The Reign of shapeshifter is over. The King has been dethroned. Now that sorcs got some spotlight (well ranged for that matter), they are finally playable. Thank you Blizzard!





On good news. If they fix this. Phoenix is now usable for Fireclaw druids and physical boost.

This post was edited by Tarisus on Jan 26 2022 11:44pm

A new day...

I had to log off the PC last night because this crap is so dumb and awful
Still no word from Blizzard on how big of a mistake this was on their part
Just their last response implicitly phrasing it as a buff and telling the community that we're wrong

Blizzard is people who dont play diablo 2 taking their advice from someome who made a video that recommends maxing out feral rage and using feral rage on a fury druid. They also dont even pretend to consider pvp. There is zero chance they even understand what they are doing let alone having the ability to fix it.

Youtube subscribers and likes mean everything, actual knowledge of the game means nothing.

No phoenix is still not usable for Druid, haven't 0.6 second delay for every 3 attacks is not worth it. But now that Druid attack so slow, maybe it wont matter.

That's exact my thought with D2R. The legacy IAS is actually very well balanced, because getting to the 3fpa break point's is very difficult, but rewarding.

Wait so they slowed down druid by like 80% because it was 'unclear' for some players on how numbers were calculated?

Also does Blizzard not test their changes before launching PTR? There's no fucking way Blizz dev sat down with a fully geared fury druid and thought that this is a solid attacking speed?

It would at least make sense somewhat to test the speed change, if they had given anything at all to compensate it, maybe triple damage, fury uninterruptible and double range, but nope we got nothing just a straight nerf on every single end game weapon, yet they want us to test other weapons in PTR because they think it is a buff

I think they legit do not understand what makes shapeshift builds fun and why people play them, otherwise they would not do something like that. Or they never even tested this and just thought this would be a good change 'on paper'.

I have honestly been reflecting on this for the past day or so and I can't recall a time when a nerf of this magnitude has been made and Blizzard tells the player base to fk off in response like they did yesterday. Has something similar happened before and I'm not recalling? I guess I was pretty young when I played LoD so maybe my memory wasn't great yet.

I do know this: the people telling the shapeshifting community to STFU is beyond unreal and annoying. If I hear one more, "this is the PTR. Public test realm. They're TESTING things. Druid players need to stfu, this won't make it into the live game" I will blow a fucking gasket.

I think we already know Blizzard probably won't let this current nerf sneak its way into the live game, especially given all the backlash. The bigger problem now is trust in these developers. How the hell do you butcher an entire skill tree when your intent was to make it better? It's such an egregious error and I still can't wrap my head around how they are continuing to think this is a beneficial change.

I am constantly being told to reread the last sentence in the response as proof that everything will be fixed shortly: "We will be looking at ways to improve the performance of the transformed Druid without sacrificing the benefits obtained from unifying the attack speed calculations."

But what the fuck is the bolded part? You're meaning to tell me that I should be reassured this developer team will do the right thing and fix something they believe has "benefits"?

I can only come to the conclusion that this developer team is not at all familiar with IAS, frames per attack, the animations, or any of the core mechanics of shapeshifting builds. I think this is a really dark time for any D2R players that bought this game to play a shapeshifting class and, to be honest, I am not convinced this will ever be properly fixed in a way that makes us competitive with any other melee class.

This post was edited by Koston on Jan 27 2022 02:07pm

For people on the outside looking in, if they are willing to go forward with these catastrophic changes, think of what else could be down the line

Remove the ias cap, add FRW (fury druid is now infinitely better)

I also want to add, given the reaction - can blizzard give an update? It's hard for me to imagine there is nothing in the works if their CM said the changes were not going to stay, but what do they have in mind to FIX it

This post was edited by Brandoloni on Jan 27 2022 02:43pm