I wonder what would happen if we said nothing

It's pretty obvious that Blizzard has someone like me: he has a lot of great ideas, but also a whole lot of really, really awful ideas and isn't very good at filtering them. Apparently those around him aren't either.

I can't see how the lifetap change ever got to the PTR. I'm not going to argue about whether or not warlocks needed a nerf. I care more about the method of nerfing. Adding stats should never decrease efficiency. Ever. But that's exactly what the change did. It made stamina essentially act as a -healing stat, requiring greater mana from healers for the same mana regen for the warlock. But what is even more strange is the brief change they attempted, changing it to 5% health for 15% mana. That's a gigantic buff. Who thought up that change?

Ideas like this, really awful ideas, are not new. We've seen them before. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly what the change was, but for a short time there was going to be a damage reduction on forbearance. This got shouted down. Everyone from paladins to the mages that they BoP was mad about it.

What if we had said nothing? If really bad ideas can get onto the PTRs in the first place, how do they come down? It's not as if these are changes that look good on paper but get screwed up in game. They are pretty obviously screwed up on paper. If we had said nothing would Blizzard have pulled the changes?

It's not as if this is limited to nerfs even. Just look at the MS flametounge change. It does not address any shaman issues at all. We're not gimped vs. healers. DW is really nice for pushback, purge is amazing against priests and druids, and an interrupt on a 5-6 second cooldown is something other classes drool over. The totem isn't needed either. We already have an incredible melee totem; it's called windfury. But this buff, despite being really huge, doesn't help with our weaknesses like being the only class with absolutely no form of CC.

But maybe we're misreading the buff. Perhaps it wasn't a badly thought out fix for shamans overall. Maybe Blizzard just wanted to make fire totems not the bastard children. It wasn't a retarded PvP fix-all. Notice how I've turned back on myself? I do that a lot. I leave in all my self-contradicting because I think it's important to see the process, not just the end result. Maybe I've taken too many math classes and lost too many points for not showing my work.

I am sincerely afraid that change requires people to be loud and immature. It requires mass warlock cancellations and shamans spamming their own forum. It requires dozens of threads about 40% of 0 = 0 and "omg bliz r u retard!?" Oh sure, maybe Blizzard isn't responding to them. But they sure act as if they do, with changes coming soon after that shit and Blues coming by for damage control. I want them to bring Tseric back and the next time a class spams, just start throwing around bans and add a simple sticky: "STFU." And then do nothing. Of course they wouldn't need to do that if they simply showed us their internal processes a bit more so we could see changes were coming before the spam. I wish Blizzard had a blog where they posted whatever they were thinking about that day.