Why does it take Blizzard so long to nerf blatantly OP classes?

[PrairieChicken]

They didn't have Holinka before

[Senathor]

They didn't have Holinka before

The state of the game hasn't exactly improved significantly since his arrival.

[PrairieChicken]

The state of the game hasn't exactly improved significantly since his arrival.

PvP stuff are getting fixed faster than ever before(They used to ignore blatantly gamebreaking stuff for several months, but they are being addressed quickly nowadays)

And if not for the recent changes heroic upgraded thunderforged people will be destroying arenas/rbgs by now

[Flaks]

This is almost certainly it. A major solution to this would be to separate each move into a PvE and PvP form so that each could be tinkered with. That has its own drawbacks however - twice as much things to change/balance, confusion to a lot of players, implementing that actual tech to support this, new UI.

I WOULD agree with you here but we've seen a trillion and one times players recommending changes to classes that would bring a class in line without gutting it and not effecting it at all in PvE. And what does Blizzard do? Guts the class and neuters it in PvE ending up (over)compensating the nerf a few patches later.

And the biggest gripe I have is that they CAN and HAVE done it better as we all saw in the later seasons of WotLK. But for some reason they like sticking to this bs cycle of 4-5 fotms. And before anyone says there were fotms in WotLK, I'd like to point out that s6-s8 saw every single class have at least 2 specs be rank 1 viable.

[achromatickang]

PvP stuff are getting fixed faster than ever before(They used to ignore blatantly gamebreaking stuff for several months, but they are being addressed quickly nowadays)

And if not for the recent changes heroic upgraded thunderforged people will be destroying arenas/rbgs by now

Wouldn't it actually be the complete opposite, bro? Not to sound like a smartass, but you can be Heroic Thunderforged all day long when you have 0% resilience you are still going to get 100-0'd in 4 seconds. Now it's the complete opposite. You have sub 1550 Heroic raiders taking a shit on actual skilled players because of the baseline resilience changes. Before I would care less about your raid gear because pre PVP power nerf, and pre free resilience the boosted stats / dps weren't enough to make you viable in PVP. I know this because I regularly dueled raiders last season who always threw a fit that they basically died in the first stun.

[meathead]

heres the right answer- its because blizz does not want to/ and dont give a rats ass about making changes.blizz knows you guys are going to pay to play reguardless of what or what they dont do.look how fucked up pvp is now,and your all still paying for this crap.why on earth should blizz spend $ on man hours to fix things when they dont have to?

its like you paying me to fix your car,but i never fix it right or on time.why on earth would you keep going back?im getting my $ so i dont care wtf you think.its all about $ with blizz,if you player stopped giving blizz $,they would HAVE to fix pvp our they would be fired.

[achromatickang]

heres the right answer- its because blizz does not want to/ and dont give a rats ass about making changes.blizz knows you guys are going to pay to play reguardless of what or what they dont do.

This is why subscriptions are plummeting, and Blizzard took drastic measures (in the wrong direction) to try and increase PVP participation? As stated in the OP, regularly balancing PVP is more likely to increase participation rather than letting entire seasons be dominated by God mode classes.

[Senathor]

PvP stuff are getting fixed faster than ever before(They used to ignore blatantly gamebreaking stuff for several months, but they are being addressed quickly nowadays)

And if not for the recent changes heroic upgraded thunderforged people will be destroying arenas/rbgs by now

Depends on how you define "quickly" I suppose. Letting hunters ruin 2 season is not quickly to me. Took them one and half season to nerf SP's. Took them one season to nerf warriors and in doing so nerfing them inappropriately. I'd like to see him actually prevent a season from becoming terrible from the beginning before i fall on my knees.

[Yvaelle]

Depends on how you define "quickly" I suppose. Letting hunters ruin 2 season is not quickly to me. Took them one and half season to nerf SP's. Took them one season to nerf warriors and in doing so nerfing them inappropriately. I'd like to see him actually prevent a season from becoming terrible from the beginning before i fall on my knees.

I'd like to see them create some sort of PTR arena testing system in which they could maybe post their planned changes to an early PTR build and let us compete a bit - and then provide competitive PvP-specific feedback to them in a much quicker fashion, so that we could get some real iterations and bug-catches going before the PTR goes Live.

I actually understand why once something goes Live they like to let it play out and don't want to constantly iterate their live servers for the general public. The problem is that the PTR changes occur up until the night of the patch - sometimes with pretty big implications for PvP, so even if we play on the PTR - we almost never play the real changes, then you add in that the system for feedback is either absent or extremely inefficient, and the PTR system as far as competitive PvP is concerned is effectively useless.

A better development cycle for PTR feedback would solve a lot of the current problems - we want to be able to run multiple iterations of a season on the PTR before things go Live - and then push to Live whatever the polished conclusion of those cycles are. Right now it feels like they make up some ideas, they put it on the PTR, they don't receive or don't take feedback - and then they put their unpolished ideas on Live - and to their surprise it's broken in a whole new way.

If they wanted to be formal about it, they could hire some well-versed PvP'rs (would only need like 3 to 6 of them, of gladiator+ level) who can play many/all classes well, to try out and theorycraft compositions and classes to see what becomes 'the new broken'. That would greatly reduce the noise-level of trying to take the pulse of PTR arenas from the millions of angry noobs on the official forums: which I think is where they get their feedback right now.

[unholyness]

PVE oriented game.

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This is why subscriptions are plummeting, and Blizzard took drastic measures (in the wrong direction) to try and increase PVP participation? As stated in the OP, regularly balancing PVP is more likely to increase participation rather than letting entire seasons be dominated by God mode classes.

Blizzard already had very low Pvp participation which is why they are attempting to get more PVE players to Pvp. LFR has more people raiding and doing heroic scenarios as the numbers of people Pvping continued to drop. GC mentioned this over a long period of time on his twitter feed until they implemented the resil change hoping for more people to pvp. Sounds like interest in Pvp isn't what it once was as it is a uphill battle pvping in a Pve oriented game.

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I'd like to see them create some sort of PTR arena testing system in which they could maybe post their planned changes to an early PTR build and let us compete a bit - and then provide competitive PvP-specific feedback to them in a much quicker fashion, so that we could get some real iterations and bug-catches going before the PTR goes Live.

I actually understand why once something goes Live they like to let it play out and don't want to constantly iterate their live servers for the general public. The problem is that the PTR changes occur up until the night of the patch - sometimes with pretty big implications for PvP, so even if we play on the PTR - we almost never play the real changes, then you add in that the system for feedback is either absent or extremely inefficient, and the PTR system as far as competitive PvP is concerned is effectively useless.

A better development cycle for PTR feedback would solve a lot of the current problems - we want to be able to run multiple iterations of a season on the PTR before things go Live - and then push to Live whatever the polished conclusion of those cycles are. Right now it feels like they make up some ideas, they put it on the PTR, they don't receive or don't take feedback - and then they put their unpolished ideas on Live - and to their surprise it's broken in a whole new way.

If they wanted to be formal about it, they could hire some well-versed PvP'rs (would only need like 3 to 6 of them, of gladiator+ level) who can play many/all classes well, to try out and theorycraft compositions and classes to see what becomes 'the new broken'. That would greatly reduce the noise-level of trying to take the pulse of PTR arenas from the millions of angry noobs on the official forums: which I think is where they get their feedback right now.

They focus on tuning numerous raid bosses and then heroic versions of those bosses which is what the PTR has always been. They aren't going to tune PVE play so that PVP is more balanced. Changes in PVP effects some classes in PVE.

[Magpai]

Because your opinion about what is blatantly OP is not fact.

[Mongler]

They need to just separate the PvE and PvP sides of the abilities if there is any hope of us coming to terms with this word "balance". It angers me when GC has the answer of, "It will take too much time and resources/manpower to do it". The thing he doesn't get is: even if this is true (more than likely is), the end will justify the means. I would rather take time out and state that, in a blog post, this is what my team and I have decided on if it means long term longevity and survivability of the game. If this is truly what the players want, then I would rather spend the time, money, manpower, and resources to make this happen for the long term future. IF (and only if) this is a successful implementation, then 1 or 2 or even 3+ years later, I could gladly look back and say that this was the right decision, and that now if there is an imbalance existing somewhere not ONLY in PvP but in PvE, they could be fixed separately without either negatively impacting the other. Gotta spend money to make money. And in this case - even though Blizz may be hurting on subs/income - it has the potential to be a big, big turnout.

[achromatickang]

Because your opinion about what is blatantly OP is not fact.

Except in this case it's not my opinion, it's a fact. The OP directly refers to when the development team themselves acknowledge, and state that particular classes are too powerful, and then propose upcoming changes to "fix" said problem - but them make players wait months for them to happen.

It would be one thing if the Development team didn't come out and say "hey, such and such class is too strong, and needs to be nerfed" and there was simply player speculation, but when the Dev. Team does come out and say that specific classes need nerfs/buffs, and then expect players to wait months for any changes there is a major problem. It's like they acknowledge that a portion of the game is broken, but expect us to wait an entire season for it to be addressed.

[meathead]

This is why subscriptions are plummeting, and Blizzard took drastic measures (in the wrong direction) to try and increase PVP participation? As stated in the OP, regularly balancing PVP is more likely to increase participation rather than letting entire seasons be dominated by God mode classes.

what you call "drastic" measures i call cheap and easy hot fixes.all blizz did was try to hide all the problems in pvp by introducing this gear scaling crap along with the res changes.show me one quote where blizz said they made these changes to IMPROVE pvp for actual pvpers.thats right they never did or said that,all they wanted to do was get non pvpers into pvp.

drastic measures would be blizz separating pvp and pve =having abilities work different in each setting.included in that would be bring back of pvp and pve specs.for example arms =pvp fury = pve.those are drastic changes and would actually fix alot of problems in wow pvp.

as far as sub #s go,well i been saying this for years now.wows "prime" was BC,say what you will but im right.wrath sold alot because of how great BC was.wrath is were raiding started to go easy mode and pvp got f'ed up beyond repair,s5 says hi. since then the game has gone down hill ever since.or do you really think cata and mop are better then BC?lmfao.sub #'s have been dropping for a long time and all bliz does is add new dumb as shit to the game,like pet battle instead of improving things like pvp.

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They need to just separate the PvE and PvP sides of the abilities if there is any hope of us coming to terms with this word "balance". It angers me when GC has the answer of, "It will take too much time and resources/manpower to do it". The thing he doesn't get is: even if this is true (more than likely is), the end will justify the means. I would rather take time out and state that, in a blog post, this is what my team and I have decided on if it means long term longevity and survivability of the game. If this is truly what the players want, then I would rather spend the time, money, manpower, and resources to make this happen for the long term future. IF (and only if) this is a successful implementation, then 1 or 2 or even 3+ years later, I could gladly look back and say that this was the right decision, and that now if there is an imbalance existing somewhere not ONLY in PvP but in PvE, they could be fixed separately without either negatively impacting the other. Gotta spend money to make money. And in this case - even though Blizz may be hurting on subs/income - it has the potential to be a big, big turnout.

like i said blizz does not give a rats ass because people will and are still paying to play.why should blizz spend $ and man power on fixing something that peopel will pay for when is broken.