[blizzard author=Bashiok link=http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2046965610?page=13#259]After the designers looked into this issue more, there appears to be a pretty complex series of bugs that may have led to where we are now. I'll do my best to explain.
Early on in Cataclysm, it was concluded that druid tanks took too much damage and we deployed a hotfix to buff their armor through Thick Hide. Originally, we had thought that 4.0.6 was just updating the Thick Hide tooltip as well as the armor display on the character sheet for the earlier hotfix, but we think now that the armor buff itself was actually correctly applied with 4.0.6, and the previous hotfix had never taken hold properly.
The reason we missed this is because there is no easy way to know what your armor actually is when you can't trust the tooltip – you have to have things beat on you and see how much damage you take. This test was tainted by a second bug however, where some druid characters were invisibly retaining the 12% damage reduction benefit of the obsolete Protector of the Pack talent. Even though we removed that talent, its effects were still benefitting some characters, and we didn't know who or how many. Again, there is no easy way to know if your druid was affected without a lot of testing. We knew about the Protector of the Pack bug but were hesitant to try and mess with it too much via hotfix since bear survivability was where we wanted it to be for those characters and we didn't want to risk making anything worse. In any event, those characters appeared to be taking the correct amount of damage, so we thought the Thick Hide hotfix was successful. In reality, we think we were seeing the Protector of the Pack damage reduction and not the Thick Hide armor buff.
We believe the 4.0.6 patch finally removed the Protector of the Pack effects while finally getting the Thick Hide buff applied. Characters who had the Protector of the Pack benefit won't see their survivability change much (they lost damage reduction while gaining armor), while characters who lacked that talent will see their survivability improve (they gained a lot of armor). The good news is that current bear survivability in 4.0.6 appears to be where we want it to be for everyone.
We're still not 100% sure that the above explanation is what happened, but it seems consistent with our observations. Again, as of 4.0.6, bear armor should now be correct.[/blizzard]
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2046965610?page=13#259 (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2046965610?page=13#259)
That's impressive. A genuine "we screwed up and this is why" from blizzard? Quick, check the sky. Have the pigs started flying yet?
Blizzard weren't the ones that found it. These guys over at http://theincbear.com/thick-hide-theorycraft/ (http://theincbear.com/thick-hide-theorycraft/) did all the theory crafting for it.
Plus they waited till now, which...I guess is ok they admit to it, but if you think about how long since Cata has been out and how many druid tanks out there, to think how many times they were torn into in PUGs for "sucking" when it wasnt necessarily their fault, they were just taking a ton more dmg.
Alot of bear's are also reporting that there threat is pretty bad now. And also damage seems to be 1k dps less than warrior tanks. Blizzard is supposedly looking into the issue.
You'd think they'd finally be really really good at putting out fires, they have been doing it for over 6 years now.
Yay
I don't completely suck, i don't completely suck