my glyph situation like this: I’m always glyphed for PvP/quests, since that’s what I spend the majority of my time doing, and I keep a supply of Dust of Disappearance handy for dungeon runs.

Prime Glyphs

• Mangle – swapped out for Shred in dungeons.
• Berserk – swapped out for Tiger’s Fury in dungeons. There is an excellent argument for keeping Berserk in dungeons, but it depends on playstyle and preferences.
• Rip – great for both PvP and dungeons.

Major Glyphs

• Entangling Roots – highly recommended for both PvE and PvP. In a recent dungeon where a mark accidentally was erased just before a pull, I was able to sleep one dragonkin and instantly root another, and being able to use consecutive CCs as a druid felt pretty good.
• Barkskin – swapped out for Ferocious Bite in dungeons, although I’m not sure how I feel about that…
• Feral Charge – a keeper for PvP and PvE

Minor Glyphs

• Dash
• Wild
• Aquatic Form (PvP/dailies), Unburdened Rebirth (dungeons)

* * * * *

So, that’s my basic setup for spec and glyphs at the moment. I’m sure that it will change at some point. Perhaps I will decide to try Blood in the Water as I build up my gear set. Or maybe I’ll decide to stop PvP-ing for a while and throw Fury Swipes back into the mix. Who knows? For now, two weeks in, this is what I’ve settled on.

Since that first BG, I’ve participated in a couple dozen others, as well as several Tol Barad battles. I’ve found that, like before the launch, if I get into a one-on-one situation with anyone except a paladin (… … …), I feel that I have a good chance to come out on top. Usually, these encounters get sabotaged by either friends or foes riding in and demolishing me or my opponent before I have the chance to see the outcome. However, when it’smano a mano, I always consider myself to have the upper hand.

Except with paladins.

(…)

4.0.3 is live today, “Northern Spices bug” fixed!

As expected, patch 4.0.3 went live today.

While it’s not THE patch, where The Shattering occurs (that’ll be 4.0.3a), “Much of the data downloaded in patch 4.0.3 will pave the way for the shattering of Azeroth shortly before the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm on December 7th.” (taken from the patch notes).

So the world looks the same, but there were some changes and bug fixes. Here are the patch notes, courtesy of MMO Champion:

General

• Much of the data being downloaded in patch 4.0.3 will pave the way for the shattering of Azeroth shortly before the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm on December 7.
• The leader of Wintergrasp raids can no longer kick players from the raid (this change will also apply to Tol Barad in Cataclysm).
• When in a Looking For Dungeon group, using an instance portal to that instance will now take players to the Looking For Dungeon entrance point instead of the normal destination of that portal. This will make it easier to return to the instance after dying in an LFD group.
• Honorable Kills are no longer awarded for killing players below level 5.

User Interface

• Added pets to the new raid unit frames when displayed in party.
• The default UI Scale has been altered so it will be set at a 1:1 pixel/texel ratio. This will result in a smaller UI appearance for higher resolution monitors.
• Players may now adjust the local “Lag Tolerance” time for better precision of spell timing. This is an advanced-users-only feature found in the Interface Options (Combat) panel.

Bug Fixes

• Macros now handle spell variant transitions better. For example, Trap Launcher causes a different version of Frost Trap to be cast. Previously the macro system was not handling this transition properly.
• Queuing in Looking For Dungeon for a different wing of the instance a player is already in now works properly. For example, a party can now queue for Scarlet Monastery – Library after completing Scarlet Monastery – Graveyard.
• Killing High Interrogator Gerstahn before killing Emperor Dagran Thaurissan in a Blackrock Depths – Upper City random Looking For Dungeon run will now provide the proper reward. This also applies to Archmage Arugal and the Crown Chemical Company bosses in Shadowfang Keep during the Love is in the Air holiday event.
• Repeatedly inspecting other players should now function correctly.
• Area heal-over-time effects should no longer cause players to stand up.
• Male blood elves have received a crash course in dancing and now know to stop dancing when they run.
• Drake mounts have gotten bored with gliding and will flap their wings again when flying forward.
• Druid Flight Form now properly appears in the Spellbook before Expert Riding is learned.
• Sunfire’s damage-over-time effect now deals damage at the same rate as Moonfire’s damage- over-time effect.
• GM Ticket messages should now displace buff icons instead of obscuring them.

A couple of random notes:

Northern Spices Internal Bag Error fixed!

Not included in the notes is a bug fix to the problem that has severely hampered the cooking efforts of multitudes of players for the past month. Post 4.0.1, players could not purchase items that were sold in stacks with non-gold currency; Northern Spices are sold in stacks of 10 at the cost of one Dalaran Cooking Award per stack, but after the patch, players were greeted with “Internal Bag Error” when attempting to purchase them. It has been a known issue for over a month, unfortunately. In order to keep up with my toons’ voracious appetites, I’ve done the daily cooking quests in Dalaran almost every day since 4.0.1. Acquiring spices was otherwise impossible, unless I wanted to bleed gold at the Auction House.

Well, I’m happy to say that that issue has been fixed! It was the first thing I checked when I logged in today, and it was so nice to hear the stack of spices settle into my bag. I’ll definitely be fishing for some Dragonfin Angelfish today!

No more kicking from Wintergrasp/Tol Barad

One change of note: Gevlon has been writing quite a bit about WG Clean, an addon that he’s been using to kick and ban people who don’t follow instructions from Wintergrasp battles (or people who fish during the battles). I’ve been following his accounts of his experiences with it at his blog; it’s fascinating to me. He acknowledged the other day that this would be going away with the patch, and it looks like it has as of today. I’m not sure what Blizzard is seeing on their end with regard to abuses of this ability – maybe this really needed to be done. However, just from reading about Gevlon’s use of it, I think it’s unfortunate that this is going away. It seems that Wintergrasp is chaotic enough as it is, and it was inspiring to see someone who used this feature as a key tool to lead his side to victory.

* * * * *

So, I’ll leave it at that. I mainly wanted to point out the Northern Spices bug fix, which is a happy thing for me. I can now consume food liberally, which is one less annoyance.

Feral PvP: reforging for Mastery in 4.0.1

*Note: Some of the information in this article is outdated, as it was written prior to Patch 4.0.1 or the launch of Cataclysm. Please do not take the following info as gospel, as it is not current!

Patch 4.0.1 dropped on Oct. 12, and for the first couple of days, cat druids had not yet received the huge damage adjustments that would bring their abilities somewhere closer to their pre-patch levels. Thus, I didn’t PvP until several days after the patch.

However, when the damage adjustments were made, ninja-style, somewhere around a day and a half later, I spent a lot of time working on my PvE gear and spec, and then I looked at PvP.

My PvP gear looked pretty good. The gems were pretty much set, my stats seemed balanced, and so on. I went ahead, tried some things out in battlegrounds, and eventually decided that I was pleased with the results. I did write a couple of posts about these experiences early in the patch, and have been happily PvP-ing on a fairly regular basis since then.

However, late this past week, I looked at my gear and was absolutely shocked to see that I had completely forgotten to reforge my gear on the druid!

I was, as I said, shocked. I didn’t remember not doing it… but I didn’t remember doing it either… I guess that I did it on the hunter and forgot – just plain forgot! – to reforge my druid.

When I looked more closely, I saw that I had indeed reforged a couple of pieces, but that was to balance out Hit Rating (it was too high). By and large, though, I had completely neglected Mastery on my PvP gear, and so I set out to remedy that.

What follows is a discussion of my PvP reforging strategy, and how I’ve adjusted my play style to finally give bleeds their due in PvP situations.

Reforging

Before reforging, my Mastery stood at the flat 8.00 that we get from the trainer. 8.00 Mastery increases the damage done by bleed effects by 25%. Each additional point of Mastery gives 3.1% additional bleed damage, and that sounded pretty good to me, so I decided to see how much Mastery I could acquire on my PvP gear.

I had 14 pieces that I could reforge; I couldn’t reforge my PvP ring because I didn’t want to lose the Hit Rating, and my PvP trinket has Resilience as its lone secondary stat, and Resilience cannot be reforged.

I decided to reforge Critical Strike Rating into Mastery on 13 of the pieces. The shoulders are from Wintergrasp, and I chose that piece as the place to lose Hit Rating. In all, I dumped 399 Critical Strike Rating (8.7% Crit) and 25 Hit Rating, and picked up 424 Mastery Rating (9.24 Mastery). This bumped my Mastery from 25% to 53% additional bleed damage, which was a nice jump!

My unbuffed Crit chance dropped from 55.22% to 46.52%, which seems like a huge amount. However, I reminded myself that it was probably a good time to adjust my play style anyway, after that bit of reforging…

Changing my play style

Even before the patch arrived (and I dropped the ball on Mastery for the first three weeks!), I hadn’t given much thought to bleed damage in PvP. The bursty nature of Wrath PvP for several classes seemed to infect me, and I spent a lot of time concentrating on using lock-down abilities and then bashing the hell out of my opponents. Perhaps that is why I sort of got stuck, feeling like I was doing a mediocre job all-around: blah damage, blah CC, blah survivability, etc. It seems to me that cats don’t quite have the power behind their burst that other classes seem to have. However, in spite of my knowledge of how cats work, I specced for maximum Mangle and Shred damage, and applied bleeds when I felt that it was convenient.

With Mastery in mind, I reconfigured my priorities. This meant bleeds, bleeds, bleeds! In battlegrounds over the weekend, I practiced applying bleeds, regardless of the situation, and monitoring the debuff durations with NeedToKnow, just like I would during a boss fight. This is what an ideal “rotation” looks like for me:

1. Feral Charge —> Pounce (bleed)
2. Ravage
3. Tiger’s Fury
4. Mangle
5. Rake (bleed)
6. Mangle or Shred (if a CP is needed, otherwise…)
7. Rip (bleed)
8. Mangle/Shred, Maim, Cyclone, throw a heal, etc… Survivability certainly comes into play, especially when you’re in a multi-opponent situation.

The first five random battlegrounds that I did after I made this change were pretty discouraging, but they were Isle of Conquest and Alterac Valley, where I spent most of my time getting mowed down by large numbers of Horde. However, I finally drew Arathi Basin, and it was in this battleground that I started to see my focus on bleeds pay off.

Bleeds add a funny element to the equation, and to illustrate this, I’ll simply say that it’s kind of a nice surprise, at first, when you hit a player who’s got about 30 percent health with a non-critting Mangle, and he suddenly drops dead from a couple of nice bleed ticks in rapid succession. The combination of Rake and Rip with the Mangle debuff and Mastery is a pretty powerful one.

Bleeds and Mastery make for a more well-rounded kitty

In my last PvP article, I wrote that, with the removal of Armor Pen in 4.0.1, it seemed to me that kitties felt like they were hitting harder. Well, the changes that I made to my play style (which are really a correction of old bad habits), combined with the additional damage from a nice chunk of Mastery, change up the overall feel of feral PvP for me. I’m still hitting hard with Ravage, Mangle, and Shred, although I’m definitely not critting as much. However, adding those powerful bleeds to the priority list complements the impact abilities nicely, allowing me to damage my opponent more consistently. This is especially true at times where I get thrown, stunned, incapacitated, or am taking a few seconds to throw myself a few quick heals.

Closing

I’ve read quite a bit about Mastery for kitties in 4.0.1, but I haven’t seen too much about using it for PvP. Red (A Distant Land) had a nice PvP/PvE post a few weeks back, and he mentioned that he had reforged all of his gear into Mastery, although he did seem to be reconsidering dumping so much Crit for Mastery.

I currently have one piece that has Haste Rating, which is Bloodfall. If I reforged the Haste instead of Crit, I would lose 7 points of Mastery Rating and pick up almost 1% Critical Strike chance. However, I am less than 200 Honor Points away from being able to buy the Wrathful staff, and if I do that, the 92 Haste Rating on Bloodfall will be replaced with 108 Resilience anyway, so it won’t matter. However, if I decide to use my Honor Points to get a couple of other pieces instead, I may reforge the Haste on Bloodfall… but that is unlikely – the Wrathful staff is pretty awesome!

I think that reforging Crit into Mastery on every piece is the route that I’ll continue to go as I upgrade my last couple of PvP pieces. There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that once you land those bleeds, the opponent can’t remove them, and he’s going to have to deal with them even if you’re out of commission.

* * * * *

In my next post, I’ll talk briefly about my PvP spec and glyphs. Apparently, a lot of people find my blog by using a variation on the “feral pvp spec 4.0.1″ search term, so I’ll take a look at that very soon!

Feral PvP: pretty sweet in 4.0.1

(not a guide.)

Several days ago, I posted a QQ-filled whine-fest where I expressed frustration over my inability to kill priests in PvP. Sorry about that.

In that post, I summed up my experience by saying that I probably wouldn’t be PvP-ing much for a while. As it turns out, I got all of my frustration out of my system then and there, and the next day I was back to PvP-ing. Actually, it’s pretty much all that I’ve done in-game since then.

There are a couple of reasons that I am enjoying PvP again.

Adjusting to changes

The biggest thing for me has been adjusting to the changes that came with the patch. There are several mechanics that differ from before, and learning how to use some of them has helped me have quite a bit more success than I’d had in the past.

• The addition of Skull Bash, while having its range limitations, is nonetheless extremely useful when fighting spellcasters. It’s an ability that I pay a lot of attention to now.
• For me, the removal of Armor Penetration from the game seems to make damage dealing feel different. While bleeds are still just as important in PvP as they are in PvE, it feels like my direct damage is making more of an impact now. This doesn’t mean that I’m seeing “bigger crits” or anything; it just feels like my hits really slam into the person. Perhaps I’m totally wrong, and what I’m feeling is just a result of better playing or something. However, feeling like I’m pounding on my opponent makes the experience that much more fun!
• Ravage, which is even more useful now with the change to the Predatory Strikes talent and the addition of Stampede, is something that I am still working into my repertoire. It’s great for huge chunks of damage.
• The Primal Madness talent, which raises the maximum energy level during Tiger’s Fury and Berserk, is great for when you really need to go to town on someone, which is almost always!
• The expanded glyph system gives druids a nice level of customization potential, and I’ve been playing around with different glyph combos over the past few days. For example… Red (A Distant Land), who has made several fun, high-quality feral PvP videos, recently extolled the virtues of Glyph of Entangling Roots, so I’m giving that one a try as one of my Majors.
• The 31-point talent trees significantly reduce the number of available talent choices, but for feral PvP there are still several combinations that you can use. I’ve been tweaking my spec this week, and while I’m still not completely sold on one or two of my choices, it’s working out pretty well for me.

Wrathful Arena gear

For a while now, I’ve been at the point where I had all of the gear that I was going to get. Since I haven’t participated in arenas, I have no Arena Rating, so I haven’t been able to get a PvP weapon, along with the Wrathful set, boots or belt.

However, with Patch 4.0.1, some of these items are purchasable! It looks like anything that doesn’t require a 2000(+) Arena Rating can be purchased with Honor Points. A couple of days ago, I remembered that I had read about this change at some point before the patch arrived, and so I went to look at what was available.

I’ve been eying the Wrathful Gladiator’s Staff for a while, but when I went to look at it again, I wasn’t as sure that it should be my first purchase. I first looked at it a few months ago, before I had gotten Bloodfall. At that time, the staff was simply a sweet PvP upgrade! However, comparing it this week with Bloodfall, I decided that I didn’t want to lose the sheer damage that it brings to the table right now. The staff has a nice chunk of Resiliance (108), but it costs 2550 Honor Points now, and with slightly more honor than that, I was able to buy the Wrathful chest (1650 HP), gloves (1040 HP), and idol (265 HP), which gave me direct stat upgrades on pretty much everything.

I now have a pitiful amount of honor, and am beginning the long process of saving up for the helm and legs (1650 HP each) and belt (945 HP), which are also direct upgrades. The boots (945 HP) are still a damage downgrade, although I would gain 80 Resilience, but I’ll get them eventually. And then, the weapon!

Fun stuff

So, things are going much better than they were a week ago. I’ve had some exciting fights in battlegrounds recently, including a few situations* where I was able to survive and prevail in a situation where I (and my opponents) assumed that I was overmatched.

Yesterday, in Warsong Gulch, we ran up against a pre-made. Usually, these games go badly, as they get two quick scores and then farm us at the graveyard. However, while they got their two scores, we didn’t let them destroy us for 20 minutes. We had four druids and two rogues, and so we kept stealthing and sending people to their flag, which spread them out. We also defended our own flag, and after a while, when they realized that they were wasting their time trying to farm, they started coming for the flag. They sent one person, and then two people a few times, and then four a few times, and finally five. We had two cats, a warlock, and a DK in the keep, and we were able to hold them off quite nicely.

It was a good experience. There were a couple of people who were saying “Why aren’t we just letting them win?” My response was “Screw them – if they want to play ‘Farm the Alliance,’ we’re going to make it as painful as possible for them!” The DK concurred, and the other cat was pretty good. They kept coming, and we kept dropping them. For me, it was a good time to test my skills over an extended period of time in a confined space.

The situations* that I refer to are situations where I fight two people at once by myself. The times I’ve succeeded, it has generally been two melee that are ganging up on me. In the past, these situations were the death of me. Over the past week, though, things have gone a little something like this:

I attack a warrior. I stun him and get to work on him. A DK joins the fun and grips me. I hit him, stun him, and switch back to the warrior, who has been bleeding. I finish him off. The DK is now attacking me again. (At this point, I’m low on health.) I switch to bear, Bash, and then pop a couple of heals. I switch back to cat and try to land as many blows/bleeds on him as possible while avoiding him. He dies.

I cheer loudly at my computer like my team just scored a touchdown. My girlfriend wonders what the heck just happened…

Succeeding in these situations is really fun and exciting. I’ve done it a few times, and the fact that I can do it at all gives me a thrill.

Obviously, there is more that I could do. I’m still working on using Cyclone, Nature’s Grasp, and Entangling Roots more often, and that’s just something that will take practice and diligence. However, I am definitely improving.

I still get creamed when there are a lot of people attacking me, and casters – particularly priests, who are like warlocks with heals right now – are still difficult, but even that is going better. I often find myself in skirmishes where there are a few people on each side duking it out, and I’m finding that if I close in on the caster, I can contain him a bit, and will generally survive longer than if I worried about the melee attackers instead.

Additional inspiration

In addition to the potential for gear and the different feel and abilities, I was inspired in part by an experience that I had with an enemy feral druid that I ran into in Arathi Basin the other day.

We ran into a premade from my server, and held our own for a while before their superior organization (etc.) started to overwhelm us. We were trying to find a node to take from them, and in the course of attempting to take the Farm, I began to be chain-ganked by this druid.

He was badass. I looked him up on the armory, and he had a nice set of gear, both PvP and PvE (including Deathbringer’s Will and Heroic Cryptmaker). He was much more skilled than I am (he has the Arena achievements to prove it), and, while fighting him (he killed me approximately eight times), I got to observe a little bit of his play style. The most inspiring part of it, though, was just seeing how he dominated just about everyone he fought. I’ve fought with or against some pretty pesky kitties in my time, but never one who so dominated his opponents like this guy. Seeing how he moved and the ways that he killed us inspired me to work harder at improving my skills.

Closing

This is a bit of a rambling post, and I’m not satisfied with that, but I wanted to share my updated views on the feral PvP experience. I’m happy to be excited about PvP again, and to be seeing some improvement.

I can’t kill priests

Where I get all of the QQ out of my system, right now.

I had originally intended to make a few comments about this topic as part of another post, but the topic threatened to drown out the rest of that post, so I’m making it a separate one.

I’ve been excited for awhile about trying out some of our new feral PvP mechanics/abilities: Skull Bash is supposed to be the long-awaited ranged interrupt that we’ve so desperately needed, while changes to the Predatory Strikes and Survival Instincts talents (among others) seemed to make for some interesting damage and survivability choices.

However, I’ve been pretty disappointed in my ability to make those things translate into “win.”

My number one problem is the same that it has always been: dealing with casters, especially Shadow Priests.

Specifically, here are my issues:

Skull Bash: While many ranged interrupts have a decent “range” at which you can use them, Skull Bash has a range of 13 yards. 13 yards. So if I’m being targeted with a slowing or fear effect, and my Feral Charge (8-30 yd range) is on cooldown (or I’m out of range of Feral Charge), I can easily, helplessly, watch my health go down the drain. This usually happens to me when my trinket and potions are on cooldown. Of course.

Health/survivability of clothies (?): I’ve done a couple of battlegrounds and a Wintergrasp since the patch arrived. I have killed, let me see here… ah yes, if my memory serves me well, I have killed ZERO cloth-wearers by myself.

The closest that I got was in Warsong Gulch, where I had a warlock stun- and spell-locked and down to just a smidge of health in the enemy’s tunnel. And then, along came a priest… and it was all over. Between the two of them, they chain-feared the crap out of me, and the priest divided his time between throwing heals at the lock and assaulting my mind. It was super-frustrating. I died.

At this point, I was not yet the fully discouraged kitty that I am now. I ressurected, ran back to the enemy keep, and stalked up behind a bubbled priest who was all by himself. I waited for the bubble to fade, checked my cooldowns (all available), and began my assault. The priest was helpless to combat my arsenal of stuns, bleeds, and general awesome powers. I looked up to see how close to death he was (since the nameplates are a mess right now – more on that in an upcoming post), and… he was still at about 90% health and ready to rock, while all of my offensive cooldowns were used up. Long story short, see the above paragraph.

The latest update on my ability to die quickly against priests happened late last night. There was a priest who was killing NPCs in Darnassus. I watched him, prepped for the kill, and went at him, claws-a-blazin’.

He promptly destroyed me.

* * * * *

I can’t kill priests.

It sucks to look at my screen, while being Mind Flayed (etc.), and see that I am out of range of Skull Bash and Feral Charge. It also sucks to see that physical damage that would seriously mess up a melee class is doing almost nothing against cloth-wearers.

The mechanics for kitty PvP don’t seem to have changed too much. We have our charge, stuns, bleeds and burst. We have our roots and Cyclone and so on. Unfortunately, I used to be able to take down priests. I don’t seem to be able to do so anymore, at least for the time being.

So… I’m, probably not going to PvP much for a while. It’s like “Kill The Hunter Pet” out there, except that I’m not supposed to be that bad.

* * * * *

Oh, and my the way, a feral blogger that I highly respect (I’m not sure which, and I’m not going to take the time to look) recently made a dismissive comment about ferals getting Skull Bash, saying (and I paraphrase) that it didn’t matter, because we should be up in the enemy’s face anyway.

Mmmhmm. Sure. Because staying up in the enemy’s face (or ass, as ferals generally try to do) during PvP is exactly like DPS-ing Deathbringer. Yep.

/end QQ session.

 

Preparing for the end of the Wrath-era kitty

(Not a guide.)

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to spend some more time with the updated Cataclysm druid trees over at MMO Champion. A few talents have been revised, which changes the build picture somewhat. I’ll have more on that in a future post.

On the heels of playing around with talents and taking a few screenshots with the intention of writing about them, I read Kalon’s (Think Tank) latest post about specs and glyphs for ferals before I went to bed. I wish that I hadn’t – his last few sentences paint a picture much more severe than I had imagined it to be, and I can’t sleep as a result:

My gut feeling is that if the 4.0.1 patch comes out on Tuesday and it’s anything like what we currently have, cats are going to be doing ridiculously low damage compared to what they do now – likely around half the damage. I’m not sure they’re a reasonable option for any hardcore raiding at this point. Hopefully they fix things a bit more.

Let that sink in: HALF THE DAMAGE.

Underlying everything that I think about when it comes to ferals in the new expansion is this disconcerting message that I keep getting from what I read: right now, still, cat DPS is GRAVELY UNDERPOWERED in beta and on the PTR. Now, while this really doesn’t matter to me too much with regard to the opening days of questing in the expansion, it will matter quite a bit to cats when patch 4.0.1 drops. And the early side of the predictions has it arriving on Oct. 5th or Oct 12th.

What does this mean? In addition to the changes to gear, stats and mechanics, we cats are going to have to deal with being severely gimped for the time being.

• If this comes true, it means that if you average a very competent 12k DPS on fights like Saurfang, you could be doing around 6k instead, give or take one or two thousand. If you’re still going for the Lich King kill, HMs, or that special drop, you could instantly go from star to shlub through no fault of your own.
• It means that in PvP, your ability to burst down enemies could take a serious nosedive. Going into fights expecting otherwise could mean lots of time spent at the graveyard.
• It means that, when questing or farming, rounding up and burning down several mobs at once will take quite a bit longer, because not only is Swipe going to be heavily nerfed, but the new, currently-broken “attack power now comes directly from weapon damage” equation for cats could, as I understand it, make AoE-ing even more feeble than Blizzard intends it to be.

And so on.

* * * * *

Lately, every time MMO Champion announces a new build, I’ve been anxiously scanning the druid section in hopes that I see something that will relieve my worries (like, “We have fixed the feral cat attack power issue in order to bring cat DPS closer to that of other melee DPS classes. Sorry for the wait.”). I’ve also been keeping close tabs on Kalon’s page, because as far as I’m concerned he’s the one feral druid writer who has been providing consistent, detailed information and commentary about beta cats over the past several weeks.

I know that the developers have stated that they are attempting to balance classes for level 85, not lower levels, and I’m fine with that. And I knew that beta cat DPS had been running on the low side, but I didn’t start to get really worried (even after reading Shifting Perspectives: A peek at the beta cat on WoW Insider on Sept. 14) until I read his latest post.

* * * * *

If the patch drops on the 5th or 12th, we still have some stuff to do (the pre-Cataclysm world events, Hallow’s End, and so on). I’m looking forward to that. And as I’ve stated before, I’m excited about trying out my druid in dungeons and against more brutal quest mobs. I like the idea of cats having even more utility, and am up for the challenge of using more CC as we work through the new world.

However, I recently followed through on my idea of starting a new guild of old friends, and we have several members who would like to run ICC-10 one more time. One of them, who has the Kingslayer title on his alt, wants to get it on his main. The prospect of only having a few days to organize it and potentially even get a team in there for one more shot at it is daunting, because admittedly it will be pretty difficult to complete it all in one day – even if we blow through the first two thirds of the place – and that may be all the time we have before I get nerfed into raiding oblivion. And while that may sound selfish, it isn’t. He wants to do it, and I want to be there for him – not to be carried at half-strength through the whole place.

* * * * *

So, with all of that being said, my focus has, as of now, shifted. The hunter, who is now half of a bar from level 72, will largely be sitting on the shelf for a few days. I’m going to take some time to enjoy what may be the last few days of kitty-life – and Wrath – as we kitties know it. I’m going to try to get us into ICC. I’m going to PvP my ass off. I’m going to farm and quest and play like crazy, and, even though it sort of goes against what I said a couple of months ago in this post, I’m going to round up boatloads of mobs, pop Berserk, and mow them down, sending my video card into Defcon 4 with all of the big-crit glory.

While I still can.

Once Cataclysm comes out, and we get into the nitty gritty of dungeons and PvP and perhaps raiding, I’m sure that cat DPS will be adjusted at some point. However, we’re going back to Vanilla in many ways, and unless we get an announcement to the contrary in the next one-to-three weeks, kitties will likely be starting out, at least in 4.0.1, at a severe disadvantage. So I’m going to relish what we have now, which is, although certainly imperfect, still pretty freaking great.

A preliminary Cataclysm launch-day kitty leveling build

*Note: Some of the information in this article is outdated, as it was written prior to Patch 4.0.1 or the launch of Cataclysm. Please do not take the following info as gospel, as it is not current!

For some reason, a couple of articles that I read last week inspired me to look at potential kitty builds for both PvE and PvP, based on the latest talent tree changes for Cataclysm.

I went to MMO Champion and quickly built myself a custom DPS build, and was happy with it. I then  tried to whip up a PvP build, but I soon decided that I wanted to think about it a bit before I finished it. I don’t know if anyone else has this problem, but I still find myself wanting to take more talents than I have points for when it comes to PvP. The same thing happened when I put together my current (live) PvP spec…

After a short break, I went back to a topic that I had been chewing on earlier: if everything were to stay the same between now and Patch 4.0, what would my leveling build be on launch-day, or more accurately, the day when the major patch drops and our talents are refunded?

Almost everything I’ve read with regard to ferals has been about 41-point raiding builds, which require level 85. However, I’m not going to start Cataclysm at 85, so a full DPS/raid spec isn’t going to be practical at that time. What will be of use is a 36-point leveling spec, which would also be a potential PvP spec.

There are a lot of things that I am uncertain about: guild issues (will I be in one? what will we do together if I am?), whether or not I will tank dungeons while I level, how kitties will work in Cataclysm compared to other melee classes, etc.

I don’t know how much dungeon-running I will be doing as I level, although I assume I will do some. I have this weird idea that I don’t want to miss any quests by leveling mostly through the dungeon finder, but I think that with the boosted experience requirements it won’t be too much of an issue.

That said, I think I’ve come up with a 0/36/0 leveling/PvP cat spec that will work adequately.

 

kitty – a possible level 80 build

 

(By the way, the link to MMO Champion’s Cataclysm Druid talent trees is here. And the final five points come at each level from 81-85.)

This spec gives me most of the high-damage kitty talents, leaving out Nom Nom Nom, which I will definitely take for my raiding spec. It also gives me some survivability with Thick Hide 3/3, Survival Instincts, Predatory Strikes 2/2 and Nurturing Instinct 2/2, etc., and some mob-inhibiting boosts with Infected Wounds 2/2 and Brutal Impact 2/2. These are all talents that will be useful in PvP as well.

It feels kind of noobish to be taking all of my points from the feral tree. However, with the reduced number of overall talents and points, I don’t see any added benefit from dropping anything for the sake of having restoration talents, unless I were to drop Predatory Strikes for points in Heart of the Wild. That would be the area where I feel least certain about my choices. However, there will be opportunities to fine-tune the spec, just as Blizzard will most likely alter talents and mechanics through patches after the game launches. I think this is a good start, though. I will almost certainly need to re-spec by level 85 anyway, in order to adjust for Blizzard-related changes, my mistakes, and new playing situations.

One thing that may or may not mean anything is that I plan to do most of my leveling with my girlfriend, who plays a disc priest and an arcane mage. I’m not sure which she will be interested in leveling first. Her mage is her first toon, she plays it very well, and it is her achievement-meister. However, her priest is her best-geared, since it has been her main raiding toon since sometime in Ulduar (and will probably continue to be when Cataclysm raiding begins).

I’ve given some thought to which combination might be better for me, although what I think will not determine what ends up happening. I also have a poorly-geared paladin, Abenadari, whose purpose in life is mainly to provide flasks and potions for Anacrusa. I’m predicting that Anacrusa will be 85 before Abenadari is 81, because I just don’t enjoy playing the paladin. However, Abenadari will need to be leveled for the whole alchemical-dependency issue, so at some point that will have to happen.

Most likely, my druid will level as feral with her priest. That will be a nice combination of buffs, healing/damage balance, CC (in some situations), etc. It will make some of the leveling conditions that I’m reading about go much more smoothly. In Cataclysm, mobs reportedly have vast amounts of health and hit very hard, a lot harder than we’re accustomed to seeing in quest situations. Additionally, soloing certain areas where single-mob pulls are impossible is apparently unsurvivable. I recently read a post by a geared level 83 prot paladin who said that one mob in Deepholm left him at half-health with his cooldowns blown. During the most recent WoW Insider Show podcast, the writers were talking about regularly receiving 5k melee hits (not crits or special abilities). In these situations, having a melee-healer combination will be much more palatable than trying to solo through everything.

As regards the paladin, I’m not sure how much I will concentrate on leveling her in the first few months. There are a few reasons that I say this.

1. I don’t enjoy playing her, so the leveling speed, even when I do play her, will be much slower than with Anacrusa.
2. I may have another toon that I want to level first (the longer it takes for this expansion to arrive, the higher the chance that I will level my new hunter to 80).
3. Knowing me, I will drag my feet through the leveling process for anyone other than Anacrusa. My girlfriend will want to level her mage much faster than I will want to go. Yes, my girlfriend is more into the game, and is generally a better player, than I am! Therefore, I may find myself going it alone more often on Abenadari than on my druid, so that will slow things down.

At any rate, whichever toon she chooses to level with me will work well with my kitty. She also has her newly-80 rogue, 74 shaman, 71 frost mage (the up-and-coming jewelcrafter among the two of us), 80 balance/resto druid, and 71 hunter, although the last two are toons she hasn’t played much over the past several months. Most likely it will be the priest or mage, and I’m excited about playing with either of them. As for the paladin… I’ll worry about that some other time.

 

 

Wintergrasp: Tenacity and individual encounters

Wintergrasp and Tenacity

Dalaran-US is, for better or worse, an unbalanced PvE server. According to various population measurements, Alliance outnumbers Horde by about 2-to-1. This has made the Alliance complacent during Wintergrasp battles, because most of the time we steamroll over the Horde during assault, and can successfully defend several times per day.

The imbalance between factions triggers Tenacity, which sometimes helps the Horde win. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, because if the numbers are too large on the Alliance side, and we hold the enough bases, we usually win.

I’ll be honest – I don’t like the ways that the designers attempted to balance Wintergrasp. In battlegrounds, the queuing system fills teams to the maximum number, which means that, as far as numbers go, there are relatively few issues; any balancing issues are basically relative to teams’ abilities to play, organize, etc. This isn’t the case in Wintergrasp, unfortunately.

Where I think that the Tenacity mechanic fails is on the individual level. In a normal duel, each class has abilities that allows it to defeat every other class. In an unbalanced Wintergrasp, this is not the case.

For myself, as part of the larger team, my already significant inferiority complex was, for a while, amplified by the fact that individual members of the outnumbered team could mow me down in a few seconds. Warlocks with 40k health would destroy me. Warriors, paladins, and death knights were unkillable. Come to think of it, so were good priests, resto/balance druids, and shaman. Rogues would take me out in just a few seconds.

I was morose about the states of my gear and my skills. Was I doing something REALLY REALLY wrong? Whereas I could do gobs of damage as a raider, my damage-dealing abilities in Wintergrasp seemed puny. The sting of failure was very frustrating.

Eventually I realized that I wasn’t taking Tenacity into account. During some of our battles, the opponent has five or six stacks of it. When this happens, a good player with good gear becomes an amazing player with amazing gear. There’s nothing I can do about that.

Additionally, through the processes of gaining experience and researching my class, I became both a better player and more situationally aware. Unfortunately, some of that awareness means that there are situations where I have to roll with a horde of Alliance players. In these cases it means we win a skirmish because we have more DoTs, stuns, slows, and GCDs on our side. It’s not my favorite way to play, but it’s a fact of life.

At any rate, I feel better about my ability to take care of myself and make a difference in the battle than I did previously.

One outcome of this entire situation is that there are a handful of great players on the Horde side that are truly badass with this buff, and have become somewhat legendary among Alliance PvPers on our server, infamously terrorizing Alliance players in the keep and running around “lol”-ing and evading death.

Camped in the Relic Room, or, “revenge is best served cold”

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve begun messing around with a resto off-spec for PvP. I blew a ton of Emblems of Triumph, Honor Points and Stonekeepers’ Shards, as well as a nice chunk of gold, putting together a decent resto set. Last week, I healed several BGs, WGs and dungeons, and things are coming along.

* * * * * Side note: It was fun though, yesterday, having to read a crap-ton of questions about my gear from a DPS-DK in Heroic Old Kingdom. “Why are you wearing PvP gear?” Because I PvP. “But this is PvE. Why don’t you use PvE gear?” Because I have mostly PvP gear, and some PvE gear. We’ll be fine. “Why don’t you put on PvE gear?” etc. The thing is, he had three pieces of Relentless gear on… Oh, and he did 1.5k DPS – 4th overall in the heroic. When the warrior tank asked “The question is, why am I the top DPS in here?” the DK shut up. Ah, the joys of LFD. * * * * *

Anyway, this morning I headed to Wintergrasp and prepped to heal. Unfortunately, there was a rogue in the Relic Room who was camping unsuspecting adventurers (stupid me) and he killed me. Then he killed me again as we were buffing outside, at the very start of the battle.

As a total novice at PvP healing, I don’t feel as comfortable in individual situations, especially when I’m unprepared. In addition, the tools for exacting revenge as a tree are highly inadequate; it’s hard to give a super-buffed assassin his comeuppance with untalented balance spells.

So… I went back to feral.

And I stalked him.

And I found him.

And I killed him.

Three times.

Did I have help? Yes. Did we win Wintergrasp? No. Do I care? Not one bit. Sure, I focused down some vehicles, but I specifically looked for one guy.

They had five stacks of tenacity. So when I attacked the guy when he had only 60% health and shut him down, I was really attacking a guy with about the same health as me. It seemed fair to me, considering that he attacked me when I was sitting down and unbuffed.

The guy is good, and I was proud to fight him. But I will not be bullied.

 

How I was the last person ever to learn about Predator’s Swiftness!

So it’s two days after I published my personal PvP update, and I once again learned something new today. I sort of figured it out on my own, but I also partially figured it out as a result of reading Keeva’s Resto Druid Guide at Tree Bark Jacket.

See, I was reading her guide (which is an excellent guide, btw) because I’m thinking of ditching the tank spec for a while and having some fun with a resto PvP spec. I know, right? Crazy feral! Anyway, that’s story for another day.

In my previous post, I talked about how I suck at, among other things, using Cyclone. I was always under the impression that Cyclone could be an instant cast, but it never seemed to be one for me. While I was reading Keeva’s guide, I read about Nature’s Swiftness, which falls in the fifth tier of the restoration tree. I assumed that this was what people had been talking about, but that’s not a talent that a feral can have, so I let it go.

However, some of my heals with cast-times in WG have been instant casts… hmm…

It’s been haunting me.

Finally, it hit me this afternoon. I quickly logged in, opened my feral tree, and found Predatory Strikes. I feverishly read the tooltip, and then I ported to Ironforge and hit the dummy to see what the buff was called…

Predator’s Swiftness.

Yes!

Predator’s Swiftness is similar to Nature’s Swiftness except that it’s a proc instead of an ability. I think that’s what was confusing me more than usual (I’m a bit of a flake by nature). So I configured NeedToKnow to show me the buff along with everything else I track, and tried it out a few times. It works like a charm.

* * * * *

I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t know the details about (and use, except by accident) Predator’s Swiftness forever ago, but I’m also excited. This gives me something else to work with in the heat of battle!

So anyway, there’s one problem solved. Heals and Cyclones should come easier for me now.

* * * * *

I originally titled this post “L2P n00b!!1! lol,” but thought better of it… it’s still true, though!