Balancing PVP and PVE to a semi-reasonable state is extremely easy. Balancing it to an amazing state is the hard part. What we have in SoD in unplayable. Its substantially worse than any point in the game’s history and by a significant margin.
The flat 10% damage boost to two of the most overpowered and oppressive specs in the game in PVP highlights that the team is not equipped to make balance changes to WoW.
For example, looking at some of the top WCL runs, I can look at a run with a warrior and a shadow priest and analyze some of the boss fights and find that Wrecking Crew and Shadow Word: Death both contribute roughly the same DPS in said fight. Why? Because when a warrior has a bunch of raid and world buffs and crits a lot then you add 10% damage to that, it happens to do the same dps in the encounter as SW:D. But out in the world, wrecking crew is almost unnoticeable. SW:D by contrast will instantly obliterate over half your HP at range. It all boils down to how damage is done.
Is it ranged? Is it instant? Is it up front? Does it modify other existing abilities? Does it require ramping? Does it have resource or external conditions to meet?
Every warrior rune practically is some passive or ramping damage. Deep wounds was buffed to stack, which works great in raid but not much outside of raid. Wrecking crew and rampage both of pre-reqs of critting and passive. 20% attack speed on legs is passive. Flagellation, one of the only good runes, is still just a passive you enable with an enrage and overlaps with warbringer. Endless rage on gloves turns your 10 rage swing into a 12 or 13 rage swing. It all contributes very little compared to dispersion or SW:D or insane dots melting away.
What if instead of wrecking crew, warriors had a new weapon throw on a 12 sec CD that did similar dmg to SW:D? Their raid DPS wouldnt change but they’d be stronger in PVP. What if Spriests instead of getting a passive 10% dmg boost like they are, got a a way to stack shadow weaving up for their own benefit beyond the initial 5? It could be even better in PVE than 10% flat buff but it wouldnt be as good in PVP because it has more pre-reqs to apply.
Its a very simple concept. You dont need separate PVE and PVP modifiers if you just consider how easy or how hard it is to apply something in different situations. That by itself is the pve versus pvp spell change.
As it is now, warriors do half the damage of rogues and hunters until the last 20% hp, where they can then use a 30 minute cooldown with world buffs to quadruple their damage to achieve a stellar 4th place in PVE. Of course theyre going to be worthless in PVP. If theyre that okay in the most optimal conditions, of course theyre obsolete and unplayable in all the other game’s content.
Priests in SoD needed passive damage and got burst and utility. Warriors in SoD needed burst and utility and instead got passive damage. Its really a very easy fix to get the game to a semi-playable state in PVP. Also getting a calculator to someone on the team would help tremendously.