Patch 4.0.6 February 18 Hotfixes, Blue Posts

[blade5o]

I hear Rift is looking pretty nice until blizzard stops smoking the joe and do their job correctly

[Anium]

I hear Rift is looking pretty nice until blizzard stops smoking the joe and do their job correctly

aye it's not half bad.

[wickedbastard]

Awesome, making MM one week viable and then nerf it back into the ground.
Back to DoTting then....

[Daylosprime]

Oh what a "surprise" they don't give a rats ass to the feedback from the PTR testers.

I still remember good old 4.0.1. were tons of feedback was provided about the bugs, the cogwhell-of-death per example, and surprise surprise the bugs went to the live realms.

THIS. They don't listen to people who spend time and provide feedback on the PTR then they run around like chickens with their heads cut off for 2-3 weeks hotfixing everything under the sun. PTR time should be sufficient to vet all this stuff ahead of time so there are no big surprises when their changes go live. They need to spend more time on testing these changes; otherwise, they come off looking like they don't know what they're doing. The fact they even acknowledged it is proof positive that know they look like idiots.

[Deleted]

ok then,heres my view on this hwtas the point of having a ptr if u cant actually see whats going to happen to a clas when u buff it/nerf it ill give an example,

shadow priests must have been doing the same damage/dps on the ptr as they were doing on live servers so why not implement the 10% less shadow damage specilization before they let people do all this insane damage/dps. i have a sp myself and could crit up to 90k on some targets and yes thought that was op for 1 class at this stage to be doing that but surely they were doing the same on the ptrs.

problem is u buff them up and then take it away

solution would be look into alot more before buffing and basicly do ur job correctly.actually play the classes urself to see what it would do, in the case of shadow priests if they had played the class and saw how much damage/dps they could do with mind blast and 3 orbs procced im sure they wouldnt of buffed that ability,and if u did see the amount it could do why buff it in the first place.

[Deleted]

ok then,heres my view on this hwtas the point of having a ptr if u cant actually see whats going to happen to a clas when u buff it/nerf it ill give an example,

shadow priests must have been doing the same damage/dps on the ptr as they were doing on live servers so why not implement the 10% less shadow damage specilization before they let people do all this insane damage/dps. i have a sp myself and could crit up to 90k on some targets and yes thought that was op for 1 class at this stage to be doing that but surely they were doing the same on the ptrs.

problem is u buff them up and then take it away

solution would be look into alot more before buffing and basicly do ur job correctly.actually play the classes urself to see what it would do, in the case of shadow priests if they had played the class and saw how much damage/dps they could do with mind blast and 3 orbs procced im sure they wouldnt of buffed that ability,and if u did see the amount it could do why buff it in the first place.

Mainreason why shadow and balance druid did and do so much dmg ist A. Multidot encounter... (totally ok there) B. Dark Intent.. bliz could just fix Dark Intent, or make it a passiv Warlock ability not a spell casted on other classes. Singletarget DPS without DI we are now rank 10/12 after the LOL MM Hunter, Rogues, Mages, Furys.. etc etc.. so thats for the point "blizz balancing politics.

[Lazoric]

OMG

So many clueless people here.

When the game gets as big as WoW is now, of course balance and debugging is going to be alot harder. There still probably alot of old code that has caused a mess of things when converting for cata.

I think most here just like to see themselves post and dont know anything.

[Azrile]

I don´t have a problem with this flurry of hotfixes. I think the devs have been pretty accurate and you definitely get a feel that almost everyone is viable now, and the classes that are not, or getting buffs while others are getting nerfed.

It does need to end though. Now that the devs have had their chance to optimize things, players also need time to learn to optimize their classes. With all these changes, it is very hard to develop your ´sweet spot´ especially with gear and to a lesser degree with rotation. The devs need to stop messing with individual spells or stats if they want to balance things, and instead just do small changes that affect everything.. similar to the 2'handed weapon change for arms. It will help make arms for viable, but not require the actual players from having to relearn new priorities for gear or rotation.

But my biggest problem with all these changes is that fansites (and therefore moderately informed players) are out of date. There are sticky threads on multiple sites that are outdated now, but that ´knowledge´has already become cannon for a lot of players.

[Deleted]

And the change for lowlv aimedshot? Will they continue oneshot ppl?
I don't think the ability to cc one guy twice in arrow if need, and oneshot him is fair. lvl40 to 60 is boken thanks to hunters and imortals disc priests and prot palas. Many times wsg victory is decide about how many hunters you have or if you jhave prot pala and disc priest to get flag.

[Deleted]

SV and BM buff YESS!!

yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[Farora]

I hear Rift is looking pretty nice until blizzard stops smoking the joe and do their job correctly

Yes I'm sure a poor wow clone is perfectly balanced.

[Kiro]

OMG

So many clueless people here.

When the game gets as big as WoW is now, of course balance and debugging is going to be alot harder. There still probably alot of old code that has caused a mess of things when converting for cata.

I think most here just like to see themselves post and dont know anything.

Likewise yourself. Please, blizzard is "the leader" in MMOs, they have the money, knowledge, and skill to make it work. But they don't. They DON'T put the money back into the game, their best devs are off on other games right now, and who they're left with because of this does not have the skill to make it work. The game is in shambles. I've learned that when a new MMO that's about to launch which is vastly more a balancing nightmare due to the insane possibility their skill trees provide, is better balanced than a game that's heading to a decade in age, there is something majorly wrong here. Yes, RIFT is better balanced, and surprisingly has fewer bugs than WoW does live. And trust me, RIFT is a BIG game which is heavy on the content, before you blizzy-boys come to blizzard's defense.

Blizzard lost a lot of respect of players here in this last patch. People are finally sick of their ways of "we know best, screw the consumer", and their elementary "balancing" methods as well as how lackluster the content really is that the honeymoon is over. Blizzard really needs to step up their game as a brand new MMO is exposing them for their worth, not to mention they have to deal with a Star Wars MMO and Guild Wars 2 this year as well. This may finally be the end of WoW's dominance, it won't die, but it certainly won't own as much of the market.

[bloodwine77]

* Aimed Shot damage has been decreased to approximately 160% weapon damage (at level 80+), down from 200%.
* Aspect of the Hawk now provides around an additional 2000 attack power at level 85.

Ok, im happy with Aimedshot Nerf, its ok. But wtf why isnt aspect of the hawk buffed? still just gain 700ap.......

For what ever reason, Blizzard can't change tooltips in a hotfix. So you might be getting the extra attack power from the Aspect of the Hawk buff in this hotfix, but the numbers on the character panel do not reflect it.

I guess it is because tooltips are client side and Blizzard is only messing with server side in the hotfixes? No matter what, I think it is in bad form to change stuff and not have it reflected in the UI. It makes everything a little confusing and messy.

[Prothall]

OMG

So many clueless people here.

When the game gets as big as WoW is now, of course balance and debugging is going to be alot harder. There still probably alot of old code that has caused a mess of things when converting for cata.

I think most here just like to see themselves post and dont know anything.

Huh? The mechanics haven't changed that much between Vanilla and now. Perhaps some of these problems are adding things to the game (say, Heroic Leap) that the engine's just not up to handling. But my warrior's basic mechanics didn't change significantly between 2004 and now (I'm not talking new abilities, I'm talking how the class actually functions).

If there's that much old junk code that's causing that much of a problem for the current game, then Blizzard really needs to think about updating the engine (and yes, I know how big of a project that would be). What's happening here is more like Blizzard is just changing things for the sake of changing things, and there's no longer any rhyme or reason. I mean, when Blizzard says "hey, a lot of the 4.0.6 changes were just wrong", and "we made sure the designers know not to use the live realms for a balancing laboratory", it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that they don't have as much of a clue what they're doing as some would like to think they do.

Bottom line - they know and we know that Cata has lots of problems, but instead of sitting down and fixing them methodically and competently, they're just throwing things against the wall and hoping something sticks. And so far, not a lot has. It has nothing to do with the size of the game, or the complexity of the code. After all, it took quite a while to go from 11 or 11.5 million subscribers to 12 million, right? This game's been the size it is for long enough for them to be able to get this stuff straightened out.

[Fierae]

I think they must be on crack or something.

I'm just getting images of a bunch of devs sitting in their armchairs getting high and lol'ing at all the players flocking to forums to try and understand what's going on.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Nice to see some feral changes made it in as well......

[Prothall]

I don´t have a problem with this flurry of hotfixes. I think the devs have been pretty accurate and you definitely get a feel that almost everyone is viable now, and the classes that are not, or getting buffs while others are getting nerfed.

It does need to end though. Now that the devs have had their chance to optimize things, players also need time to learn to optimize their classes. With all these changes, it is very hard to develop your ´sweet spot´ especially with gear and to a lesser degree with rotation. The devs need to stop messing with individual spells or stats if they want to balance things, and instead just do small changes that affect everything.. similar to the 2'handed weapon change for arms. It will help make arms for viable, but not require the actual players from having to relearn new priorities for gear or rotation.

But my biggest problem with all these changes is that fansites (and therefore moderately informed players) are out of date. There are sticky threads on multiple sites that are outdated now, but that ´knowledge´has already become cannon for a lot of players.

This is a good point. After the 2.0 and 3.0 patches, things were relatively stable for a good amount of time before big changes were made. People had time to play with the new abilities and see what worked best and what didn't. With Cata and 4.0, things are changing so rapidly that people are still trying to figure out what the hell they should be doing. Go take a look at Tankspot (if you can make it past their front page, which appears to be nothing more than a YouTube mirror these days). There are recent threads where people are saying "we're still trying to figure out all the math and everything". And the expansion's been out for over two months now (and patch 4.0 for about three months now).

How can the players tell Blizzard what works and what doesn't, when the classes change so often that nobody can actually play the game long enough to find out what works and what doesn't? I think a lot of what Blizzard's calling "noise" and "clutter" and the like on the forums is really people trying to say "stop jerking the classes around whenever you get the urge, and let us actually work with this stuff and figure out what the hell is really going on here".

[Kiro]

Yes I'm sure a poor wow clone is perfectly balanced.

It's sad to say, but as it stands with it's "custom skill trees" (aka pick your trees, mix-n-match), it's actually better balanced than this game and it didn't even launch yet, this is from beta. It goes to show how lazy blizzard has become, or actually were the whole time. This will be the first MMO to put a real dent in WoW's playerbase as it exposes blizzard for what they are and WoW is. At the very least, hopefully it'll get blizz to put more effort into WoW. Maybe give them some new ideas to steal from again like they have in the past.

[Fierae]

Yes I'm sure a poor wow clone is perfectly balanced.

You would be surprised! They've done irregularly well so far. Considering the sheer amounts of available souls.

[Prothall]

Yes I'm sure a poor wow clone is perfectly balanced.

Go give it a try - it's in open beta until Monday. You don't have to pay a thing, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. When you play a class, it doesn't change every twenty minutes because one of the developers spilled some Mountain Dew all over their shirt or something.

[Throrion]

Thanks for posting about the demon hunter update, Boub. Wouldn't mind if you made a habit out of posting D3 info, at least when there's substantial news.