To the World of Warcraft Development Team,
I’m writing as a Brewmaster and Fury player in Midnight Season 1 with feedback on class balance and how tuning decisions are being made.
On the philosophy of balancing:
The core problem is that there’s no clear target driving tuning decisions. Buffs and nerfs happen patch to patch without an obvious benchmark, and it shows.
My suggestion: use Raidbots/SimulationCraft as the foundation for balance targets. Sim DPS output is the closest thing we have to objective truth for what a spec should be doing at a given gear level. Set a target number, sim every spec against it, and close the gaps. There are obstacles to making that work perfectly — fight style variance, skill expression, real-world versus sim conditions — but those are just problems to solve on the way to the goal. Without a defined goal, you have no balance. You’re just guessing.
On item level and the player population:
Balance should not be tuned around max item level characters. The vast majority of players will never reach the seasonal ilvl ceiling. The players who actually care about tuning — the ones pushing Mythic plus and progression raids, the ones who feel these changes — are mid-gearing characters working their way up.
A reasonable and realistic balance benchmark is item level two fifty. Players who are engaged enough to care about balance reach this threshold quickly. A player brand new to Midnight can hit two fifty five within just a few days of starting. That makes two fifty a natural breaking point — it’s achievable, it reflects the engaged playerbase, and it’s a concrete number you can actually sim around. Balance the specs there. Everything above that is a bonus, not the target.
On transparency and player insight:
When you make tuning changes, explain why. Show us the target, show us the reasoning, and show us how each spec compares to that target. Right now there’s no visibility into your decision-making process, which makes it impossible for players to understand the direction or trust that there’s a coherent strategy behind the changes.
More importantly, ask players for insight. We’re running the content every day. We feel what works and what doesn’t in ways that sims and metrics alone can’t capture. Players have ground-truth feedback that could inform much better tuning decisions. Open the conversation instead of closing it with opaque patch notes.
On current Monk tuning:
Windwalker has been passed over in multiple tuning passes while Warriors received a ten percent damage buff and Vengeance Demon Hunters continue to benefit from unaddressed bugs inflating their output. Fists of Fury remains undertuned relative to comparable rotational abilities on other specs. Windwalker’s rotation is also more punishing than most, meaning the gap between sim ceiling and real-world performance is wider than it should be — which compounds the problem.
Brewmaster’s Master of Harmony tree took meaningful nerfs without clear justification, effectively making Shado-Pan the only competitive hero talent choice and removing real decision-making from the spec.
The ask is simple: define a target ilvl, sim every spec against it, tune toward parity, and talk to us about why you’re making the decisions you make. Right now there’s no visible goal — and without one, balance will always feel arbitrary.
— Mike
