Pushback talents suffer

There's a widespread change happening to the way pushback talents work. We already know about the change to continued spell pushback; while casting a regular spell (Frostbolt, Arcane Blast), the first two hits against you will increase the spell's cast time by 0.5 seconds. However, after the second hit, every other hit after that will be pushback-free for the remainder of the cast.

While channeling a spell (Blizzard, Arcane Missiles), damaging attacks will cut the total time channeled by 25% (that would be 2 seconds per hit while channeling Blizzard, and 1.25 seconds off your Arcane Missiles, effectively removing one missile from your spell). Like regular spellcasting, you will only suffer pushback twice while channeling a spell.

Now, another change has been made to talents that offer[ed] pushback resistance. Pretty much every caster class has talents that increase your chance to resist spell pushback; many of these spells give you a 70% resist chance. Obviously these talents are very useful, especially in PvP. However, all of these talents have been changed; instead of giving you x% chance to fully resist pushback, instead they reduce the amount of pushback suffered by x%. I suppose that means if normally an attack would increase a spell's duration by 0.5 sec (for a total of 1 extra second of cast time), 70% less pushback would mean only 0.15 sec added to the cast time (for a total of 0.3 sec).

Talents affected by this change include:

Nature's Focus for Balance/Resto Druids
Improved Barrage for Marks Hunters
Arcane Stability for Arcane Mages and Burning Soul for Fire Mages; note that because Arcane Stability is 100% anyway, there's no real change to how the talent works when maxed out.
Spiritual Focus for Holy Paladins
Healing Focus for Holy Priests and Improved Shadowform for Shadow Priests
Eye of the Storm for Ele Shaman and Healing Focus for Resto Shaman; note that EotS didn't offer pushback resistance in Burning Crusade.
Fel Concentration for Affliction Locks and Intensity for Destro Locks

When I first heard about the changes to spell/channeling pushback, my intial thoughts were this: if you're casting a fast spell, it won't matter because you won't get to three hits anyway, and if you're casting a slightly slower spell, it won't matter because by the time you reach pushback immunity at three hits, whatever melee class is beating on you is going to find a way to interrupt your spell or otherwise screw you.

I'm sure the changes to pushback talents exsist because Blizzard is hesitant to grant casters nearly complete pushback immunity: with a 70% chance to fully resist pushback, and only two chances to be pushed back per cast, that's a really good chance to experience no pushback on most of your spells. So instead, with talents you only get 0.15 seconds per hit on your spells, which really doesn't sound bad.

I have a caster Druid with Nature's Focus, and I have a Mage I could spec back into the Fire tree and Burning Soul. I need to get on the PTR and do some random soloing and try this out. Theoretically I'm against the change to pushback talents, but maybe I'll find it doesn't actually mean much anyway.

But before I can do that, I need a new card. Account expired on Friday. Gotta see that Brewfest! I let my account expire during Children's Week, which made me sad :( No mini Elekk for me.

EMERGENCY BETA PATCH POST

*queue news-ish theme*

This just in, there's a beta build and such. Wasn't there just one a few days ago? Oh well... what news does this patch bring for us Droods?

Earth and Moon Rank 1 damage increase changed from "1 to 6%" to 3%.
I don't get this; I thought all ranks just gave you the full 13% damage buff. Now you have to dump five points into it to get the full effect. Darn. It really does seem like they wanted people to max out this talent. At first it was a 20% chance per rank to apply the full effect; next they tacked on 1-5% extra spell damage to try and incentivize maxing out the talent. But even that's not really worth it, so instead they force us in a sense to go 5/5. Maybe if I raided I could just get a Warlock to throw up the dang base Curse of Elements?

Improved Moonkin Form now causes affected targets to gain 1/2% haste (down from 3/3%)
This confuses me, sort of. Last I checked, Balance Druids don't benefit from haste like other classes do. Somehow we've ended up with +6% to haste through talents, and they're just lopping off 1% because whatever? Those minute adjustments just seem odd to me. Plus, while I do find 1% less spell haste on a talent strange, I can't say I really care.

Nature's Grace changed from 1 to 3 points and now has a 33/66/100% proc rate. (Old - 100%)
Nature's Splendor changed from 3 to 1 point. Now Increases the duration of your Moonfire, Insect Swarm, and Rejuvenation spells by 3 sec, your Regrowth spell by 6 sec, and your Lifebloom spell by 3 sec.
This is just really weird. They haven't acually changed how you spend your points. I'm sure most people would be taking Nature's Splendor anyway (Balance and Restoration), so why swap the point values of these two talents? It turns our actual 11-point talent into even more of a passive one than Nature's Grace. Change it back! This change was not needed as it does nothing!

Other random stuff:

Mages

New spell - Polymorph - Black Cat
New spell - Polymorph - Serpent
Will this lessen the QQ over Polymorph: Penguin?

Arcane Potency now Increases the critical strike chance of your next damaging spell by 15/30% after gaining Clearcasting or Presence of Mind.
I'm pretty sure the ability to keep up PoM forever as long as you chained instant-cast spells is still out, which is too bad. That looked like it would have been a lot of fun.

Priests

Dispersion doesn't increase your spell damage anymore if it runs its full duration without you taking damage.
And thus its hope of ever being more than a grinding tool or a PVP toy goes out the window?

Lastly, as an Alchemist, this ability sounds great to me:
Northrend Alchemy Research: Experiment with Northrend herbs to discover a new Alchemy recipe. Can only be done every 7 days.

The cooldown is wicked long, but the proc rate on new, fat loots is supposed to be very good; sounds better than sitting around hoping for new transmutes. After two months of xmutes almost every day I got maybe two recipes?

Wait... how do you discover how to transmute metal by throwing a bunch of herbs in a pile and "experimenting" with them?

I really feel sorry for Ghostcrawler and Koraa; while they're not the only ones who work on class balancing, they have to face all the crap of the QQers. They may be swimming in money considering they work for Blizzard, but you probably slowly lose your mind the longer you spend on internet message boards as part of your job.

From what I've heard, Blizzard doesn't care about Balance Druids one bit. Also, they don't care about Priests, Death Knights, Hunters, Rogues, or Shaman. Maybe they want us all to go play Warhammer; that must be it.