As you may have been aware, dire bear was changed from 360% armor and a flat amount of hp (1240 at 60?) to 450% armor and 40% extra hp.

However, in the most recent patch, it's been changed from 40% extra hp to 25% extra hp. Quite a few people over on the beta forums are pretty upset about it. (Personally I don't really care; changing things in beta is pretty normal.)

Pretty hefty nerf. And if that does go live, it's a huge nerf to lower-geared players. At level 60, you would need 5000 HPs in caster form before the 25% started giving you more HPs than the current 1240 by shifting to dire bear.

I hope that change doesn't make it to live, ever. It would cut down survivability when a warrior or rogue gets close to me....by quite a bit (Balance / Resto 4 life!).

The 15% cut is alot of HP. Its going to cut into non feral spec's ability to tank.

hmm, they did increase attack power to 210 or something... lol, i suppose that's not all that important. nvm! :]

Ouch, as a person who hits about 5200 raid buffed this will hurt me in PvP the most ,helping only slightly in raids. I hope they reconsider and go with a 35% or so at least. Currently wearing a mix of PvP blues and epics so it's not like I'm in greens/blues either.

I'm not overly happy about this one... I only hit 5k in caster when raid buffed right now. Us having more HP was the one reason we were chosen over warriors as MTs on some high-end encounters, cause we could survive the 8k cleaves and such.

Well, on the brighter side... we'll get more HP as we level to 70, so once we start leveling we won't feel its effects nearly as much.

Personally, I love this change. The (for me) incrase of hp from a flat 1240 to 25%, will be a pretty hefty PvE boost for me already at lvl60. Fully raid buffed and flasked, I've nowadays got around 11k hp when I MT. This means I'll get over 1k extra hp, and end up at 12.2k-ish.

For endgame PvE tanking at lvl60, this is a definite boost -- even more so when we get big amounts of hp when we level towards 70. For PvP, this is a nerf unless you've got a priest to buff you with fort, which is sad. (It'll be a buff after a few more levels though.)

What this is really doing is moving everything back to the way it was...Resto. When the latest patch came out it was a beacon of hope for druids who did not want to be priests, but rather wanted to be what we are, hybrids. Unless you have uber gear and are fully spec'd feral what this effectively does is further cripple our ability to switch roles when needed. You won't see a Resto in a raid going into bear to save a fellow clothy...like I said, its moving everyone back to Resto. Just watch, many of us who were feral in the latest patch will go back to Resto because everything that was enhanced for hybrids WILL be nerfed back to nothingness. Good job blizz, thought I was going to get to play a hybrid in PvE instead of once again going PvP.

...but in a few levels there will be very few (if any at all) druids with less than 5k hp self-buffed, so then everybody will gain from it.

I agree that it's a pretty big nerf to pre-60 druids though. :-(