While the nerfs to fire (balance and Aff as well) may well be numerically justified, I really think there might be an overall nerf to fun, mechanically, as well. Even a nominal nerf feels bad, but changing the gameplay (for the worse) ought to be avoided no? It really seems that proposed nerfs are almost a punishment to players who enjoy the nerfed classes—not so much balancing.
Fire for instance needs it’s uncapped aoe to be checked. Some kind of diminishing return, target cap, whatever. But fire is incredibly barebones, and without a minute combust will feel horrible to play. Keep the fun gameplay, tune accordingly.
Likewise for moonkin, the stellar drift “rework” seems like it would be a damage loss to take. Absolutely terrible design for a talent, but having the mobility in starfall was fun, it feels good. It’s damage isn’t usually problematic until you get crazy spread cleave value, but it could be tuned, without ruining the fun gameplay element.
Afflock… Well Aff needs a lot of help in everything outside of raid, you’re really just taking it out back “We’d rather you didn’t play Affliction” and putting it down. This really feels punitive. If the nerfs went through today, I legitimately don’t think anyone could make a case to play Aff as an optimal pick in any form of content—possibly bordering on unviability. Why? Why nuke from orbit when actual balancing could be done? Nerfs to focused malignancy, deleting SE, but no. The proposed changes are a universal nerf to a spec which struggles in most game modes.
Balancing ought to be balancing. Nuking a spec from orbit and effectively deleting it is terrible practice. Bring outliers in, or make those outliers the new center. But heavy handed mechanical changes feel so bad
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The only thing I really don’t like about Fire’s changes this expansion, as someone who has literally not played Fire in SL, is that they had to take the legendary that makes them cast Frostbolt. Not that it’s a huge ask, but I still think that’s just not fun for them.
Maybe Fire mages don’t mind, idk.
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And how much of people thinking fire or affliction or boom is fun is only because they were broken as hell? Most people get enjoyment out of having big numbers and being top of the meter, or globeling others in pvp. I doubt people are upset because the nerfs have fundamentally changed the way these specs play in terms of rotation. It’s all because they are being brought down to earth.
4 Likes
Speaking for myself, I hate Disciplinary Command.
That’s Blizzard for you. They can’t ever get balance right. There are always outliers and over-performing specs that they don’t immediately rein in and instead leave them in that broken OP state for an entire season only to bring down the nerf hammer hard in the next major content update.
The underlying issue is that, for the most part, the over-performing specs derive their power from being able to take advantage of certain core spec mechanics and how they interact with whatever Blizzard adds at the start of each expansion/major patch. For example Fire and the mastery corruptions at the end of BfA, or once again Fire and the insane amounts of cdr available through soulbinds and conduits in SL allowing them to have a near 1 min Combustion.
These are not things that can be addressed through simple number tuning but at the same time Blizz are unwilling to make deeper changes (either to the spec or to their systems) and so the result often feels exactly as you describe: a punitive nerf. In other words they are using a very blunt tool to address a much more complex problem that requires almost surgical, deep dive intervention.
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If your team can’t global someone, you team can’t win this season.