As of today or yesterday, a cvar that’s very commonly used by both Feral and Guardian druids has been protected so it can no longer be changed in combat. This is a big hit to QoL for both specs, and in the case of Guardian it is also very likely to get them killed.
Some background on why it’s used:
Both Feral and Guardian have a proc that allows them to cast Regrowth in their primary form (Cat/Bear), Predatory Swiftness and Dream of Cenarius respectively. This is a proc you want to make use of, but if you happen to press Regrowth without having the proc (whether a misclick, not noticing that you didn’t have the proc available or whatever other reason), you will be shifted out of form and start hard casting it instead. If this happens, you either cancel the cast and shift back immediately, or finish it and then shift back, which costs you between 1 and 2 GCDs depending on which you choose and how quickly you do so. As Guardian, you likely just immediately get 1shot instead of getting to shift back, though.
That’s where the macro comes in:
This disables the default behavior of “if I can’t cast this in the form I’m in, leave form and cast it in caster form”, then attempts to cast Regrowth (which will fail if you don’t have the proc), then enables the default behavior again. This gives you complete control over which spells you want to use which behavior. So you can have Wild Growth (or Rebirth for Feral, because ““friction””) automatically unshift you because there’s no way for you to cast them in animal form anyway, but for Regrowth (and in the case of Feral, some people also use it for Moonfire due to not all builds running Lunar Inspiration) you force the game to keep you in form regardless of whether Regrowth can be cast or not.
It being protected means you either get all or nothing. All spells break form if the current form can’t cast them, or you always have to manually shift out before casting a spell that isn’t castable in your current form.
Basically, disabling the ability to toggle this cvar in combat sucks, and there has been no explanation of why it happened. There are some theories about it potentially having been used for some exploits, but nothing concrete.
So, it’d be fantastic if this could be reverted, and if changes like this could be communicated ahead of time so feedback can be given. Especially because there might be random other cvars that also got disabled but haven’t been noticed yet.