Yes, I did forget the sweeping strike change, and it is nice. I just don't know if I'd say with all the changes that warriors got buffed.

Instant form switching is going to be a huge buff in the next patch. Being able to go from bear to travel form in one click will be huge. Apart from that, Intensity being doubled in effectiveness is certainly not insignificant. Druids were already the most efficient healers in the lower brackets, and this only makes them better.

Instant form switching macro's are going to be insane, as well as the extra mana regen (especially with BT gear, which my Druid often uses) and range buff on Abolish poison is huge against Rogues. (their arch-nemesis)

Seconded.

This will greatly reduce the gap to what is now known as "good druid" and "great druid". It will definitely make players will lower response skill perform better. I know I will love Maim from bear form after I charged/bashed a target. Actually, when I read this change this morning I thought it was either a joke or a bug. Sure it will suck having our bars filled up with all kinds of skills and more actions hotkeyed, but I don't complain.
As for the rest of the druid changes, there's no significant buff, besides the Intensity change which is in line with the spirit addition to our pvp set, which is only useful and buff after you've used Innervate. However, I have to mention again, the above quoted change is just HUGE. I play with 150-200 latency and this will greatly improve my reactions on time.

You'd be surprised how many members of Nurfed and other prominent pvp/arena guilds work at Blizzard. Also, as of right now Kalgan's 5v5 team is 2100+ in 5v5 on bg9, so I presume he has some idea of what it's about. I really don't think we need more whine threads on this sort of subject. The issue of pve and pvp balance always mucks up the works.

I still laugh at this blue explanation though. It's as if they think Mages should most definitely die after that nice .5 second MD goes off.

Yes, so this extra manaregen which you are talking about is going to come from where? Because every other Post I've seen on these boards says the exact opposite, which is also my understanding as I'm never out of my 5 second rule unless I'm cc'ed in 5on5 (which is also the only place I'd understand using BT gear in, as playing against a warrior/rogue in 2on2 without the 15% seems really hard). As to the other thing you mentioned this wasn't in the notes I saw on mmo so omg I'm looking forward to that, no more cat-form-lag-switching.

I dont get why they are so scared of having different rules for different brackets.

It would make it a lot easier to balance the game.

No matter how much I wish it was still the case, you can't do an 8-hit WW since they patched that out years ago. Sure was great fun when you could though.

I think you may have misunderstood here... the change is an increase in a talent from 15% regen in casting to 30%, hence its a buff directly influencing your in-combat casting regeneration, and has nothing to do with your regen outside of 5 sec casting.

Rogues are getting some pretty substantial buffs in 2.3. Holy priests are also getting a lot of love with Fear Ward for everyone and Chastise for Dwarves/Draenei. Night Elf shadow priests are getting a monster buff. Enhancement shamans got some nice buffs, perhaps even enough to make them viable. It's not all doom and gloom. The one relevant druid buff (the shapeshifting change) was more of a UI streamlining thing to help players with high latency, and it definitely matters for shadow priests as well. Although druids are already unreasonably powerful, I can see the justification for this change.

I do agree, though, that the warrior changes seem unreasonable. A talent tree rework is a big thing nowadays, and not something that happens very often - and this one was done to apply a buff to what is already an ubiquitous class in arenas. Changes like this, without some substantial compensating rebalancing in the other direction, just don't make sense.

Before even reading beyond the first post in this thread I played a game with myself and guessed who would post, and what they would post. So far, I've guessed a few correctly and we're only on page 1. Regardless of the intent of the OP, this is likely to degrade into a "Bliz doesn't even play their own game because they didn't buff my class" thread, that or at the very least the same disgruntled people rehashing their same complains in another thread.

But until it does, one major PvP change which will mainly affect the Arena I haven't even seen mentioned in 2.3 is the fix to Resiliance double penalizing people with added crit damage bonus talents. While technically this affects specs like Destruction Locks (all three of them in the Arena) and Rogues with Lethality, the reality is it punishes Frost Mages the most. Blizzard has acknowledged the bug and said they were trying to get it in. This "buff" (re: bug fix) will help out Frost Mages immensly.

Back to the original question, yes of course Blizzard plays their Arena, it's simply that balancing classes isn't easy. We like to think it is, but it's not.