In the age of hero sub specs they can’t just do the flat damage nerfs to individual skills anymore when a spec is overperforming. For example, they’ve just decided to nerf the damage on both Arcane Blast and Arcane Missiles with the weekly reset because Sunfury Arcane is currently the top DPS spec by a fair margin. However, this nerf will also affect Spellslinger Arcane which is most definitely not overperforming and is, in fact, doing about 20-30% less damage than Sunfury Arcane.
How did they not take this glaring fact into account? They boxed themselves into a corner with their design choices and now they have to figure out a way to navigate this balancing quagmire without the flat damage nerfs to skills anymore.
12 Likes
Frost should have received the nerfs lmao
They didn’t care about non-meta specs before. Why would they care about non-meta heroic talents?
2 Likes
One, because it’s literally their job to care. Two, because it’s not as simple as just nerfing an entire spec anymore. What they’re doing now would have been the equivalent of them nerfing the baseline damage of all warrior abilities for Prot and Arms too just because Fury was overperforming. They would have never done that in the past so why are they doing it now?
4 Likes
Incompetence. They got used to nerfing just the spec and not the hero talents I guess.
5 Likes
Exactly! All of the balancing changes they’ve done so far this week have all been knee-jerk reactions to incomplete datasets all, no doubt, in some misguided attempt to affect the upcoming race to world first. Absolutely zero attention was given to the ramifications and wider implications of the changes.
They need to buff Spellslinger to compensate. Arcane only has 1 hero spec that is actually arcane themed and having that hero spec be so far behind is ridiculous.
Also nerfing Arcane Missiles damage when we’re already clipping the channel is beyond stupid.
3 Likes
This also affects PVP where arcane in either hero spec is not overperforming and just doing “ok”
You were born in Sen’Jin Village weren’t you?
1 Like
I mean, legitimately it’s bottom mid, you can look for yourself
Unless you’re talking about frost dk in a mage thread without specifying
They are balancing specs around a single hero tree. Its pretty obvious.
It was never a real choice.
A simple if-then-else seems effective, assuming it’s not already spec-specific tuning.
IF (spec = Sunfury Arcane) THEN
apply nerf
END IF
Spellsling Arcane is unaffected as the nerf is specific to Sunfury. Trivial code design (although the more branches they add the more lines of code and the harder to maintain, but that seems to be their overarching design decision).
Not surprised they picked the hero tree that is excessively fire themed. Blizzard really likes their fire casters.
The ol’ trusty mirror image trick.
The illusion of choice
1 Like
If you have to move around at all, the Mage specs are insane.
Or it’s as simple as they would rather you didn’t play arcane lol
These are the same developers, a few months ago, who saw a screenshot in a tweet about a Brewmaster who was caking red stagger with Dragonfire Brew to do massive DPS… and responded by announcing another nerf of Keg Smash.
No. The developers don’t realize anything.