And further to this - you can’t take into account previous expansion balance when trying to adjust balance in the current one (as some seem to want to do).
It should be based first on class representation and then on role. Essentially you want to make stacking and/or dumping a single class less attractive as a priority - then focus the same effort on role.
Having said that - I don’t think people will really be stacking or dumping classes for ICC. I am for an adjustment to the Feral buff as it was over tuned - but I don’t see it as a priority (I don’t think people will be stacking them) - I really don’t think there’s much basis for any changes to balance at this point going into ICC.
Blizzard shouldn’t really balance specs based on where they are with a legendary. When rets don’t have one, they aren’t competitive with top specs (neither is fury), but are pretty reasonably tuned with these buffs.
If you tune ret so that they need shadowmourne to be a mid tier spec, they are pretty much trash tier and not really a consideration for a raid slot without it, nevermind one you carry for 1-2 months until it stops holding you back.
There isn’t a ton of room under where ret is without shadowmourne before it is in range of specs that you just don’t even seriously consider bringing to raids at all.
That all said, I do think rogues should be a bit higher. If these sims are accurate, at least one rogue spec could use buffs to break the 16k DPS barrier of the top DPS specs.
Idk what you are talking about. When i raid on my 252 rogue the fury and ret of the same ilvl are competing against me at the top. The biggest outlier would be feral with 242 ilvl competing with the three of us in basically p3 bis. Other than that you’ll have your usual lock, mage, unholy usually at the top unless they suck.
I mean, literally any spec can do this when lacking context of the group. A person doing 95 parses in a group of 60s/70s is just going to win.
So yeah… they might just suck… Ret isn’t a top tier damage spec, and never has been. If everyone is playing and geared evenly, it isn’t near the top without the fight favoring it.
People continue to post this without any context. This was during phase 2. And continues to be true even into ICC unless you get a legendary. And legendary weapons SHOULD be an exception.
I think the funniest thing about these threads is that , it doesn’t seem like ret is going to be nerfed, so the only thing this thread is good for is ret propaganda now, they can use this thread as evidence that ret->warrior and get that shadowmourne prio, even though the original intention of the thread is to get ret’s nerfed so the op can get his shadowmourne on his warrior
best thing of all is, its not even true, warrior is going to outdps ret, the warriors are working for the wrong side, by going all in on ret nerfs, you’ve sealed your fate when they didn’t happen, the narrative is “ret is the 2nd best melee dps” and it can’t be undone.
Yes, they were actually trying to buff ret significantly, because the spec was severely underperforming.
That’s why it was an exception. It’s the only DPS spec that needed buffs due to not having alternate DPS options that were viable.
Honestly, in equally geared/skilled players, you probably give Smourne prio to the fury because it has noticeably better cleave, and speed runners save more time on trash DPS gains than single target (where we basically tied on sims).
Plus, I’m kind of expecting fury parses to pass ret on single target as well by the end of the phase.
ret wishes it was the same level as fury, the reality was it wasn’t even close, an average of about a 10% gap extending to almost 20% on the very top end throughout naxx, pre-buff ret is more around the arms/frost mage level than near fury
