Dear Blizzard - A few comments on your PvE balance pass, Warrior PoV

[Deleted]

Falken's thread on the official forum need to be bumped by everybody. The 50 pages long warlock thread probably helped them 2 weeks ago...

[Deleted]

Thank you.
I'm worried like you all are. I will have to make my progress on M+ due to not having time to schedule raiding into my life like in earlier years.
But I don't really see why I would EVER, as an arms warrior, be picked for run high M+ dungeons when you could grab WW, hunty, mage, DH etc for clearing the increased amount of trash a lot quicker than the time my ST dps would ever save the group..

[Deleted]

Baring in mind I fucking hate this FR build with a passion, if not for getting a Legendary and holding out hope for Fury I would've probably quit...

Yet again Blizzard manage to go about reducing an overpowered spec in the clumsiest and most illogical way possible. A flat nerf to MS? Just reduced % from FR? Reduced EtW % on relics but buffing the baseline Tactician chance so we can actually use other relics? Reducing the % increase on Shattered Defenses?

Any of these, with the right amount of adjustment, planning and testing would've been fine. I'd happily drop from 30k ahead of the pack to top 25% on the basis that the spec doesn't revolve around fucking RNG procs but, with this absoloutely mind-blowingly oblivious change you'll have some players getting RNG procs out of their ass with god-like luck and some getting trashed with 30 sec CDs on CS. Our first dragon killed on HC I had a full 30 seconds without a CS proc and I only have 1 EtW relic. With this new change I'll actually have slightly less of a chance for it to proc if I had THREE of the same relic.

It's not about topping the meters any more, though at the pinnacle of raiding you really need a niche to hold a viable raid spot, for me it's about not sitting there for 40% of the fight auto attacking pressing insignificant buttons for shit damage.

[Gottalot]

I could't express this matter in a better way. Omw to the official forums to bump this post. Hands down to Falken!

[Deleted]

I agree with you Falken; even tho I don't raid at this moment.

[hyperhyve]

The poor arms warrior in our raid said that if he had to wait for 2 CS back to back, he would alt+f4 and unsub immediately. I can understand that.

[ehxy]

Kinda like 90% + of the forum content including very much so your post ? Don't see much of a point there. So now shoo back to the thrall fanboy forum.

Wrong critical thinking education is important.

The nerf is fine, bring up the procs. Problem solved.

[Bram24]

Wrong critical thinking education is important.

The nerf is fine, bring up the procs. Problem solved.

To me it really is this simple...FR nerf: Fine and deserved...EtW Nerf: Ok but needs a baseline increase to Tactician.

[Deleted]

Found this on the EU forum

"Personally, if Blizzard wants to balance Exploit the Weakness, they could stop making relics that upgrade that trait and rollback the EtW nerf. This would lower the Colossus Smash effect on the target (which with 5 points at 10% each, the up time was too high)."

Great Idea IMO and eazy to fix.

[Allenschezar]

Here's the thing people seem to forget (or like to ignore): Single Target is always useful, Multi-target is not. Even in a heavy cleave fight, there's almost always a single target boss that needs to die, and total DPS isn't always a good measurement of actual performance. A simple example of this would be Immerseus - lots of AoE, and AoE classes might look considerably more powerful than a single target class, but the adds don't really need to die. Killing them (talking about the AoE pack, not the split phase adds) doesn't do anything to hasten the end of the fight other than take minor pressure off tanks. Thus their inflated DPS isn't really important. Just like pure single-target may be a bad measurement for overall balance, DPS isn't always a good measurement of contribution to success.

My Problem all in all is exactly this. On my difficulty level (Mythic raiding but not racing for server ranks or anything) many guilds just look at the DPS meters. And the more dps you have the better. They don't seem to care for anything else. I'm able to perform very well and i'm always one of the first for special jobs but as a warrior we can't really do any special jobs except for maybe interrupt a specific target? Or is there anything i'm missing?

So why can't we do more dmg than others if we can't do things like soaking with cloak a la rogue. I mean if there is nothing "Special" we can do except our dmg why can't our dmg be our "special" contribution to a raid?

[Deleted]

My Problem all in all is exactly this. On my difficulty level (Mythic raiding but not racing for server ranks or anything) many guilds just look at the DPS meters. And the more dps you have the better. They don't seem to care for anything else. I'm able to perform very well and i'm always one of the first for special jobs but as a warrior we can't really do any special jobs except for maybe interrupt a specific target? Or is there anything i'm missing?

So why can't we do more dmg than others if we can't do things like soaking with cloak a la rogue. I mean if there is nothing "Special" we can do except our dmg why can't our dmg be our "special" contribution to a raid?

Thats what bugs me the most aswell, how they seem to be obsessed with a few niche speccs that do well under certain circumstances, but it seems completly okay to have a specc like Outlaw with superb surv, immunity, selfheal, great st and great aoe and great mobility at the same time.

[Fog]

I don't even raid anymore and this entire rollercoaster has left me wonder if I should even keep on playing casually.
Well written, Falken.

[Khorneflake]

Dear Blizzard,

At this point I can't justify bringing a Warrior (myself) to our Top20 Mythic Progression anymore. Our niche dps (single target) was rightfully brought down, but by far too much and at the cost of already shaky gameplay (tactitian resets). We're lackluster in pratical appliance on most encounters in Emerald Nightmare Mythic, and are quickly outmatched once AoE/burst cleave is introduced on an encounter - or by one of many melee punishing mechanics leading to minor/massive downtime.
The nerf did not compensate in these areas, nor did it take into account that there are no true Single Target fights in Mythic (even Ursoc demands cleave/AoE). Somehow though, Single Target SIMs (performed by a robot in near uptimum conditions) seems to be the determining factor at play in your tuning pass (Arms PoV), and not the grand total in diverse encounters, mechanics and class requirements.

Ultimately, I'd bring myself only because of my capacity as a raid leader and tactician. My class is no longer desired (nor is my Havoc, Enhance and Unholy - who I've also prepared based on beta test raids/gameplay) and I find myself too demotivated to compete as a guild, without the ability to compete as an individual.
On a personal level (to top it all of) trinkets, legendaries and gear have all eluded me, despite insane levels of preparation, loot funneling split raids and enormous time spend ingame. I guess that is what the element of RNG does to the unfortunate bell-curve outliers.

It's not too late to realise that the change in the PvE pass was excessive, given the grand scheme of things, and revert/half-way revert/alternate changes, so that you're not left with loyal and enthusiastic, yet discouraged and demotivated players.

Sincerely yours,

Falken

Warrior and Raid Leader
Ðanish Terrace, EU, Sylvanas.

This post have been shared here too: http://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17613472310

Very well put, as a shadow priest I agree whole heartedly.

[ehxy]

To me it really is this simple...FR nerf: Fine and deserved...EtW Nerf: Ok but needs a baseline increase to Tactician.

Bottom line we need more reliable SUSTAINED damage. Not this did we proc did we proc did we proc holy hell I procced go nuts. It's great when it's great but absolute ass when it doesn't.

[cFortyfive]

Wrong critical thinking education is important.

The nerf is fine, bring up the procs. Problem solved.

That you even perceive your bullshit as something worthwhile is cringeworthy at best.
The problem is by far not solved since "bringing up the procs" does nothing for the non existing aoe and the terrible other spec choices so please again be so kind and keep your spam of worthless posts up somewhere else.

[Hoeth]

Slightly frustrating seeing people avoid the spec's consistency issues when talking about its outlier ST DPS.

Yes, focused rage ST DPS is very high - sometimes. That really isn't the spec's average performance though. You're rolling the dice on every pull. If you a) don't proc tactician consistently, b) don't proc tactician at the right time (e.g. to line up correctly with every single BC without having to delay BC), and c) have really shitty crit streaks outside of BC, then your DPS isn't likely to be anything worth talking about.

Nerf FR damage, fine - but please normalize consistency in the process. Otherwise, the nerfs are going to bring down the outlier parses to something more "acceptable" with the side-effect of making the spec's average performance unnecessarily worse.

Very much this.

The massive DPS swings from one pull to the next are hard to deal with, particularly so when perfect execution is secondary to how many tactician procs one gets.

[Grimsong]

I've been thinking about this nerf a bit and think my conclusion is this:

If you're going to shred apart the one tool Arms has to be competitive, which many people felt forced into a "clunky" spec as it already was, then other aspects of the class need to be altered as well to smooth things out. This isn't class balance at all, but a half-hearted attempt to address a problem that truthfully doesn't exist. If it does, it's not because of our potato rotation RNG that we live or die by.

Also, gutting the class going into week 2 of the raid being released? Not cool at all.

Very frustrating.

[Bigbazz]

I still don't get that part. You need four cooldowns to deal slightly more aoe damage than say a uh and that if the adds last pretty much exactly for the duration of bladestorm. Where is that potential ?

It doesn't have good multi target potential. Take into account that Archi never plays Arms, he'd happily sit on the bottom of the damage meters dragging his raid down just to play Fury. So when he says thing like this he says it out of a bias and also lack of experience. We all know how shit Arms AOE really is, of course someone not playing it will say "ooh look at these cooldowns you can stack, great AOE"..

When as we all know the Arms AOE is really quite pathetic, even a full cooldown burst cannot compete with classes that do burst AOE well (as in you could blow Avatar, Battle Cry, Warbreaker, Potion, Bladestorm and do less than 1/2 of another class), and once that burst is over you've gimped your actually good single target and you have another 1.5mins minimum (while saving cooldowns, gimping ST) before you can do that AOE again, as the sustained AOE is most cases lower than the single target.

[ehxy]

That you even perceive your bullshit as something worthwhile is cringeworthy at best.
The problem is by far not solved since "bringing up the procs" does nothing for the non existing aoe and the terrible other spec choices so please again be so kind and keep your spam of worthless posts up somewhere else.

Right because everyone is supposed to be good at AoE that's obvious from their design choice.

[cFortyfive]

It doesn't have good multi target potential.

I don't know it seems to be mentioned a lot maybe it's some relic from the alpha/beta where you just pressed brostorm and everything up to a rare elite just died but I can't see much of it now in for instance 5 man content.
Sure if you pull together a couple low hp murloc packs or whatever and they die in six seconds - congratulations you just did good damage but that's pretty niche. Sweeping strikes is also at times nice and maybe with vastly more gear it's actually consistent but until then it's just a gimmick to me. Especially when using shockwave it regularly leaves you rage starved as fuck. Cleave whirlwind might just as well not exist the damage is pitiful.

Right because everyone is supposed to be good at AoE that's obvious from their design choice.

Great argument chap but it doesn't make it less of a problem nor does it fix how badly the other arms talent choices are.