Is this a mistake?
If this is a response to the PvE DPS buff ferals received last week, why is this the change being made?
This affects PvP and Feral tanks, not just PvE Feral DPS.
For reference, Naturalist is supposed to be 10%, not 5%, but is currently 5% on live.
Edit: Update, the change was reverted as outlined here:
I hope there’s a bluepost on the way. It feels incredibly backhanded to drop this in a hotfix with nothing at all being said, even if it’s a quick two-sentence “We did abc because xyz.”
More communication please!
Feral either shouldn’t have been touched in the first place, or nearly anything different would have been better. I think a glyph for OOC to proc 100% of the time from GOTW that would replace/that you’d take over the Savage Roar +3% glyph would be an easy and reasonable solution, and be a lot more in line with the ret change.
Would love to know more about why these changes were pushed from a developer’s end!
They posted right as you posted your post:
But nothing about how this screws over PvP for no reason.
It also doesn’t really go into why either of these changes were wanted or made.
Greetings,
I think it’s fair to ask for some clarification on these adjustments, and we think this whole situation deserves a bit of a post-mortem as well, so I’ll bite and do my best to provide as much insight as I can here. I don’t know how satisfying this will be, but I’ll do my best.
So, What Happened?
Essentially the original Druid adjustments last week were merely meant to de-emphasize the “Bearweaving” playstyle and smooth out the feral druid rotation, as our original post highlights. I’m not going to rehash all of that here, but the original logic was simply that Bearweaving is unintuitive, has an impact on how your raid behaves, and is simply not something that would have been permitted to persist had it been widely used in original Wrath of the Lich King. While increasing or decreasing damage wasn’t really the main goal per se, we knew it would impact damage, likely dramatically for lesser skilled players in particular. For the most part, this actually was fairly successful, particularly for the average feral player who did not Bearwave before.
However, it’s safe to say we definitely underestimated the level of buff this would be for top-end players, and the net effect was that this ended up being a much larger buff across all skill levels than we had intended.
Looking at it over the next several days, our team considered several options and decided that the change with the fewest moving parts is an adjustment to the Naturalist talent. All told, adjusting the damage increase from these talents from 10% to 5% would have decreased the top end players’ output down from the ~6-12% damage increase on most bosses to around half that increase, which felt better than reverting the original change entirely.
As many players quickly pointed out however, this adjustment has much further-reaching impact than just a PvE nerf of course, particularly in PvP. This of course runs directly counter to one of the goals we called out last week for our first set of changes, so we relatively quickly reverted the Naturalist change this evening, which leads us to where we are now.
Going Forward
Having had some time to reflect on all of this, I think there are a few key lessons we can learn here and apply to any future adjustments we may feel we need to make.
Put these kind of adjustments on a PTR first, period. PTRs allow us to measure twice and cut once, and we should have used this tool to help us better evaluate both changes.
Communicate intent better for every change of this magnitude, including follow-up adjustments. This goes hand-in-hand with the lesson above.
As painful as this was, this is a good reminder as to why putting these kinds of changes out for public testing before we commit to them is a good idea. Ultimately our team are all humans, and we make mistakes, or may fail to consider all angles. It’s frustrating when these mistakes cause confusion or uncertainty, and frankly just isn’t very “classic”. We can do better.
I’ll start wrapping this up by saying that for now we don’t have any further adjustments planned for Druids, but we are going to be watching the performance of Feral DPS over the coming weeks and may look into testing and getting feedback on additional refinements to our original Omen of Clarity change when we stand up the patch 3.4.2 PTR to test Trial of the Crusader and other Phase 3 content.
Lastly, and for transparency, we wanted to let you know that we have been experimenting with some foundational adjustments to Deep Wounds and Ignite to fix the very authentic–but very frustrating–“Munching” effect that causes these spells to not stack properly when two attacks that add to their magnitude land at the exact same time. This is a tricky issue to solve as it will require completely rebuilding how these spells work, which is a risky change. Looking to the lessons above, we are going to wait until we have those adjustments fully fleshed out and can get them tested carefully on a PTR before pushing any adjustments to these spells live. Please keep an eye out for those adjustments coming to the Wrath Classic PTR over the coming weeks.
Thank you for your patience with us on this, and apologies for the confusion and uncertainty. This was a good reminder of the right and wrong way to go about doing these things, and we are going to do our very best to do better going forward.
Thank you for the long post Aggrend. I know it took you a good amount of your own personal time to write this as I saw the “Aggrend is typing” more than 30 minutes before the post and I want to say how much it is appreciated that you spent the time to communicate with the players on this.
I can only speak for myself but I’ll say that this was the right way to handle this mistake. Letting it rest and see with Phase 3 testing how this should be handled.
Regarding this:
I want to emphasize one thing here.
There is an army of players out there that will basically work for free at testing, providing ideas, and reviewing potential changes your team may consider. From simming to PTR testing, to crunching numbers for you, and doing all the maths, the players are extremely passionnate about Classic and if we sound angry all the time it’s because of the passion we have for the game and we do not want to see it fail.
Use this passion the right way, don’t waste it with silence.
Players are hard to work with, but the benefits that can come from it cannot be understated.
I am Looking forward to hearing more about the ignite/wound munching adjustments down the line, many people are.
Thank you Aggrend for taking the time to write this all out!
I definitely want to echo Mispeled here; we need more communication from your end as far as changes go. I have no doubt in my mind that you folks had nothing but good intentions; likewise, the strong reaction you’ve had is because the players also had good intentions and are passionate about the game.
I agree! You’re people, at the end of the day, just like all of us. I feel like moving forward, communication needs to be upheld, even if it’s in a minor way. A sentiment I feel personally, and one that I hear echoed often, is that anything is better than silence (nearly always, at least- nobody is expecting you to reply to every single forum post).
I also feel like you folks are apprehensive on speaking about a topic until a decision is made internally, and I completely understand why that is; it makes sense, to a degree. However; I think it would be more work, yes, but far more satisfying overall to have more back-and-forth dialogue. “Hey, we’re thinking about doing [this] because [this.] [This] and [this] are ideas we had, what are your thoughts?”
I think that nothing is more of the Classic spirit than iterative and sincere conversations between us; two groups of people that love the game. Let’s bridge that gap more. Let US know how to better work with YOU, if that’s something you’d like to have happen. I understand that General Discussion, social media, etc are all hiveminds of negativity, but a lot of that brooding is from us not having anything to extrapolate off of but literal silence. Even a quick “We are looking into this, what are your thoughts on ways to move forward?” is such a massive step in the right direction.
Thank you again for your time Aggrend, I look forward to talking in the future!