teddabear wrote:I played 1 month of Cataclysm, that was enough to make me quit for 2 years. What really has me irritated is Blizzard's comment that Bleeds shouldn't benefit from Haste because we get resources instead. That shows a total disconnect from reality. They said they were going to remove Raid CDs from DPS which sounded perfectly reasonable and then they let almost everybody keep their CDs in a reduced form except for Tranq. The Ferocious Bite buff is laughable. With no snapshotting the only skill left would have been squeezing in as many FBs as possible but at +20% it will never be worth the risk. As I said it's just the first pass so there are certainly many changes to come but I have yet to speak with any Heroic raiders on my server that were pleased. If the next big release of information isn't a whole lot better it will not surprise me if 80% of Heroic raiders leave the game in WoD. So far it's like somebody took the Dumber knob and cranked it to 11. Yes I thought it was reasonable to give Raid CDs to just the healers but honestly I enjoyed the occasional fight where every player had to utilize every ability they had to down the boss. It usually only happened when you're undergeared but it sounds like the days of 30, 50 or 70 pulls for that first kill are over.
Aside from bleed hasting, all of your concerns are because you're taking everything they say at face value without considering context, or out of context entirely.
I highly doubt you can find a source of them saying that they were going to remove all raid CDs from DPS. They've always said they were interested in toning down the strength and availability of raid cooldowns, which is exactly what they have done: Classes that had several now only have one (or none, if they had enough utility in other departments), cooldown strength was brought down to be lower that healers' cooldowns, and classes that brought zero raid utility (Mages) were granted one.
Perks are not buffs and you should not look at them as such, except for the ones that offer real mechanical differences. In the end, the damage bonuses can be tuned around and change pretty much nothing. The one thing they do offer is some (
very vague) idea of their intent in balancing.
And stop with the hyperbole, it's silly and offers nothing to the discussion.
Whitepaw wrote:It seems to me that what a lot of you see as "complexity" is in fact just an elaborate dps rotation/priority. I don't mind the situation we have now, but it's gone way beyond being "complex" - and that's probably why Blizzard is dialing it back.
The fact is that right now, you can't do competitive dps as Feral, unless you run a heavily modded UI. You also need to read forums like these to know the more detailed aspects of Feral damage dealing (like the fact that Thrash is a dps gain - on single-target). The Feral dps rotation/priority of today is over-elaborated, over-designed and counter-intuitive. And the worst part is when people call out other players as being "bad", just because their setup is not heavily modded and they are unaware of the latest simulated stat weights.
While I totally understand why you would think that (I'm sure it's not an uncommon sentiment), I wouldn't say that's entirely true. It is true that most of the things some have come to love about the feral rotation are almost purely complexity for the sake of complexity, and that can definitely be tuned back and replaced with simpler but more engaging mechanics. Unfortunately, we haven't really got any of those yet; a case could be argued for Lunar Inspiration, but Savagery (and to some extent, Bloody Thrash) actually remove gameplay instead of adding to it (and we don't really have any new mechanics aside from those).
Feral can be played to it's maximum on default UI by a very skilled player, it's just plain untrue to say that feral
requires addons to play. However, what properly configured addons grant you in terms of in-combat performance is the same as it does for any specialization: allowing you to do the same performance, but with a significantly lower attentiveness requirement, which allows you to focus much better and perform your part in the raid encounter instead of just doing lots of damage. In this regard, I would say it's accurate to state that feral requires addons to play
effectively, but really this is the exact same story for pretty much every other specialization in the game, just to a lesser extent. If you're not using appropriately-configured addons in your UI, you're just plain less effective than you would be with them, but people have some notion of pride that prevents them from admitting this, or otherwise just don't understand the purposes addons serve.
