What's the PVE nerf you mention? The changes to ice floes and icy veins are pretty big and address one of the main issues for frost mages in 5v5 which is their vulnerability to spell pushback, many teams will stick 2 pets and a hunter or warrior on the mage and he'll be unable to contribute any damage for most of the match. I've regularly been in high end arena games playing 2345 vs lock/hunter or vs 2346 and the lock is able to pump out 3 or 4 times more damage than the mage because of pets and los.

I'm actually starting to believe that these patch notes are real, they sound a lot like the kind of changes Tom Chilton would make. Just like the lifebloom and cyclone changes: 20 yards on cyclone mean that druids have to expose themselves a lot more making it easier for teams to switch to them if they play too aggressively, same deal with lifebloom, if they get less healing from lifebloom alone they'll have to increase their use of other heals limiting their mana endurance and also opening up more opportunities to counterspell/interrupt the heals with a casting time. I'm sure lifebloom change is not intended at pve and any changes to tree of life form are meant to offset that.

I no longer raid on my mage so my TC isn't the best but not being able to stack Icy Veins with Bloodlust/Heroism would be a pretty decent to large PVE nerf for fire mages. I don't think IV is giving pushback immunity either, just the Ice Floes change. So basically just PVP buffs.

Any suggestion of what Buff to Tree of Life, would offset such a nerf to Lifebloom? (even though the numbers may be unkown, it - to show an effect- has to be quite a high percentage)

Lifebloom is the reason to keep a Restoration Druid in a Raid (Rejuvenation to a lesser degree)

"Tree of Life: You may now cast any Restoration spell in this form." -MMO


So you can keep RJ, LB^3 on a tank and cancle/cast HT to cover burst damage should it arive.

More importantly it might mean you can stay in ToL while buffing MOTW, a huge buff indeed.


NB: its still speculation and from unconfirmed sources.

I'm going to qq a bit here but ...

I think it's a bit (lot) retarded that blizzard would nerf lifebloom. It is mainly the only reason why trees are brought to raids anyways. I expected that they would nerf something about druids, seeing people qq'd so much about us being op in 2's (and i have to agree we are pretty op in 2's) i just never thought that they would go and nerf our best PVE spell.

Oh btw, big wooohooo we're getting Ht in tree form again ............................


Khiran

Presuming its true, then it makes Druids pretty solid (single) tank healers while still being able to be decent on multi-tank healing (depending on how large a nerf to LB).
The ability to provide a constant flow of solid HPS and an option of anti-spike as one person would be really quite unique to us as all others can only do one or the other, however it would cripple the usage of Swiftmend somewhat.

Keep in mind the LB change would be 3fold worse than it first implies in terms of PvE healing unless it only effects the bloom.

If they ever went back and changed ToL aura it could negate any slight nerf to LB, considering that ToL is never used in PvP anyway it shouldn't matter.

It seems odd they would further decrease the ability of the elemental shaman to participate effectively in pvp and pve, but hey, they balanced it in the first place so it's not like they're rocket scientists.

Yeah I'm sure elemental shaman's 1550 tops raid dps is really ground breaking. Considering virtually every other dps class with the exception of shadow priests is capable of doing far more dps. Especially after the freaking nightmare that was the last major patch when people flooded the shaman forums with posts saying how the changes were unwarrented. So making LO unable to crit and reducing the LB coefficient again is going to be crippling. That added with the pvp set bonus is pretty much a giant fuck you to ele shamans around.

I was thinking the same thing. But this change makes sense if Blizzard does something else. Give shaman talented 70% pushback in the elemental tree. Thats one change alot of shaman have been asking for for a long time.

Uh if the MMO champion notes are correct, one of the biggest raid effecting ones is the changes to the druid Nurturing instinct talent. At least 1000 extra healing on a druid tank for ALL the healers? How is that even remotely reasonable?

It's the 20% snare that kills TOL in PvP, not the spell restrictions

Makes sense - gives Moonkin scaling and very useful raid utility.

First half makes sense - Nurturing Instinct still being based off STR was left behind when HotW was changed to make STR-less Rogue gear more desirable. Second half is a little mystifying though - it's a huge buff to Bear tanks even if we're talking about caster AP.

Makes sense. I can vaguely recall Blizzard mentioning something about TU being made to work on Demons.

Doesn't make sense. Why keep it as a debuff if it only works for you?

Makes sense. Fire has no way catching up to Shadow if the coefficient of their respective base spells is uneven to begin with.

With that said, the Imp. Shadowbolt changes makes some sense in this context: The raid utility of the increased Shadow damage is just too good to pass up unless Incinerate is greatly superior to Shadowbolt.

Since when is turn undead used in pvp? That in itself screams FAKE!

Read the rest of the thread/patch notes. It states TU is going to be made to affect Demons, ergo, a Warlock's pets.

By actually reading more than one of the sentances about the spell you could also of picked up on:

• Turn Undead no longer fears the target, and now incapacitates it.
• Turn Undead now works on demons. (Prob will be renamed to a diff spell)
• Turn Undead is now subject to diminishing returns.

I took the liberty to bold the part which linked so very well to your comment, which upon a few seconds of thought would bring you to a place where understanding shines and presents you with the knowledge it would work on Warlock pets (like that pesky felhunter snapping at your heels!).

No doubt it would be similar to this spell except for it working on different pets.

Maybe there is something else that wasn't mentioned that makes up the other 70%!

The shadow school nerf really makes no sense to me. It's logical to assume Blizzard aren't trying to nerf Shadowpriests by these changes, it's been a long while since those were setting the world on fire with their DPS. The obvious target is Warlocks, same as with the Shadow vulnerability nerf. The change also takes away some of the much envied synergy between locks and priests, since the latter won't benefit from improved Shadowbolt procs. Why change such a core raiding talent after 3 years? Even affliction locks, the defining TBC build of "Raid Support" grab it, and I for one was never concerned about people 'stealing' my charges; on the contrary, I was happy to provide synergy and additional damage to the raid.

I don't see the reasoning behind nerfing a damage class' output at this point. 0/21/40 is a clear-cut PvE spec that, with the right gear, can produce very high DPS and firmly place a Warlock in the top 5 on most encounters. Hunters have their fights, Rogues have theirs, ditto for Mages and Warlocks. Each of them shines at a different fight, it's not like Warlocks were monopolizing the top spot in damage done.

On the other hand, the buff to Incinerate may be suggesting Blizzard intends for mages and locks to synergise better than simply having the 3rd lock of a raid cast CoE on the boss.

That said, I should probably wait for confirmation, but if this goes live, I'm deeply worried most guilds' Sunwell caster roster won't be much different than it was at Naxx.

If the Nurturing Instinct from these notes was further changed to be an on-use effect with a long cooldown (say a 20-30s buff with a 15+ minute cooldown), wouldn't that make it a similar tanking tool to Shield Wall or Last Stand? It would give bear tanks the sort of "oh shit" button that they currently lack.

A thought just occurred to me:

For anyone who still has a set of High Warlord's gear, are the set bonuses backward-compatible with Gladiator gear? An example would be 1 piece of Merciless and 1 piece of Vengeful giving you the 35 resilience bonus.

I can understand the reasoning behind a buff to Nurturing instinct: they're wasted talent points at the moment, and druids are probably the best tanking class to receive a passive +heal buff, as they tend receive damage more frequently and more consistently than war/pally. But the numbers do seem absurdly high by conventional standards. We might see a change like this end up on the PTR with a decreased effect.

No.

If you have 2 piece glad, and 2 piece HWL, you'll get the +35 resilience bonus twice. (Assuming it is not changed in 2.4)

I won't even begin to talk about how overpowered the proposed version of Nurturing instinct is in PvE. In t6 gear most bears have roughly 3k-3.5k AP fully buffed, that means they'll receive 1.5k-1.75k extra healing from all sources.

If that's the case, for any boss that doesn't require the stability of stance dancing, mechanics like shear, or have any case to have the bear one shotted, it seems like bears will be the superior MT just because how stupid this buff will be.

You could argue arms warriors and enhance shaman bring a similar amount of utility and raid buffs but their damage is still on par with 'primary' dps classes. The same can be said for elemental shaman although their overall raid utility isn't as high. Meanwhile shadow priest damage has slowly but surely sunk into the gutter.

The only reason shadow priests were topping damage meters in Gruul and early Tier 5 was because of the huge blunder in itemization they made with tailoring sets and school specific damage. And, rather than having the foresight to realize shadow priests basically don't scale at all with more +hit, +crit, and +haste they brought out the nerf hammers to a (sub) class that only improved about +300-400 damage from crafted to full Tier 6.

If those notes are indeed true, and I always remain skeptical until they are posted officially by Blizzard, it is a horribly hamfisted attempt to reign in warlock damage.