Probably time to roll back the class changes, Rets and ferals way too high on expected DPS

“Buffs pls” :joy:

Both of these situations have also applied to warriors. Lowest raid representation of a melee class.

Fury has a actually pretty solid representation right now, at #5 most parses logged, they are just about tied with Unholy for the most popular melee class (291k logs vs. 304k) Ret is #6 with 278k.

Ulduar it was a bit worse, Ret #9, Fury #10, but there were melee that were worse off. Enhance #12, Feral #14, Combat #15, Arms #18. Only DKs and Assassination and slightly Ret were ahead of Fury over the entire Ulduar tier in parses logged as far as melee go.

Looking at Naxx, it looks very very similar to the Ulduar spread for parses logged. Assassination #1, Frost DK #5, Unholy #10, Fury #11, Ret #12, Enhance #14, Feral #15, Arms #16, Combat #18.

Fury has never been the lowest raid represented melee class. And right now in TOGC it is just about tied with Unholy for the most popular melee class. (291k parses vs. 301k). Even at it’s weakest in Naxx/Ulduar, it was still only ever behind Assassination and DKs and in Ulduar slightly behind Ret in the number of parses logged.

“Overpowerweaving” to perform at the highest level is literally “bearweaving”.

I would probably agree with you here, but bear weaving was actually prolific among top parses. After filtering for overpower on the logs today, I found it to be extremely rare. Like, single digit number of parses. And further down in the rankings, none of them are really near the top at the moment from what I can tell. Bearweaving was also a lot more DPS and caused threat issues. Overpowerweaving is only 75-100 DPS gain so almost all warriors just don’t do it as it is not even really worth attempting and risking a DPS loss for such a small gain.

Will TAJ get fixed? Doubtful.

TAJ isn’t broken, it is exactly how it is supposed to work. Seal of Vengeance procs from Crusader Strike & Divine Storm is what is different, and the DPS change from reverting that is less than most people think as we have many other proc sources and this constitutes only a small portion of them.

TAJ was always going to be over a +1,000dps trinket for Retribution. That is “blizzlike”.

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Not quite, bear weaving did come with a threat issue that overpower never will. Which is probably a significant part of the reason they wanted to squash the playstyle.

It’s broken from an intellectual standpoint in that it breaks literally all the rules about melee procs, but blizz waited literally a full year to fix it, and opted to wait until cataclysm to do so. It would have hit ret very, very hard if they fixed it earlier, which would have prompted serious buffs for the class as a baseline. They avoided that by waiting until cataclysm when rets got reworked anyway.

If they fixed it now, same deal, rets would need a compensatory buff.

I felt bad for warriors when that got fixed, and I actually had thought TaJ might be given the cata form for a while because of it.

Aggrend did briefly comment on that comparison in the light club discord, basically saying that the difference to the devs was that TaJ was widely used by paladins back in wrath, while the fiery weapon created a new meta of using vanilla gear and enchants forever (your BiS neck becomes an item no longer even available as well), which is why that one was fixed.

I personally think it would have been ok for warriors to keep that for blizzlike mechanics, but I feel like plenty of warriors would feel a little weird about their gloves and neck being forever locked into weird ancient items that happen to deal like 2 fire damage per hit.

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Bang on dude.

I personally think it would have been ok for warriors to keep that for blizzlike mechanics, but I feel like plenty of warriors would feel a little weird about their gloves and neck being forever locked into weird ancient items that happen to deal like 2 fire damage per hit.

Yah I would agree with this. It’s kind of weird to have neck/gloves locked into vanilla items for the entire expansion, one being unattainable completely and no longer present in the game. I was hoping that a munching fix would cancel out the DPS loss from changing deep wounds like this. Fury wouldn’t have been super OP if they left it in, as far as I can tell, but it would have been somewhat cringe gameplay.

I’m sure the non-super-sweaty Furies wouldn’t have liked that very much, to have their DPS locked behind vanilla items they may not be able to obtain, and it kind of has a negative impact on gameplay to wear super weak items that proc single digit fire damage in exchange for deep wounds damage. The one thing is Flame Cap/Oil of Immolation - easily accessible consumables that did originally proc deep wounds, not sure how prevalent they would’ve actually been in 2010 WOTLK, but they are more reasonable than the vanilla items - though I heard Flame Cap is possibly in the same CD as potions nowadays, so unsure of the exact DPS cost there.

It’s broken from an intellectual standpoint in that it breaks literally all the rules about melee procs, but blizz waited literally a full year to fix it, and opted to wait until cataclysm to do so. It would have hit ret very, very hard if they fixed it earlier, which would have prompted serious buffs for the class as a baseline. They avoided that by waiting until cataclysm when rets got reworked anyway.

If they fixed it now, same deal, rets would need a compensatory buff.

Exactly, it IS a busted trinket, but it’s exactly as busted was it was in 2010, with the exception of small amount of extra TAJ procs from SoV. We were tuned around it, it was PART of our balancing act in ICC along with set bonuses. And we rely on it now in Wrath classic more than we rely on Shadowmourne.

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That arms warrior did 12k dps for complete raid, with those numbers he would be the top dps in almost every raid, he is really the meta breaker, its part of the reason why buffing warriors is such a hard decision, the class just goes insane with cleave already

who cares about a 15 year old iteration of a game . just play it instead of doing math

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It’s a bit amusing to say Ret was tuned around this trinket at the time and then ignore the buffs Ret received in Classic.

Not sure holding up original WotLK tuning is the road you wanna take here.

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Not making any further changes that would screw ret over for the entire phase until they get their magical bis is the route any logical person would take. Just not crybaby warriors who are in an uproar because they do more dps than ret, but not so much more that they get hands down Shadowmourne priority.

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Eh, the design of TaJ is part of Ret’s problem in wrath classic.

Blizzard was actively tuning classes throughout the original wrath expansion based on current performance. Ret performed quite well the whole time back then, was never meme tier, and often was near a top performer.

The first time through ICC, ret was designed to be a top performer, and this trinket was part of how it got there, and the developers opted to leave the trinket as is to keep ret a high DPS class despite knowing it was broken.

So the developer intent was that ret does great DPS. If they had nerfed the trinket, paladins likely would have received more buffs to the class to bring them back to where they were in ICC, which the developers intended.

Fast forward to WotLK classic…

Modern theorycrafting and simulation tools are much better, allowing classes to perform much closer to their mathematical peak than players ever did during wrath’s original run (when the balancing decisions were made).

Largely due to spec and rotation complexity, along with better widespread understanding of snapshotting (which only some specs can do) and raid composition optimizations, most classes got far more gains than retribution did for the second run through wrath in optimal play situations.

When things are really unoptimized, ret was fine, if not great.

But the standard of play is wildly different today, and now a much larger percentage of players have an eye toward optimal groups, which ret failed hard at with such a low ceiling.

Ret looked better back in original wrath because it had a much higher skill floor than most, and very few people were playing near the maximum output of the other specs.

So yeah, if we could just make everyone start playing 10-20% worse again, ret wouldn’t have needed buffs. We can’t exactly do that though, so it makes more sense to give ret a boost to bring it back in line with how it performed relative to the other specs back then, rather than going with a new theorycrafted meta. It’s more “wrath like” that way from my point of view, than being hands off.

The original devs weren’t hands off, and wouldn’t have let ret fall behind on DPS like it was doing in wrath classic.

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As Smeet referred to, you’re missing the context: in 2010, we performed much much better throughout the expansion relative to other classes. It wasn’t unheard of for Retribution to top DPS in any of the raids throughout the expansion, for the average raid. Then we underwent major class changes and the set bonuses / TAJ were used to bring us back up to a strong DPS.

And again, as Smeet referred to, when most classes are less skilled / unoptimized, Retribution performs better relatively because it is so hard to screw up the rotation and an average player can get close to optimal gameplay, very easily. You see this same effect now in TOGC, just look at all percentiles vs. 99 percentile. Retribution always performs better in all percentiles, and in average 50 parse raids, and below that as well, than it does at higher percentiles where it often drops to the bottom. The higher the percentiles go, the further and further down Retribution goes, as well.

We were tuned and balanced around TAJ/set bonuses, yes, but we were tuned specifically to be a strong DPS class.

Retribution in ICC on Classic will finally match the player experience in 2009-2010. Phases 1-3 have, so far, not matched the experience of playing Wrath in 2009-2010, where you could top DPS meters or at least be in the top 5, because we perform relatively so much worse for multiple reasons: such as the massive changes our spec underwent throughout, and the fact that we are on the final patch, and having a much higher DPS at the skill floor. The lower skill ceiling didnt matter as much.

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you r making unfounded assumptions

they were working on cata…

They got fixed TaJ early on to weaken it for rogues. They left paladin’s interactions alone. Balance changes happened into ICC as there was a content patch months after ICC opened.

They didn’t just abandon the game once icecrown opened.

Your stance here is the assumption with less to back it up.

When you look at all the trinkets in the game on all the classes and look at their value, and then look at TAJ, its broken. Just because it was left broken doesnt mean it isnt broken. Its such an outlier that it’s clearly doing something that the general game design wasn’t trying to create. I.e. if trinkets for the other 9 classes in the game are 150 or 200 dps upgrades between phases and then one is suddenly 1200 for one spec on one class, something went wrong lol.

I think you’ll always arbitrarily support whatever makes you class overpowered and be against whatever doesnt.

Its been the lowest represented class overall, despite warrior being an EXTREMELY popular arhcetype. People will play warrior when its the worst class in the game because its your quintessential MMO barbarian character with big armor and weapons.

Paladin has been the most played class because it has two S++ tier specs via prot and holy and ret is still in very high demand as its the best source for the 3% raid dps buff + all the other blessings, salvs, bops, lay on hands, cleanse, freedom, mana regeneration, hp/mana seals, etc.

Meanwhile if you don’t want to deal with an imp’s range or make your lock use a less desirable pet you can bring a single warrior of either prot/fury spec for commanding or just drop it all together :\

Now, people will want to play warrior. The amount of warrior alts I see coming to alt runs or gdkps that despite being geared do terrible damage because the class is undertuned will always persist.

Same thing with PVP, Mages at 1500 rating go from 4% representation to 12% at glad meanwhile warriors lose representation, but it doesnt prevent tons of people from trying. Class has almost, if not the, worst representation arc of any class overall but people still want to play it because it’s a warrior.

100% blizzard should have not touched any class balance. They shouldnt be buffing ferals or rets. They shouldnt be nerfing shield wall. Outside of QoL or extreme outliers, like lock pet’s and pact or DK gargoyls, they shouldnt have messed with it. I don’t care that you Aggrend or you want to be overpowered. This is classic, not some private server.

ok first, fury warriors should be ahead of rets in icc full bis… rets cant even use armor pen and we finally get to reach hardcap… idk if you even read the first post but there is not a single spec that brings more raid utility/buffs/debuffs than ret. If having them top the meters seems balanced to you then you’re delusional.
Second if you’re talking about resto druids being the worst just wait until icc… Resto druids will shine soo hard on fights that have sustained raid wide damage… theres quite a few of those in icc

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Only because of the buff.

What other blessings?

1 paladin gets you 2% of kings, a second one saves you from using a warrior for might, a third one gets you an extra healing stream totem instead of Mp5,

Blessings are negligible dude.

Yeah, all of your needs are covered here by 1 holy/prot (which are S tier in performance), you almost never need a ret to do any of these.

Only a good option here because of the buff.

Think you mean the judgement, which don’t stack beyond your holy/prot pal’s 100% coverage.

Which is…?

Commanding shout is a longer range, doesn’t fade if the warrior dies, and is a stronger effect. There’s more gained than just convenience.

You mean they are bad? The class performs just fine now.

Ret was an extreme outlier, the buffs brought us to last place among the PvE DPS specs. It took another tier for the buffs to start making us look ok, It isn’t until icecrown full BiS (which includes a legendary) that it makes us look good.

Without the buff, very few guilds would have even considered giving ret that legendary to make them a viable option. Probably about as many as plan to give blood DKs one so they can play their 3rd DPS spec.

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This is literally you, not the paladins. The only one with an axe to grind is you and other petty, hypocritical warrior players.

warriors in classic ended as the most broken spec in history by a mile

this isn’t evidence of intent

pally probably just wasn’t broken enough for it to be a high prio

stop the bs

Not the first time around, that was a new development.

Blizz did not leave warriors doing triple the DPS of others during vanilla. People just figured out that they way over buffed dual weilding in private servers after the fact.

Common “wisdom” back then was that dual weilding was bad.

It’s another great example of later optimizations ruining the class balance at the time that was maintained from people playing worse.

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