Why blizzard Nerf the strong class instead of buffing the muggle classes

[Aggrophobic]

it's just not possible to do that all the time.
The fact that they "don't like" and that "they would prefer" does not mean that it is "always" the best option.

I get that. Shadow priests for instance will need nerfs to StM, for sure but mages? Hunters? Warriors?!
They just overdo it and they overdo it all the time, every expantion.

[Deleted]

I get that. Shadow priests for instance will need nerfs to StM, for sure but mages? Hunters? Warriors?!
They just overdo it and they overdo it all the time, every expantion.

That can be debatable, I was not entering into the specifics

[HordeFanboy]

This is standard across most games and I'll never understand the reasoning.

when you dont know wtf is going on. its always about money

[Deleted]

There's plenty of reasons design wise for this approach.
The first one is depending on how "op" the "op" class is, and if it's op just relative to other classes or to how encounters are designed.

I'm gonna throw some made up numbers for this examples: Let's say that Ursoc (M) is designed around having every DPS in your raid having an average of 300k DPS (in the "wrong" assumption that all classes peform at the same effectiveness in that encounter)

So in an ideal world you have all classes doing around that number and everything is nice and jolly
Now you can have some classes that underperform and do something like 200k DPS - That's an "easy" solution you bump up the DPS until it reaches the 300k DPS average.

But what if you have a class that goes 350-400k DPS?
Is it the solution to bump everyone to that value? No. Why? because then you screwed up completely your balance and design for *all* encounters, and this mean going and readjust every single HP/Damage componenet and berserker timers and enrage/soft enrage for *every boss and every trash mob* so that players don't simply go in and steamroll everything due to the new average DPS value.

This is in the assumption that all classes perform the same, and we already know this is not true by design because devs are ok with certain classes excel in certain encounters and not so much in others, that brings another layer of difficulty in balancing.

Nerfing also act as a negative reinforcement in what would be otherwise a system with a positive retroactive reinforcement (Where A positively influences B and B psitively influences C and C positively influences A)

These kind of systems tend to collapse and go out of control easily as they snowball pretty hard once too much positive reinforcement has been applied in any point of the chain.

As having all classes being completely balanced is probably not possible unless everyone has the same rotation and abilities effect the risk in buffing everyone instead of applying buff and nerfs appropriately is that at any point in time there's gonna be an OP class, and the what? if before everyone was doing 300k with the 320k outlier now we have everyone doing 320k and 340k outlier. And it could go on indefinitely.

And this is why idea that Nerfs are "lazy" way of solving a problem is bullshit. I'm out.

While i appreciate the time you put into writing your post, it is not as binary as you made it look with your analogy. If we went directly into it, you would have classes at 300k (which would be the average), and outliers at 200k or 400k. It is obvious that if the intended DPS for most classes was 300k, then you would need to nerf the top outliers while buffing the bottom ones.

What blizzard is doing is nerfing plenty of middle of the class specs into bottom outliers, while also leaving some of the top outliers untouched. I am not trying to strawman you with this, It is flawed from a design point of view from the beginning, and hence people's skepticism. As an answer to the OP, power creep is obviously the reason why the can't do so.

[Aleksej89]

Those damn muggle classes, filthy half bloods.

[Krom2040]

I can't imagine a dumber thread topic. It's obviously much easier to adjust one class downward than to adjust every other class in the game upward. To say nothing of rebalancing all the rest of the content that you'd have to do after pointlessly adjusting everything upward all the time.

[Deleted]

While i appreciate the time you put into writing your post, it is not as binary as you made it look with your analogy. If we went directly into it, you would have classes at 300k (which would be the average), and outliers at 200k or 400k. It is obvious that if the intended DPS for most classes was 300k, then you would need to nerf the top outliers while buffing the bottom ones.

What blizzard is doing is nerfing plenty of middle of the class specs into bottom outliers, while also leaving some of the top outliers untouched. I am not trying to strawman you with this, It is flawed from a design point of view from the beginning, and hence people's skepticism. As an answer to the OP, power creep is obviously the reason why the can't do so.

I appreciate the response, and I understand the point of view. But mine was an answer to a very specific matter that is the title of the topic.
If this was said "why are they nerfing strong classes into irrelevancy instead of tuning underperforming one" that would have been a different discussion.

Though even in that case is difficult to say cause a lot of players on the forums tend to be a very hyperbolic and they overblown even the tiniest of nerfs. I'm aware that it seems the mage ones seems pretty big nerfs though I don't play the class so I would not know

[niil945]

While i appreciate the time you put into writing your post, it is not as binary as you made it look with your analogy. If we went directly into it, you would have classes at 300k (which would be the average), and outliers at 200k or 400k. It is obvious that if the intended DPS for most classes was 300k, then you would need to nerf the top outliers while buffing the bottom ones.

What blizzard is doing is nerfing plenty of middle of the class specs into bottom outliers, while also leaving some of the top outliers untouched. I am not trying to strawman you with this, It is flawed from a design point of view from the beginning, and hence people's skepticism. As an answer to the OP, power creep is obviously the reason why the can't do so.

Your entire post is based on the fallacies that you understand what Blizzard is trying to do or that you know all the final changes and can make a determination as to where every spec is going to be afterwards. You don't on either account.

[Deleted]

I appreciate the response, and I understand the point of view. But mine was an answer to a very specific matter that is the title of the topic.
If this was said "why are they nerfing strong classes into irrelevancy instead of tuning underperforming one" that would have been a different discussion.

Though even in that case is difficult to say cause a lot of players on the forums tend to be a very hyperbolic and they overblown even the tiniest of nerfs. I'm aware that it seems the mage ones seems pretty big nerfs though I don't play the class so I would not know

Yup, i know you were answering the OP mostly, that's why i said i wasn't trying to strawman you, but you are right, i shouldn't had tried to derail.

[XDurionX]

Yeah, buffing 31 specs and then buffing ALL the npcs would be easier than nerfing one class, got you.

[thilicen]

Because if one class is the problem, how would altering the remaining 11 and re-balancing the entire end-game instead make sense? If you'd just try to think for at least 20 seconds this entire thread could have been avoided.