Given the response from the dev, I actually think that original poster’s feedback is quite reasonable and accurate lol
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Yes, it is. Shapeshifters are no longer a playable class. People are going to become emotional over this, no way around it.
I read your moral grandstanding perfectly, so, be better, again - thanks
It may be a Test but it still illustrates a total lack of understanding of their game, granted most of the game design team wasn’t even alive when the original game launched.
3 Likes
Where did they respond?
Just read the dev response. My comment still stands. Go outside. Get some fresh air. Come back when you learn how to act like an adult.
I just want to say a couple things here.
People are emotional over this for a number of reason. From an objective standpoint, this change has completely eradicated any shapeshifting class. It’s no longer possible to attack something in wereform without dying long before you can make any meaningful change to the enemy’s health, whether it is an enemy monster or enemy player.
What is upsetting people is that this is, undoubtedly, a bug that Blizzard accidentally introduced with this PTR. Read the following summarization of what occurred: “The thing the devs messed up is that they didn’t realize that the wereform (anim code 40) is supposed to have a base frame of 13 frames per attack. Human form has a base of 19 frames per attack. Since there is a 75% eias frame cap in the game, it means that using the human form base frames makes it impossible to get shapeshifted forms to a decent speed. The people who made the game set the base frames to 13 for a reason.”
This is a bug. Unless Blizzard is intending on phasing out shapeshifting classes, then this has to be a mistake of some sort. The shapeshifting community thought, “Fine, it’s a mistake. We will wait until these changes are reverted.”
The developer response you reference here not only doubled down on this new bug that they introduced (which, lest we forget, killed all shapeshifting classes, period), but had offensive undertones - and you’re upset that people are getting offended? If you read between the lines, the developer response essentially says, “We are right and the shapeshifting community is wrong. You have yet to figure out how to take advantage of these awesome changes we’ve implemented. Go figure it out and then come back to us.”
There is nothing to figure out. There are no weapon or gear changes to explore. The wolf druid community has been exploring different build options for 20 years. None of the changes they made here would benefit from changing our gear. They simply made everything slower - it doesn’t matter if you use Grief PB, Tomb Reaver, or an EBOTD Thunder Maul. The entire build is dead, gear diversity be damned.
I am hoping this explains why people are becoming upset over this.
11 Likes
Nothing is dead. It’s the PTR. Things are subject to change. My god you people are insane.
I’m simply trying to explain why people are becoming emotional. But the response from the developers today does make it seem like the change is here to say, I won’t lie.
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Shapeshifting druids were already way underpowered and underused…what the hell were they thinking?
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They inadvertently introduced a bug that they believe is a buff.
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THey seem to have no concept of “how they work” Even if they did EXACTLY what they claim they wanted to, “ok you can use any weapon now , and you have to stack off weapon IAS to reach the same attack speeds” they will be breaking things horribly because… shapeshift druids have ZERO defensive skills. The only way they ‘work’ right now is by exploiting fast attack and proc effects, particularly life tap from draculs, in order to be able to face tank packs of mobs with a large heatlh pool and rappid attacks filling their health back up as the NPCs chew through their red bubble. Shapeshift druids are already underpowerd and bad because you need SPECIFIC gear to make them work at all in the first place, and without that gear you can’t even clear normal packs in Hell difficulty because you take too much damage.
Unless they fundamentally change the shapeshift tree to introduce defensive and healing abilities to the class itself, ones that actually WORK (here’s looking at you , utterly useless hunger) along the same lines as necromancer lifetap curse, then shapeshifters are still restricted by requiring specific pieces of gear to be viable, and UNALBLE to make up for loss of weapon IAS anywhere else.
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It is dead when there’s no difference between a The Cranium Basher and a Wirt’s Leg
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It isn’t personal.
It’s incompetence.
This should have NEVER had to reach the PTR in this state.
Anyone that has played wereforms well knew this was the result of their changes without even having to test it.
The fact that people did have to, and that it even made to PTR after their internal testing (ummm i am even giving benefit of the doubt the did test it) is beyond bad.
they meant, by their language to strengthen the wolf and bear forms…and they released this to PTR…color me dumbfounded.
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so this is gonna turn into wow. where they wreck your build out of nowhere just for the sake of making you reroll constantly 
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Tested, its slower. Genuinely slower. About 2-3 frames worse than the same setup pre2.4
Alright then, Karen.
shall we test skills having negative AR next? i mean for the purpose of testing it should be fine right?
I am sure players would love to test things that we can see are terrible within less then 30 sec of gameplay.
Plenty of us have played the game for several decades and this is equal to taking an entire class out of a game with a change that nobody was asking for.
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I think what they should do is reduce every caster FCR% by 50% and only let characters receive 11% FCR% max from gear next. To “test” and add “diversity”
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