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

[stickyjam]

People justifying blizzard are actually not thinking about it very well.

take ele shamans current OPness atm. if you nerfd lava burst and buffed another spell so the pve dmg was the same but LB burst was lowered it'd be fine and could be pushed out in a week. They havent even looked at ele dmg on ptr yet!

especially as LB got a buff of 25%!

they could do simple stuff too like echo talent applys a 50% dmg spell twice as often.

[Hyve]

People justifying blizzard are actually not thinking about it very well.

take ele shamans current OPness atm. if you nerfd lava burst and buffed another spell so the pve dmg was the same but LB burst was lowered it'd be fine and could be pushed out in a week. They havent even looked at ele dmg on ptr yet!

especially as LB got a buff of 25%!

they could do simple stuff too like echo talent applys a 50% dmg spell twice as often.

And what is so bad about having Elemental Shamans being powerful at the moment.

I think people misuse the term Overpowering / Overpowered.

There is a big difference between being a Powerful Class, and being an Overpowered Class.

[Drynix]

Because when you think something is blatantly OP that doesn't make it OP.

Yes in the general viewing a class might be just a punching bag or a godly being in pvp, but that doesn't mean it is true. Quick example, you aswell said that rogues are punching bags and even Ghostcrawler admitted to this. It might just be my battlegroup or my luck in 2v2, but I got absolutly no trouble in pvp with my rogue. In my eyes they are fine as they are atm. I am not saying they truely are, just pointing out that a class being to weak or being to strong is heavily opinion based. Therefore blizz shouldn't just change it based on the first QQ wave.

Besides, minor changes non stop prevent people from really looking into the class since it becomes way to messy to keep up with the changes.And minor changes non stop unbalance it even further in most scenarios, because they are based on hasty decisions.

[Deleted]

Because PvP was never the main concern for WoW. If you ever see hotfixes for bugs, or something to prevent "clever use of game mechanics" it's mostly something to do with PvE, raids/dungeons. PvP changes? Mostly in big patches, when people have played the certain class combo to it's fullest. They will obviously make changes to try keep up the balance in PvP, but you cannot really balance game like this, unless you make all spells/abilities do something different in PvP and something different at PvE (or have different scalings and such). That in my opinion would help balancing issues a lot in WoW.

Blizzard doesn't really care that much at PvP in this game, and I actually (personally) think that's good. They just added additional features (bg's arenas etc) because it would make sense, since they made two factions in the game fighting against each other, to keep up the illusion of having good/any PvP content. But that is just my opinion.

[Deleted]

Because when you think something is blatantly OP that doesn't make it OP.

And thats why we had to wait for so long for a hunter stampede bug fix and for the 5.0 warriors nerfs? Classes not op at all.

And what is so bad about having Elemental Shamans being powerful at the moment.

If they proc you die, such a large emphasis on rng should have never existed.

[kaptan]

Yea they can be nerfed in a pre patch not in a brandly new patch

[Deleted]

Yea they can be nerfed in a pre patch not in a brandly new patch

Its a great thing they listen to the pvp community in the beta. Oh right, they don't.

[ComputerNerd]

Because a change is not isolated, it can then have more influence elsewhere than you would like to think.
If an ability is used regularly in other content, then any adjustments could well affect other content, forcing a "see-saw effect".
Push one end, and the other end moves too, which then means a counter adjustment and perhaps not even adjustments limited to the one class.

[Deleted]

It didn't take them but one patch to nerf Hunters. And instead of fixing the problem (aka nerfing Stampede in PvP), they started neutering the class as a whole.

They're still doing it by making Silencing Shot MM-only again in 5.4...

Because Stampede wasn't the only thing that made Hunters OP. The amount of instant CC they have at the moment is stupid. Now, BM gets the pet stun and MM gets Silencing Shot.

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People justifying blizzard are actually not thinking about it very well.

take ele shamans current OPness atm. if you nerfd lava burst and buffed another spell so the pve dmg was the same but LB burst was lowered it'd be fine and could be pushed out in a week. They havent even looked at ele dmg on ptr yet!

especially as LB got a buff of 25%!

they could do simple stuff too like echo talent applys a 50% dmg spell twice as often.

The way I see it is this. If Lava Burst gets a nerf and Lightning Bolt gets a buff, casting Lava Bursts will have very minimal impact on your DPS. Therefore, there would be very little difference between someone who's only using Lava Burst with the instant cast procc, compared to someone who hard casts it every time it comes off of cooldown.

So what else could they buff? Buffing Flame Shock would probably make them too strong with multi-dotting. Buffing Earth Shock/Fulmination would make the issue worse as they'll have more burst.

[Cantheal]

IDK it seems like the few times I would say my main which is a Spriest was truely OP stupid Blizz seems to have a server restart almost instantly to nerf him. Of course I am bias but it sure seemed like it LOL This is from a PvE standpoint i couldn't really comment on PvP

[Boogar]

People just need to understand that PvP is never gonna be perfectly balanced and there will always be superior classes and specs which are called Flavor of the Month.
Blizzard do not like to nerf good performing classes straight to the ground when they turn out to be strong and powerful, they are giving them their time to shine...
At least thats how I perceive the problem. But its certainly much less of an issue now, when the classes are getting tuned down in next major patch. I had my fun with shadow priest at the start of MoP, rogues were the best PvP class the whole vanilla.

[Deleted]

People just need to understand that PvP is never gonna be perfectly balanced and there will always be superior classes and specs which are called Flavor of the Month.

So is pve never gonna be balanced, but you people keep repeating this in pvp threads like we dont know it and sudden realization will change it.

[Deleted]

The funny thing is, they're not just OP in PvP, but in PvE as well

[Bjarne]

When something is OP they probably have to "plan" how to nerf it. A lot of times they fail and nerf it too much.

Shouldn't take more than a week to push out a tiny nerf to something OP. Not that hard to nerf something by a couple %

[Deleted]

When something is OP they probably have to "plan" how to nerf it. A lot of times they fail and nerf it too much.

Shouldn't take more than a week to push out a tiny nerf to something OP. Not that hard to nerf something by a couple %

So they nerf it to the ground for a patch, they've been OP for a while now, they should be UP for a while as well to balance it.

[Drikkink]

w-warlocks? I'm sorry, did you just try to say warlocks are as OP as hunters?

Sure, warlocks are strong-ish, but I would put them, at best, as upper third in terms of dps right now. I'd consider Fire and Frost mages, all three hunters and both DKs above any warlock spec (although demo approaches fire mage and DKs)

[Bjarne]

So they nerf it to the ground for a patch, they've been OP for a while now, they should be UP for a while as well to balance it.

Yea, they shouldn't have to be OP for more than a couple of weeks before they should be balanced out, but Blizzard operates with buffs / nerfs at the start /end of new content and one time in the middle of it

[Abysal]

OP at your own skill level doesn't necessarily mean overpowered overall.

For instance, I see a lot of average PvPers say that frost mages are overpowered, yet looking at the ladders, I don't really see enough near the top to call them OP.

Blizzard is then tasked with determining why the particular spec is OP at a certain skill level and not at another. They can't just do a blanket nerf, because then the spec because balanced at one skill level and weak at another. They are trying to make the game fun for everyone. They don't just balance around gladiator skilled players, nor should they.

The problem is that some things are easily countered by the best players but not by average players. Other things are OP in the hands of the best players, but not in the hands of average players.

[Ultima]

The reasons given are:

• It's hard to predict how this changes will actually affect the in-game world, regardless of how good it may look on paper. Usually tested internally and/ or PTR.
• How to fix the change without destabilizing PvE for the spec/ class.*
• May require a whole spec revamp.
• They do not want the players to feel like they constantly have to relearn their class.

*The reason why you see this and not so much the other way around is because the opponent can be changed instead, that is, the "boss". E.g; "Omggggggg Balance is so OP on 3/7 fights, please nerf class Blizz". Blizzard: "Adds now take X% reduced damage from Damage over Time effects." Or cleave damage (Garalon says hihi, Rogues!), or whatever. In PvP, you can't nerf the static component because there isn't one. I guess a close example I can give would be The Council Fights. Depending on the randomly chosen order/ selection of mobs, a fight is easy/ hard. Halfus as an example, some guilds/ servers couldn't progress on for the first resets due to terrible set ups. This is as opposed to Rogue/Mage which rocks against X/Y but sucks against BM/Disc. A lot harder to balance.

Did I intend to write that much? Hell no, but it feels great to be back at the keyboard.

[Senathor]

Isn't it obvious? Perhaps you haven't been following the actions and statements of the developers for the past couple of years. They're incompetent. Their insecurities which exist from the absence of PvP or even time spend in-game forces them to draw out everything. They don't notice obvious things that are broken because they wait months for community feedback. If Ghostcrawler and Holinka actually bothered playing the game they would probably change things at a significantly faster paste...

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The reasons given are:

• It's hard to predict how this changes will actually affect the in-game world, regardless of how good it may look on paper. Usually tested internally and/ or PTR.
• How to fix the change without destabilizing PvE for the spec/ class.*
• May require a whole spec revamp.
• They do not want the players to feel like they constantly have to relearn their class.

*The reason why you see this and not so much the other way around is because the opponent can be changed instead, that is, the "boss". E.g; "Omggggggg Balance is so OP on 3/7 fights, please nerf class Blizz". Blizzard: "Adds now take X% reduced damage from Damage over Time effects." Or cleave damage (Garalon says hihi, Rogues!), or whatever. In PvP, you can't nerf the static component because there isn't one. I guess a close example I can give would be The Council Fights. Depending on the randomly chosen order/ selection of mobs, a fight is easy/ hard. Halfus as an example, some guilds/ servers couldn't progress on for the first resets due to terrible set ups. This is as opposed to Rogue/Mage which rocks against X/Y but sucks against BM/Disc. A lot harder to balance.

Did I intend to write that much? Hell no, but it feels great to be back at the keyboard.

There haven't been many changes equal to a spec being revamped in-between patches. Just small changes which could have been done way faster. I mean if you went to work and had to focus on PvP balance 40 hours per week for several months, you'd think that you would have come up with something besides buffing Feral and Retribution damage to god-status and increasing the CD of Shockwave to 40 seconds while waiting half a year to do something about BM.

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Its a great thing they listen to the pvp community in the beta. Oh right, they don't.

I agree that they should. For an example MoP beta was out forever and everybody complained about Arms being OP and yet they didn't do anything. But most people lack the ability to post criticism constructively which makes it hard for them to interpret feedback and see what's actually going on.

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Hastily making a change to nerf a blatantly OP class will result in several other unbalances.

Possibly. But Arms/BM control, Demonology burst and Shadow utility should've been dealt with earlier before they ruined an entire patch. Or several patches in some cases.