You know how we do this thing every Xpac now, where Blizzard makes every possible wrong choice, gobbles schmeet over it in the forms of mass unsubs or general steep decline in all aspects of participation and viewership? And then at the end Ion steps out in front of a camera and say things like
“well… what we were trying to do… is make the game… better… and… more appealing. And, that can be challenging. Now, we’ve learned a lot, and we’re sorry, and, what we’re trying to do… is be more transparent. And listen to the players more…”
and then we get maybe half of a PTR of reception and communication, then total silence at the first turn of animal excrement decision making (dog or horse, you choose), and then we repeat the cycle, and get all the way to the end of an expansion before any acknowledgement that every choice was wrong and whatever it is they tried to make work didnt work at all???
Yeah its always the same old beta cycle man. The classes/specs that have consistent developers get massive posts explaining the thought process of changes every time they get changes which is frequent, while other classes/specs that have constantly changing developers or have devs thrown on it that don’t really know the class/specs in depth get very infrequent changes.
They also had this beta cycle going through Thanksgiving, Christmas and New years which is wild, they lost a ton of time from that and didn’t extend the beta or anything they just stuck with the same cycle lol. Beta released november 11th.
Ele/enh had a dev that understood both specs very well in TWW s2/s3, and I also think they did a relatively good job with both specs in Midnight especially enhance. Ele only needs a couple smaller changes (imo) like adding Flame Shock back, but even that hasn’t happened.
I’m not sure where our dev went, maybe got pulled to other specs or something else but enh/ele haven’t had any actual changes for quite a while now. Enh doesnt need much gameplay wise, its fun, but it needs some bug fixes (searing totem from totemic) and both ele/enh need better survivability which has been the #1 complaint since beta started. Can go back to page 1 of the shaman feedback thread and see people already mentioning it. Yet this hasnt been addressed at all, enh actually got nerfed survivability wise just a few days ago lol. The ele nerfs are also very very questionable.
Our class tree has been a very common complaint as well and that has not been touched once in 3 or so months. Obvious issues like removing Totemic recall without updating totem CDs that were nerfed due to Totemic Recall (Poison cleansing, static field) werent addressed. 2 pointers clogging up the middle portion of the class tree were not addressed, etc. We’ve given feedback for months only to get very few changes and barely any posts. It sucks for sure.
edit 2: The only “saving grace” is that they actually do a lot of updates to classes/specs in the .05 and .07 patches as well as the big .1 and .2 patches whereas prior to Dragonflight that never happened. So we dont have to wait an entire expansion or even a full patch before potentially getting changes/fixes at least. But that does not excuse classes going months without feedback getting addressed or acknowledged during beta.
I won’t nitpick your criticism… But I’m curious about the specifics of what’s got you the most frustrated/angry.
Sure, we can say the “sum total” of changes = excrement, but what’s your assessment of the nuts & bolts?
Are we talking Add Ons? Class Changes? Mythic+ changes?