Patch 5.3 interview with Ghostcrawler
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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsUpcoming class and item balance changes
by Adam Holisky 
Jan 7th 2010 at 8:17PM
There has been a lot of good discussion lately concerning various aspects of the DPS status quo. Some classes are putting out too much compared to their cloth counterparts, and others have suddenly found themselves too powerful in certain areas of the game. Blizzard recognizes this, and this evening the Lead System Designer, Ghostcrawler, came out and enumerated a few things Blizzard believes are true.
Ghostcrawler has left the door open to these class and item balance issues being fixed (if Blizzard decides to pursue such fixes) in either a hotfix or through an upcoming patch. Chief among these changes are an increase in warlock DPS, a decrease in rogue DPS, a change in protection warriors to limit their utility in PvP, and refinements to Icecrown Citadel weapon procs.
When looking over this laundry list of areas to change, it's important to remember that Ghostcrawler is not promising a fix, and that he and his team are not ready to share specifics. He has not promised you the pony, so don't be mad if some of these changes don't happen.
Ghostcrawler's full statement after the break.
Ghostcrawler has left the door open to these class and item balance issues being fixed (if Blizzard decides to pursue such fixes) in either a hotfix or through an upcoming patch. Chief among these changes are an increase in warlock DPS, a decrease in rogue DPS, a change in protection warriors to limit their utility in PvP, and refinements to Icecrown Citadel weapon procs.
When looking over this laundry list of areas to change, it's important to remember that Ghostcrawler is not promising a fix, and that he and his team are not ready to share specifics. He has not promised you the pony, so don't be mad if some of these changes don't happen.
Ghostcrawler's full statement after the break.
From Ghostcrawler:
As many of you have suspected, we think rogue damage is too high. We will be making hotfixes to lower the maximum damage output of Assassination and Combat rogues. The Combat nerf will be slight. Both specs should still do just fine on damage meters (assuming skill, gear etc.) but shouldn't be beating out other specs to such a large degree.
Other things on our radar that you might see soon -- none of these are promises and we have no specific changes to announce yet:
- Warlock damage in PvE is a little low.
- Protection warriors have too much utility and damage for PvP. (We don't want to hurt their tanking in PvE of course.)
- We are considering adjusting (not replacing) the Elemental 4 piece Tier 10 set bonus.
- We'll continue to refine and look at the Icecrown weapon procs.
- Other stuff (yes, we've heard your concerns), but these are the big things we are focusing on at this time.
We usually don't make such general announcements before we're ready to share the specifics, so we'll see how this works out.
Filed under: Patches, News items
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 9)
scherbaddie Jan 7th 2010 10:17PM
wut? single target trash (e.g. giant skeletons at start of ICC, or VoA trash) should be just as good as single target bosses - they don't die too quickly to properly sort a rotation.
Arbolamante Jan 8th 2010 11:37AM
I leveled a resto druid up to 80 before dual specs came out, so when I started leveling a lock I thought "Hey, this is great - I can actually kill stuff!" But then I got to 80 and hitting the heroics and became a little bit of a sad puppy when I saw the dps that other folks were doing. "Hey, wait just another sec to kill that thing so I can get some damage in!" Affliction in particular - switched over to destruction and things got better, but still not so great.
Mihn Jan 7th 2010 8:36PM
"As many of you have suspected, we think rogue damage is too high. We will be making hotfixes to lower the maximum damage output of Assassination and Combat rogues. The Combat nerf will be slight. Both specs should still do just fine on damage meters (assuming skill, gear etc.) but shouldn't be beating out other specs to such a large degree."
/facepalm
The Old Republic cant come out fast enough.
StalkerofFlames Jan 7th 2010 8:52PM
Oh so true. I was actually getting invites for a few weeks... but who cares, I lived like this for 5 years, why stop now.
jfofla Jan 7th 2010 10:01PM
The Old Republic
Aion
Warhammer
Age of Conan
The wannabes and pretenders have many names,
but there is only One Game.
One Game to Rule Them All!
SamLowry Jan 7th 2010 10:16PM
...which is run by folks with well-lubed heads, to ease reentry back into their derrieres.
Snuzzle Jan 7th 2010 11:46PM
Five years? Really? All that shows me is you definitely didn't play in Vanilla wow.
Remember "World of Roguecraft"? Remember "full on rogues" because there were so damned many of them? And why were there so many? Because they were massively overpowered.
Rogues were kings of physical DPS. Mages were kings of magic DPS. That was just the way it was for about the first year or so of WoW.
Then the devs realized the game would be more fun if people actually had more than two DPS classes to chose from that performed well, so everyone else got buffed.
Except for Warlocks. That comes later. Sorry warlocks. :(
Legolastom Jan 8th 2010 4:02AM
Please do not compare a Bioware RPG to those games.
Raze Jan 7th 2010 8:40PM
I think this "class balance" pipedream is a waste of effort. More work needs to go towards making this game fun and adding new content instead of making sure it's "perfectly balanced". The only reason everyone gets so bent out of shape about it is because these ceaseless, far-too-frequent class changes have got it in everyone's head that it's actually possible to perfectly balance 30 different talent trees across at least five different styles of gameplay.
It'll never happen, and as soon as Ghostcrawler and the rest of the team get that in their heads, the better off WoW will be.
Jeff Jan 7th 2010 9:06PM
Ghostcrawler != people who develop new content for Wow. Ghostcrawler tries to make the content we have better.
Besides that, balancing the game is very important, who would want to run raids that consisted entirely of prot paladins, rogues, and whatever the OP ranged DPS class of the week (I heal so I don't look at DPS meters) is? That would not make WoW more fun.
ToyChristopher Jan 7th 2010 9:09PM
I'm not sure it is true that Ghostcrawler doesn't help develop new content for WoW. From watching Blizzcon is sure seems like he does.
It's hard to say that it feels like they change too many classes when some classes feel untouched and forgotten.
Raze Jan 7th 2010 9:24PM
If fun = being the absolute best at everything, at the exclusion of anything else, than I think your idea of fun and my idea of fun are two completely different things. Fun to me is playing a class you love and doing so well. It's entirely possible, if you've got well practiced, talented players, a bunch of people who don't take this game as seriously as so many seem to, and lots of patience to finish any and all of the game's PVE content, hard modes included, rather you're using so called "gimped" specs and classes or not. A few hundred points of DPS here or there shouldn't make that big of difference in PVE, and that's exactly what everyone is fretting over.
Not to mention: how does one measure "balance" in this game's complicated and varied PVP systems? This isn't a fighting game where the only factors to consider are one character (or, in the case of something like Street Fighter Alpha 3 or Guilty Gear one "style" of character) versus another. You've got so many things to wade through: gear, talents (of which there are nearly endless configurations in this alone), player skill, team make up....
There's a reason Capcom threw balance to the wind with Marvel vs. Capcom 2: it was just much more fun game for people who didn't take fighting games so seriously to just have access to every character from the entire Vs. Series thus far, of which there were 52, than to perfectly balance a tiny handful of those. Sure there are only about four top tier characters; I dare you to say that the game isn't fun to play despite that.
On the subject of developing new content (if someone has hard evidence to prove this statement false or true, please reply with it), from what I remember reading somewhere much of the developmental time spent on Wrath of the Lich King, so much in fact, went to class balance that many aspects of the expansion simply couldn't be focused on. This includes the infamous dance studios and aerial combat, both features that were heavily advertised and never saw the light of day. If he deems it "unbalancable", or whatever, I bet you Ghostcrawler could veto out a ton of stuff players would of loved to have gotten their hands on, balance be damned.
Adeany Jan 7th 2010 11:56PM
Cutting edge hardmode progression is tuned around perfect raid execution. If someone is a few hundred dps short of where they should be, that has a very significant impact on the potential success of the raid.
In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, if you find that your character is underpowered, you can end the match and start again. What happens if your class is underpowered in WoW? Roll a new one and level all the way to 80?
arcady0 Jan 7th 2010 8:42PM
"Protection warriors have too much utility and damage for PvP. (We don't want to hurt their tanking in PvE of course.)"
To fix this though... hurting them in PvE is exactly what they'll do. They always end up down this road. "X is too much or too little in PvP, lets tweak some random numbers. Only that tweak ends up doing something way overboard... making a class suddenly fall notably behind or too far ahead in PvE...
I wish they would just add an offensive version of resilience to PvP. Some number that only applies in PvP - and boosts damage up, or down when fighting another player (and then also remove all remaining PvE effects of resilience, so it could be used the same way for mitigation without any concern for PvE effects).
Banthis Jan 7th 2010 9:39PM
Honestly, if you just put the collection of stuns available to a prot warrior on the same diminishing returns for PvP only, that would make a huge difference.
Ynfynyti Jan 8th 2010 5:00AM
I don't do much PVP on my warrior but do like going into Wintergrasp occasionally for some PVProt. On my server its the opposite faction to me that gets the tenacity buff so its great fun to keep an enemy locked down for sooo long while my teammates zerg them down. Can understand why its annoying ;)
Most of these abilities that cause the annoyance (like Shockwave and Shield Slam) were things partly designed to make warrior tanks more viable and fun in solo play outside of dungeons or raids. I only switched to prot from arms after they did this. Pity the poor souls who ever tried to level a warrior in protection spec prior to this. But with dual specs there doesn't seem so much point in making a protection warrior do anything else apart from tank.
I kind of see the point (though i'd miss the fun!) in removing this utility in pvp as i'm sure it can't be what was intended, but fear that it will negatively impact on our tanking. Just hope they can balance it correctly. I'd swap this pvp utility for increased AOE threat and shorter cooldowns on defensive mitigations. They're in a tight spot though, they gave warriors these abilities as a result of warrior QQ, now they may have to take them away again after everyone else QQs.
Arbolamante Jan 8th 2010 2:41PM
I wish they would give us separate PvP specs and be done with it. I PvP very little, and hate hate hate when they nerf something because it's OP in the Arenas or some nonsense like that. If I wanted to play "Counterstrike: World of Warcraft" I'd play Warhammer or some other game designed around PvP in the first place.
jjtwalton Jan 7th 2010 8:44PM
Inc Shockwave to a Daze and not a Stun and Shield bash to a higher CD.
Alar Jan 7th 2010 8:49PM
Shockwave was one of the main abilities that actually made Prot FUN for me again. I actually -enjoyed- being able to go into PvP and not getting demolished thanks to some cool, useful, and not (in my opinion) overpowered abilities.
Shockwave also makes grinding out mobs or fighting in instances a lot easier too.
Sleutel Jan 7th 2010 9:13PM
That would dramatically hurt Prot Wars in PvE.