The full post:
As some players have noted, the following changes were made to realms that were down for extended maintenance. Please note that it was determined in-process that these fixes should be made tonight so that we would not need to bring the realms down again tomorrow. The changes will be implemented on the remaining realms tomorrow morning beginning at 5:00 AM PST. These realms will be brought down in groups of 4, and each group will be down for approximately 10 minutes.

Soothe Animal
- Casting time was increased to 1.5 seconds.
- Monsters would not agro players when they resisted the spell. This has been fixed.

Mind Soothe
- Casting time was increased to 1.5 seconds.
- Monsters would not agro players when they resisted the spell. This has been fixed.
- Can only be cast on Humanoids

In addition, the following monsters are no longer susceptible to charm: Hederine Initiate, Hederine Manastalker, and Hederine Slayers.

We apologize for the lack of forewarning with these changes. This was in no way deliberate, and we will work hard to make sure you have this type of information ahead of time in the future.

This seems a bit disappointing, really. I don't see the point in limiting the usefulness of an already limited use spell.

Edit: Their reasoning for the change:
Players were using these spells to bypass content, which was trivializing some of the encounters within instanced dungeons. After further investigation the developers found that these spells were not functioning as intended. These changes address the encounter exploit while still allowing the spells to remain effective.

/sigh, no more running around and insta-soothing animals on the way to spot_x.
Stupid 230984290348 gray bears will be the death of me.




...again.

The only instance I've come across so far where Soothe Animal was even remotely useful was Mauradon, and that was to bypass 2 or 3 groups of dinosaurs at the most. Maybe BRD/BRD had some situations that made it game-breaking or something, but I really think this was a pointless/uneccessary nerf.

Aye, I could see maybe maybe making it .5 seconds so you couldn't cast it while running maybe. They're making a mistake similar to one EQ made early on though. In Everquest the long running joke was that pacify/lull spells best use was pulling. With the new changes, it seems that this will be the case in WoW as well.

Blizzard always over nerf things at first. They have a huge reputation for that in all their games. I wouldn't be suprised if it's lowered just a bit. But then again, wouldn't be suprised if it remains either.

The only time I really used the lull series was to snag that flower that decided to grow in the middle of 8 million mobs.

Lull needed nerfing.

It made farming things much too easy. Could lull passed many things in dungeons.

I don't know if the cast time is needed, but aggro on failure should be.

I would have thought that invis potions and sneak would have been worse culprits in sneaking past content than lull.

invis pots don't last long enough to sneak through most places (in my experience)... and for steatlh :) they tend to put in hounds of some sort in areas they don't want stealth to bypass.

Invis potions only last 15 seconds and I believe have a 2 minute downtime (most utility potions are 2 minutes).

Stealth self only and it was built to allow rogues/druids to run around a zone, with some risk, agro free which is most likely why you're not seeing any chances to it.

Lull was allowing not just the caster, but their *entire group* to by-pass all the npcs. I'm sure that's what Blizzard wasn't to happy about.

It just seems strange... what's the point of Soothe spells if not bypassing stuff? Since it doesn't affect assist radius, it's not much use for pulling anyway... I'd use it to run past greys or go past animals on the way to a quest spot. I'm not as likely to use it now, though, with the cast time and aggro on resist.

:) It was the ability to spam soothe an entire group of mobs... now that's not possible

You can soothe one or two, but if you fail, you aggro, and you can't cast it fast enough to soothe an entire group.