Bear armor - Like... what?

After some theory from various Druid bloggers, Blizzard have finally fessed up about what the hell they've been doing with Bear armor over the past few patches:

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.

source

So here we have a hotfix which was applied to Thick Hide which had "never taken hold properly" whatever that means, in my mind it means the fix wasn't actually working and should have showed up under testing. But hold on, "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". Except if you actually have access to the code and logs and traces from the game, of course, then I would expect you to actually be able to debug the damn thing and find out exactly what your armor is!

Then we get to the most weird part of this, that "some druid characters were invisibly retaining the 12% damage reduction benefit of the obsolete Protector of the Pack talent". I mean how on earth can that happen? Is World of Warcraft like The Matrix now, where things go on without actually being coded in? Even odder, "we didn't know who or how many" had this 12% damage reduction. There is no spoon! Where on earth is this behaviour stored in the WoW system, I had assumed it was in code somewhere, but clearly it is not if they can drop a fix which should remove some benefit and add some other benefit, and that only happens in a certain number of cases.

Of course now we have a potential loss of 6% attack power from Protector of the Pack, if you had the "ghost" version, which along with a nerf to damage output in 4.0.6, means potentially some threat loss. That may be fixed later, but will such a fix "take hold" given they seem to hotfix but cannot test their hotfixes actually work? Or is there no problem and we will are indeed just fine? Only running some heroics and a raid or two will tell at this point. Words are failing me here so I will just stop writing now. Lol.