#1 - Jan. 30, 2009, 5:06 p.m.
Look, all things considered we would much rather buff than nerf. Players love it when they get buffed. The sun comes out and the birds are singing. When we nerf a class we get (I kid you not) death threats. So we must have a really good reason for nerfs.
Usually the reason is that we have absolute, not relative targets. If you are in a raid and someone is doing 8000 dps, sure the "fun" solution is to buff every other class up to that point. If we end up over-buffing someone to 8500 dps, well then we can go back and give everyone else additional buffs. Maybe at level 90 everyone will be doing 12,000 dps, but inflation is inflation, right? Right? Of course we'd have to buff all the monsters too. We'd probably have to buff gear and talents because otherwise their contributions might seem paltry (I get 20 more dps when I do 8000 dps? lol.). In short the changes necessary to avoid a nerf just spiral out of control.
I am talking mostly about PvE here. The balance for PvP is quite different and while raw power is certainly a factor, specific abilities and their cooldowns and synergies are usually far more important. The same thing is true though. If a particular form of CC is too potent, then in order to avoid nerfing it, we would have to give lots of other classes better ways of breaking CC. Then the original player feels gimpy so we give him the "this CC cannot be broken" ability. The vicious cycle still exists. Sometimes a single nerf, even if it's unpopular, is a ton less work than a lot of buffs, and sometimes it is just better for the game regardless.
Some players ask: Isn't this what betas and PTRs are for? That is true. But it often isn't enough. MMOs are living games. Things change over time. Players are crafty and find new ways of using abilities to do things we didn't anticipate. Software has bugs, and sometimes they aren't uncovered even with the most rigorous QA. Rather than denying that these problems can arise, we would rather just be open about them and get them fixed as quickly as we can. (I didn't say "quickly," I said "as quickly as we can.")
One of the things we are trying to do is get changes turned around in a more timely manner. In the past if a class or spec was too weak they often had to just suck it up until the next tier of content is released. I think the community wasn't necessarily prepared for this, which is why you see some "roller coaster" feedback. Other players, we know, are thrilled that issues might actually get looked at quickly instead of going on and on. And to be fair, we can be even faster and there are problems that have persisted for longer than we would like, but WoW is a big game and supertankers don't turn on a dime.
