feral-weapons
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Shifting Perspectives: A history of feral weapons
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we visit a now-vanished world. Once upon a time, feral druids had their own specialized set of weapons. This was very good, because it meant that you weren't rolling against half the raid when an upgrade dropped. This was also very bad, because it meant that 98% of the game's weapons were completely useless for us. This was before the dark times. Before gear consolidation. Before every two-bit jackass with a hard-on for agility thought himself entitled to the armory of the game's noblest class. They were elegant weapons for a more civilized age.
Breakfast Topic: What you miss most
I miss feral staves. I know that nobody else liked or wanted them, but I loved that my spec had its own weapons. They didn't drop frequently (and, in the case of Pillar of Ferocity, sometimes not at all) and you invariably waited months for an upgrade, but when you finally got one, it was always beautiful and it was always yours. I made a point of saving every single feral staff I got in Burning Crusade, and they're still in my bank today. When the developers finally eighty-sixed feral weapons, we were sad but understood why they weren't a sustainable solution for the spec. Since then we've been competing for mostly hunter-themed polearms, and between that and all the hideous rogue leather we have to wear, it feels like feral's trapped in a permanent case of Outland Clown Syndrome. A lot of things have disappeared from WoW over the years, and more are set to go the way of the dinosaur as the game evolves into Cataclysm. More than five years into WoW, what do you miss most from now-defunct abilities, items or practices?
Lichborne: Of Cabbages and Kings
Welcome to Lichborne, where each weekend, Daniel Whitcomb helps you keep pace with the ever-changing Death Knight class. This week, While Death Knight tweaks continue, there's no big piece of news that really stands out. We got a nice bump in damage to our base weapon strikes, Death Coil, and the abilities that mimic them in the talent trees in the latest build. Unfortunately, poor Plague Strike still sits at a sort of dismal 30% weapon damage, meaning it still doesn't feel like it scales as well as it should. But preliminary reports are still that it's a noticeable DPS increase. At the same time, our PvP utility and survivability was nerfed, but not in completely unexpected ways. Chains of Ice is dispellable again, as the devs felt that between it and Death Grip, it was far too hard to get away from a Death Knight. Again, this nerf is somewhat expected, if not needed, although some argue the nerf is unfair in the face of other classes that have similar abilities to ensnare and entrap opponents. I have to admit that I'm hoping we see, at the least, Chains of Ice getting put on Virulence. If nothing else, that Glyph of Blood Boil is looking a lot nicer. Still, none of the news really jumps out and grabs me, and with the beta patches coming fast and furious, it's hard to write with any authority on something that may be changed next week. With that in mind, I've decided this week to post on a potpourri of odds and ends from around the World of Warcraft as they relate to Death Knights, both stuff that refers back to previous columns and new observations. Read on:
