Solidarity

If you read any Druid blogs, you should be very aware of the change to Lifebloom (the defining spell of Restoration Druids—often, the healers for Main Tanks in raids throughout WoW) planned for the 2.4 patch.

Phaelia and Bellwether, especially, have decried the change, and with good reason. I encourage you to visit their blogs and read their articles to understand why this PvP-driven change is such a negative for PvE.

To show my solidarity with their position, I’m prominently displaying the "Don’t Nerf Trees" graphic on my blog, at least until 2.4 goes live. I don’t pretend to have a solid grasp on how Resto Druids do their thing. I do know, however, that many groups prefer them to holy priests for healing. To me, that’s not a bad thing (well, as long as I’m not the guy left behind!).

But the truly irksome thing about this change (and believe me, I’m trying hard to keep the emotional rhetoric to a minimum here) is that it is supposedly PvP-driven, yet has such a negative impact on what is arguably the original intent of World of Warcraft: the PvE, end-game raiding instances.

While I’ve come to embrace at least the Battlegrounds aspect of WoW PvP in recent weeks, for me, at least, this game is still all about questing, exploring, and conquering bosses with a well-coordinated group. Ironically, a couple friends and I were discussing some of the PvE grind last night (why can’t a quest mob drop a crystal for each group member, instead of us having to kill 4x the number of mobs, so every gets their four crystals?), and trying to come up with ideas to make things more challenging. But we certainly were NOT talking about nerfing players; rather, make the mobs more challenging, rather than making us kill more mobs.

But with the proposed Lifebloom change (and while I am not one to indiscriminately toss around the term "nerf," in this case, it fits), Blizzard has, in my opinion, made one of their truly few, but huge, errors in judgment. Although I really wasn’t concerned one way or the other with another proposed 2.4 change—the short-lived Lifetap "nerf"—I felt it was a lot more reasonable than what we’re looking at for Lifebloom. The hue and cry from the Warlock community convince Blizzard rather quickly to reverse themselves on that issue. We can only hope the same sensibility will apply to Lifebloom.

In any event, I just want my Druid friends, bloggers or not, to know I fully support their cause on this issue. 

Edit: I wondered why I couldn’t find the origin of the DNT graphic. Somehow, while I got Leafshine into my Blogroll, I either didn’t add or removed Leafy from my feed reader! ACK!  So of course, I missed Leafy’s article kicking off the Don’t Nerf Trees campaign. My apologies for not giving proper credit when I originally published this article.