Bliz Announces Druid & Mana Regen Changes

So some announcements yesterday/tonight for druids

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14910422662&sid=1

DRUID

• Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done

• Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.

• Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.

• Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.

• Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.

• Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.

• We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

Clearly bliz have some 'concerns' with feral druids right now and this patch is focussed on that, althought these are really draft notes and more could be in the mix too.

MANA REGEN CHANGES
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14910422908&sid=1

• Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
  
  
• To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
  
  
• The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
  
  
• We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
  
  
• We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
  

So myself I think that the Mana Regen Nerf is more important to us Tree's as their is minimal changes currently planned for us.

Thorns and Nature’s Grasp in tree form could be cool but it's clearly not going to add much to the appeal of having a Tree in the group.

With the Mana Regen, I'm not all that happy that they are nerfing spirit - mp5 but I guess we have to suck it in. What it really means is that some of the rediculous overhealing will come to a stop and classes that are spam happy will have to actually learn to heal again, not a bad thing really.

I think overall the changes are fine, I suspect alot of QQ regarding spirit nerf but we'll see :D

Have a Good Day!