From a melee dps perspective is weapon normalization a good thing or a bad thing? I was watching a well known streamer recently who said they were going to play a caster if normalization is in classic. I guess I thought that normalization was a good thing for melee DPS that use one handed weapons.
Can someone she’d so e light on this?
May not be the best person to answer but pretty much it nets to a dps loss or increase depending on how you look at it.
Every speed of a weapon had its own attack power bonus attached to it but with the normalization a 4.00 weapon will get the attack power bonus of a 3.7 speed weapon where as a 1.4 speed now gets the bonus of a 1.7 speed weapon.
Hmm. I see what you’re saying but don’t exactly understand what it means.
weapon speed normalization resulted in a dps loss for all that were then using the then-BiS weapon(s)
weapon speed normalization is like this:
all weapons gain a benefit from melee or ranged attack power equal to:
((attack power/14)*base weapon speed)
this also applied to all abilities that dealt weapon damage or a percentage of weapon damage
but then, weapon speed normalization happened, causing SOME abilities that deal a percentage of weapon damage and not other ones, to replace the part of the formula that says “base weapon speed” with either 1.7 for daggers, 2.4 for 1h non-daggers, 3.3 for 2h weapons, or 2.8 for ranged weapons, which resulted in a dps loss for slower weapons, and a dps boost for faster weapons
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in doing a little more reading, it seems that the only real effect was to Nerf very slowly hitting weapons so as not to make their AP multiplier ridiculously OP compared to faster weapons?
Normalization makes fast weapons better. They suck though so that doesn’t really matter.
Normalization also makes slow weapons worse. Slow weapons are the best weapons in the game.
That ends up meaning that normalization is a nerf to anyone who knows how to properly gear their character.
What the other posters have said is true but upto MoP weapon speed still impacted weapon choice with the general rule of slower= better.
I clearly remember my GM longsword producing bigger sinister strikes in Karazhan than any current weapon of 2.6 speed (which had effectivly a 19 dps increase over it)
You will still find in classic wow that slower still does better for alot of classes.
Before normalization a good slow 2 hander had a speed of 3.8.
That meant your attack power bonus to your weapon swing or weapon abilities was multiplied by 3.8. After normalization it was 3.2 for all 2 handed weapons if I remember correctly.
There’s a darn good reason they introduced this. Melee classes did absolutely stupid damage with a good weapon before normalization. It was overpowered. It was a much needed nerf. We will be getting normalization. It was vanilla. It was 1.12.
Normalization was overall a good thing because it let higher DPS weapons actually be an upgrade.
Pre-normalization, only 3.8 speed weapons were worth equipping for 2handers. The Arcanite Reaper, a blue crafted axe, was higher overall damage output than many of the epic 2handers in Molten Core. Normalization fixed that problem. A slower weapon was still better, all other things being equal, but weapon speed was no longer so important that it could override huge upgrades in DPS.
It impacted bis weapons comparatively to pre normalization. If you had a weapon that was slower than normalized speed for that weapon type it was a nerf otherwise it was a buff.
But more importantly what it did do was open up more options for upgrades because bis didn’t end up being the handful of weapons that had exceptionally slow weapon speed.
Not really. On paper there was more options but the slower weapons were still BiS by a margin.Alot of abilities like sword spec,seal of command etc still benefitted heavily from slower weapons.
Yeah the arcanite reaper for 2 handers and the barman shanker for dagger rogues were BiS for MC and most of bwl before they fixed it.
Slow weapons were still better but weapon dps was a much bigger factor after.
I remember as a fury warrior i wanted a slow MH for bigger white hit and heroic strike hits and a fast OH for fast consistent rage generation.
Normalization was one of the early “nerf pve to balance pvp” changes. It lowers dps under the guise of “making faster weapons more attractive.” Except that even if you take speed out of it, the slower weapon still has a higher damage range, so will hit harder, so will be taken.
No.
It was a design fail that clearly needed to be fixed.
The arcanite reaper, barman shanker and a few other BLUES that i dont recall were more powerful then any higher dps EPIC weapon from the first two raids, in both pve and pvp.
People complaining about getting hit too hard in PvP may have been what called attention to it but that don’t make it a “nerf pve to balance pvp” change.
It was a programming error / oversight that was made clear by extensive player testing.
Allow me to rephrase, “Normalization of hunters was one of the early “nerf pve to balance pvp” changes.” Because the hunter abilities that were tied to weapon speed weren’t instant cast, and they didn’t get changed for at least a couple of patches after the nerf to instant abilities.
I would also argue that if you don’t fix a problem until people start complaining about its effect on pvp, then you’re changing it to balance pvp.
Okay, this is pretty much what I suspected when I started learning about it.
Warriors and rogues are already in a really good spot in 1.12. Without normalization, we would see some really wonky numbers from those 2 classes in comparison to everyone else.
Pve’ers and pvp’ers both complain about how changes on one side of the fence negatively impact the other side. It’s been around in every expansion that I’ve played.
Is weapon normalization going to be a potential change in classic?
Just to clarify it really put the hurt on BURST damage not sustained damage.
All it did was make it so that you did not have to study weapons or understand the math to get the best weapon.
Certain weapons were better and did more damage so Blizzard made it so that they all did very similar damage.
In my opinion this was a bad step that took detail away from the game and was one of the first dumbing down moves.