Elemental Shaman being on 20% of teams does not overpowered make... How many teams are Disc Priests on? MS Warriors?

tbh we may or may not be overpowered in PvP... but I tell you what, I don't feel "overpowered" in PvE, certainly not compared to my Enhancement and Restoration brothers and sisters... and these "PvP nerfs" will have major impacts in that realm.


And yeah, time on Tremor pulse is wrong. I'm hoping for fake.

Concerning Druids, the ability to negate crushing blows via more HP aka 'HP soaking' is reduced considering theres not much HP difference now-days between all the tanks (perhaps a Druid has 2k~ more?).
TC doesn't matter because any Warrior can place that up for you where its needed.
An 'oh shit' button is almost required for the harder bosses because often a bad situation is saved by the quick reaction speeds of the tank (Illidan P5 - bad trap means tank the enrage), or they throw in the famous last stand abilities (Mother 10% - do you really want to risk a MT tank death sub 10%?) to keep things interesting.

No, but an elemental shaman doing 8k burst in 2k seconds on his own does. These changes are more to smoothen out outgoing damage so there's less [unhealable] burst damage. Unfortunately it does have a big impact on the PvE side, some people in guild were discussing the possibility of putting +nature damage on one of the warlock curses but that might just give people another reason to use a warlock over a mage in 5s if all it meant was the curse had to be put up before the nuke.

I'm also glad to see some mana burns nerfs too which in turn buff hunters a bit for mana drain purposes but more importantly we can see some longer games where all casters aren't burnt to 0 in the first few minutes - there definately needs to be some strategy to it.

Well, in fact Blizzard has already allowed bears to tank some bosses in T5/T6 content : they've made bosses that require more than one tank, and I think it was the best way to do it.
We do not compete with prot warrior, we are something else : a tank dps/hybrid, and arguably the only one. I don't think it make us less usefull.

The same raid make up we've used since day 1. Or tried to anyway. Even when learning Illidan or pre-nerf Shahraz 5 months ago 1 shadow priest is enough (if swapped intelligently) to support a raid of people who are aware and pro-active about their mana pools.

If that is their reason for giving iceblock across the board, they do not even play the game. I would rather play a holy priest with 0 resilience in arena than pvp arcane or fire.

Updating the OP to include the only confirmed change, the bit about the raid UI calculating distance to other players.

I'm moderately hopeful that bits and pieces of this are true - I'm holding out faint hope that the Moonkin change is incorrectly written, and that they actually read their Suggestion boards. I've been pushing for Moonkin Aura (rather than Moonkin Form) to refund mana on critical strikes (the same way Improved Leader of the Pack returns health to physical DPS on crits) for months.

Even if you are perfectly aware, it is much easier to bring a lot of healers rather than zerg everything with DPS. Why would you stack melees on Illidan unless you were trying to set a world first on damage?

We have done Gurtogg with 7 healers, it isn't particularly difficult, but why bother if you can just bring 8 and make it trivial every time?

If they added an Improved Moonkin Aura which gave this benefit to party members aswell it would go along way to allowing better synergized groups.

SP doesn't need crit or hit (Ele Sham, Moonkin), but both of those classes need a SP in order to sustain optimal damage.
Having a group based on crit/regen would work wonders especially towards making crit a more valuable stat.

You're generalizing too much here. TC isn't the best PvE X Class item/enchant vs PvP X Class item/enchant, it's the best PvE X Spec item/enchant and PvP Spec item/enchant. That's the way it has always been and therefore Blizzard's statement changes nothing. Take mages for example, a PvE frost and PvE fire mage are going to have different weapon enchants. Likely there will be a "best" inscription for a spec for each environment, but for classes there will likely be a few different "bests" for both PvE and PvP.

This.

Shadow Priests could be put primarily with mana-dependent, low-crit classes (Holy Priests, Affliction Warlocks, Resto Shaman, Hunters, etc.), whereas high-crit classes would synergize well with a Moonkin (Holy Paladins, Destruction Warlocks, Mages, etc.).

If this change went through, a) I'd feel super-cool; and b) I would honestly expect to see a Moonkin in most raids (a la Shadow Priests, especially in early Burning Crusade). The amount of synergy would be phenomenal, and talent spec representation would be dramatically improved (lots of raids are already using Ret Paladins, Shadow Priests, Elemental/Enhancement Shaman - the Balance Druid is one of very few specs that has been left in the cold).

Totally off-topic, and I'm feeding the speculatory trolling (for which I apologize), but a man can dream.

Actually, even if it is revealed to be true, and only the druid itself is effected, it could be a sign that they are indeed reading suggestions. Although i do support an improved moonkin aura as talent in order to make it comparable to our feral counterparts, it is somewhat at the lines of "would be nice, but don't rush it, please". The melee manaregeneration, which was a not useable mechanic right from the start, has been critizised in every feedback thread, and really deserves a change for so much time now.

The second main change to balance spec, well, if it's true, i will be a little bit disappointed. Treants proccing roots? Yes, our Force of Nature talent is weak, and should be looked after, but the idea in these other fake notes were nicer, the healing proc similar to shadowfiend (would allow a light self healing in moonkin form). Even if this enables to have roots indoors available (i'm assuming, that a proc would ignore our cast restriction), right now i couldn't come up with a useful strategy to incorporate such a change in my PvE playing style. It's random, unreliable and will most likely hit more often than not the wrong target.

As a whole, even if fake, the druid part looks ok to me. Even the lifebloom restriction (depending on how much the coeffizient would be changed of course). The feral heal increase would need to be scaled down, though.

Oh, I only just noticed the moonkin bit... don't be silly, 2% mana? Unless this has a rather high cooldown (more than 6 sec) or only works on high-rank spells (rank 1 moonfire spam) this would eliminate every mana issue a moonkin could possibly have. I'm not familiar with the balance build, but with Moonglow, a wrath costs only 232 mana, considering a moonkin should have 9-10K mana, this is 2-2.3% of the total mana. Add Dreamstate and a crit-orientated equipment, voila, owl spamming nature bolts every GCD and hardly going oom.

Unless it's 2% of base mana. Since it's all speculation at this point anyway, who knows.

From a healer perspective the gains of bringing as few healers as possible are quite large.

1. Bringing as few healers as possible makes the game more fun to heal. I guess if you want everything to be trivial and don't like a challenge this woudn't apply. Personally I like actually having a challenge every week despite the fact we had BT on farm for months. It makes everything more fun as far as I'm concerned. I constantly find myself making new macros and trying to improve my performance. Had we just brought more healers to make it trivial this self improvement would not be needed since I could simply get better gear and not worry about it.

2. Overstocking on healers usually means more overhealing. Not that this is a bad thing per se but it always annoys me when I look at my wws.

3. Total time for raiding decreases. Sure there may be a wipe everynow and then if we bring new healers or someone falls asleep but with very high raid dps everything takes less time to kill and clearing Hyjal and BT in 6 hours total or so is quite nice.

I wouldn't go so far to say, there a no more mana problems, as you try to suggest. Just take a look at an average balance druid in late T5/early T6 enviroment (no raidbuffs or suchlike assumed for this example). He would be at around 33% spellcrit in form with 10.000 Mana (about 500 int for dreamstate asumed). During a minute he would cast 45 wraths (assuming that the GCD no longer is not touched by Nature's Grace, as suggested in a blue post in the druid forum), of which 15 would be critical hits. This would cost 10440 mana (an increase of 1160 mana before the GCD change), and he would get 3600 back in this minute (3000 from 15 spellcrits for 200 mana each, 600 from dreamstate), resulting in 6840 mana spent during this minute. This is quite a mana loss, and because most fights are somewhat longer today than before BC, i wouldn't consider 2% overpowered.

As suggested by pixen, if it is 2% base mana (quite likely if being thought over a little bit), the mana increase during wrath spam (due to the GCD change) would be almost equal to the mana return from the moonkin effect change.

You know this game needs new content on shorter timelines when there's more discussion on upcoming, possibly fake additions to the game than actual current content.

More DPS is nice and it's certainly a worthy goal to shoot for both overall and especially when farming content long past its natural lifespan. But many of the best fights in the game rely little on your DPS and much more on your ability to control the situation -- just look at the original Al'ar, Illidan, Kel'thuzad, and so on. By contrast DPS is a much larger factor in some equally awesome fights: Nefarian, C'thun, Kael'thas, Vashj, Magtheridon.

I'll be very interested to see how a DPS-crazy melee-heavy guild like yours does in Sunwell -- assuming the zone is difficult enough to differentiate a large number of Illidan-farming guilds.

Uh, they are. Abananax is very near the top spot on almost every boss in BT/Hyjal last I looked. Did they piss in your Cheerios or beat your dog?

He probably meant world firsts as in Nihilum-style, which is silly since Abananax got a much later start. Regardless, this whole line of conversation is pretty silly and starting to veer off topic.

Beat by Snowy

I know others have posted this as well, but I believe it is very true. I think the 'cap' to shadow priest dps is mostly determined by the mana returns. I would guess that currently shadow priests return too much mana compared to what they intended. Nerfing their DPS would be one way to lower the mana returns, although I think we can all agree it is not really the proper way to fix it, if that is the final intent.

As I said, I'm not really familiar with Balance builds *whistles and hopes nobody notices Dioneirra merely mentioned talents, but raw theorycraft, which Nath was too lazy to undertake (currently preparing for the cinema)*

Of course, when you look at it from an objective point of view, it's not that OP, but you know how people react to druid buffs