I have enjoyed playing a "Tree Build" (Avatar of Nature) for the last 2 or 3 years. It was a very fun and rewarding build. It took quite a bit of game knowledge, twitch/keyboard/mouse skill, and gear to play correctly.

Not many people were playing this build and only about half actually knew what they were doing with it.

However, the recent changes to add the animations for cleave, great cleave, trip, sunder, whirlwind attack, etc. have truly made it where there is absolutely NO reason for anyone to "transform into a tree".

Builds to be proficient while in tree form (i.e. you had to have a Spirit "generator" class in the build... cleric, wizard, warlock) means that outside of tree form, you were definitely in a very sub-optimal build.

However, with the recent changes, my 12 fighter, 5 monk, 3 wizard actually does more DPS outside of "tree mode" than it does while in tree mode, and there is really no benefit at all now to build spirit and transform into tree.

In fact, even if I could stay in Tree build forever at the biggest SIZE of the tree (i.e. most damage), I would still do more DPS with that 12Fighter, 5Monk, 3Wiz "gimp" build.

There was some mention that you couldn't do everything you wanted with AON at this point... I find it discouraging that instead of waiting until you could fix it correctly, you took what appeared to be heavy-handed/brute-force philosophy of "We are just going to break this because we don't have the time/resources to even begin to understand how this actually works." Sorry, not trying to be insulting, but this is the perception that your change is being received as. And since none of the current tree changes were ever on Lammania and you haven't discussed it since the release, you aren't fostering any goodwill about the change.

I definitely understand that the build was taking advantage of previous oversights from the design/dev team, so before the piling on starts from other forum members about "Taking advantage of exploits gets you what you deserved", understand that I know that. What I'm asking is that we have some hope of the tree at least being viable in the future, because as it currently stands, there is absolutely no reason to even use this "epic moment" in the Primal Avatar destiny.