I’ve seen this in so many patch and hotfix cycles. Blizzard has a tendency to overnerf abilities and classes and then only provide minor buffs (at a snails pace) when more are needed.
I definitely understand things are in flux with so many types of content and so many specs - but as a player it’s really troublesome to have your classes drastically changed from one tier to the next, from one patch to the next.
It effects what classes we find fun, raid spots (esp. on a mythic team), farming new sets of gear etc…
Can you please spend more time during your alpha and beta process to balance your classes as much as possible. This should always be a priority so that once live, minor number pass hotfixes only need to be made, no more revamps.
Been meaning to post this for a while, it’s not directly related to 8.1
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BM was nerfed relatively quickly after BFA launched, Shaman and priests have had to wait months for a basic tuning buff.
Spriests and shaman were left unfinished. It was rediculous that Blizz would do such a thing in my opinion. But even if BM was nerfed it’s still one of the best tanking specs in raid and m+
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He’s referring to beast mastery hunter, not monk tanks I believe (BrM)
I’m trying to think of a good example, but it’s not like I’ve been taking down notes. I know in legion, WW had a huge nerf to I think RSK and some other abilities, then over a course of 2-3 months it had to be mostly reverted. I remember jumping from low on meters to higher during ToS progression.
How about the undocumented change to spirit mend? 90% nerf. Bug fix. Whatever.
Those cases are especially sad, since Ion said during beta that the specs would need to wait for 8.1 because the changes were too big to just be introduced in a hotfix.
Probably a stealth nerf - which I find to be ridiculous at this point. Like we wouldn’t have found out about that, really?
I’d say the ele changes are a little bit more than a basic tuning fix.
The enhance changes should have been pushed months ago.
I don’t expect it to be especially popular but preferring to nerf over buffing also serves to pull back against power creep.
I’m not saying that the situation isn’t complex and nuanced, but from a board meeting level, nerf is almost always going to be the go-to option just to keep things from running away.
Fair, but I’d argue that ele could have had some tuning buffs to compensate for the wait. The enhance changes, like you said - are pretty basic and should have been implemented sooner.
After all these years, I would have hoped Blizzard would have gotten better at balance. I can understand there’s great complexity involved, and sometimes you just need to see the numbers and how things play out.
But really, there are tons of tools out there which let me break down how people are performing, and it should be a simple matter to be able to reverse that and see how changes would effect things. Mostly at least, I will admit it won’t be 100% accurate as changes can have repercussions.
But really after all these years how have they not improved the entire system. Tooltips should be more easily updated and NOT require a patch for the client. The ability to update tooltips to keep them in sync would prevent screeches when tooltip “updates” get data-mined, and prevent confusion.
Now take that, and start taking advantage of being able to update things more easily and turn those balancing knobs far more often in far smaller increments.
The rate of balance changes is absurd really.
The ele changes don’t actually do anything. They designed all the new/reworked talents around a spell that they moved most of the damage from, so the old setup is still the optimal one.
My sim dps has gone up about 1k with new changes. And will change my rotation a bit as well.
I also now have a mobility option (ice fury) that sims better on patchwerk than I did in 8.0 without icefury. Icefury is only like 300 dps behind my normal ability for single target fights.