Sure, and I hope so. But they explicitly stated that the buff was guided by community feedback and I find this a concerning justification. The outcome isn’t concerning - but the justification is and the fact they’re now claiming to draw a line under it for further reviews.
I don’t think player input has much place in raid balance concerns. It should be driven by metrics.
Apart from the obvious affect of player bias and uneven class representation, you rightly point out that players don’t have the best or most reliable and complete data.
Anyways - I don’t expect you necessarily to agree, but you’re a reasonable poster so I hope you can see my point.
This isn’t new though, this is how blizzard gets a lot of their info through the PTR and players playing the game. This case may stick out as a special case but player input from sources outside the forums has played a part in quite a few changes to the game and class balance.
Obviously if we see more coordinated crying receive similar responses I’ll modify my stance but right now I don’t see player input being considered for changes as a bad thing. Just them listening to intelligent reasoning’s outside of the forums.
Classically I believe it is based on both. The XT changes are a recent example(contentious for sure) of blizzard listening to the plater base and taking action on it.
I don’t entirely disagree but the basis of change based on player input isn’t something new to me in this game in particular, and it did play a part in this ret buff for sure, I just disagree that it was entirely or in part due to the forum posters crying. Otherwise we would have RDF based on metrics of forum crying.
No, it isn’t new. Though it is problematic and it is something they made a concerted effort to counter in Retail by using published metrics and set percentage range goals.
In classic they avoided it by having class balance be off limits. It’s now not off limits - since the UH nerf. So, I hope they reconsider their stance (again) and apply a similar approach to what they do with retail.
Thats because Ret is an offspec for most tanks and holy paladins so your getting 3 specs or 3x the people for 1 role. Plus why be a warrior outside of tanking, might as well be a DK or Paladin.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they did make another change, I think they need to choose their wording on these posts about changes more carefully as well. They use increasingly “final” language and it gets them in trouble a lot.
If their stance was more of a “we will make minor balance changes in extreme cases…” I think less of an issue would be had. I also don’t think classic has the human resources to handle a full on balance team beyond system maintenance and, well I almost said “game bugs” but ya know…
I don’t think each balance change to one class/spec warrants or requires them to change other class/spec or buff them if it really isn’t necessary. At that point it’s just placation and becomes a mess as some classes just don’t need changed currently and other classes are going to behave differently with end game or even next tier level gear.
They also seemed overly concerned with making PVE changes that could mess with PVP balance. PVP is arguable the one area that could use some fresh meta shake up.
Sure but it does oblige them to investigate the merits of each case - and they should also communicate that back to the community.
To be clear the blue post read like favouritism. It read like “we’ve listened to the bulk of the community and acted this once as a one off”.
Given the size of the Pally population this doesn’t ring a nice cord with less popular classes - so yeah, they could definitely have worded it better and maybe even provided more actual data as justification for the singling out of the Ret case. Especially given that they were backflipping on a previous decision. The justification from a non Pally perspective seemed weak.
Putting it in perspective - the Pally buff isn’t overpowering and they were underperforming - so it’s not a bad move. But there needs to be some justification around why it’s just going to be them that gets a look in beyond “the community wanted it” and the weak “other classes have two specs for that role”.
The amount of specs is irrelevant - it is the relative power of the most potent spec a class has in that role that is relevant.
As a Warrior I would have liked more detail on why they are assuming Warriors will scale well in this phase, beyond community feedback.
I disagree and I understand that coming from a paladin that would be the default but hear me out.
I played ret all of TBC and I knew going into wrath that the class would not be the monster It was in prepatch or for the majority of wrath classic. I rerolled to holy/prot soon after I hit 80.
It read as a really hesitant decision to me, and contained a lot of things about really not wanting to keep making changes like the DK one and the ret pally one. If the DK change had not been made or made after the Ret change I’d be more inclined to agree that it was favoritism for sure. I think more people are upset at the idea that blizzard find their spec to be fine while they made changes to ret which was just under the level they apparently wanted. The community pointed it out, hopefully not the forum crying but actual smart brained individuals, and blizzard took a second look at what was going on with ret.
With how it was worded and based on the very minor level of change they made (dps increase for sure but the type of change was minor) If this was favoritism I would have expected to see more of a sweeping buff to more than one seal and adding a glyph.
I don’t see this as weak, but I can understand why people who play “weaker” specs right now would be understandably upset, specifically druids and shamans.
I do agree that the optics of the change are pretty bad to anyone not benefitting from it and those classes that could use a bump hopefully get one of some kind.
I won