Nerftastic

Yeah, what we've been expecting has happened. We got a tanking nerf.

From the build 9038 changelog (off of MMO-Champion):
* Predatory instinct now reduces the damage taken from area of effect attacks by 10/20/30%. (Up from 5/10/15%)
* Dire Bear Form armor contribution from items has been lowered from 400% to 370%
* Moonkin Form - Armor Contribution from items has been lowered from 400% to 370%


Let's have a look at the bonus armor reduction first. We ignore base armor for the moment (doesn't scale anyways).
Given that, how much armor do we lose?

	old	new	change
w/o Thick Hide	5	4.7	94%
with Thick Hide	5.5	5.17	94%

This means it comes to around 6% less armor in bear/moonkin form. Could have been worse.


Next, Predatory Instincts. It looks like a buff, until you read the clarification made by Ghostcrawler:

"Predatory Instincts is a huge nerf. You just haven't seen it yet. It only works in cat form."

Damn. I hope she means the AoE damage reduction only, because losing the crit bonus would hurt our TPS and rage generation.

How much would DPS contribution from crits change?

Old: 0.67 + (0.33 * 2.2) = 1.4
New: 0.67 + (0.33 * 2) = 1.33

That comes to a DPS loss of 5% - which translates to a similar TPS loss (not exactly, but close enough).


But at least we get a few positive thing out of it:
* Growl range has been increased from 5 yards to 20 yards
* Wild Growth healing value has been greatly increased. (Up from 350 to 686 for Rank 1, 469 to 861 for Rank 2, 805 to 1239 for Rank 3, 1085 to 1442 for Rank 4)

Making Growl go farther is really useful. Think of encounters like Al'ar, and how difficult it was to catch the two adds. In such a circumstance ranged taunts come in handy. Warriors got the same, btw.

The change to Wild Growth seems to make it more useful again (some numbers). They also reduced the mana cost of Nourish.