Explanation of 4.2 Balance Changes

[Keristrasza]

That Hungering Cold nerf, just because of PVP. Yet another example of why blizz should add a PVP only talent spec so the PVE players don't get screwed.

I agree, to many times does PVE get screwed with because someone in PVP Cried about talent XYZ. Each spell should have a different effect in PVP than it does in PVE. Will make there so called balancing act easier.

[notwarnus]

-The Glyph of Dark Succor change was to keep Death Strike from providing so much healing in PvP.

i lol'd a little i'm not gonna lie. i play rmp, if you sap--->sheep---->CS the healer, garrote the dk, they basically get globaled. at least they have an instant cc...oh wait never mind.

well to be honest that's kinda how you do most groups...but dk's just seem to be the easiest to kill for some reason lol. Oh and bye bye spriest in arena completely now. pretty much ALL their damage now has to come from casted spells...

[Antherios]

So did he basically said that warriors are being nerfed in pve, because we were on top of meters with casters?

so.. they are nerfing us because we arent doing the crappy melee damage that all the other melee classes are doing?

wow, we got trolled

[Xbraveheartx]

Those changes won't improve your arena rating i'm afraid

what do you mean by that, you dont know any of my chars arena ratings. so explain.

[inthemist]

That Hungering Cold nerf, just because of PVP. Yet another example of why blizz should add a PVP only talent spec so the PVE players don't get screwed.

do u really think that having hungering cold to be a 1.5 sec cast ( it will probably be affected by haste so it should be shorter) will screw it in pve?

[Achaman]

Shadow was doing too much DPS in PvE when multiple DoTs was favored, so we nerfed their DoT damage. We want Shadow to benefit from multi-DoTs, but Shadow’s damage was just too high under those conditions. We buffed Shadow cast-time spells to compensate.F you blizz

[inthemist]

He may be wrong on some stuff, but i really appreciate that blizz is trying to be more in touch with the community. We cant have perfect things that we all like, we cant have every class doing the same dmg on every situation (aoe, movement, multi target, adds, burn phases, patchwerk style, etc). But this is definately nice step do having a better game

---------- Post added 2011-06-17 at 04:15 AM ----------

So did he basically said that warriors are being nerfed in pve, because we were on top of meters with casters?

so.. they are nerfing us because we arent doing the crappy melee damage that all the other melee classes are doing?

wow, we got trolled

Blizzard said they were trying to fix that melee vs range stuff in 4.2 gotta see how things work out

[LibrarianKay]

It is very likely it was done for PvE reasons - if a Warlock can do good DPS while self-healing for a substantial amount, why bring classes who don't automatically self-heal while doing their normal rotation?

Because Warlocks need to do a substantial amount of Lifetapping to keep their mana up. They MUST do this to do raid dps, they are balanced around needing to do this, and any health gains they received from their sources of self-healing were far, far outweighed by the need to lifetap. Not to mention the most basic of healer spells outclassed their self-healing by a country mile.

[epec]

"Yet once you start eliminating data -- “oh that’s a gimmick fight” or “oh, someone is inflating their meters by attacking an irrelevant target” -- you risk skewing the results."

Is he serious? Of course you can't just look at statistics to balance a game because random pve fights with weird mechanics, unless you rule it out, will skew your results. That's absolutely idiotic and pointless. The only sound way to balance the game is 1) Around abilities (Who can do what and you can do it to) and 2) Damage verses other players in a neutral environment. Looking at random derp dps meters from pve boss number 32 that gives mages an infinite mana buff or warriors super rage is not a good idea. This is why you have shit like frost dk's running around blowing shit up in the first place. It becomes an endless circle-jerk trying to balance the game this way.

[Randoo]

I like how they never explained the rationale behind the Spell Reflect nerf.

[frownface2000]

You're right, any frost Dk speccing into Hungering Cold is doing it wrong. The only exception possibly being if that Dk's sole purpose is to kite, where I could see it being only a slight hindrance, you'd just have to use your brain and cast it pre-emptively.

Umm, you sir, FAIL.

Hungering Cold is a REQUIRED talent to get Howling Blast.
Any Frost Death Knight that ISN'T spec'ed into Hungering Cold is doing is so much worse than wrong.

[isadorr]

>> We boosted Feral damage to compensate for their losing the attack power from Strength. Net DPS shouldn’t change much overall, though burst may be slightly higher. (We didn’t want to buff bleeds since that was a problem before in PvP.)

So, their intention was to "compensate dps loss", not to buff the worst PvE spec. No wonder buffs was so weak. Seems 20% is new 5% in terms of 'acceptable dps difference". What a freaking retards.

Feral hasnt been good for months so why change it now? get more druid to go bear and resto while giving gear to rogues who do alot more dps.

[Marc123]

"Balance is an art, though, not a science". OMG, what a bunch of crap. Art is in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to wow it is one beholder, Ghostcrawler.

My expectation was and is much more of a science. Designed properly from the get go, the wow matrix should have been a master mathematical algorithm which is where balance can be managed, tweaked, shifted when a known outcome is desired. At the moment by worst fears are confirmed. It's all guess work made up by some feedback, internal testing and personal observation. For christ sake, I am paying for some backyard lunar theorist with a divining rod to make decisions. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into a money pit that is based on one person's theory and that person is bold enough to even call it art. It's not art. It's a travesty.

Throughout this commentary, we nerfed, changed, tweaked, introduced, recognized, buffed slightly, allowed because we wanted this or that. The word of concern is want. Who wanted what and on what basis? The basis should have been a chart-able and demonstrated need that is statistically verified. Now don't tell me that this is impossible, just look at the statistics Blizz keeps on all of us. Apparently the most important statistics on balance are nowhere to be found.

Summary, everyone's complaints are justified because Blizz does not have a methodological approach based on sound science to balance classes. And Ret Paladins, my toon of constant discomfort has and continues to be victimized and trivialized by nondescript developer's whims and wants.

Enough is enough...

[announced]

one of the main problems with DKS is frost was OP in pvp and in pve its just mediocre. they need to do something to balance it out. hungering cold is indeed needed for howling blast so theres no way a DK cant spec into HC unless their retarded and dont wanna get the talent "howling blast". unholy did fall behind but honestly frost has almost no use for HC in a pve setting. in pvp sure its great for being instant but thats just a single CC, its not quite overpowered. being able to spam HB from range constantly + generating runic power was a lil op.. and blizz has yet to figure that out.

dk nerfs bad
shadow priest nerfs bad - almost no one uses mind blast in pvp anyway. even with lolmindspike.

[Gottie4u]

Looks like the WoW designer team took some advice from the SC2 designer team and no explained their reason for their/our buffs and nerf.

[Tybudd33]

I guess my warrior will continue tanking full-time then

[Sylla]

"Balance is an art, though, not a science". OMG, what a bunch of crap. Art is in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to wow it is one beholder, Ghostcrawler.

My expectation was and is much more of a science. Designed properly from the get go, the wow matrix should have been a master mathematical algorithm which is where balance can be managed, tweaked, shifted when a known outcome is desired. At the moment by worst fears are confirmed. It's all guess work made up by some feedback, internal testing and personal observation. For christ sake, I am paying for some backyard lunar theorist with a divining rod to make decisions. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into a money pit that is based on one person's theory and that person is bold enough to even call it art. It's not art. It's a travesty.

Throughout this commentary, we nerfed, changed, tweaked, introduced, recognized, buffed slightly, allowed because we wanted this or that. The word of concern is want. Who wanted what and on what basis? The basis should have been a chart-able and demonstrated need that is statistically verified. Now don't tell me that this is impossible, just look at the statistics Blizz keeps on all of us. Apparently the most important statistics on balance are nowhere to be found.

Summary, everyone's complaints are justified because Blizz does not have a methodological approach based on sound science to balance classes. And Ret Paladins, my toon of constant discomfort has and continues to be victimized and trivialized by nondescript developer's whims and wants.

Enough is enough...

You cant do what you propose, it is just impossible. I am sure the setups they have far surpass whatever idea of 'the wow matrix' as you envision it, but the point is that even with this amount of data you cant take every tiny little thing in every situation into account to get absolute balance.

Nah, the only way you can hope to balance a game like this is to do exactly what they do, make the best decisions they can at the time given the data they have available, and then buff/nerf when there are inevitably classes out of whack. It does lead to things being broken occasionally unexpectedly - or even when they kind of did expect it but just wanted to see how it worked out - but I guess you kind of have to deal with it in a game like this.


Anyway, giving explanations for balance changes is a brilliant idea, and i really hope they keep doing it for future patches.

[Thessalor]

tldr: PVP ruins PVE.Thank arena nerds for ruining Hungering Cold. It's fun to kite adds as frost, at least it WAS. Those who didn't try it bitched about Hungering Cold being instant. Those who bitched... arena'd.

[Leynal]

tldr: PVP ruins PVE.Thank arena nerds for ruining Hungering Cold. It's fun to kite adds as frost, at least it WAS. Those who didn't try it bitched about Hungering Cold being instant. Those who bitched... arena'd.

'ruins' PvE, huh? You do realize the change makes almost no difference whatsoever when it comes to kiting adds, right? This is the difference it makes: once every minute you have to precast hungering cold 1.5 seconds before you want it to take effect. That's right, you have to take 2 steps, and cast for 1.5s to aoe cc every single one of those mobs. If that's your idea of ruining, you have some serious issues.

[Deleted]

very nice nice