New PTR changes 02/27/09Follow

Why the Feral changes? Just... why?

I know the Lifebloom change is gonna **** off a lot of druids, but I don't tend to use lifebloom as often as most, so it's not going to affect my playstyle as much as others. And I was under the impression that intesity was already 50%?

strange....

See this post.

We should have SD on the PTR but don't. It makes it well worthless to test druid tanks. All the nerfs and none of the buffs.

I could go on but I have been drinking and it would get nasty.

Blizzard should make up her mind. Seriously.

If I'm reading it right, the only situation where Lifebloom is nerfed is if you're continually refreshing a full stack, rather than letting it bloom.

Just putting up lifeblooms and letting them bloom will cost the same mana as before, since you'll get the extra mana spent back upon the bloom. If anything in those situations, it's a buff, since the double and triple stacks blooming will now heal for two or three times as much respectively. Even more so if there's truth to the rumor going around that it's currently working off the base mana cost, so you'll actually get back more than half the cost if you're in tree form.

So it seems like what Blizzard really don't want us doing is keeping full lifebloom stacks refreshed on multiple people, which isn't really a huge deal, considering that the way things are now, you can keep it going on one person and actually gain mana over time.

The intensity change is probably to compensate for the changes to spirit based mana regeneration. I'd expect it'll probably keep us getting about the same mana back as we are now, essentially negating the changes as long as we're casting.

Uhm, I think I can tell them what will happen - bears will get their tails handed to them due to their lack of shields and parry.

We've got higher health and AC for a reason - we can't block or parry. Give us those two skills and then sure, you can nerf our AC and HP down to what other tanks have and it wont matter.

You know, I have this sinking suspicion that this dual spec is going to be our curse - with bears nerfed to oblivion if this crap goes through Blizz will say "No need to fix - you can dual spec as a healer" while guilds are going to demand it if you want to keep raiding. O_o

I was just curious to see if people thought this was a little buff in pvp? the lb changes that is.

Well, that's not a raid situation. I don't think Blizz balances anything around 5 mans, and honestly heroics are ridiculously easy if you're raid geared. The issue is going to be in 25 mans, when you're job includes rolling LB stacks on multiple tanks while doing whatever else you're assigned to do. Doubling the cost of LB is going to put your mana regen in the toilet. People need to keep in mind that changing intensity to 17/33/50% is not a buff in any way. It's designed to counteract the massive decrease to spirit based mana regen that they have planned for 3.1. Supposedly as long as you stay in the FSR, you shouldn't see a decrease in you in-combat mana regen.

It will be interesting to see how bad this ends up being. I don't really buy the argument GC made about planning whether to let your LB bloom or to refresh the stack. It's silly to think that you can predict spike damage 10 seconds in advance in more than a few situations.

That's true at the moment, however the spirit-based mana regen changes that were already coming in 3.1 would have changed that. You're not going to regen nearly as much mana when you drop out of the FSR than you do currently. Only rolling 1 LB stack gives you 8.5s between casts, which is more than enough for 1 tick of out of combat regen.

I think we can all pretty much agree that Naxx is stupid easy. Ulduar is supposed to be much harder, and I guess I'm worried that with the nerf to mana regen and the nerf to LB, that we're going to have some significant mana issues. At the very least, we're going to have to strongly reconsider our healing style.