3.3 Oh No!!

I've been waiting for it for a while....but patches have gone by without a lifebloom nerf (Blizzard's all time favorite spell to nerf). We druids haven't been spamming lifebloom all that much though, Rejuv has been my ohsotasty go to button when the raid's gonna get hurt. We all got a preview with the nerf to the T8 set bonus (50% reduction in the initial heal applied). I don't know how many of us were too angry about that and honestly I was almost expecting it after I looked at my guild's World of Logs parses from a night's raid and found out that T8 set bonus was accounting for 10%+ of my effective healing, and any set bonus that's so juicy that it has me taking off my T9 to heal for our guild's raids might need a little tweaking. Anyway to get to the point, Blizz is applying a "bug fix" reducing the duration of rank 15 Rejuvenation to 12 seconds. This means one less tick before it expires. There seem to be two ways of looking at this bug fix (it's blatantly a nerf, even if it's fixing a bug). The first school of thought has been saying: well it probably all went to overheal anyway, it's just one tick less, while the second says that I'll have between 1 and 2 fewer rejuvs on the raid to tick when BIG DAMAGING ATTACK happens and it's gonna gimp my healing. I belong to the second school of thought. I'm definitely not looking forward to this change but as always, we'll adapt.

The other nerf on the horizon is what seems to be a 50% nerf in the armor Improved Barkskin provides us with: from 160% armor contribution from cloth and leather items, to 80%. This is going to hurt, literally. Barkskin is my ZOMG ROGUE OW OW OW button when I'm totally stunlocked and OMG I'M STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO A WARRIOR AND HE'S GOING SPINNY SPIN. I think most of the time I'll be able to live just makes me more squishy and I'm not good enough to carry myself through all that much more squishiness. I'm gonna have to haunt some arena junkies forums to see what the good druids think about this and how scared I have to be.

Another change seems to be more geared to my owly druid friends but affects the rotten broccoli among us too. Nature's Grace won't proc from periodic spell criticals anymore, which means when I get my 4 piece T9.245 (hopefully this Sunday finger's crossed) I shouldn't count on the constant Nature's Grace procs that Rejuv crits are going to supply to be around forever. I'm not too concerned about this, I've never been a Nourish/Regrowth spammer.

Oh, a whole mess of our spells are having their mana cost reduced for lower ranks. Makes leveling easier for baby druids, but I highly highly DO NOT RECOMMEND leveling resto :) I did it and it took a long time (don't regret it at all).

Edited: It's not 3.0 /facepalm