I know right. People talk about meme specs like they’re a thing. Most people have no idea about maths, burst, scaling, or any of that stuff… That’s what random youtubers are for.
Ret paladins and feral druids were viable before their buffs. No ifs ands or buts.
It’s not my intention to white knight Blizzard here, but I believe in being fair.
Anybody who has been a software developer (in any capacity) for longer than six months has either felt compelled, or been around others who have felt compelled to fast-track a change because it seems fine. Then everything goes horribly wrong and you get a stark reminder of why you have these processes in place to begin with.
If you’re lucky, that reminder comes in the form of a low impact change that is easily walked back, like this one. But you’re left with a hard lesson learned that, “Oh yea, we do this for a reason!”
That’s all that happened here. I can’t fault people for making mistakes and I appreciate more than anything when people acknowledge the mistake, own it, and have a plan for moving forward. Blizzard has done exactly that here.
We don’t need to run it into the ground.
Guess you suck then, my logs suck and I do just fine. Also could be you are not particularly enjoyable to be around which from your forum interactions I totally get.
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Yeah believe it or not, when I get into groups I argue with them about buffing under performing classes and they get just as butt hurt about possibly buffing them, my biggest flaw.
The problem is how often that happens.
F no. Don’t touch the specs. I came to play classic. You don’t do enough damage play another class.
Like it or not…all classes should not be created equal in dps for a reason. If they were classes with utility would far exceed play and usefulness than those that only bring damage.
Let alone why would you ever bring melee if ranged can do it just as good.
It would just be BC all over again…loved trying to find a heroic group as a rogue. It was a nightmare. Why would you ever bring one when every other class just does your only raid job but better or with added incentives.
No no no!
You’re not wrong, but we can still be forgiving. Everybody makes mistakes and they not only did they revert it quickly, they also owned it. That’s the Blizzard communication I really appreciate (and miss).
Wdym, ranged do it much better, the raid would be much better if it were 2 tanks 4 healers and 19 locks. Only issue is no one would get gear, and most classes are competitive enough to have a spot, that’s why most guilds will have an entire group of warlocks despite what I said.
How can the first response be, “don’t change anything, I want it the same as it was 12 years ago” when someone points out a blantant issue with the game, that was flawed 12 years ago, and is flawed now.
Every spec not doing the same d p s is not a flaw. There should be such things as support classes that are there for a reason and shouldn’t steal the spotlight.
Example, the day all druid specs compete for the same dps /heals etc. Is the day you just bring druids nothing but druids to the raid and everybody else just fills for loot min max.
Why would you not being a million battle rezzes if you all do the same damage.
…see my point.
There is no way to balance classic wow with utility. They shouldn’t even try to. Those people who played classic knew what they were getting into upon signing up. They shouldn’t f it up for everyone else by ruining original balance.
No one is going to bring a million Druids. Why would you? How are all these people dying? But sure, right now ferals do the 2nd highest dmg single target in the game, and they do the most aoe, but guilds aren’t bringing 5 feral Druids. Next…
This is a common fear but it doesn’t happen. In retail, druids are often competitive DPS but people still tend to balance groups/raids. You might see a funky meta in MDI (I still remember the triple hunter meta from BfA), but by and large nobody seems to care. Brez’s are handled a bit differently in retail, but they didn’t used to be and even when druids were doing well, groups weren’t stacked with them. Again, I totally get how it’s easy to talk yourself into this… but it’s just not a thing.
I’m 
with you that all dps doesn’t have to be the same, but it also doesn’t matter which class is on top and which class is on the bottom. I don’t need druids (or any other class) to be on top, but it just wouldn’t really matter as much as you think if they were.
(Retail druids still have more utility than most other classes by the way)
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Dps does need to be perfectly even, but why did a lock do 13,300 dps on thorim and an arms topped out at 8600?? Make it make sense, frost at 8,200?? Hello?
First Its not like there’s not a competitive dps spec for warrior. Its never first atm but it’s not insignificant. My Guild has a fury who does very competitive damage on thorim.
Arms is a pvp spec plain and simple. You can’t fix pve without breaking pvp and vice versa. Otherwise all those sub rogues should go back to one shotting just so they can stay pve viable. No thank you. I didn’t like playing combat in bcc but it was that or be subpar. Arms is not a spec meant to pve. You can but you suffer plain and simple. Just because some crazy decides they like to shadow step in raids it doesn’t mean blizzard should focus on making subtlety spec pve viable when there is a perfectly tuned alternative.
2 looking at top dps or even top 5% is a misrepresentation. Those parses are unrealistic outliers where groups are literally catered to that express purpose. That and it can just involve a ton of luck. Those parses don’t represent a typical Guild setup. Best to look at the standard deviation and how big the threshold is from good to bad parses to compare a class. The tighter the threshold the more stable a class is in general and the better idea you get if it’s the player or the class itself.
3 A 13k on thorim probably abuses the 20% haste mob. Frankly a 20% boost just doesn’t mean as much to an arms warrior as other classes. Additionally,Depending on the aoe available im on transition its not hard to see why big numbers come. Most melee suck at arena fights, aoe, and switching targets compared to ranged brethren. The sad truth of most ulduar fights. Ive played thorim as both melee and ranged and the sad truth of ranged is if you get lucky on pizza slice placement you never have to move.
4 A buff to warriors now just means a revert come ICC. When the available crit becomes crazy.
I agree with almost all of what you wrote here. I just want to comment on a few things…
This doesn’t really mean that fury is fine… all it really tells us is that your guild has a fury warrior who really knows that fight while others in your guild maybe don’t. Or that you manipulate mechanics that favour them.
When folks talk about overall class balance rankings, they’re typically talking about the overall average, which shows a fairly consistent trend of warriors being near the bottom. I usually check the weekly rankings that wowhead publishes. Here’s the latest 
So if your guild has a fury warrior who is doing great, that’s awesome, good job to them! However, it also doesn’t mean that fury warriors are in a good place, relatively speaking.
I commented on this with another poster, but this isn’t a foregone conclusion. Folks predicted Feral was going to do very well in Phase 2 and it definitely did not. Sometimes things don’t work out like we predict.
If Blizzard is handing out buffs (which it appears that they are), it doesn’t make sense to make warriors wait for the rest of phase 2, then all of phase 3, just to get strong. The same could have been said for feral druids as well, which are supposed to fare better with armor pen (as all melee will, I’d imagine).
If Blizzard buffs warriors here (and I believe they should), then I also expect them to stay on top of things and nerf warriors if they get too far out of line in ICC as a result of these buffs. Just as I expect the same for feral druids if the same scenario plays out as a result of their buff.
The alternative would have been to make no changes here and let it play out as it would, which I thought was a fine option, but we’re not going that route. While I may not agree, it doesn’t really matter… it’s just a thing that happens.
Nobody really loses if Warriors do more damage. At least in PvE. We’re all on the same team, after all. I’d imagine The Lich King might pop into the forums and complain, but we can just throw him on ignore 
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I just really wonder how they could possibly NOT see the PvP implications to the change they were making. The ret change almost convinced me they could make adjustments without looking like fools.
Buff everyone, by that logic.
I don’t disagree… but again, mistakes were made and it got reverted. 
Of course. Nobody loses if class balance is tighter. I’ve said many times that it’s impossible to get it even, but it seems they want to try to get it closer with smaller changes.
Now keep in mind that caution is warranted here. If everybody is brought up to Warlock/Rogue levels, content will become easier by default. I’ll leave that in Blizzard’s hands to monitor.
But as it stands, looking at that link I posted for Ulduar Week 12 DPS rankings (overall), it Blizzard chose to apply tactical, PvE only buffs to anything below Shaman, everything would be just fine.
I mean, sort of. They left in the counterbalances to the post-buff nerf, actually buffing feral even more, and just abandoned their stance that they had even over-buffed them in the first place.
Right, you would need to bring classes down as much as up or you’d destroy the raid tuning. And that’s not fun.
Hopefully they realize that blanket damage nerfs affect PvP lol still just mind-boggling that they had to be told that by external sources.
And I guess they’re just incapable of making the Naturalist change effective in PvE only?
This is a correct statement, but if you’re trying to make a point I’m not getting it. Ferals flat out got a buff… stronger than intended, but does it matter? Other than some grumbling that first week, the general forum populace seems to have chilled out and moved into the not caring phase of existence.
For sure. In this new world we live in where WotLK balance tuning is happening, I would expect it to apply across the board. Phase 1 was marred by the fact that it was very easy. It sounds like Ulduar is working out a lot better, but if half the classes end up doing another 20% damage, it could undermine that.
If (and only if) that becomes an issue, it would have to be addressed. Likely by increasing boss health pools accordingly.
It was an oversight, they admitted the mistake, there’s absolutely no value in harping on it. As to whether or not they could nerf feral PvE without compromising PvP… they probably could, but the general vibe I got was that it wasn’t worth the effort. Feral didn’t shoot up to #1 by a large margin and it doesn’t seem like the world is ending, so why bother making a change here.
Again… nobody seems to care anymore. Which is as it should be.
It just looks terrible for them to put out the buff, attempt to revert it, then pretend they never attempted to revert it or had reasons to do so.
Yelling at a brick wall does get old after a while.
It was an incredibly obvious issue with the change they were making. Sorry it’s stuck in my mind as a symbol of their incompetence.
Exactly what Blizz hoped would happen, I’m sure. They even tried some positive deflection by throwing munching in that post when I’m sure they have no clue how to fix it without breaking the game.