Balance Patch Notes

Took a little bit of digging but it seems Wow Insider DOES have some commentary on the WotLK beta patch notes for balance druids here.

Main thing: Entangling roots INDOORS now. Increased treant damage which means my 3 points invested in brambles becomes even more awesome. And let's not forget, more aoe, and hurricane apparently has no CD now (!?). Makes us more mage-y I guess but I've always felt inferior only having one aoe so to now have 3 makes me happy.

I'm still unsure how I feel about this new spellpower gig they've got going on, but since all my stuff is X + dam, X + healing right now anyway I'm kind of thinking I might not see too much impact.

The main complaint in the commentary (and the comments on the commentary) seems to be that it's more difficult to pick a general spec, now you kind of have to pick a spec geared to PVP *or* PVE instead of having a more utilitarian one. I'd noticed a little of that anyway, but I guess it's more exacerbated now? I'm not sure I see it, but if that's true then my answer is that you should stop whining. Just how you have to get different gear sets if you want to be truly successful PVP *and* PVE, that may be the case here too now with specs. However I'm not sure it's as big a stress deal as people are making it -- I've read some things that said blizz was trying to get those two fields closer together, for example by putting some high-quality resil gear in raids, or the well-known statistic that walking into your first raid your weapon should probably be a PVP reward. So I'm not sure how much credence should be assigned to somethign that on first glance looks like blizzard doing an about face and heading back in the opposite direction. Guess we'll see more about that as things develop.