Problem is that druids can only play that role for 30s every 3 minutes now. (Folks were -very- upset at the change to ToL form when it became a cooldown…)
I think the real issue isn’t so much that druids got hit with a nerf branch as the implication that at this point, really and truly, the hardcore theory community knows more and better what’s going on below the engine than the actual people making the game. That’s… worrisome.
(It’s also interesting that they dropped Unholy DK damage coefficients another 25% today, which also points to the fact that the people in charge over there are losing their grip…)
This syncs well with scuttlebutt I’ve heard that a huge chunk of the WoW team has been pulled from WoW and is now working on the next-gen MMO instead.
I have to stop playing WoW for awhile.
Big desktop blew up. But I have a laptop that plays Wow.
Just need to stop.
JM1
5183
I spotted those Unholy DK changes - they seemed pretty major.
metta
5184
After over a decade of gaming message board browsing, I still find the idea that the users know more about the game’s balance than the people who make the game, the people who have access to hundreds of terabytes of logs and game data; data that now stretches back almost 7 years, across hundreds of thousands of player characters, to be a ridiculous assertion. That player base has no idea what Blizzard has planned for their game moving forward; that player base can’t see what pops up over here, when you push down on this spot; they have no wide angle lens.
My main has been a DK since Wrath, was Blood DPS then blood tank and in Cataclysm went Unholy DPS, was pleased with it.
Now with these changes I’m not even going to bother and resubscribe, hell, my subscription will last until April and I stopped playing already, guess it’s time to move on; no hard feelings about it though, It’s just the circular nature of WoW: buff - nerf - buff - repeat ad nauseam.
Apparently the BM buffs didn’t go in?
I said fuck all about balance. I’m simply talking about mapping changes to real-world outcomes. I think for a while the community has been better at this, because they tend to do data analysis and simulation to get their numbers vs. model assumptions. Empirical vs. theoretical is pretty much always going to throw the win to empirical. That definitely seems to be the specific case here. (Both for the druid snafu as well as, say, the fact that one day after they implement DK reductions they drop the same reductions by an additional 25%… clearly the model assumptions aren’t stacking up with empirical data there.)
JM1
5188
Mmm. That argument only works when you can point to a history of good decisions being made in terms of class balance. I don’t need to explain that that often hasn’t been the case.
They have terabytes of data but that’s counter-productive - it’s very hard to work out from logs what’s good data and what isn’t. The (sometimes awesome) mathematical studies done by the chaps on EJ and elsewhere, with their stringent vetting of data, can easily trump the work done by Blizzard themselves. Who do you think it is who tells Blizzard when they’ve fucked up? Blizzard certainly didn’t aim for, say, Shaman Flametongue weapon imbue to be a main-hand enchant on spellpower daggers for Enhancement spec.
Fallacy of appeal to ungrounded authority. Unlike the developers, the players know very well how the game feels to them right now, and I would argue that even more important than the existence of balance in the rules is the feeling of balance in the game. This is the primary reason why Puzzle Quest pissed so many people off - it was a perfectly fair game, but it didn’t feel that way when the computer whipped off an eighty seven match sequence and killed you in one move. At this point, we’ve got no reason to believe that Blizzard is actually using the data that you correctly observe that they might have to inform their decisions because the process by which these changes happen is largely opaque. For all we know, they throw darts at mallards and interpret the spots of blood left on the carpet. We presume they don’t, since their changes have been largely effective, or at least not completely destructive, but we’re still making an educated guess.
What you’re making here is an appeal to expertise, and I would contend that it’s the wrong way to use expertise. Expertise in a field indicates that a group or individual is more likely to have their facts straight, but it’s not an effective response to legitimate criticism. I don’t even have a Druid, but I’ll admit that a lot of what they’re doing makes very little sense to me. It’s neat that my Priest is now officially a better healer, but the whole Restoration tree seems kind of confused to me right now. Rather than withholding comment or hiding behind their secret knowledge, I think Blizzard would be best advised to explain why they’ve made all the changes that they’ve made, and to what end.
If there’s a significant number of people (who would be impacted - for the sake of this discussion we’ll exclude the casual community and people who don’t routinely raid, since the base game is a LOT easier than the end game and anybody not involved in that area of play shouldn’t be expected to feel as much of an impact to balance changes) complaining, I would at least try to explain the thinking behind the changes in Blizzard’s place. I mean, I don’t even have skin in the game and I’m kind of curious as to where they’re going with this.
Until Blizzard seperates PVP and PVE talents / speccs from each other they won’t succeed in balancing the classes.
I don’t understand why they can’t create a system that would lock certain talents / speccs to either PVE or PVP.
Once you enter a PVP area you get these talents / speccs.
Once you leave the PVP area you lose these talents / speccs.
Simple.
I was pissed every time they nerfed PVE rogue damage because we owned someone in PVP hard because I was never interested in PVP.
Why was I punished for this then?
One constant of WoW has always been backlash from PvP into PvE and viceversa; sure, by now they could/should have separated specs or made pvp-only specs but think about it:
how long did it take blizzard to allow dual speccing? (not to mention it was used as a money sink, costing 1k gold and now costs what, 10g?)
how long did it take Blizzard to implement a LFG system?
how long did it take Blizzard to fix known bugs in gear looks/geometry? (trick question, some, not to say most or all, were never fixed).
Sometimes it feels like, for a game that generates millions of dollars, they invest so little in it in terms of maintenance and sometimes simple aesthetic fixes (remember tauren cat form? yeah…) it’s as if they have 2 guys working on the game… in their spare time. Compare the investment in textures and other assets in several other games with a much shorter life than WoW and think about how much money you have already given Blizzard over the years…
Jag
5192
So anyone notice the buff to Whiptail spawn rates in Uldum? I’ve never seen nodes respawn so fast in all my years of WoW. Literally as you pick one, another appears. There are tons of posts on the forums, so I’m sure Blizz is aware (plus they seem to be omnipotent with game dataz). One poster even spoke to an in-game GM who said it is ‘working as intended’. Curious the reason and the silence for it.
In addition, they have still never fixed the hit box on female tauren, a problem that had always existed and resulted in such things as not being able to zone in MC through the window and not being able to leave the fort in Wintergrasp. You would think that at least they would use that model to test any doorways or openings they create, but it just continues to happen.
They probably think prices of the herbs are too high. A week or so after launch the same thing happened with Obsidium ore in Hyjal
The reqs for flasks were all dropped as well, so this seems like as likely a cause as any, although changing both at once seems to me to be a bit of a haphazard way to tamper with the economy. They made up the difference in Volatile Life, but just with my “herb anything you can herb that you walk by” method of leveling herbalism, I’m swimming in that crap at this point.
SlyFrog
5196
There’s a very obvious reason why you are objectively right about this.
Not having the level growth in crafting match your characters is yet another exposure of a system where, for all intents and purposes, all of the crafting in the soft, gooey middle of the crafting leveling curve is really fairly pointless, except to sell to others.
By having it be very difficult to actually craft the mid-level cooking recipes by yourself until you are actually level 85, the game is pretty much pointing out that all of the crap in the mid-level really isn’t intended to be used by the player crafting it at the appropriate levels, and is really just placeholder material to get to the max level.
Drives me nuts about tailoring as well. I originally took it for my priest, to be able to, you know, actually craft myself useful clothing as I level.
There is no way, given the current leveling speed and slow rate of finding cloth drops, that you are ever going to be able to organically craft yourself useful clothing that is better than what drops randomly (or comes from quest rewards) without buying a ton of mats off the market for high prices (which a real, honest to goodness new non-twinked character by definition shouldn’t be able to easily do).
Instead, tailoring for my main has also become, “Make a bunch of useless crap once you hit 85 and can stock up on mats so that you can power through to 525 and hope there is something useful to make for your 85 at that level.”
It would be nice if crafting would actually have some benefit for the crafting character itself while the crafting character is leveling.
Lorini
5197
I don’t understand why Blizzard doesn’t just hire some of the top tier theorycrafters on EJ. That way they wouldn’t have to run over to the website every time they make a change AND they could even get their changes theorycrafted ahead of release!
Their class design leaves a lot to be desired. Why would anybody think that having a pure DPS class (Mages) run out of mana in the middle of a 5 man boss fight be a good diea?? 4.06 of course ‘fixed’ this, but it never should have even gone on the PTR in the first place.
I’m really looking forward to RIFT. They will have class balance issues too but it will be far easier to localize the changes to PvP builds without affecting Pve/Raid builds.
Ranulf
5198
Yeah its sad, my hunter is still level 80 but I’d grown to rather like survival spec in LK. Far more than MM or BM but I was slow to switch to beastmaster in BC too. My guild leader’s SV dps went from tolerable on most fights (gear issues mostly) to sub tank dps in Bastion on Tuesday. Even the DK tank was beating him on Halfus and the two dragons.
As for druids, I could tank ok on 5man heroics Tuesday, just had more taunts required. AOE is still crap and single target threat is now going to be a problem especially as dps gears up with T11 stuff. I will not be tanking any pugs on my druid and once he has decent gear I won’t bother with heroics at all, I’ll be gearing up my paladin and priest.
Druid healing seems mostly the same from healing in Bastion on Tuesday, just with lower mana costs. Not that I’m a fan of the current druid mechanics (or the healer design in general). We’ll see if I like holy priest healing again or if my pally will be dropping ret for holy.
RickH
5199
Actually, the point was that Blizzard’s institutional memory may not be very deep regarding the “B” team currently working on WoW, while the “A” guys get shifted to work on Titan.
In contrast, the institutional memory of hardcore, class-loving MMO nerds only grows.
RickH
5200
Yeah, I picked up a few stacks when I needed more VL for my 4.0.6 alchemy agility trinket that should have been in the game in the first place. Their spawn rates for herbs, particularly herbs that only appear in one zone like Whiptail and Twilight Jasmine, have been awful. That only results in frustrating farming, high AH prices, rampant botting, and stunted crafting. For Blizz to let this go on for 3 months and act like it was all part of their grand plan was offensive.
