Level 85, pvp and heroics

Hey everyone,

So I reached 85, gathered some gear via the normal instances and then used my honor points to buy two blue items (pvp) that put me at the cap for heroics. Some of my old guildies have transfered to this server and together with a couple of people from the guild we are now all part of we moved into Heroics.

My impression is extremely positive at the moment - they are hard and well tuned. I love some of the boss mechanics and enjoy the fact that mana is an issue for healers and you typically end a fight with most people at lower than 50% health. Feral druids are certainly ok in heroics - the QQ I've seen on the WoW forums about low feral dps is just not true - ok, sure we can't keep up with the pure dps classes, but it is far from poor.

I've been running between 6.5k and 11.5k dps in heroics depending on the boss - and I think that is acceptable at this gear level.

Of course I miss my 76% crit rate - that was mental, but right now the rotation is hard enough to be fun without being annoying - oh, and thank god they removed the confusing and stupid armor penetration stat from the game.

I've of course been blessed with doing heroics with a superb tank and an amazing healer with us, but I really hope that Blizzard do NOT nerf the instances.

Next is pvp - I've noticed a LOT of QQ about ferals on the official forums - and people seem to be posting screenshots from before the last round of patches when there was a bug with mastery and rake. We have long been fixed and have received a 50% nerf in rake damage.

I am doing less dps than "pure" classes and have no major advantage in PVP really. I've been destroyed easily by elemental shamans and shadow priests - spirit walk in a cross server BG with plenty of lag makes catching and killing an elemental shaman very challenging - however, I love fighting them because it is now difficult and less predictable.

Ferals are in a very good balance now - and I guess the QQ is because they are now fairly equal and they used to be a free kill before the Cata talents arrived. Patch 4 and now Cataclysm has addressed feral balance very well indeed. I hope we get left alone for a while now.

I still find mages the single hardest class to beat followed by warlocks - a well played prot paladin is nail biting to play against as well.

I am a little worried about the possibility of raiding as I notice that when we ask people round us if they are interested in joining for heroics we don't get much positive response - this stuff is much harder now. Even with the super pro players I when with yesterday, we still wiped several times while learning a boss in Grim Batol (Drahga Shadowburner)  and I needed to change spec to manage Erudax (so I had infected wounds).

Raiding is going to needs some pretty serious players I predict and that might be difficult. I've experienced low interest when raids suffer wipes early on - and it's tough to pick moral up after that!

I'm looking forward to the future of WoW right now.

I still have some disappointments:

1) Engineering - really very disappointed with the change to this profession - I can't use the enchants in an instance now for fear of causing a wipe - and in BG's the backfires will kill you most of the time (because you are mostly using them in an oh-shit moment)

2) Mining node exploits - Blizzard STILL havent fixed this - trying to mine anything on my server is almost impossible as there are bots underground speedhacking between all the nodes and mining them.


Well, that's it for now - I will be making more videos in the future when things settle down of course!

cheers,
Red