What is keeping blizz from from implementing additional tuning

[Astarial]

I would just like to know the reasons behind additional tuning for mages (and other classes for that matter) not being implemented as of yet. It's pretty easy to see that certain specs are just way behind others. Although fire is great, I would love to have the choice of going frost or arcane.

For example, all the sims, as well as beta testing evidence show that frost is around 30% behind fire. Now fire may be slightly OP, but according to the top players (eg. Furty in Serentity) it doesn't actually top any meters. Top single target is held by Assassination rogues, Shadow priests and possibly mm hunters while AOE is topped by dks , warriors and hunters. Fire's strength comes from being good at everything (but not actually top of anything).

Therefore what would be the harm in buffing frost's damage by 20-30%? Does it have some magical scaling at very high gear levels that I'm unaware of? I do not believe PVP balance is an excuse anymore as the very reason they implemented separate talents for that sector was to avoid holding pve balancing back and vice versa.

Could someone please tell me why they think an immediate 20% damage boost hotfix for frost would be unwarranted? I understand things are always more complex and stuff but for some specs it just seems so obvious. Of course I would love for them to introduce more mechanical changes (more interactions with FoF!) to address dps issues but that kind of change will obviously only come with a major content patch.

[Deleted]

Your guess is as good as anyone's. There seems to be a standstill for a long time now. The main changes are very minor, mainly fixing bugs or severe imbalances. There are various possibilities here. One, they may have tuned it well for raiding gear and we're just wrong. Two, they may tune imminently. Three, they may tune within the first days of the launch after seeing the first 5mans on live. Four - and that's what I suspect they will do - they will wait for the normal and heroic raiding week, collect data from the first 3-4 days and then do a tuning pass, on which they will try to tune it without major changes.

I think we are missing something important here. We hear Watcher claiming that they will tune them carefully. But in reality, nothing might have changed from their old methodology. I mean, say you want to tune for HFC. Why won't you do it carefully, or at least try? That doesn't see to be realistic.

It doesn't seem realistic because the game is complex and balancing/tuning/comparing two specs is kinda like comparing apples and oranges because the utilities are different, the mechanics are different and the way they scale with gear in the long term is different.

[bledgor]

You have to remember they recently dropped 7.0, and from Watcher himself they were fixing thousands of bugs a week. They (and most of us for that matter) didn't care about tuning for the prepatch so they probably held off on tuning right after the patch drop minus huge issues (demo 4 set) to not only focus on fixing bugs, but also on getting some at least level 100 data on specs. I have heard rumors of a tuning patch tomorrow, so I imagine we will start to see number passes again soonTM.

[Halanad]

It is definitely worrying for a lot of classes that have a great amount of parity between their specs. I know a lot of people say "don't worry about it, they will tune stuff when the raids come out" but the artifact system is a huge wrench in that. If we spend the first month or so of legion with one spec being obscenely better than the others and dump our artifact power into it as a result it really won't matter if they eventually tune the specs to be closer to one another because it will be too much of a waste of time for a lot of people to bother switching anyway.

It would also be pretty punishing if they over-nerfed the OP specs to try and force people into the underdog ones because of said artifact power and the people who genuinely enjoy that spec. The only good way to solve this parity is to tune them close together BEFORE we start working on artifacts, but we're getting worryingly close to that not happening.

[Zensine]

It is definitely worrying for a lot of classes that have a great amount of parity between their specs. I know a lot of people say "don't worry about it, they will tune stuff when the raids come out" but the artifact system is a huge wrench in that. If we spend the first month or so of legion with one spec being obscenely better than the others and dump our artifact power into it as a result it really won't matter if they eventually tune the specs to be closer to one another because it will be too much of a waste of time for a lot of people to bother switching anyway.

It would also be pretty punishing if they over-nerfed the OP specs to try and force people into the underdog ones because of said artifact power and the people who genuinely enjoy that spec. The only good way to solve this parity is to tune them close together BEFORE we start working on artifacts, but we're getting worryingly close to that not happening.

Pretty sure they made it clear if a specs damage is op they will never dumbster the spec, rather tune it 5% above other specs rather than the 20% above every other class/spec.

Also balancing other specs might cause a disparity in the following tier thus more tuning if they are going for the overall content playstyle, fire might be top now but arcane could very well be better when tier comes around

[LordAmbrosia]

For the last month everyone's been reciting the spiel about how tuning pass(es) will come... but we're one week away and they really haven't done anything but very minor taps. It's pretty late in the game now, people are going to commit to lvling an artifact in just one week.

[Deleted]

For the last month everyone's been reciting the spiel about how tuning pass(es) will come... but we're one week away and they really haven't done anything but very minor taps. It's pretty late in the game now, people are going to commit to lvling an artifact in just one week.

a lot of tuning can happen from now and until the the raids release, i can understand that ppl are worried that their favorite specs isnt performing well but a lot can happen in a week.

[Creatinebrah]

a lot of tuning can happen from now and until the the raids release, i can understand that ppl are worried that their favorite specs isnt performing well but a lot can happen in a week.

lol its funny when this statement is brought up. tuning will be going on well into the expansion.

thats what WoW is...there will always be a bottom feeder spec compared to that top tier spec. blizzard will always be "tuning"