@Bael: 6 seconds doesn’t seem like a tremendously long time, but if this works the way that Blessed Resilience does, it should be able to refresh itself if you avoid a crit due to Resilience (that’s kinda rare, though). And now you’ll only need to be crit 3 times which is much more feasible. And wow – this plus Barkskin would be amazing. Although Barkskin never seems to be up when I want it to be. ^_^

@Ermengol: Yeah, this is pretty clearly a PvP buff. So healers that stick primarily to PvE won’t derive much benefit. While it doesn’t exactly bring the ability on par with Blessed Resilience, it’s still a very nice buff, especially since they’ve reduced the number of crits required to max out the reduction from 5 to 3.

And yeah, not being able to cast Lifebloom on low level friends you’re taking through dungeons sucks. Especially since it tends to be my immediate reaction to any damage taken by anyone!

@Doomilias: Well hello there! I didn’t know you read here. That’s great! Thank you for popping in and saying hello. I hope you enjoy your transition to WordPress as much as I have. =D

getting tired of blogger myself…looking for a new home!

Things may change with patch 2.3, as the extra +3% crit will be more than welcome for balance spells (its value for heals is laughable if you’re a raiding tree), and if I respec to move my feral talents into balance I’ll probably take this (with or without change). “Oh, it reduces damage taken too? Nice.”

Now, regarding the possible change: I like it. These talents are not supposed to save your life by themselves (well, rogues’ “cheat death” may be the exception ^^), but to ease things, and I believe this will be really annoying for dual wielders and kitties. Yeah, I know that will be mostly rogues and feral druids (PvP warriors and shammies kinda like two-handed weapons I guess; I don’t know how high a hunter’s pet’s crit rate can be), but you’ll probably notice it. Even if you don’t get to stack it much, a random 3%/6% reduction now and then added to its original benefits can be interesting.

In the particular case of stun-locks it’ll be funny, as by the time the rogue decides to land a 5-point damage dealer you’ll probably have 15% damage reduction.

Although a minor change, it seems fair to me.

Speaking of which, I know it’s totally off-topic but, am I the only one that thinks it’s unfair that HoTs get automatically down-ranked when cast on low level characters? They’re treated like regular buffs and you can’t even cast lifebloom on a level 50. Given all the changes they’re doing, it’s about time they change this too :/

Six seconds seems way too short, since to get the maximum effect from the ability you’re relying on being crit 5 times in a row; but getting crit that much is obviously bad, and at the resilience cap doesn’t seem terribly likely 1 on 1.

I guess its meant to be a last resort defense mechanism, maybe intended to proc during a stunlock/focus fire…there, I can see 15% damage reduction being useful, especially if you can pop Barkskin and maybe Bear Form for some uber mitigation.

Other than that, it seems a strange buff.