that is actually good news, in a way. well, sort of, because i expected nothing but a nerf to animations. animations being included on tree cleaves would have to be slow enough to matter, since how it works is now that the attack rate is tied to the cooldowns.

currently 5 second cooldowns on cleave, great cleave, and whirlwind attack, gives trees a rough rate of 3 every 5~ seconds. the attacks are performed as fast as button pushing allows. you can test this by hitting an action boost and performing 4 rotations of cleave/great cleave/ whirlwind before 20 second boost timer expires.

if they were to implement an animation similar to the basic attack that the trees were nerfed with the first time around, then that would completely gut the build by halving the dps at best, or quartering the dps at worst. the devs wouldnt suddenly raise the dps of tree by the appropriate amount to balance this out. you wont see tree crit for 60k non-helpless, if they were to half the dps by nerfing rotation times.

If they are really tinkering with the spirit accumulation and decay rates, then that could off-set the rotation time nerfs by enabling tree form uptime. right now trees get around 45~ seconds of uptime ( more depending on if tree is attacking, or less if sitting with only aura on ). they don't have to increase the rate of acquiring spirit, but slowing the decay could achieve a desirable outcome if tree form gets an enormous uptime of around 2 minutes instead of the 45~ it has now.

i mean, we all know they are going to fucking butcher the builds and leave primal avatar as another victim of there being very few Epic Destinies that are good.  but, maybe one of the devs realize this and decide to do the right thing for build diversity and active combat, areas where trees are now.