There is so much myth around what supposedly happened in Wrath - from both sides of the argument. Most of it is completely off and irrelevant.
Fact is, Classic is quite a unique and incomparable experience from a class balance perspective.
It runs on the final patch the whole way through
It runs on an engine that’s far removed from the original
Players engage with the content differently
There’s just loads of things that make OG Wrath and Wrath classic an apples and oranges comparison.
Add to the mix the completely made up rubbish people pull out of their ten year old memory banks and I don’t see value in the comparison at all - or talk of patches and nerfs that supposedly happened “back in the day” - with mysteriously absent patch notes.
To my mind there is a strong case for Blizzard to tackle small balance changes based on analysis of the numbers (setting average performance percentage thresholds) and from analysis of current class and role (not spec) participation. This should be consistent, comprehensive, and on going - because this is basically a new and unique game with unique balance challenges. We say we’ve all been here before but we actually haven’t, not from a game balance perspective.
This seems a no brainer to me. I actually struggle to see why it’s a controversial view. The only reason not to is that Blizzard are being cheap skates and treating this as a free title with a low development overhead. But we know that many people subscribe to WoW just to play classic.
I’d love for you to do a small case study of Assassination rogues in retail. Watching them from release to current.
They had a talent called exsanguinate. It was pretty powerful and probably should have been a top tier talent, but it wasn’t, it was halfway up the talent tree. Many assassination rogue players didn’t like the playstyle and used single target sims to make a case to blizzard that the talent should be nerfed(because they felt they were forced to play around the talent and didn’t want to). Even the guy who writes for wowhead assassination class lobbied for it and praised it when it was nerfed to 1/3 of it’s original power.
Keep in mind this made them #1 at single target dps, but they were trash at cleave/AOE. All the new content has very little single target fights. So fast forward to after the nerfs, and the talent is now in the garbage can with no replacements(because blizzard is incompetent at balancing). Assassin is the lowest ranking dps in mythic raiding 90-95th percentile. The lowest. It’s been that way for weeks.
So in summary. Blizzard is terrible at balancing. The communities ideas are really bad. The self appointed “simulation kings” and class leaders also have bad balancing ideas.
So honestly it’s just better if we know which classes/specs are good, which aren’t, and if we aren’t ok with being a bad class/spec, we can change to a different one knowing that blizzard won’t waste countless hours of your hard work by “Fixing” something you enjoyed doing.
I don’t think the ret change is the last balancing tweak they make. They won’t change every build but some of the ones really low on the representation totem pole will get small tweaks like the rets did.
Yeah we are. Blue claimed they weren’t going to buff Ret and then when they backflipped they cited community feedback as a contributing factor:
The justification they used contradicted their original position and was a copy paste of the arguments used on the forums for Buffing Ret.
Pretty sure, the way they are doing this is if you don’t ask you don’t get.
Disclaimer - I’m not saying the Ret buff was wrong - or that the community were wrong to agitate for it, just that it strongly looks (to me) as though Blizzard aren’t actively monitoring balance and are relying heavily on community discussion.
Given how cheap they are with Classic - this all checks out. So, I wouldn’t bank on more small class changes unless it’s stuff the forums and content creators agitate for.
Now Birmingham is walking out the door, I’d say “watch this space” on that one.
If this is something you want now would probably be an ideal time to push it. They seem to be building their action list priorities around thread counts lol. So push hard on the forums for this one if you want it in. The main person against it is now doing exit interviews.
Fair… just didn’t think they actually read the board. Apparently, I was wrong. I feel bad for the devs who have to now deal with the fallout of that… because just about half of the new posts are about changes to their favored class and the other half is hating on rets.
Good luck parsing through the garbage, devs!
It is… I’m tired of never finding an H+ outside of dailies on Atiesh.
GS doesn’t make a difference if nobody is doing them. RDF solves a lot of those issues.
not a great fight for resto druids so most go balance, since they’re about the slow healing of HoTs which doesn’t vibe well with the brutalus style chunking of the tank. I wouldn’t say overall resto is struggling because they shine on some fights…like council or freya.
Holy is very good on Algalon, but I would imagine most only have an spriest and a disc and there’s little reason to make your spriest respec if you have shaman to swap over to heal.
An overlooked part of that is that a lot of people such as myself diehard warrior.
A lot of these diehard warriors have connections and/or influence in their guilds from when the class was good.
Just because I’m stubborn doesn’t make my class good
It’s definitely not a top tier DPS right now, but the fact that like 50% more fury warriors have Algalon kills than ret paladins, and that it’s in the same ballpark of population % as most other DPS specs getting alg kills in these first weeks isn’t spelling doom for the spec.
I don’t think Fury is in a great spot in Ulduar, just that I don’t think that it is doing so badly as to demand additional buffs to the spec beyond the ilvl buffs on the gear which helped it a bunch by giving it access to more ArP and higher damage weapons earlier than expected.
Had they not touched the ilvl of the gear, they probably could have used a temporary buff for this tier.
