wowbloggers last blog post..Phasing

@Thorn: I think I’d probably be in the same boat, even if specced Balance for PvP. It’s just so frustrating to not be able to play because you’re OOM, especially with the current success of drain teams.

@Oni: That’s a really interesting observation. You may be right about the removal of the Swipe glyph, but I hope not. I can see a raiding bear forgoing it for something else since there are generally multiple tanks available for trash mobs, but it will be godly for the purposes of 5-man instances.

@Tone: Wow, you’re right. The consolidation of melee/spellcaster stats is going to be wonderful for Druids in a way I hadn’t considered. I have to wrinkle my nose when looking at Beta quest rewards because there are now a lot more stats and stat combinations that I have to consider when picking my reward. I pretty much have every item saved up for when I can take the time to really evaluate them. Hopefully I can firm that up for myself before the expansion goes live. I think you’re right about the way that Celestial Focus will work. Truly awesome.

@Hokuto: In my full Resto set (mixed T5 and badge gear), I was BOOM BOOMing everything quite impressively. Really just tearing things up in my Balance spec. And that’s with no crit to speak of and tons and tons of Spirit. I haven’t used Innervate once even. Now that I’m deep Resto spec, the BOOMs are more like booms, but I still feel more than capable. HoTting myself while I nuke things seems to work very well, and I did dip far enough into Balance to nab Insect Swarm.

I’m at 2.1k heaing, I suppose it’d be some respectable, albeit crit-less gear when I spec balance for leveling.

Regarding the Celestial Focus change, with all 3 points in it, would you expect that to mean that each of the two potential pushbacks will hit your Wrath for a 0.15 sec penalty each? Although it’s a shame to lose the chance to ignore pushback completely, overall this change (along with Nature’s Grace reducing Wrath’s GCD) seems like its going to make Moonkin an UNSTOPPABLE WRATH MACHINE!!! (even more so than they already are!). I can’t wait! (though I do still wish they’d give Starfire this pushback resistance as well… I’m so hard to please! )

@Oni: Another interesting outcome from moving Swipe to four targets (and even more so if it can be five) is the effect it would have on rage generation. Currently, Swipe is pretty rage efficient because all three hits have a chance to crit and generate 5 bonus rage from Primal Fury. This, coupled with Ferocity reducing the cost of Swipe to 15 rage, makes it already possible to use Swipe for “free” if all three hits crit. While this obviously doesn’t happen every time, Feral Druids do still get a lot of crits so you’ll usually get at least 5 or 10 rage back with a Swipe. If the new version hits one or two more targets, it suddenly becomes much more likely to get these free or nearly free Swipes… and even possible to use Swipe to actually *generate* rage! I have a feeling Blizzard won’t let this dynamic make it to live without tweaks, but a bear can hope!

But I’m also worried that the glyph may go away due to this change, maybe they realized that the swipe glyph was something all bears wanted and no serious tanking bear would go without and decided to make it an ability instead. I sure hope not. It’s going to be glorious to go bear in DPS gear and swipe-kill five mobs at once during questing. Especially now that frenzied regeneration is actually useful as well.

Made me laugh

I looked at those PvP sets and decided I’d take the resto set and get crit from other gear.

Then I remembered I barely PvP anyway and hopefully they’ll remember PvE Boomkins usually spec intensity too.