Yeah dabbling in adhoc class balance changes “by popular opinion” has been patchy at best. To be fair, the Pally change was pretty mild and the least impactful and egregious of all of them. But I don’t think any of the changes were truly necessary.
Bliz took on Servailant’s suggestion for the Ret buff and got lucky (because it was a pretty measured suggestion). But the idea of getting class balance suggestions from the streaming community and then putting them into the game without even ptr testing them was - absurd. And we saw how that could go pear shaped with the subsequent Druid buff nerf buff fiasco.
While having multiple roles can increase it, warriors have 2 roles, and were still in last for a few phases. Another thing to consider, is that multi-role doesnt always mean unique buffs. Like each paladin has mostly the same utility. Perhaps one of them didnt spec dsac, but they can if they need it for a fight. The rest of the utility is still there. When the utility is super good, you benefit from bringing more of it. If you have 1 resto druid 2 feral druids and a boomkin, thats 4 battle rezes. Its pretty strong. 4 or 5 paladins is numerous Dsac opportunities, many back up bops, lay on hands, cleanses, salvs, hand of sacrifices, etc.
What does bringing more warriors do? Sunder, 4% phys dmg, 5% crit, and everything but commanding is brought by better classes. You bring 1 prot or 1 fury warrior for commanding and no more. Their DPS doesnt justify bringing more. The more DKs and locks your raid has the better, and other dps like ret or feral still beat warrior and bring a lot more useful abilities and potential to the raid.
We just saw multiple phases of warrior not brought for a very good reason. And warrior’s are beat by most classes even in ICC gear matching ilvl. THe only thing a warrior can do decent is 3-4 target cleave, and even then they lose to the stackable classes in that niche.
I don’t think there’s a strong case for nerfing anyone at this point. The approach Blizzard used was flawed but it’s an even worse approach to then go messing with stuff again in the final phases. The game has basically played itself out by this point and now is “the fun” phase. The s-storm Bliz would create by reverting buffs or nerfing classes at this point would be damaging to peoples fun across the board.
They should just come out and say they screwed up the class ranks and revert the buffs. I think its possible they even noted they could do further adjustments if they had new data that changed their opinion. With the #1 class being feral, and the #2 melee being ret, a logical team would revert them, or make further changes to preserve the original class rankings.
But Aggrend plays ret. He likely knew very well when they made the changes it would make ret OP with T10 and TAJ
theyre already competing or beating warrior in some ToC fights, they surely will. If prog matters, still revert the buffs. Why make prog easier? Why not just buff everyone to make prog easier?
The most sensical thing would have been to not touch class balance. But once you do, make sure the math pans out. Feral being #1 overall and Ret being #2 dps is worse than some Pserver shenanigans.
Yes, Aggrend plays ret paladin, it is curious they havent changed their mind yet.
When the community found it is spawned quite the uproar and memefest. Not everyone knows it though, so its important to keep noting it when noting how Ret is so insanely strong in ICC and still maintains its 11% buff.
Most popular class in the game got BUFFED in WotLK classic and the buffed spec is now one of the best specs of an already super popular class that a senior game producer plays. Like I know some private servers have cash shops, or bugs that cause weird things to happen, but outright buffing the class that the pserver admin plays? Wut?
Fury is in a pretty fantastic spot going into ICC. Retribution at the simulated DPS will have virtually zero impact on Fury representation. You won’t drop Fury to bring more Retribution. It’s not a zero-sum-game competition between the two. Each raid still wants 1 of each. Retribution and Fury have had similar DPS all expansion now, and will likely continue to in ICC, but with Fury having much better cleave (by ICC, Fury is one of the best cleave classes in the game). Fury representation has not been significantly affected by this as of yet. Currently Fury has better representation in TOGC parses compared to Retribution despite whatever utility we provide. Retribution is not suddenly a meta stacking class in ICC with these numbers.
Feral being #1 overall and Ret being #2 dps is worse than some Pserver shenanigans.
No, Retribution is not the #2 dps, and it is not “much better than Fury”. I’m not sure where those sentiments came from but they are not borne out in the sim data, which puts us effectively equal on single target, and Fury miles ahead on cleave (35k vs 40k).
Retribution is 5th on 180s, 9th on 120s, and 3rd on 300s. We are always at least 500 DPS below the #1 spot, on 120s we are over 1,000 DPS below #1.
The “Aggrend did this because his plays Retribution” arguments are nonserious and should be ignored. Why would Retribution be nerfed anyways before we even see how it performs in the raid logs? Sims are not the gospel.
If it’s going to cause this much of a meltdown now because of a more balanced top end of DPS options, then we just remove it all together.
I mean, even though I rarely DPS anymore I would like one too, but, casual guild, priority is already going to the one melee dps we have anyway (as it should), and I will be fine with just the epic version for however long.
Essentially this - and that’s all that really matter regarding whether a buff or nerf is needed.
Arguments around entitlement, or fairness are pointless even when the claims are valid. Further change requires concrete overall balance justification based on maths and population - irrespective of how badly it was done prior.
