For me, there’s really nothing more demoralizing than nerfs—sizable, broad stroke nerfs. While almost certainlty necessary in most cases, the caliber of nerfs or meta influencing changes we’ve experienced in Season of Discovery is unique to my World of Warcraft experience. We’re the testers. I get it. There don’t appear to be the typical controls to limit, well, significant disappointment related to class competitiveness or playability. I can only speak for myself, but it’s for this reason I left a major title alongside many others. One day, I logged into the game to find that the character I spent considerable resources bringing up was far less powerful than just the day previous. That was fatal for my continuation of that game. Power level is a core component of player identity.
One of if not the greatest challenge for the Season of Discovery team is class balancing and playability with the introduction of runes. Personally, I’ve enjoyed the rune system. I’ve been encouraged to play classes and builds I’ve never played previously. There’s a lot more there to digest, but it’s not the main purpose of my post.
With great power comes great responsibility, right? For me, this is my greatest critique for the Season of Discovery team. No doubt, Season of Discovery is a significant undertaking, but why are some classes being manipulated under a microscope whilst others are being influenced with broad strokes? Who suffers the most? It’s your players and, well, your bottom line.
In a meta defined age of gaming, you’re making it especially difficult for players to enjoy their preferred class identity. Recently, I’m thinking of retribution paladins and their revolving door of best in slot items as it directly relates to ability modifications. I’m thinking of Raptor Strike for melee hunters. Shadow Word: Death for priests. Starsurge for druids. Consumed by Rage for warriors. Living Flame healing for mages. Should enhancement shamans dual wield or use a two handed weapon? I don’t know if Blizzard can answer that themselves. Ranged hunters? I’m just sorry. Welcome to Season of Emotional Damage.
I’m not arguing against the necessity of some or all of these changes, but I am making an argument for the clear lack of responsibility as it relates to class power changes. I understand there are many other issues met with varying degrees of passion, but this is the issue I’m bringing to the table. Please start handling your class design with far more responsibility. Take more time with these issues, and consider more than just that period’s hot issue. One class or specialization getting attention doesn’t mean that others aren’t worthy of a hard, long overdue look.
It all comes down to a lack of testing on Blizzard’s part.
They should have known that melee Hunters doing 2x the other melee classes damage in PvE and one-shotting people in PvP was too strong.
They should have known that SW:Death hitting for 1000 when people had 1500 HP was too strong.
They should have known that Starusrge costing zero mana on a 6 second CD and critting for ~50% of someone’s health pool from 42 yards away was too strong.
They should have tested these things and made adjustments BEFORE players ever got to experience how broken they were, because once people roll flavor of the month builds and spend 50-100 hours on them, they’re going to be very disappointed when nerfs come.
would like it if the frequent pvp nerfs were tailored with equal or slightly lesser pve buffs, similar to what happened to shadow priests.
that was a good directional change for shadow (and hybrid disc spec) and a good example for other class design. it’s not very good to completely derail a class’ best in slot set with changes for example
What if, and hear me out on this, power changes and moments of being overpowered and then nerfed and brought in line…were pre-planned to control the meta and get the powercreeps to switch toons and stay engaged.
Effectively reducing the impact of influencers while creating a higher demand for more and more current review videos and class discussion generating consistent attention.
Maybe this isn’t thoughtless, maybe it is a scheme that is working wonderfully. I kind of like the flavor of the week over the flavor of the month etc, and it is kind of funny to see people abandon a class and level up another just to do it all over again next week, you are being tricked into playing all the classes! hehe
This is one of the most frustrating issues that has arisen for me personally this phase. As a Retribution Paladin, this entire phase since day 1 has been nothing but a pendulum of constant changes. It’s to the point where you don’t know what your BiS is from one day to another. Not to mention the changes to playstyle and everything else that have come alongside the changes we’ve received.
We went from Guarded by the Light being meta so we could sustain our with Divine Storm/Seal of Command, to Art of War getting a change (which honestly should have been launched with from the start) to make it viable. That alone changed the gameplay of Retribution. Then they normalized Seal of Martyrdom and completely flipped our BiS weapons on their heads. We went from wanting the slowest weapons to the fastest possible ones we could get our grubby little hands on.
There has been zero consistency this phase from my standpoint. These changes are getting absurd. I understand we are “Discovering” things, but my current “Discovery” is realizing how unpolished these classes really are.
The other design philosophy I don’t agree with that they’ve done is the shift from BFD to Gnomeregan. We went from a raid that had an egregious amount of spell resists, which required nerfing, to a raid with armor values higher than that of Molten Core bosses, which are getting SLIGHTLY ADJUSTED. That just feels miserable that we go from casters being useless, to physical being useless, and them saying that this design was intentional.
why would you have week-long (or months for pvp ranks) grinds when you discard a class phase to phase? this is the real problem. why am i putting tens to hundreds of hours into a character then being forced to bench it?
See this? This is what people mean when they say SoD is Retail. Its what they do retail, they make certain classes completely useless to make you feel bad.
You can say these things should be obvious but SoD is a hack of a hack of a 20 year old game worked on by a dozen people rushing to service a demand of people who view Catacylsm as a fake successor to Classic.
I dunno, I hope they can figure out how they can scale up their team, but until then,
with SoD you are paying for the privilege of being alpha testers. not even beta… alpha. that’s the reality, and it’s why you’re seeing such huge buffs/nerfs in either direction. very characteristic of alpha testing.
This isn’t a possibility. Humans for the most part are tribalistic sheep and always were, before YouTubers it was religious leaders or other people of worldly influence.
If a YouTuber with a large following discovers a broken playstyle for PvP literally all the sheep will follow. A perfect example is all the terrible Druids in green arcane wrath gear pretending to be moonfirebeam from 43 yards away.
This is the sad reality of things. Season of Discovery has no testing available for it outside of internal testing and with all of the cuts made to the teams recently, I can’t imagine there is much of an internal testing team going through hardly anything.
Ultimately they need to let people test these runes without necessarily revealing how to get them if they want to keep that a secret. At the very least to make sure that things aren’t launching in a completely out to lunch state.
