Balance druids have been the novelty clowns of World of Warcraft for two expansions now and although their chicken like form, silly dance and laughable dps has entertained all the real raiding class and specs it has sadly come time to retire them.
"This is for a number of reasons, the first is clearly from a development perspective - it is simply too hard to tune a boss encounter with boomkins in the raid, and some guilds are unlucky enough to have two or even three raiding turkeys and this causes the encounter to be a lot harder than initially intended as raid dps/healing and even tanks effective health are all lowered with balance druids in the group. The second is to make leather caster gear more rounded as we have to accommodate the people who are stubborn and silly enough to play the spec which enrages the vastly more useful and played resto tree spec.
HOWEVER! Moonkins are not gone completely. They will return in Cataclysm as a player mount. It will be an incredibly rare drop from high end PVP encounters when a feral or resto druid is killed and will be bind on equip. The mount is unique in a number of ways the first one being its land speed, although it starts at 100% like most level 80 mounts we have decided to keep with the spirit of lazy moonkins and the mount speed will drop gradually with use until eventually when you try to summon your mount it appears, does a half hearted boomkin boogie then actually hops on your back reducing your run speed by 50%. In years to come we believe this will bring back nostalgic memories of Balance spec druids in raids slowing people down.
However needed and wanted these changes are they will not come into effect until Cataclysm so you guilds with boomchicken mascots have a few months to take your screenshots of friends and raid with artificially induced hardmodes."
Seems interesting, would make me pvp more for the mount. Seems at last Blizzard is listening to players needs and requests.
Qieth sais: I removed anything claiming this was actually from Blizzard. It was slightly easier than banning you