Stop, take a breather, get your facts straight and assess the new situation.
It amuses me to peruse the official forms and walk away astonished at the complete lack of intelegence (or rather the complete presence of stupidity) that occurs once a new instance of the PTR has been made available to the masses.
Today, on Big Bear Butt’s blog he addressed the cycle that has driven much of the Druid community into a blood thirsty frenzy (cycle: apprehension, fear, worry, and outrage over changes). It’s a great read and recommend that everyone read it.
Anyhow, while in the the Test Realm Forums today I stumbled upon a post in response to the Heart of the Wild nerf that caught me by surprise and I couldn’t help but laugh. Not wanting to poke fun at a situation where someone is clearly upset over the upcoming changes that we well be seeing in 3.1, but I was bothered by what was said by the original poster. I’ll let you see for yourself.
“Are you kidding me? I lost 10k HP the first time this was nerfed, now I am basically losing another 10k hp. WTF are you doing to feral druids honestly? You make it hard enough get armor, and now you are basically pushing our mitigation down further. Like this is honestly a huge nerf since feral tanks rely solely on high stamina and dodge. Either give us our stamina back or give us a huge bonus to the new mitigation ability.”
My main problem with this particular post happened to be his complete lack of facts and reactionary response to the changes without even understanding the current changes that were live in PTR at the time of his post. The following was my response.
This is a serious exaggeration. I encourage all druids to not follow suit like this. The sky is not falling.
Truth be told though, yes we are seeing a a drop in our health due to the 10% decrease in the stamina bonus from HotW (I experienced a 2040HP decrease and I have really close to the same amount of HP as you, and the only reason you are as high as you are is due to the frost resist gear you have equipped. Our biggest hit will be seen in our armor. On my character I experienced close to a 5900 armor decrease on PTR which is a bigger hit than the stam nerf. Currently, the biggest gripe from Druids is that we’re seeing these nerfs without the Savage Defense mechanic in place which will act as another mitigation mechanic much like how block works but our chance to “block” is strongly based on our ability to Crit and the amount blocked is scaled by out already high AP. In other words Crit is becoming our multipurpose “chance to block value” and AP scales the “amount blocked”. Once the Savage Defense mechanic gets implemented in PTR only then will we be able to see the true effects of these changes come into play when we are going head first into new content.
IMO, a month after 3.1 is released and druids will adapt and get used to the new mechanics and it will be business as usual.
Posting recommendation: Don’t react negatively to the changes made to the class, but be willing to work with blizzard to find the right solutions.
Moral of the story? Once you finish reading the PTR notes, Stop, Take a Breather, Understand the facts, assess the new situation and formulate your new game plan. Please, by no means, ‘over react’ and make yourself look like an asshat, it’ll keep us from being embarrassed for you.
It’s not the end of the world, it’s just another challenge in a game.
-jaded
