New Class

I know this is a bit premature considering that LK just came out a few months ago... but I can't help wondering.

Apparently, with every new expansion (supposed to occur once per year or so) Blizz is going to incorporate a new hero class into the game. I think death knights have been a hit thus far. They are a great concept and seem to be very easy to use. I haven't leveled mine yet. I'm not sure I'm going to as I'm not very interested in another melee toon AND I don't like tanking very much. Otherwise, I love the buffs they bring, I love the disease based nature of their spells, and I love the little sublteties like the creepy laugh.

With that said, what will the new class be? I'm sure they already have a list of ideas. I'm thinking it has to be a caster type unit. Another healer would be cool, but is another hybrid class really valuable? Archdruid has been mentioned a lot in various forums/posts. I just can't see this happening. Lets go over a list of requirements:
1. The class has to be accessible by a number of races.
2. The class has to be represented in WC lore.
3. The class has to be unique.
4. The class has to be associated to the new content.

Here are some other earlier ideas that we probably won't see either... Brewmaster, Necromancer, and Runemaster. I suppose we could list the Bard in there too :). In the past Blizzard had attempted to combine spell casting and melee into one class/spec ie. shamans and druids with little success. I think these classes have been improved upon but in a direction away from what was originally intended.

Any ideas on what to expect?

Sarth 3D

This muthafuckin' fight is a motherfucker!! I love it. It's the only challenging thing in the game. I really like the idea of being able to choose your own difficulty for a fight. What is a bit off is the scaling for this fight especially at 2D. Sarth by himself is a joke. Sarth plus one drake isn't much harder. Sarth plus 2 drakes can be a challenge but is also a modifiable fight depending on which drake the raid chooses to down before the boss fight. If Shadron is killed there just isn't any pressure on the healers or the tank unless the raid dps is just super horrible.

The one thing I don't like is that the 3D fight doesn't allow for a dynamic group. For example, due to the high necessity of dps it isn't viable to mix the group between caster and physical damage classes. This is disappointing cuz my rogue actually ends up nerfing the raid (or being nerfed myself by the lack of buffs). It's expected to have a fair shot of downing him that the raid put out at least 4k dps on average. I believe 3.5k dps would be the threshold.

Regardless, I've been toying with the idea of putting together a melee group to go in and hammer this SOB. Unfortunately, we just don't have the available players to make that happen. We need to recruit more!!

Mutilate vs. Combat specs

I recently ran did a VoA run just to pick up some pvp gear. I was invited by a former guildie that just happened to be a rogue. She's always had pretty decent gear comparable to my own. Upon inspection her gear is a bit better than mine by a few gear points AND she's specc'd mutilate. Immediately, I thought this is going to be a contest to see who does more dps. I'm not sure if she was competing, but I know I was!! I don't run into many good rogues anymore... actually, I never really did.

Her spec was pretty much cookie cutter HfB. Mine has the essential combat point allocations. The first bit of trash went down pretty fast with the two rogues topping the meter. I do want to point out one interesting thing I noticed. The first pull she was distracted and didn't start dps'ing for the first few seconds giving me a lead on overall damage done... but that frakkin' mut spec is so damn bursty that by the time the mob was down she had clearly caught up to me. I'm very annoyed at this...

Anyway, by the end of the raid we were both clearly the best geared toons there. How often does anyone see 2 rogues leading on the dps meters anymore? It was a virtual tie on both damage to Archavon and overall damage done for the raid. Her dps was a bit higher due to the burstiness of the spec. I believe with the new patch combat is going to surpass mut by a nice margin... I've noticed that as a single target dps class that my dps on single targets isn't really that great. I've seen classes catch up to me on the meters on boss fights quite often. This is the only place where I see haste actually providing a buff to me. Longer fights mean more energy procs and with the changes to mana pots I forsee a bonus to having non-mana users in raids. I'm very much looking forward to Ulduar.

I'm still not sold on the changes blizz made to haste to improve overall combat dps. I would like to see Armor Penetration get buffed a lot more. I would also like to have Blade Flurry on a shorter cooldown OR have Blade Flurry effect more mobs.