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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsGhostcrawler: Round 1 of patch 4.0.1 class rebalancing implemented
by Fox Van Allen 
Oct 14th 2010 at 3:00PM
WoW Insider's own Matt Rossi had a terrific post yesterday about the class balancing issues that we were seeing with patch 4.0.1. Casters like me were experiencing the thrill of god mode, with reports of mages being able to one-shot their opponents. And while we casters were getting sweet, delicious ponies, melee players got a big pile of pony excrement. Arms and fury DPS were down -- way down. So was retribution paladin and kitty DPS.
Last night, Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler let us all know that fixes were on the way. Today, he confirmed that fixes were implemented and explained what was done to each affected class to balance them out. The full post explaining who got buffed, who got nerfed and why is available just after the break.
Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010We made many changes yesterday. A lot of these were bug fixes, and many bug fixes will affect damage one way or the other. So just because you don't see a specific change referenced below, doesn't mean it didn't change.
With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post:
1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn't do as much to tanking abilities.
We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities.
We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities.
2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two.
3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn't nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow's biggest spell.
4) We returned Searing Pain's damage to its 3.3.5 levels.
5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change.
We don't have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic.
With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post:
1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn't do as much to tanking abilities.
We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities.
We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities.
2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two.
3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn't nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow's biggest spell.
4) We returned Searing Pain's damage to its 3.3.5 levels.
5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change.
We don't have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic.
This is it! Patch 4.0.1 begins the slide into December's upcoming expansion. It's a whole new game from here on out. Get oriented with our roundup of everything there is to know about patch 4.0.1 and how it changes the game until the launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Filed under: News items, Raiding
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 9)
Tokhand Oct 14th 2010 4:16PM
Sunaseni has it pretty much there.
What I did, as soon servers came back online, was to take my mage to the reforger and make Spirit on my gear into Mastery (I highly recommend this- it isn't on topic but I don't care).
What I found in random dungeons was that in the now-rare longer fights (things like the Gauntlet in HoR or stupid terrible Tribunal in HoS), arcane DPS starts at a very high very silly number then goes to a place a little above where it was pre-patch. In the fire spec, damage was consistently lol-high.
The problem with both specs were the super-duper high numbers; tanks couldn't keep up with keeping aggro and healers weren't able to heal us ranged casters after we took pretty much all aggro with just a few cycles of the normal arcane rotation or watching DoTs and RNG and then King Dred eats you or something. With lesser geared/quality tanks and healers, we (this was in a few different runs and including a filthy aff lock, boomkin, another mage, and a couple of elemental shaman) were pulling aggro on trash mobs, with just doing our regular things.
Also take in mind, that this nerf is more of a normalization. This is also before the Uh-Oh with our glyphs has been fixed (a whole bunch of prime glyphs got initialized as major ones; they are Fbolt, Fball, FFB, AM, ABarr, and Molten Armor- so the ones for three of our four main nukes, two arcane side-arms, and the armor that makes us have moar deeps are not working as intending and we're still bringing in silly numbers).
Molly Oct 14th 2010 4:28PM
I was grouped with an arcane mage in VH yesterday. He/she did 18k on the last boss.. it was crazy.. he also said he crit with arcane blast for 47k..
Tobias Oct 14th 2010 3:06PM
nooooes, i liked my OP mage fire spec :'(
well, i guess we all have to sacrifice something for the grater good...
KJP Oct 14th 2010 3:52PM
Here here. At least I got one night to finally get a little payback for all those 2 killing blow, 12 death WSGs I suffered through back in the vanilla days.
Scooter Oct 14th 2010 4:13PM
Seriously though. I was so happy when my mage could take more than 2 hits from a melee. Id set a living bomb and maybe a fireblast on 1 target release my mirror images and i was in/out of the flag room in seconds. I actually go the iron man achievement in WSG. Of course my group had 6 shadow priests me and 3 healers. God that was epic!!!!
BTW anyone notice the HP and damage of their mirror images? It's about x3 the original amounts. God DAMN it was fun!
Oh one more thing HEY PLATE WEARERS HOW DOES IT FEEL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
bob Oct 14th 2010 4:16PM
Yeah, but why can't we just have sacrificed a warlock or something?
Natsumi Oct 15th 2010 12:04AM
@Scooter
About the same as before the patch, only I die faster and do less damage. Unless you WEREN'T talking about Warriors, in which case I stand corrected. If you can't kill a Warrior in PvP as a Mage you suck at magery, you have too many ways to get away from us to complain that we have 3-5k more health than you do (if that much). However, enjoy your new repair bills, suckers. Now you will understand why "us plate wearers" complain so much about wipes! FEEL THE WRATH OF DURABILITY LOSS AND DESPAIR!
Conversations we'll never have again:
Mage: Man I just had to full repair, cost me 60 gold.
Warrior: Stuff it, mine was 120.
Mage: Haha, sucker, that's what you get for wearing Plate.
Warrior: Go stand in a Void Zone.
PKthe13thvah Oct 14th 2010 3:09PM
"but lowered Fire more than the other two"
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Justin Oct 14th 2010 3:09PM
Hopefully round 2 consists of a slight buff to rogues (especially Combat), and a nerf to Boomkins.
Wild Colors Oct 14th 2010 3:14PM
Speaking as a boomkin who was doing 10k single-target dps without even bothering to use a rotation...I'm regretfully forced to admit we should be nerfed a tad. (Though it was fun learning to manage my threat in late stages of boss fights...)
Then again, there's no real point in balancing too much right now. The current system (4.0.1) is meant to be balanced at 85, not at 80.
Justin Oct 14th 2010 3:19PM
Yea Boomkin DPS is a bit out of control currently from what I've seen. Our Raid boomkin who's normally maybe...5-6 on the meters (respectable, not trying to slight him) was suddenly #1 with about a 2-3k DPS buffer between him and the #2 player.
And I say slight rogue buff for the sole reason that I compared my last raid against a raid 2 weeks ago w/ the same people, and I dropped about 2k dps...not terrible..but obviously would rather stay equal or slightly better if anything.
vocenoctum Oct 14th 2010 4:05PM
While I understand the "balance at 85" line, given the way spells scale now, I don't see why they can't balance at 80 pretty easily. Oh well.
Jorges Oct 14th 2010 5:56PM
That's exactly what we experienced last night. Our two moonkins, while not being bad at all, normally where fighting for the 4th or 5th place. Suddenly both were on the top by more than 2k dps from the rest of the group and less than 500 dps from each other. It was hilarous, we joked around on how the chickens from hell were finally revealing and taking over the world... but it wasn't so funny after some time while everyone was struggling (specially melee) to do decent damage and they were just facerolling the meters.
@Wild Colors, I salute you for being responsible and admiting the current ridiculous OP state of the moonkin. But I'm not so sure I can agree on not being a point for balancing for 80. The thing is, while this game is focused on the max level game, there are millions of players leveling and doing randoms or pvp to gain experience. If blizzard doesn't balance things for the whole leveling experience, then we'll have a bottleneck on those imbalanced levels, specially for tanks that can't hold aggro or healers that run out of mana. Remember that most of the concerns comes from players with ICC gear, but in the next months, that won't be the case anymore. People will be leveling on greens/blues through 80, and could have serious problems if damage/threat/healing is not balanced.
So, while *right now* maybe it's not so important to balance the game before 85, they have to do it eventually. Better start now that the problems are fresh.
Wild Colors Oct 14th 2010 8:00PM
@Jorges
I agree that, in the best of all worlds, the classes would be balanced for every level. I think Ghostcrawler has come flat out and said that they just can't do it, however. The big problem right now is that the scaling for crit and haste is out of whack (and mastery is assumed in the balancing, but not actually in the game yet). For boomkin, for example, even if Blizz changed nothing, we would get weaker when we hit 81, and weaker still for every level up to 85. This is because our effective crit and haste will drop.
Remember that ICC gear is overpowered b/c Blizzard hadn't accounted for all the half-tiers. Our haste and crit will, in theory, never get as high in Cata as it is right now. For a spec like boomkin, we had been doing 90% of our damage through our nukes because our DOTs didn't scale at all. 4.0.1 suddenly provided a huge bonus to our DOTs, without reducing the damage of our nukes. This will level out by level 85 because the bonus to our DOTs will actually be smaller. My boomkin on the beta server does not do damage that is significantly higher than anyone else's (though this is hard to measure because beta boomkin burn through their entire mana pool in about 30 seconds).
That's not to say that Blizzard shouldn't try to make things a bit more balanced now. It's just that the scaling issues may never permit them to have things balanced at every level (or even at every 5 levels). They spend their time balancing for end game, and I think that's a fair way to do it. It doesn't bother me to be underpowered and overpowered for certain periods of the leveling process (though I don't PvP until I hit max, and I can see that being a big factor).
thebitterfig Oct 14th 2010 10:36PM
While combat is a bit weak, the bigger rogue problem is that HaT is glitched to unplayability right now. It puts your CP on the target of the person who gets the crit, rather than the rogue's target, but since you can only have CP on one target at a time, boom! you lose your CP on your own target.
Meatwadz Oct 14th 2010 3:09PM
YAY!!! Feral is back, baby!
Jorges Oct 14th 2010 6:01PM
Really? :o
OMG I cant wait to get home and try :D
William Tillman Oct 14th 2010 3:09PM
I knew Mages were gonna get nerfed. I was doing ultra-damage in heroics and raids and really not having that big a hassle managing mana as Arcane.
Chairman Kaga Oct 14th 2010 3:17PM
Yeah, mages didn't need a nerf bat, they needed a nerf pile driver. I was getting 16-20K crits on Arcane Blast with only heroic (all ilvl < 200) gear.
Bulvai Oct 15th 2010 11:15AM
Yeah, i had a fun night also. All of my gear is ilvl 200-232 and i was pulling 30k crits and had near infinite mana with arcane. I was lucky to get a 14k crit on monday, but last night, for those few hours, i was like a magical rambo.