全 121 件のコメント

[–]LordBaytor 101ポイント102ポイント  (3子コメント)

I'm sure Priests would give constructive feedback, but by now they've all surrendered to madness.

[–]athrian 45ポイント46ポイント  (57子コメント)

The smart thing to do would have been to put these changes on the PTR and get feedback there.

[–]Ashendal 79ポイント80ポイント  (56子コメント)

The smart thing to do would have been to use the 8 months they had during beta to tune numbers with everyone at full artifact power and in full tier sets and get numbers and feedback there.

Fixed that for you.

Blizzard had MONTHS to get things right with perfect situations where everyone could be in full tier sets and maxed out artifacts to be able to balance things accordingly so it's not a shit show on launch but once again they failed to use the beta for its intended purpose, to test as much as possible, and we have the mess that is class balance on live. There's no excuse for it.

[–]Show_Me_Your_Rocket 21ポイント22ポイント  (23子コメント)

The smart thing to do would have been to use the 8 months they had during beta to tune numbers with everyone at full artifact power and in full tier sets and get numbers and feedback there.

Does that even work, though? With the way different classes scale, you could balance end-game to be perfect, but what effect would that have on earlier content, like now?

[–]athrian 19ポイント20ポイント  (5子コメント)

You'll never achieve absolute perfection under test scenarios, but the point of doing it is to iron out the glaringly obvious bugs and deficiencies.

If this was a true tuning patch that they needed to see numbers from live on, we'd be getting things like modifying individual skills by a few percentage points. If you have to for example buff every warlock ability by over 10%, that's not a "minor blip" that will only show up with a large data set, it would have (and has been) obvious for months during the legion beta.

[–]Treyen 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

The shitness of fury and the mechanical/tuning problems of arms were well known and had massive threads on the beta forums...went live anyway. I'm sure the story is the same for other classes. Blizzard just uses beta as a hype engine these days. That's why streamers are basically guaranteed an early key.

[–]Show_Me_Your_Rocket 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

That's true. I mean, through beta I noticed some blue posts in regards to class changes, specifically rogues, and just assumed the same was happening for every other class. It's pretty disappointing that some obvious flaws have made it through.

[–]didymus44 [スコア非表示]  (1子コメント)

While I completely agree with you, the beta is for this kind of thing, the warlock buffs seem huge to non-locks, but it breaks down like affliction and destro +~6% dmg buff overall, demo +~7% dmg buff overall. So, relatively minor tune there considering it's just numbers.

A more egregious buff/nerf is changing proc rates of major abilities, I.e. warriors. That is absolutely unacceptable in-tier and should only be done in big patches. They could have just reduced the dmg slightly and left the proc rates so it was still fun. I feel for you warriors.

[–]athrian [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Yeah, I'm only using warlocks as an example because I have not played any melee classes so I have no insight into warriors and didn't want to start raging about an area I know I am clueless about.

[–]joshychrist 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Also I wish I knew the affliction artifact got fucked up before I picked it as my main spec. shame on me for not researching every little bit and picking the class and spec I liked to be.

Apparently it used to spawn a soul for you to kill for an added boost of some sort. But they took that out but kept 2 of the 3 special talents focused on that particular type of thing happening.

[–]Thyrllan 12ポイント13ポイント  (11子コメント)

Parts of NH and EN were tested on beta, your gear and artifact would scale. You even had a legendary vendor for the end of beta. Class issues weren't unknown. There is a reason why all the top hunter theorycrafters were telling people to go marks despite the "useful" sims saying Survival and BM were better.

[–]Ashendal 4ポイント5ポイント  (10子コメント)

So why were the numbers and such not adjusted? If they had all of that info why are we STILL seeing these issues and all of the crap like buffs to under performing specs that would be overtly obvious to anyone looking at any parses from beta testing. That just shows they're even more incompetent which is even more unsettling.

[–]Thyrllan 9ポイント10ポイント  (9子コメント)

Variety of possible reasons. Blizzard have admitted to nerfing specs so no one plays them. Survival was originally going to get redesigned in WoD. End result of beta is they just removed two buttons. Then with Legion's announcement of Survival's redesign, it was pretty apparent they scrapped it until artifacts were ready next expansion. Survival initially did horrible damage, until a small buff and realization that an unintended interaction existed with multistrike. They fixed the interaction and kept Survival in such a low state that everyone switched to BM or Marks.

They also have a tendency to be very stubborn and ignore player feedback. A good example is Ret and Prot at the start of Cata. Judgement initially didn't generate Holy Power. Paladins argued nonstop on forums about how slow the playstyle felt because your only generator was CS and Judgement felt like a dead button. Blizzard ignored feedback until Dragon Soul, where both prot and ret had the same two set bonus, judgement now generates 1 holy power. In MoP, seeing that the set bonus was successful, they added it baseline. Another example is just Ashran, I don't really even need to discuss that one.

[–]Ashendal 7ポイント8ポイント  (4子コメント)

I think it's the stubborn thing more than anything honestly. With how much good feedback, backed up by math, they ignore or disagree with it's the most likely cause of why we're not seeing proper testing and even more so lack of any actual positive movement in regards to parity in DPS. You can't be that stubborn as a developer, you have to take feedback from your community or you end up failing over and over and over.

Also Trashran will never be forgotten.

[–]athrian 1ポイント2ポイント  (3子コメント)

Yep, I work in the software industry. Most of us are stubborn "no I'M RIGHT". Sometimes it's beneficial, sometimes it gets you a crappy product.

[–]Ashendal 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

I've done dev and balance work on two games in the past so I'm no exception and have done it on two things I really wanted to do and later backpedaled and did what the players wanted. In the end you have to let a lot of things go and listen to and act on feedback. It'd be ok if they really pushed one spec into one thing because the dev responsible really liked it but to blanket the entire game with it is just a huge no-no especially when it's breaking classes.

[–]athrian 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

Yup, same here. I did dev/balance on (of course) a much smaller multiplayer game. And boy were there times I was a stubborn asshole about things. Because they were my ideas, I knew what I was doing, and by god was I going to make it work. But I had to eventually learn that I can't make a game just how I want to play, I have to balance my ideas with my customers' wants. And how to learn which customers are worth listening to and seeking feedback from.

Edit: But at the same time, when I did make any types of changes, I had numbers, algorithms, spreadsheets galore at the very least to present and let people refute.

[–]caessa_ 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

Yup, they straight up nerfed Demo into the ground in WoD and told us they didn't want anyone playing it.

[–]CX316 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

And that, kiddies, is why I'm still playing Affliction >.>

[–]SalizarMarxx 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

Don't think judgement adds holy power now either. It felt weird when I played my pally. Don't care for it now at all

[–]Templereaper 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

It reduces the CD of your Avenger's Shield, though, which at least makes it so that it's not just "Press if nothing else to do, might as well get a little damage in"

[–]frogandbanjo 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Welcome to yet another episode of "Why Combining Gear Progression With Serious Endgame Content is a Bad Idea."

Neither the development team nor most of WoW's players are fans of the show. But it's a really, really fucking good show.

[–]Ashendal 1ポイント2ポイント  (3子コメント)

The point is to make it so that your classes are balanced for end game and then you can do tuning from there on live. They STILL aren't so we're going to constantly see tuning patches for the next few weeks once people get gear from the current raids and they scale off of that, and then once the Nighthold opens and we get tier sets that throw all of that into chaos.

If you balance it around "end game" loot you'll catch all of the scaling issues that will come about because of that loot, nipping what you're talking about in the bud and making far less work for themselves in the long run. (For example any classes that scale off of Crit will be able to perform at their max potential on all the crit they could possibly get off of tier set gear and accessories and trinket procs from that raid letting the devs see how they'll perform with "perfect" gear and adjust scaling from there preventing runaway scaling issues like we've seen in the past) Then they can look at the classes and catch any that are off by 2-5% and adjust those on live based on what people are having trouble with or some random outside case that wasn't caught because it's based on 4-5 pieces of gear and talent choices all acting in conjunction that one player found and passed around.

TL:DR - if you balance around the end game loot you'll catch all the scaling issues, fix any damage falloffs, prevent obvious UP/OP issues, and generally have a better balanced game from the lowest skill level all the way to the top. Not testing leads to patch after patch after patch of larger damage tweaks like we're seeing. You should never see a buff of 50% to an ability, EVER, if you ran a proper beta.

[–]athrian 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

You should never see a buff of 50% to an ability, EVER, if you ran a proper beta.

Just wanted to quote this for emphasis. Except in very rare or specific circumstances, if you have to change something this dramatically, your design or QA team absolutely failed.

[–]Show_Me_Your_Rocket 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

This saddens me greatly now that I understand the situation. Thanks for the insight.

[–]Madkat124 14ポイント15ポイント  (2子コメント)

Like the fact that the Ret Paladin beta thread reached near 1000 pages but nothing was done with them.

[–]Ashendal 7ポイント8ポイント  (1子コメント)

That's not true! Ret's got Divine Steed baseline which proves they listened to all 1000 pages! /s

Other than me being slightly salty about their overall lack of responses, you're absolutely correct. They ignored pages of feedback across all classes that would have prevented a bunch of this. It honestly frustrates me to now end to see a company as large and successful as Blizzard make mistakes that a first year company would make, AFTER 10 YEARS OF GAME MAKING. >.<

[–]Trinich [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

10 years of game making? They've been working on WoW alone for over 15 years or so. Some of these guys were making games like Lost Vikings back for the SNES. I think. They've got well over 10 years of experience is my point.

[–]RYCBAR 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

The games industry just uses betas for marketing these days, it's not really for testing. They do their own (Clearly unhelpful) internal tests, get it all basically ready and then drop a 9 month sneak peek to build hype

[–]aos7s 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

dont forget that they kept planning raid testing in the middle of fuckin work days. like blizzard really? you're a game developer you can't be scheduling testing that requires your customers during work hours. switch your schedules around in the office so you can do raid testing 6pm-10pm if you're going to do them on weekdays.

[–]Ashendal 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

That was just stupid from any angle. They had to know that they would get very little real data from that because of how few people would be around for it. Why they aren't doing invites to the top mythic raid guilds to outfit them with the "correct" gear (with partial legendary items across the board so not everyone has one to simulate actual live conditions) for their specs and have them do several encounters of each type (ST/Cleave/AoE) and pull data that way?

That seems like one of the most obvious ways to get info from players who know what they're doing and see what types of numbers the gear you'd be tuning around would produce.

[–]athrian 1ポイント2ポイント  (8子コメント)

Oh I absolutely agree. The arrogance and incompetance of Watcher and the other devs at this point is mindboggling.

[–]Ashendal 23ポイント24ポイント  (7子コメント)

Ion is incompetent for totally different reasons, chief among them spouting off nonsense that he really shouldn't. The biggest offender here is Celestalon, AKA "you're op, you just don't know it.", and his team who have no idea what they're doing.

Math wise it's not crazy difficult to sit down with a calculator or use a spreadsheet and balance out classes. Then pass those numbers off to a coder, get them put in, and then log into their private testing server and play the rotation you came up with. The class dev team doesn't do math (which should be overly obvious right now to anyone looking at the game), doesn't test or even play some classes (Celestalon had no clue how to even play MM hunter at a basic level and tried to laugh it off on a stream), don't listen to any feedback even if it's backed up with a bunch of math proving you're not balancing things properly, and overall just have no clue what they're doing.

I don't like Ion, but he's just someone who keeps having to put his foot in his mouth for saying stupid things. It's the class balance team that needs the boot and new people hired that can work a calculator and actually log into the game to try out their ideas to make sure they aren't steaming piles of broken mechanics that feel terrible to play regardless of how much damage it does. (And in some cases how little damage it does looking at FDK's before this)

[–]frogandbanjo 3ポイント4ポイント  (5子コメント)

I don't like Ion, but he's just someone who keeps having to put his foot in his mouth for saying stupid things.

FYI, the idiom "putting your foot in your mouth" means "saying a stupid thing." You don't end up having to put your foot in your mouth because you said a stupid thing. If anything, you'd want to (idiomatically) take it out.

I tend to think Ion tells the truth more often than most WoW developers ever have; it's a low bar, but, well. Sometimes it seems like he's doing it by accident. It can be refreshing occasionally, but unfortunately he doesn't follow up the occasional truth-telling with any clear, consistent "therefores" that lead to a better game. WoW's wildly inconsistent and largely anti-player game design continues apace.

He also benefits tremendously from being a lawyer who doesn't have to deal with any unified opposing counsel while also serving as the judge. Give any half-decent lawyer - especially a litigator - those advantages and they'll come off far better than the substance of their positions would warrant alone.

[–]heat_forever 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Ion is a born liar, comes from his prior life as a lawyer. You can see all the slimy tactics he uses, chiefly saying whatever the fuck will make people happy in the current moment and then doing the complete opposite and then pretend like it was what he intended all along. I much prefer Ghostcrawler's chummy "gonna nerf ya but at least you'll know why" attitude rather than Ion's "just gonna lie to your face and smile about it".

[–]Ashendal 0ポイント1ポイント  (3子コメント)

I end up screwing stuff up like that when I type quickly and that's usually how I post on reddit. (I have to go over everything for work multiple times to avoid stuff like that, especially when it breaks half of what I'm working on.)

Most of Ion's issues are he's trying to be like Greg, who did a LOT of the "state what's on my mind and tell the players what the intent is even if they don't want to hear it of like it" and getting tied up in his Lawyer background. He wants to tell the truth, even if it's from a certain point of view, and keep us informed but it ends up backfiring because players listen to him, go "wut?", call him out on it, and then he has to backpedal later on like we've seen a few times.

A little of that occasionally is one thing but it's every Q&A it seems like with him having to post on the forums with, "THIS is what I really meant guys!" with either backpedals or an explanation that really should have been in the original comment to begin with. Him constantly doing it is what makes me dislike him. Bring some notes on what you're talking about man, especially if you're in front of a camera.

[–]heat_forever 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

Yes, Ion tends to argue a point and will leave out certain things or flat out lie rather than actually listen to both sides, analyze things and then make an informed decision. Often he decides things ahead of time (or is mandated it) and then makes up twisted "arguments" to "close his case" rather than actually making decisions based on data, analysis or evidence.

For example, when he came out and said "welp, we're gonna cancel flying forever - fuck all of you" and then later when he backtracked, then came the pissy passive aggressive "well, you'll get flying but it'll be useless" and "i'm sure you'll get it in weeks, not months" when he knew full well it would be months. Just assholey behavior like that is what I can't tolerate from this dev team.

[–]frogandbanjo -1ポイント0ポイント  (1子コメント)

See, I tend to remember all that bad stuff happening long before he was the lead developer, so I focus on the distinctions rather than the similarities.

Greg championed Secret Data all day long, and called player feedback an ocean of noise where literally everything the community got right was just hindsight digging up the monkey who typed some Shakespeare. His contempt for the community indiscriminately washed over the (admittedly minuscule) subsection that actually did the work and could communicate effectively via the written word. His CMs would, just like now, strategically reply to mostly irrelevant comments and ridiculous unstable commenters to bolster their appearance as the more reasonable party out of two-and-only-two.

So, to rephrase all of that: it was SSD(L)D. The only difference I've noticed is that Greg would stonewall and dissemble more consistently. You could practically set an expansion release clock from his first willingness to admit a mistake from the soon-to-be-obsolete expansion.

I can see how Ion might rub people the wrong way moreso than Greg. It is incredibly frustrating to listen to someone talk like a lawyer from a vaunted position of power where they don't have to follow the well-established rules of the adversarial process (or hell, any process, even the more collaborative ones used for civil proceedings in Britain.) I remember his musings during the last Blizzcon Q&A about versatility. Those musings were begging for a retort from some kind of opposition, but of course that's not how the Q&A works.

[–]athrian [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

One of the most important lessons I learned when I did a stint as a game admin. I can have access to all the internal data, algorithms, and inner workings of how something works. But there are always some damned good, hardcore players that are so knowledgable about the game, they will know how some of this stuff interacts as much or more than I do (or at least can provide a meaningful, informed perspective that I don't see).

[–]athrian 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think Celestalon spends more time on his hair dye than his actual job.

[–]whatevers_clever [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Nah they use beta for their intended purpose. Hype. That's bout it. Oh and free of charge bug finders.

[–]LardUlrich 0ポイント1ポイント  (3子コメント)

Beta was only around for about 3 or 4 months, Legion was still very much in alpha development 8 months ago. That does still seem like plenty of time to test shit and consider feedback, though.

Also, keep in mind, a SHITTON of the complaining from the community comes from people parroting simulated numbers which are never completely reliable to begin with. Then there's also the fact that those same people are comparing the lowest simulated numbers to the highest, which right now includes some serious outliers.

A good example (and I know it's not DPS, but it's a good example of what should be taken into consideration when looking at sims) is Prot Warriors - they are vastly outperforming every other tank spec. Does this mean the other tank specs aren't as good and should be buffed? Hell no, with the exception of Brewmasters. Prot Warriors just need to be taken down a peg or two, and Brewmasters brought up to about the same range as the rest of the tanks - there will ALWAYS be a best and a worst of everything, but as long as they're in the same general range then they're all viable.

Nerfing a spec that is overperforming is also a "buff" to every other class, as they're less likely to be turned down for a raid slot since Mr. Overperforming Shadow Priest is no longer consistently topping the DPS charts on every boss by a pretty wide margin, and therefore guaranteed a raid slot - they may in fact have room for an Elemental Shaman (now that they're being buffed), who has plenty of raid utility.

I keep hearing people say "I wish they would stop nerfing things and start just buffing other things", and that triggers me so hard because what they don't even take into consideration how badly that would trivialize certain content.

tl;dr: Blizzard knows what they're doing - they are not perfect by any means, but they aren't the incompetent buffoons the keyboard warriors here on Reddit and on the forums accuse them of being.

[–]athrian 3ポイント4ポイント  (2子コメント)

Blizzard knows what they're doing

I really really disagree. You cannot have a beta for only 3 or 4 months when changing this much stuff. Adding a new class, overhauling every existing class in the game, on top of brand new zones, dungeons, raids, sharding/phasing tech, zone scaling, etc etc etc.

They were still scrambling days before the legion launch to get things fixed, and a bunch of bugs and issues from during the alpha made it through. Hell, the PTR build wasn't even marked as a release candidate until a few days before the launch date. From any kind of a software perspective, that is unacceptable. Your release candidate should be ready well before the release date and short of any catastrophic bugs, you start publicly listing issues for the next patch. If your features are so unpolished that they require massive, fundamental changes 3 weeks after launch, your launch candidate was not ready.

Edit: Even look at this batch of "hotfixes". They have supposedly been working on it for weeks. Now they're already talking about backtracking 24 hours after announcing. Yes it's good that feedback is getting through, it's very very bad though that they're so unsure about these changes that they can change their mind this quickly.

[–]LardUlrich [スコア非表示]  (1子コメント)

You cannot have a beta for only 3 or 4 months when changing this much stuff. Adding a new class, overhauling every existing class in the game, on top of brand new zones, dungeons, raids, sharding/phasing tech, zone scaling, etc etc etc.

They were still scrambling days before the legion launch to get things fixed, and a bunch of bugs and issues from during the alpha made it through.

I don't disagree with you there, but let's be honest - would you have survived another 6 months of Warlords?

Hell, the PTR build wasn't even marked as a release candidate until a few days before the launch date.

I'm like 95% certain the PTR build was marked as RC about a week before the prepatch

If your features are so unpolished that they require massive, fundamental changes 3 weeks after launch, your launch candidate was not ready.

You're forgetting that Blizzard's developers have to answer to corporate (which may or may not include the Activision side of ActiBlizz), and that means when there's a deadline, they can't really spend a whole lot of time polishing everything.

And again, the post 6.2 content drought - the longer it took them to release Legion, the longer we would be stuck in HFC with nothing to do. Yes, Legion wasn't perfect, but it's still the best launch they've had in YEARS (also, the servers didn't start to shit the bed til the DDoSing started, so that proves that they learned something from the Warlords launch, so they're not incompetent).

[–]athrian [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Oh I agree on a lot of that. Let me be more specific. I don't believe some or all of the people in charge of class design know what they're doing.

Activision pressuring the deadline is something I'm pretty sure happened. I do sympathize with the devs somewhat, they had this long content draught and everything to overhaul and Activision setting a hard deadline. But the thing is, that content draught would have been a good time to introduce some of this stuff. A more staggered release of things like the sharding changes, class overhauls during that 14-month period would have given them more time and flexibility.

I do agree the launch went much smoother than in previous past, I give them credit for that. It's troubling to me though that, if you have to make drastic changes like these so soon after launch, you better be damn sure of why you're doing it and have the data to back it up. It's great that they are listening, but if their justifications for these nerfs/buffs are so weak that players (who don't have access to the data they do) can change their mind within 24 hours, that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that they knew what they were doing in the first place with these class changes.

[–]TrustmeIknowaguy [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Not really. Having actually worked in QA with this kind of stuff in other games the phrase "a million monkeys at a million type writers comes to mind." I don't have access to numbers but I'm pretty sure there weren't millions of people playing on the PTR. A lot had access, but people actually testing and not just dicking around? I doubt there were really many. The PTRs population was probably at it's highest during raid testing and even then most people playing probably weren't fully used to new play styles and mainly still only played on live servers. Realistically probably the only population of people actually testing and trying to push boundaries came from guilds chasing world/ server firsts and youtubers making guides. So that's probably less then 100,000 people, and I am being VERY generous with that number. On top of this various abilities and stats on gear are constantly changing throughout the whole beta process. Also how do you even being to balance when classes have straight up broken abilities that don't work for stretches of time in a beta? In a perfect world it would be great for them to have all the numbers down but there are just too many things going on to reliably do that during beta on a PTR. This isn't just true for WoW either. I'be been playing MMOs for 17 years and I've yet to see a single one not have this issue.

[–]miseun 32ポイント33ポイント  (3子コメント)

I really hope they reconsider the Arms changes...

[–]albino_donkey 14ポイント15ポイント  (2子コメント)

They would just need to bring up the baseline tactician proc chance. I'm willing to bet the trait was nerfed because it was by far the only worthwhile trait to have on an arms relic.

825 relics with the trait were outperforming 850 relics without the trait. That was clearly a problem and needed to be fixed somehow.

Just wish they wouldn't have gutted the gameplay to fix it. FR nerf is whatever, it's just some number changes.

[–]DJSpacedude 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

If that was the case there is no way they could have fixed it without destroying the trait. It had to be destroyed or Arms would have been broken for the entire expansion.

[–]DudesMcCool [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

I just feel like it's really going to change the way the spec play fundamentally. If the proc chance is so low the play style feels like a mess.

[–]kissmonstar 12ポイント13ポイント  (9子コメント)

Well this should be interesting. There's been some good civil discussion about helping out felblade, and I actually hope they go that route. Felblade is a lot more fun than using throw glaive every few seconds after a rush.

That and I'm happy they are looking into SP. Those guys got it worse than DH did :o

[–]The_Rapid_Sloth 6ポイント7ポイント  (8子コメント)

I love the felblade playstyle. Its so nice to go from 0 fury to 55 after a fel rush + felblade combo, even better if you get 2-3 chaos strikes out of it. I hardly ever use felblade without comboing it with fel rush since that feels a bit clunky to me, and its fits well with the reduced fel rush GCD.

never enjoyed the bloodlet playstyle, even though i suspected the build would be viable/strong with the 200% extra as a DoT. It just doesnt feel fun to me.

Regarding the FOTI nerf i think people are blowing it up, its a 1 min cd and even in large aoe pulls it is roughly 10% of my overall dps (including the rage pop passive) and maybe 25% if it a quick pack kill. When you factor in the strength of eye beam/fel rush/blade dance i don't think its that big a deal

The fel mastery 50% to 30% talent change is more of a 13% nerf, since it reduces the increase amount and not base damage.

[–]kissmonstar 11ポイント12ポイント  (7子コメント)

Blizzard ran themselves into a wall. They HAD to nerf bloodlet. It's 21% of my damage on a ST. Meaning our sustained cleave on multi-targets was stupid high.

We knew it was coming, but we didn't expect throw glaive to get nerfed at a rate of 56% PER target. If they want us to go another route for ST, that is fine, but they need to give it a boost in the process. It would be one thing if we had another dps spec to change to, but this is all we have, and we got hammered.

I'd be more than happy to switch specs to felblade over bloodlet/MotG, but I'm losing over 10k dps to do so.

[–]The_Rapid_Sloth 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

I agree, one of the things which I think makes Havoc hard to balance is the fact that most of our AoE spells do the same damage to 1 target as it would to 100 (some even scale to do extra damage with more targets like balanced blades talent, 50% per target extra on ricochet glaive with legendary, fel rush 5% on subesquent targets with legendary) so you cant really change numbers to satisfy both unless the mechanics of some spells are altered.

Add that to the crossover of spells between ST and AoE and it sounds like a pain in the ass to balance.

[–]GameDesignerDude 6ポイント7ポイント  (5子コメント)

Yes and no. As long as ST damage was balanced around it, they didn't have to nerf the ST component all that much. They could have just made secondary targets take less damage from Throw Glaive.

Really, this was largely caused by the very, very late fix on allowing Haste scaling for Throw Glaive, which was broken for most of beta and only fixed in a pre-patch hotfix. This skewed the damage a bit too much, but honestly was not that big of a deal.

Also, you were getting that much damage total from Throw Glaive, not just Bloodlet. Bloodlet was 14% and Throw Glaive was 7%. 7% for a core ability is actually not that fantastic when you consider that 34% of your damage is just from one button (Chaos Strike+Annihilation.) In fact, your Potion of the Old War outdamaged your base Throw Glaive... The total percentage of damage here is not particularly an issue, and if they were concerned about cleave they should have nerfed the cleave (although that didn't exactly work out for Chaos Cleave, which pretty much has zero value in any known fight.)

Likewise, the nerfs to Blade Dance were misguided given that it was already one of DHs weaker AoE sources. On the top Demon Hunter parse for Dragons of Nightmare, for example, Blade Dance was only 1.77% of the total damage done and Blade Dance + Death Sweep was under 6%. When you consider Chaos Strike would have offset a big chunk of that damage, the value of Blade Dance is really quite minimal already. Fel Barrage deserved to be nerfed (again) far before they even considered touching Blade Dance at all.

Realistically, they could have solved this in a much less disruptive way. These AoE nerfs to Fel Rush and Fury should have been accompanied by buffs to Chaos Strike, Felblade, and First Blood at the very least, along with the previously mentioned ricochet damage nerfs to Throw Glaive. Nerfing the base damage on Throw Glaive was completely overkill, as without Bloodlet the value of it is pretty questionable. Nerfing DH single-target damage should have never even been a serious consideration, at least not until the dust settled from all the other knock-on effects of the hotfix.

[–]kissmonstar 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

Also, you were getting that much damage total from Throw Glaive, not just Bloodlet

Obviously, but without bloodlet and MotG, throw glaive goes down to poop tier on our skill priority list, so I kind of count it together.

Agreed on the blade dance nerf, wish I could get that point back on my artifact path.

[–]GameDesignerDude [スコア非表示]  (1子コメント)

True, but when you're spending 2 talent points to buff an ability, 14% isn't unprecedented either. It's perhaps a little on the high side, but cutting it in more than half is pretty ham-fisted.

Bloodlet itself probably did need a nerf, but that could have simply been a shifting of damage into base Throw Glaive to make Felblade and First Blood more viable relative to Bloodlet without really changing ST damage. That issue didn't really need to be mixed in with the push towards lowering AoE/cleave, as that could have been solved by changing the ricochet damage to be a lower percentage.

[–]kissmonstar [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

It's a pretty simple fix: keep throw glaive/bloodlet damage the same on the first target hit, reduce it on the other two.

But that still doesn't fix the fact that felblade isn't performing well for something that should be a strong ST skill. I'd be happy for DH to have a choice between bloodlet and felblade as talent choices, or even have one be strong ST and one be strong on cleave, but that just isn't the case right now.

[–]ddak88 -1ポイント0ポイント  (1子コメント)

A melee class's highest damage single target ability also being a ranged aoe, bleed, and slow is terrible design wise.

[–]GameDesignerDude [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

From what perspective? PvP? Not sure that matters here, since they can easily apply PvP-specific modifiers where appropriate.

In the context of PvE Havoc, it's not really a major issue. The Bleed is primarily thematic as almost all of their damage bypasses armor anyway as Chaos/Fire damage. There isn't much practical difference there.

The ranged element fits nicely with their mobility and as long as Momentum/Fel Rush/Vengeful Retreat is a thing, semi-ranged abilities make a lot of sense for the class.

[–]wehttam19 6ポイント7ポイント  (4子コメント)

The change I hope they go for Shadow is this:

VoiT still gains void form stacks while being channelled, dispersion doesn't

Mass Hysteria stops at 75-80 stacks instead of the proposed 50.

It nerfs us, but it's not absolutely insane as what was in the hotfix notes.

[–]JHuggz 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

Not enough. The only change that was really needed was the dispersion one. Everything else should have been left alone until they are ready to buff the other 100 Talents or redesign STM completely.

[–]KUCoop 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

STM removed from the game - shadow buffed

[–]ajrdesign [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Dispersion change alone would make it very very difficult to reach 100 stacks and sustain for much longer. There's a point just before second dispersion comes off cooldown that gets really sketchy, at least in my gear, and if I didn't have it I'd probably not be able to reliably hit the 1:45+ mark.

I can totally buy that dispersion isn't supposed to be a offensive cooldown so I'm fine with that being changed. It's the heavy handed nerfs to things that genuinely reward skilled play that make me really angry.

[–]Swineflew1 5ポイント6ポイント  (4子コメント)

Have they ever gave feedback so quick to hotfixes like this?

[–]BlackOdder 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

At this point we're doing their job for them

I'm just glad I play monk that everyone at blizzard forgets exist every expansion because then they can't fuck it up as time goes

[–]Swineflew1 [スコア非表示]  (1子コメント)

At this point we're doing their job for them

They're doing the right thing by responding so quickly. I'm not sure the best response is to be a douche about it. This is a step in the right direction. I'd rather not go back to them nerfing the shit out of a class and the class just forgotten about until the next expansion.

[–]BlackOdder [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Then they can admit they they wish to take changes into the power of the community. Not attribute it to nothing. They are still too quiet with their super secret data while the rest of us have source code for advanced sim programs that does a really good job. Blizzard not admitting these existing is moronic

[–]Mr_Thunders 26ポイント27ポイント  (1子コメント)

Thank christ. These changes seemed like such knee jerk reactions. Like I know these specs were over performing but they took things a little far.

[–]superfeds 12ポイント13ポイント  (0子コメント)

It shadow priests case, its that its only over performing in one very specific(if key) area while under performing in others.

[–]jacob6875 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

I really don't understand how all these classes are getting such drastic changes.

I mean didn't we have an ~8 month long beta that had raid testing/ pvp testing in it ?

For Elemental Specifically tons of people (including many top ele shamans) were saying how weak we were compared to other dps specs but nothing was done until this last minute patch.

[–]frogandbanjo 11ポイント12ポイント  (2子コメント)

As always, discussions that could be way more constructive if the development team would actually release its own super-secret data.

One assumes they're actually basing these changes on some kind of data. To the extent that the changes seem to be failing to impress or outright pissing off well-established simmers and theorycrafters in various communities, one assumes they're starting from different information.

If we don't accept that assumption, then we're left with other, far less confidence-inspiring assumptions.

[–]Popstar_Poptart -1ポイント0ポイント  (1子コメント)

There already is warcraftlogs. Although it may not be perfect, we can see an outline of the problems.

[–]frogandbanjo [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

...I think you missed my point entirely. The WoW development team has a long history of claiming that its own internal data is different from, and superior to, any data to which the community actually has access.

If the development team released whatever internal data it was using as a basis for these changes, that would certainly provide the community with better materials with which to create and conduct constructive comments and conversations.

I think the fear from the developers is that it would expose them to a whole new wave of legitimate criticisms, even before we entertain the crazy idea of them releasing not just their internal data, but also their reactions to said data, and their notes on how they think their proposed changes are going to change that data.

[–]Tyr2307 3ポイント4ポイント  (1子コメント)

Personally I'm hoping they change the nerfs to Prot Warriors, so instead of having us be rage starved, reduce the Ignore Pain to 80% reduction at first and then take it from there. I don't think the problem is in having 100% uptime on it, we're an absorbtion tank after all with no self healing outwith a talent or killing something, the problem is in reducing so much damage that we barely need any healing at all.

[–]Dralas64 [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Yeah I agree that Ignore Pain shield should be targeted; not the rage generation. No one that's sane would believe that protection warrior is balanced right now, but I think there are better ways to adjust rather than hurting our rage generation, especially in a Rage From Damage Taken model (that was used back in Burning Crusade, and historically has always been problematic because the less damage a warrior takes, the less rage he has, so less abilities, and the cycle feeds on itself). The vengeance talent gives protection warriors something to watch for and use to be efficient. If vengeance is changed to the currently proposed hotfix, it won't be used for that anymore.

Instead it'll be used for fishing for ultimatum procs and then use those to get shield reductions. No more buff management + rage management.

[–]Felinomancy 16ポイント17ポイント  (0子コメント)

That's just Blizzspeak for "for fuck's sake, the world's not going to end".

[–]pouou 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Please buff survival mastery

[–]ICantSurvivee 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

Are all of the hotfixes already live, or will they be coming Tuesday?

[–]Xunae 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

everything outlined in yesterday's post is coming tuesday

[–]ThisIsCobb 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

This literally makes me so happy holy shit please revise the shadow nerfs!

[–]sethot 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

As a shadowpriest, i would really like to see Void Torrent unchanged. Otherwise it would really feel like a dumb/useless ability. I really understand for Dispersion though as it is already a tremendous defensive cooldown on a short timer and to have this versatility of being used as an offensive cooldown seems way too strong. I'm also ok with Mass Hysteria but please, don't ruin the artifact ability.

[–]didymus44 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

I wonder if they'll consider increasing the projectile speed of chaos bolt. Even with the upcoming buffs, chaos bolt isn't the MoP monster it used to be. This wouldn't be a damage buff per-se, but it would indirectly raise our damage a bit.

I don't know about other locks, but I'm constantly getting sniped by pyroblasts, sidewinders, marked shots, etc. Hell, I got a warrior friend to stand beside me ~30 yards from a target dummy and when I began casting chaos bolt, he ran (not charged) to the dummy and easily beat my chaos bolt. That's too slow.

I noticed losing a ton of damage especially on the Xavius fight and others because of this. I'd havoc one far away add (instant cast ~1second gcd), cast chaos bolt a different far away add(1.9seconds with my haste), watch it fly for ~3-4 seconds only to see instant cast pyroblasts/hunter things fly by and both bolts tunnel into corpses. That essentially was 5-8 seconds completely wasted because...cool factor?

What's the reasoning behind the ridiculously slow projectile speed of chaos bolt?

Obviously as a caster, this is to be expected from time to time, but I'm seeing it constantly. Mythic dungeons, raids, whatever. I invested a lot of time into that chaos bolt only to have an instant cast spell that not only hits harder, but flies significantly faster beat me to it. What gives?

[–]Numbajuan [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

I'd be fine as a Prot Warrior if they just nerfed Ignore Pain by a significant amount instead of reducing our rage generation and basically just completely gimping us.

[–]Juicenewton248 7ポイント8ポイント  (4子コメント)

I just hope they buff something else in place for havoc, bloodlet was broken but i hated the playstyle ( im a melee class not an affliction warlock)

but felblade and first blood along with the entire 108 talent tier are total trash, also demon blades still needs to be reworked as that talent should not be a thing to begin with

[–]wehrmann_tx 7ポイント8ポイント  (3子コメント)

It's a bleed with charges. It wasn't a dot to manage. It's damage was added to the previous dot so there was no management needed other than don't let it hit 2 charges.

[–]NullMarker -5ポイント-4ポイント  (2子コメント)

Some people don't like playing a high mobility melee class and have a huge chunk of their damage come from a ranged attack and its DOT.

Edit: Wow, getting downvoted for disliking a talent option. Nice.

[–]Kibblebitz 7ポイント8ポイント  (1子コメント)

I liked it. You can hit it right after a charge to fill in a GCD while getting back into melee range. And I don't mean massively overshooting your target, but it's not rare to be just a little out of melee range after a charge, especially when dealing with non-bosses. It allows us to always be doing something with a melee class that relies on using our movement tools liberally for offense.

[–]NullMarker 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Fair enough. I just feel that needing a ranged GCD filler at all is the clunkiest aspect of the build. The idea of Momentum is that the buff makes up for the lost damage and then some.

I'm just hoping that with Throw Glaive and Bloodlet not being such a huge component, Momentum can be buffed to return that damage in the melee rotation and better make up for being out of range without needing the filler.

[–]tootiecashew 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

simple fix for DH - make bloodlet only effect the 1st mob hit - that way it lowers aoe dmg but doesnt mess up single target

[–]Popstar_Poptart 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

Or keep it as cleave only talent and actually buff the ST talent?

[–]keithstonee 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Throw glaive should just do less damage to each subsequent target hit. Same with fel Rush IMO. I was surprised the first time I looked at those abilities and they weren't already like that.

[–]Rhailian [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Well, it kinda looked like shadow was finally going to have a good exp, seems like it's going to be just like all the others. Tired of being the underdog, too lazy to do a reroll this far in, I'm out. Maybe in six months or so I'll try a new class, I'll need to rest from the game for a while. Sucks, was having fun.

[–]isseidoki [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

pls dont go through with echo slam nerf i want to keep doing naughty things to people

[–]PhartSauce -1ポイント0ポイント  (2子コメント)

Key words here "constructive discussions". All these overly dramatic posts about this being the end of the world for certain classes are not doing anything to help their cause.

[–]athrian 26ポイント27ポイント  (1子コメント)

It's their own fault for spending weeks saying "we're going to tune things, but we can't tell you specifics", then dumping a huge list of changes at the start of a weekend 4 days before it's going to be released. They have a public test server but for whatever reason are incredibly stubborn about using it for constructive testing and feedback.

[–]paige_the_runner 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

at the start of a weekend 4 days before it's going to be released

Well, at least this is better than dumping it on us Monday. This way they can at least see feedback and have the options to react to it if they so choose.