Scary Trend in Developer Mentality

Players tend to think of things in terms of whether their class got buffs or nerfs. We tend to think of the overall balance of the game.

The metaphor that gets (over) used a lot is the wobbly chair -- you can cut one leg off or try and extend the other three. We would always prefer to buff rather than nerf, because frankly it's more fun. It generates goodwill and makes players excited about playing. But buffing isn't always the answer. Often a nerf involves far fewer changes the game as a whole. Because testing time is usually our limiting factor for releasing changes, we prefer to change as little as possible.

It's impossible to measure things, especially healing, in terms this simply, but imagine your class can heal 5000 health per second and the other specs can heal 4000 health per sec. Sure we can buff the other three because that's more fun than nerfing you, right? But it might also mean that PvE fights are too easy and PvP damage is too trivial (yes I realize that is an amusing thing to say right now while so many people are concerned about burst damage). Just buffing your spells affects spell balance too -- when you don't care about efficiency because even your light healing spells heal for a lot, then suddenly your toolbox looks pretty shallow, and that Spirit and mp5 on your gear starts to look like a wasted stat.

TLDR version: we prefer to buff when we can, but nerfing is typically far less risky in terms of the amount of data changed.

I don't want to derail this thread, but you do need to get it out of your heads that shaman or paladin QQ caused us to nerf CoH and WG. Those spells were too good. CoH was too good at the end of BC.

As a few players have pointed out, for them -- for a lot of people -- balance is fun. It's certainly not the only aspect of fun. But games in which players feel like they won or lost the game at the moment of character creation, because some abilities are just overpowered or underpowered, tend to not have the kind of legs WoW has had.

Fun is the most important concern. Trivializing content (whether PvE or PvP) may seem fun in the short term, but like playing any game with a cheat mode on, the novelty quickly wears off. Overcoming challenges is a big part of what makes games like WoW attractive.

Fun is also subjective. It's easy to say "Circle of Healing is fun for me and Renew isn't," but that may have a lot to do with the relative balance of those two abilities or your personal preference. Some players think stabbing things is fun and others think tanking is fun. We can continue to come up with cool new toys for each individual spec or role. However it also may be that nothing we are willing to do will make tanking fun for *you* specifically.

Q u o t e:
Well you should forgive us for thinking that healing might get the same treatment as tanking or damage dealing, since you severely buffed all the tanks, and you buffed all the dps so rogues aren't even near the top anymore.

If you are asking for healers to just be buffed across the board, I'm not sure many other players would agree with you. The PvE content is pretty easy as it is and I don't believe it's the lack of healing throughput that is causing people to die in Arenas at the moment.

We brought the dps of various specs more in line because we wanted players to be able to bring Retadins, Moonkin, Survival hunters and various DKs without feeling like they were gimping their dps. You typically only have 15 dps slots in a 25 player raid.

We brought the tanking ability of the 4 tank classes more in line because you typically only have 2 tanks in a 25 player raid (and you can usually get by with only one well-geared, well-spec'd tank). If we had tanking niches, then some fights were just going to be much harder for some groups (or they would feel like they had to rotate players in and out).

But the assumption for 25 player raids is that you have around 8 healers. There are only 5 healing specs. Chances are you are going to have more than one class healing (and honestly, even if all your healers are the same spec you can still manage the content at the moment). We didn't think we needed to make all the tools the same. In a 10 player raid you may only have 2-3 healers, but in that case having healing niches is probably better because it encourages you to not stack the raid with one spec (though again, plenty of groups clear Naxx with 2 of one healing class).

This explanation usually brings up the suggestion that 25-player raids should scale better from 5-player groups, and presumably have 5 tanks and 5 healers. That would be nice if it worked, but we just think we can offer better encounters with 1-2 (and sometimes more) tanks and 7-8 healers (less when you're uber).

Bottom line is we'd ideally like to see 25-player raids with as many different healing classes / specs as possible, but not unduly punish those groups who just don't happen to have that distribution of classes in their guild.

Q u o t e:
To the community it seems like you're always taking the easy way out. You did put some effort into tanking this expansion, but not enough obviously. You took the easy way out again and instead of really balancing the tanking classes you just gave them all AOE capability. This, far more than COH or WG, trivialized the game.

We often owe it to the community to take the easy way out, because that means faster changes and fewer bugs. But it isn't always the right decision. Elemental dps is low, and instead of nerfing everyone else we buffed Elemental, because that was a lot easier to do. We have a lot we want to do with the game. We are nearly always going to opt for easy solutions unless the outcome is a lot worse.

I'm not quite sure what your point about tanking is. We're pretty happy with the state of tanking. It still takes a reasonably clever person with good gear to MT a raid, but there are four classes who can do it now. I don't think the threat game was a particularly fun part of PvE for many players, but I also don't think that is why the encounters are easy right now. They are easy because the damage and health done by the mobs is low, and because none of the encounters require that much raid coordination (and the trickier ones are encounters players saw before in the 40-player days and were allowed to practice on during beta). Ulduar is all new content and it will be a lot more challenging. I am thinking of one fight in particular that will probably take some time to conquer.

Tanking is still stressful until stuff is completely on farm, not because the tank is furiously mashing Heroic Strike to stay above the lock on threat, but because the tank needs to position the boss and know when to use their cooldowns. Healing will always be stressful, and I don't actually believe the way to make healing more fun is to make healers overpowered. I think it has more to do with giving them cool tools and then beefing up the UI to give them the information they need. Penance is a pretty cool tool. Beacon of Light makes you feel clever when you use it in the right situations. Swiftmend is a lot of fun. I like Riptide.