2v2 looks pretty tragic. Druid, rogue, warrior, and warlock above the target area. Everyone else below it, and priests only anywhere near it because they party up with rogues.

It's not really reasonable to judge those ratings in the wake of 2.4 changes, both because there hasn't been enough time for any changes to cause significant rating swings and also because there's often just not much activity at the top of the ratings in general - not to mention the tournament realm is certainly cutting into serious small bracket play.

I beg to differ. Because from personal experience nothing has changed for druids. Except that their "offspecs" were nerfed as a side effect. So why should the amount of druids not rise when druids are still the best all-around healers for 2vs2 and 3vs3? Mind you, shamans and paladins are not bad. But druids are far more solid. And druids are way more offensive due to their heavy CC than any other healer. And as we all know CC in WoW matters quite a lot.

Druids *are* weaker. Things *have* changed. I play with druids in every bracket on some character or another, and every druid I play with has said they've had difficulty adjusting to the cyclone range change and find it harder to escape without the movement speed bonus. Shaman are now considerably more powerful than they were in small brackets - toughness and instant ghost wolf do a ton for their mobility against melee, and the half second off the totem global give them much more flexibility in using a number of their tools. Paladins have not improved as much, but Turn Evil isn't a trivial change - it can be very powerful to neutralize a warlock pet for a time.

But more to the point - using ratings two weeks after a patch to say "nothing has changed" isn't at all a reasonable methodology. Frankly, from a rating perspective, it's likely we'll have to wait until S4 to see the real impact, since so many druid teams are already entrenched at the top rankings, and many of them are unlikely to be particularly active with the tournament realm up, etc.

Elendril, I think the point is that it is tougher for druids, since obviously the reduction in cyclone range was a prett big nerf. The issue is that the only other combinations that are scary for a druid-based team in 2's and 3's is another druid based team.

So a druid who plays with a warrior might find it harder to play against hunter/druid because now the other druid's hunter has a easier time interrupting his cyclones. All that those changes did is shift the relative power between different druid teams.