Originally Posted by
exochaft
Easiest "solution" would be to allow SR to persist outside of Feral form to allow bleeds to continue to be buffed by SR. Rather interesting, though, how it coincides with the whole Affinity discussion made a few days ago, as this change would penalize Affinity active use if SR does not persist out of form. Be that as it may, the days of SR may be numbered considering the route Blizz has been going in general with classes. Not sure how many people remember when Blizz gave Ret paladins a spell that operated the same was as SR, but it was scrapped due to it being considered basically a crappy gameplay design.
More on reversal of dev statements: it's nothing really new, but I feel the pace of reversals has sped up... whether this is due to content being pumped out faster or staff turnovers for WoW, who knows. I feel the reversal on their stance with SR snapshotting is in an effort to further reduce ramp-up time and punishing aspects of Feral, and their verbage does suggest they may not be happy with SR in general. Despite some of the defense concerning Affinity talents, I agree Blizz did reverse their stance on them, and it's much more apparent when you are a Guardian.
For example, earlier in Legion Guardians were pretty much exclusively using Affinity talents for passives but had the option of catweaving with Feral Affinity to allow for a decent DPS gain if content allowed. With all the more recent changes to Guardian, even catweaving is generally off the table because it's just not worth it. If the upcoming SR change for Feral has you lose your SR buff to change forms, the cost will probably be too great to use Affinity active use abilities even with the power of SR being reduced. Resto druids probably have it the best when it comes to Affinity talents, but they still can be lacking. As Legion progresses, the Affinity row is being almost exclusively used for their passives, and most of the druid population would probably not notice (or care, sadly) if all the active use portions of the talents went away. The Affinity talent active uses, in my view, are not even comparable to the old HotW talent, which could have immense impact on an encounter and actually made me feel like a hybrid for a short while.