Patch 3.0.3 - Build 9095

The beta servers have gotten a new build.

Talent/Ability changes:
Balance
* Earth and Moon changed from 5 to 3 ranks and now increases spell damage taken by 4/9/13% for 12 seconds and increases your spell damage by 1/2/3%. (Old - Increased Arcane/Fire/Frost/Nature/Shadow damage by 3/5/8%)
* Eclipse now increases damage done by Wrath by 20% (up from 10%) and has a chance of increasing your critical strike chance with Starfire by 30%. (Up from 15%)
* Moonfury changed from 5 to 3 ranks. Now increases damage done by Starfire, Moonfire, and Wrath by 3/6/10%. (Old - 2/4/6/8/10%)

Feral
* Predatory Instincts doesn't work with Bear and Dire Bear form anymore.
* Growl cooldown has been changed to 8 seconds. (Down from 10 seconds)

Restoration
* Improved Tree of Life now increases your armor contribution from items by 33/66/100%. (Old - Increased your total armor)

As promised, balance got some bloat reduction, which makes creating a useful build much easier (e.g. 60/0/11)
Also, the changes to Eclipse make it even more interesting. Throwing in one or two Wraths every now and then to increase Starfire crit chance by 30% should make for an interesting rotation.
The change to bonus armor in ToL is a slight nerf, but brings it in line with the way it works for other forms.

The reduced Growl CD is something we wanted for a long time. It makes fights where you got to have several tanks taunting a bit easier to organize (although the last fight where the CD was a problem in that regard was in BWL). The Predatory Instincts change has been coming a long time. Actually I had the impression that this was already on live, and they only had to change the tooltip.

These changes have all been expected, no surprises there. But there are some changes to Glyphs.

* Glyph of Wrath - Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting your Wrath spell by 50%. (Old - Increases the chance you'll resist spell interruption when casting your Wrath spell by 50%.)
* Glyph of Innervate - Your Innervate spell now grants you full mana regeneration while casting for 20 sec, in addition to the effect on the primary target. Innervate's effect is instead increased by 20% if you are the primary target. (Old - Your innervate ability now has an additional 20% strength mana regeneration effect on you, in addition to the effect on your primary target.)
* Glyph of Starfire - Your Starfire ability increases the duration of your Moonfire effect on the target by 3 sec, up to a maximum of 9 additional seconds. (Old - Didn't have the 9 seconds limit)

The change to the Innervate Glyph is a nice buff which makes it a bit more advantageous to use it on others - although I am not sure whether that will happen often enough that it warrants using this Glyph. 90% of the time you use it on yourself, and an extra 20%... I don't know if that is good enough to pass on other, more important Glyphs.
The Glyph of Starfire got a pretty big nerf. Some have been excited about the old version of it, and now it got limited to 9 seconds extension. Still, together with Nature's Splendor it reduces your mana expenditure quite a bit.
The new Glyph of Wrath makes more sense - now you can only get pushed back by 0.25 seconds per hit (and only two times at that). Only half a second pushback no matter how often you get hit is pretty nice.


Not many changes, no big surprises.

From my side, there is a big theorycrafting post incoming. Should be done tomorrow or Monday.