Complexity for its own sake.

**Mindcrime** · 2012-08-25, 10:08 PM

Did anyone else catch this quote from Ghostcrawler on the Beta class forum?

"Now I chose that word "depth" on purpose. We don't believe in needless complexity for its own sake. We greatly respect Cynwise, but when you read what he or she is talking about, a lot of it comes from warlocks having these extra buttons that weren't really intended for their rotation but that players understandably try to jam in there because it will theoretically improve their DPS. Part of the Mists overhaul of what specs and talents mean is not to give specs buttons that they really don't need and aren't intended for them. In 5.0, Destruction warlocks don't have Corruption to mess with." -GC
Source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6413132085

Now this is reference to a Druid talking about the complexity of the feral rotation, along with the complexity of warlocks. Also in reference was Cynwise's blog post "Warlock complexity and the magic number", which is a great read for anyone interested, by the OP.
Cynwise Blog: http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2012/04...-magic-number/

I am the only one who sees this as completely infuriating? "We don't believe in needless complexity for its own sake." Really? To basically say that we don't advocate complexity for its own sake, and in return blame the warlock community for "understandably" trying to jam needles abilities in our rotation is somehow... our fault? Which in turn results in us being balanced around that needless complexity? This pretty much sums up the entire Cataclysm expansion. Warlocks have clunky, needlessly complex, and unfun rotations because we try to jam it in there to do astounding dps. Right.

Arguably we're being overhauled in MoP for this very same reason, however the final product is left to be seen. Instead of just complexity for complexities sake, we now have that and unfinished mechanics.

**Sockmaster** · 2012-08-25, 10:15 PM

This thread again?

He's not saying it's your fault for casting the extra spells.
It's their fault because they weren't able to balance these extra abilities to be both useful for one or two specs and useless for the others.

**Thelxi** · 2012-08-25, 10:24 PM

I am glad to see corruption gtfo of destro's rotation, specs felt similar and destruction especially felt like slaving over scraps from the other specs to pull out decent dps. They are admitting a flaw in their design and now fixed it, that's all.

**Mindcrime** · 2012-08-25, 10:34 PM

I don't really see adding secondary resources that are painfully slow or completely based in RNG to every spec, stance dancing, and moving around long casts every 20 seconds to achieve something that any other class can do much easier for better results as "fixing" it.

We will still suffer in MoP from more complex more effort put into our mechanics for less results. Ultimately resulting in the same stagnant point we were in for all of Cata. Unless of course you are destruction, but don't expect to be competing with fire mages.

Maybe I just fail to see the design goal that they are trying to achieve for Warlocks. There are many people in this community that have given some wonderful suggestions that would make the specs both fun, engaging and competitive to play without being overly complex. Yet most of it falls on deaf ears.

**darkwarrior42** · 2012-08-25, 10:36 PM

What GC said: Players will use any ability they think will increase their dps, and what we set out to do is to make sure that those extra buttons don't increase your dps, so you don't need to make use of them. We don't blame you for this, but we still think the game would be better without it, so we are trying to change it.

Sockmaster already summed it up nicely, I'm just rephrasing what GC said in a way that might be easier to understand.

Deleted · 2012-08-25, 10:57 PM

Originally Posted by darkwarrior42

What GC said: Players will use any ability they think will increase their dps, and what we set out to do is to make sure that those extra buttons don't increase your dps, so you don't need to make use of them. We don't blame you for this, but we still think the game would be better without it, so we are trying to change it.

Sockmaster already summed it up nicely, I'm just rephrasing what GC said in a way that might be easier to understand.

I don't get it though, things like that are easy to fix. Corruption is a spell that uses the Shadow School, destruction is primarily fire, all they had to do was buff the masteries of demonology and affliction (while tuning down all of the other spells like shadowbolt, doom, unstable affliction) and increasing the mastery bonus of Destruction to mean the DPECT of corruption for destruction isn't high enough to want to cast.

Isn't that the whole purpose of creating 'MASTERY'. Heck it was sold to us as "an easy way to tune classes by tuning it by a few %"

Instead they began to balance destruction around the use of corruption, making it use even more DoTs than it needed to have, which meant that their burst would inevitably be worse than what it should've been. (Read: Spine).

**Sockmaster** · 2012-08-25, 11:17 PM

I posted this in the other thread about a similar comment GC made, but this is pretty much the chain of events.

1. Affliction uses BoD/Corruption in their normal rotation. Blizzard is happy.
2. Destruction uses direct damage spells, but those dots are so efficient that Destruction will use them despite Affliction having those dots balanced around an extra 30% shadow damage and Destruction being given 25% fire damage.
3. Blizzard could buff Destruction's fire damage to the point where the dots aren't worth it, but then Destro is OP. Blizzard could nerf the dots, but that would kill Affliction and Demonology DPS. They could buff Shadow Bolt damage in return, but then they risk both specs going out of balance while mobile or on multiple targets with the shift in dot/direct damage. They could buff mastery, but how would that affect Warlock gear scaling (and isn't Demo mastery already ridiculous)?
4. It's a giant clusterfuck of one change affecting everything else, and so they just balanced Destro around having the dots up.

Deleted · 2012-08-25, 11:21 PM

Originally Posted by Sockmaster

I posted this in the last thread, but this is pretty much the chain of events.

1. Affliction uses BoD/Corruption in their normal rotation. Blizzard is happy.
2. Destruction uses direct damage spells, but those dots are so efficient that Destruction will use them despite Affliction having those dots balanced around an extra 30% shadow damage and Destruction being given 25% fire damage.
3. Blizzard could buff Destruction's fire damage to the point where the dots aren't worth it, but then Destro is OP. Blizzard could nerf the dots, but that would kill Affliction and Demonology DPS. They could buff Shadow Bolt damage in return, but then they risk both specs going out of balance while mobile or on multiple targets with the shift in dot/direct damage. They could buff mastery, but how would that affect Warlock gear scaling (and isn't Demo mastery already ridiculous)?
4. It's a giant clusterfuck of one change affecting everything else, and so they just balanced Destro around having the dots up.

In regards to point 3, no, that is the solution... Buffing mastery but nerfing corruption's base damage.
Mastery was only really powerful for demonology because of how the pet portion of mastery was affected.

Demonology was favoring mastery because mastery buffs you and your pet, and the Doomguard is too damn f*cking strong when snapshotting mastery.

Solution? Buff mastery for affliction and demonology.

Nerf demonology pet damage, Nerf affliction UA & Doom damage.

Buff destruction mastery.

Problem solved.

As far as scaling is concerned, why would it be a bad thing that mastery becomes more valuable? It's just another stat... Who cares what you need to stack to increase your dps.

However the buffing/nerfing goes, the aim would be to make the DPECT time of corruption (for destruction) to be worth less than Incinerate... Which wouldn't have been hard to do at all if you had nerfed doom and corruption, destruction could've received buffs in spells that blizzard wanted destruction warlocks to use.

Instead they just threw their hands in the air and said "Hey! Those naughty warlocks are using spells we don't want them to use! Oh fiddlesticks, lets balance them around it so, who cares if the burst spec sucks at burst."

**klogaroth** · 2012-08-25, 11:47 PM

Balancing DPS really isn't as simple as changing the mastery numbers unless your mastery is "increases all damage by x%"

The reason for this being that the value of mastery changes based upon what is happening at the time. If you rely heavily on tweaking the mastery stat to alter damage your alterations become amplified in situations where mastery is more important.

This is all rather irrelevant though now though, and one of the reasons I like the new deal with spec specific abilities.
Rotations can be as intended, and changes to particular specs are easier to do without affecting other specs.

Take the following scenario for example using the old system:
Let's say it's decided that destro multi dotting needs a huge buff. The natural place to do this is immolate. This will also affect demo.
Let's then say it's decided that affliction multi dotting needs a huge nerf. This could be done from bane of agony, which is rarely used in multi dotting unless stuff will live for ages. It could be done from corruption, this will also affect demo. It could be done from unstable affliction, something used for multi dotting only by affliction.

If immolate is buffed you might need to nerf demo multi dotting somewhere else.
If corruption is nerfed you might need to buff demo multi dotting somewhere else.
These 2 may cancel each other out for demo dps, but it's unlikely given that they have very different DPET's.

The very worst possible scenario however is what can happen if UA is nerfed really hard and immolate is buffed really hard - affliction locks might end up using immolate. Worse still they might end up using immolate, but only pre-execute because drain soul refreshing UA makes UA better in execute.

See the problems now with the old system?

This is why I remain hopeful that the new system will allow for much tighter balancing. It will never be perfect, ever. But when it is already established that many spells are spec specific it's a lot easier to target balancing changes.

**Sockmaster** · 2012-08-26, 12:09 AM