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  1. #1401
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    Quote Originally Posted by Verain View Post
    I don't think it's that they INTEND it to be overpowered. Ex: I'm sure they had some target for all those specs. I'm saying, we can discern what will be overpowered by what their internal metrics clearly show is lower than it is. They seem to trust those far more than community products, certainly including simcraft, spreadsheets, and even world of fucking logs.
    Nah. UVLS demo warlock was ridiculous OP for like 6 months before blizzard bothered to nerf that for warlocks. While some other OP abilities/trinkets gets nerfed in days/weeks... surely coincidence right?
    This just also happened to be expansion where warlocks got all kind special love with their class specific quests too, bit too much coincidence when they are also kept OP levels whole expansion over multiple raid tiers.

    For WoD, I am betting for shamans being newest "devsuperfavorite" class.

  2. #1402
    I would argue that UVLS was only nerfed because they wanted people to take new items, after stating repeatedly that they wouldn't do that. It was wildly OP in testing and on live the whole time, but it's pretty clear that they didn't think it would be. Hell, right after UVLS they started tweeting stuff like "well players were using addons and that was the determiner as to whether it was good or not". Meaning that, I guess they figured most heroic raiders would just MISS a massively important proc, based on the theory that we will generally not write weakauras for "chance to gain X mastery for 20 seconds". But if you add like 20,000 crit rating for FOUR seconds, well, yea, duh, you have to special case that.

  3. #1403
    Fluffy Kitten Yvaelle's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Verain View Post
    I would argue that UVLS was only nerfed because they wanted people to take new items, after stating repeatedly that they wouldn't do that. It was wildly OP in testing and on live the whole time, but it's pretty clear that they didn't think it would be.
    Well, that's somewhat untrue I think - pretty much as soon as those trinkets were datamined on WoWhead I posted a thread about how Shadow could use it to game ~infinite duration DoTs on boss fights in ToT - and how therefore it would become BIS for us. Within 8 hours of that post, well before ToT even went live - before it even hit the PTR beta - Shadow (not the trinket) was hot-nerfed to break that capability. Locks however got to maintain that brokenness not just through the PTR, but through the entire tier - where they were able to sometimes double everyone elses damage as a result - for the entire tier.

    Even when it was theoretically possible, Shadow still wasn't going to gain as much damage as Demonology did as a result - we gained some extra GCDs worth of Mind Flay over the course of the fight - Demo got Demonic Fury faster than they could spend it - it would be akin to having so many orbs we could quad-dot DP's - and they got to keep that all tier.

    Hell, right after UVLS they started tweeting stuff like "well players were using addons and that was the determiner as to whether it was good or not". Meaning that, I guess they figured most heroic raiders would just MISS a massively important proc, based on the theory that we will generally not write weakauras for "chance to gain X mastery for 20 seconds". But if you add like 20,000 crit rating for FOUR seconds, well, yea, duh, you have to special case that.
    Agreed, it was the sort of proc they should have known with a trivial amount of common sense - that would only be good for cheating with. Did they think it was only going to be Destro Locks who liked it, on the presumption they'd get a double damage Chaos Bolt? Were they really so naive? I kind of doubt it - or maybe they really do have not a single Dev who plays any spec of any class that snapshots DoTs >.>

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Maladi View Post
    If something is overpowered, it is imbalanced. If I replace the word "overpowered" with "imbalanced", you have

    Which is it? Should we be advocating for balance or not?
    We should not, for there is no such thing

    We have been advocating for balanced DPS across the classes and specs - and that is not and likely will never be their goal. It seemed to have been in WotLK, and even Cataclysm - but unannounced to us in MoP (though clear in retrospect through their actions) - they 'balance' on having unbalanced DPS - they intend for some classes and specs to do 100-500k more DPS than other classes. Just as they intend for Shadow to be one of the lowest DPS classes - because we can do 60-131k HPS (I did 60k on HJugg two weeks ago, and a whopping 131k on HMalkorok last week - as examples).

    Instead of balance - we can use their reactions to seemingly overpowered specs during the WoD beta to gauge which specs are going to be top performers through the entire expansion. For example, if Spriests do 5k DPS (after number squish), and DKs so 10k DPS - and then a nerf patch goes out, and DKs get nerfed by 2% to 9.8k DPS, and Spriests get nerfed by 15% to 4.25k DPS - it's likely that they feel close to their internal mark for DKs (10k was close to where they want them), but Spriests doing 5k DPS was considered way above what they wanted (hence the much larger nerf).

    If another patch goes out, and DKs get buffed by 1%, to 9.9k DPS - then we know their internal mark is somewhere very close to the 9.8-10k DPS range for DKs, while if Shadow gets nerfed another 10% to 3.8k DPS - we know Shadow's mark is somewhere probably closer to 3.5-4k range. The idea isn't that we should advocate for balance at all, rather - it is that we can reverse engineer the Developers internal goals by watching the potency or severity with which they buff/nerf certain specs

    If DKs were to colossally outperform every other DPS spec all beta, but only kept getting buffed or nerfed in 1-2% increments - that tells us that DKs are probably going to be the class to be for the entire expansion. I found that idea pretty illuminating

    It means I will be able to tell you all not just which class/spec is overpowered during the WoD beta - but much more valuably - which will remain overpowered for the entire expansion.
    Last edited by Yvaelle; 2014-01-16 at 02:40 AM.
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  4. #1404
    Quote Originally Posted by Yvaelle View Post
    It means I will be able to tell you all not just which class/spec is overpowered during the WoD beta - but much more valuably - which will remain overpowered for the entire expansion.
    I can tell you right now, even before beta.

  5. #1405
    Fluffy Kitten Yvaelle's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dierdre View Post
    I can tell you right now, even before beta.
    How do you tell that from those pie charts? If we're just saying popularity, then apparently Male Blood Elf Hunters are the best of all things
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  6. #1406
    They have at least acknowledged multiple times the imbalance of warlocks compared to other classes in dps, survivability and raid utility and.. have done close to nothing to remedy the situation, except for small survival nerfs (not that it stops destro warlocks in current heroic gear from soloing bosses like normal Immersius and Ji-kun).

    I do believe their goal for this expansion was to make locks a more popular class like they said near the launch of MoP, it -was- a fairly underrepresented class just like rogues. They did this likely even at the cost of dps balancing.. so they pampered one of the most underplayed classes to be the special snowflake of the entire expansion.

    The way they handled the UVLS situation showed remarkable short-sightedness on the devs part as Yvaelle said, I'm putting all my hope in the fact that Ghostcrawler was replaced, and that hopefully as a result things will be different in WoD.

    Starting to have a feeling too that they are actually balancing our dps around the ammount of raid healing we do.. which reminds me in a horrible way of the days we served as mana batteries. When we have only one dps spec to fall back to, then that one spec should NOT be a watered down version of Atonement spec.

    Really hope they cut the raid healing aspect of shadow priests back in WoD, if that's the price it takes for shadow to be able to compete for top dps with the rest. Giving us the option to switch between a single target nuke mode or grabbing an extra dot at level 100 makes me hopeful that they will finally give us the option for competitive single target dps on adless fights, by allowing us to trade in a part of our multi-dot potential for higher single target dps.
    Last edited by Calamari; 2014-01-16 at 04:55 AM.

  7. #1407
    Quote Originally Posted by Yvaelle View Post
    How do you tell that from those pie charts? If we're just saying popularity, then apparently Male Blood Elf Hunters are the best of all things
    That's the point. They don't need to be the best of all things. People like them and play them anyway. It's the classes that people don't play that they pay attention to. Mark my words, warlocks will stay (slightly less) OP; lots of buffs, lore and content for shaman.

  8. #1408

  9. #1409
    Spam Assassin! MoanaLisa's Avatar
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    Nice post Yvaelle. I agree with it but would mention this.

    Balance and the philosophy as to how to go about it including intentional pushes for certain classes actually could be one of those things that change with Ghostcrawler gone. Turning the knobs up or down is trivial once an internal decision is made about who belongs where. Should that basic tenant change, which it might, implementing a different strategy is not anything that requires an enormous amount of written code. Class balance philosophy is one thing to watch going forward into the beta. It may not change at all; it may change significantly. It's one area where they have significant room to play and mix things up should they wish to do so.
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  10. #1410
    Stood in the Fire Setheria's Avatar
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    I'd just be happy if they actually clearly communicated their design philosophy.

    It's tricker now with the wider distribution of utility, however if the aim is to popularise certain classes, fine, just be up front about it.

    If the aim is to have a level playing field (the bring the player argument) then they're doing a poor job.

  11. #1411
    Fluffy Kitten Yvaelle's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    Nice post Yvaelle. I agree with it but would mention this.

    Balance and the philosophy as to how to go about it including intentional pushes for certain classes actually could be one of those things that change with Ghostcrawler gone. Turning the knobs up or down is trivial once an internal decision is made about who belongs where. Should that basic tenant change, which it might, implementing a different strategy is not anything that requires an enormous amount of written code.
    Thanks! I agree that dialing the knobs a different way is a relatively easy thing for them to do - if their opinions shift - the problem we have been faced with however is that they never tell us what they are aiming for, or when their opinions have changed.

    In the past, they seem to come up with vision for balance once per expansion - and mostly stick to it - but since the playerbase never knows what they envisioned we're left in the dark - and when wild DPS discrepancies exist, we often assume they mean for classes and specs to be roughly equal (apart from niches like multi-dot, or burst) - it's confusing to see DPS specs tuned wildly out of proportion, and then see the top specs nerfed trivially (or even buffed), while the bottom specs get nerfed even further down, or buffed trivially.

    Hopefully, by tracking the potency or severity of buffs/nerfs, in conjunction with the performance of the specs - we will be able to reverse engineer their vision this time around I'm very excited for this ^^
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  12. #1412
    Deleted
    Agreed, it was the sort of proc they should have known with a trivial amount of common sense - that would only be good for cheating with. Did they think it was only going to be Destro Locks who liked it, on the presumption they'd get a double damage Chaos Bolt? Were they really so naive? I kind of doubt it - or maybe they really do have not a single Dev who plays any spec of any class that snapshots DoTs >.>
    UVLS for Moonkin and Shadow were nerfed BEFORE it went live.

    They nerfed the chance it could proc for Moonkin because else you'd have ridiculous amounts of Starsurge procs.

    For us too because it'd be too powerful with our 2pcT15 set bonus.

    (Both fair enough.)

    Blizz didn't fix affliction soul swap bug.

    They didn't touch demonology + UVLS.

    Soul swap bug got fixed when SoO was released and Demonology was fixed 1 week before Garrosh HC was killed.

    Those are the facts. And you're not going to tell me Blizz wasn't aware of critting Doom with UVLS, but somehow through sheer magic they did pinpoint and nerf both Moonkin and Shadow. Not buying it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Verain View Post
    I would argue that UVLS was only nerfed because they wanted people to take new items, after stating repeatedly that they wouldn't do that.
    Maybe, but RoO is still BiS for ferals.

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