DW Entirely Dismantled - Intended?

#0 - Feb. 24, 2009, 5:36 p.m.

Assuming the patch notes that have been released are accurate, and they claim to be, dual wield has been destroyed. Was this the intention? Was DW too strong? I understand that there have been significant damage nerfs for nearly every class, but why remove (rather than weaken) a playstyle that many, such as myself, enjoy?

I know that the development team planned to see this stuff following the release of patch notes, and were prepared for it. I'm not trying to criticize you all, I would just like to know about the future of Death Knight dual wielding.

From Shahrazad:

Q u o t e:
Some people have this misconstrued. The real issue here isn't "OMG they're nerfing 32/39 the sky is falling." The real issue is that there are no benefits to dual wielding anymore. There are no talents or mechanics that favor DW. Dual Wield was inherently inferior in Strike-based builds, so the only way for DW to be competitive was to use spells. When the main source of damage is spells, Dual wielding's slightly superior white damage meant it was the weapon of choice.

Unfortuneately, the obvious distinction (two weapons, not one big one!) became the trademark of the spec. Dual wielding never made the spec ridiculously OP, spellcasts did. Initially, KM drove everything... giving us massive IT and HB damage. KM got nerfed to the point where Dual Wield's signature talent benefits a 2H more because nobody is white-hitcapped, and thus we miss some of our 5 PPM. Still, we soldiered on post 3.0.8, the other buffs we got buoyed the spec a bit. There's a big difference between 3.0.8 32/39 and the others, though. 2H was useless for the spec before, but after 3.0.8 it was fairly close. Sure, nobody was going to use 2H when DW was better (and there were better 2H builds,) but in 3.0.8 Blizzard did *nothing* for one of the core issues, and that was the massive spelldamage.

Why is the DK spell crit multiplier so high? You're dealing with a situation where CASTER builds are out of balance (or were) with PHYSICAL builds. This isn't an issue of balancing 2H vs. DW, but in 3.0.8 it seems that both Blizzard and the public tried to fight the symptom, and not the disease. 3.1 is just completing this... there is no function reason to DW anymore, rather than fixing the non-DW sources of 32/39's dominance... spelldamage.

Q u o t e:
We could have made than an equilibirium in the previous patches. However instead of addressing toning down spell damage, DW weapon damage has now been nerfed to be less than or equal to 2H weapon damage.

Please, nerf spells instead of Dual Wield. If spells are inferior to strikes, DW (which can't use strikes) can make up the difference with better white damage scaling. What is elegant here is that if the scaling of physical strikes and DW white damage are not equal, there's a third variable which can be used to keep the DPS between the two styles in line, which is the scaling of spell damage. At this point, I'd like to point at Impurity and 200% spell crit... two things that can be tweaked to bring DW in line without utterly homogenizing us to one weapon style.

Obviously, the actual balancing is easier said than done, but this is the reality of how 2H and DW compare.

Constructive posting is welcome.
Trolling, flaming, also welcome.

Ghostcrawler

#89 - Feb. 24, 2009, 8:53 p.m.

If we didn't want death knights to dual wield, then we would have just removed the ability for them to dual wield. However, the damage DKs could do with DW was absurdly high in some cases, and that became the standard to which all other classes were comparing themselves. Hmm, if DKs are doing 6500 dps, then clearly my spec can anticipate yummy buffs in 3.1.

Ghostcrawler

#206 - Feb. 25, 2009, 1:15 a.m.

DKs are a new class without four years of theorycrafting history. Some of the current builds being used were not the ones being used originally -- they developed over time as players experimented with mixes of specs and gear. As good as the community is at theorycrafting -- and it is very, very good -- not many people can look at a list of changes in a vacuum and predict what builds players will be using a couple of months from now, especially for a new class like this.

We think there will be other DW builds that develop. Some we have in mind and some no doubt the community will surprise us with. But we think the pendulum had swung too heavily away from 2H for the class. To be sure there were some 2H builds whose damage was also too high, and we have nerfed those as well.

Ghostcrawler

#243 - Feb. 25, 2009, 8:12 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I'm really fairly disappointed by this quote. You are a designer. You should be thinking analytically about how your changes will affect the game. What you're saying here is, "We don't really know how these changes will affect the game, let's just throw them out and hope that the community magically dreams up a way around them."

You are being argumentative. I would never claim to be smarter than the entire rest of the community put together and accurately predict what builds everyone will be using in a few months. Our players are very clever. They surprise us. We are smart enough to have predictions about what will happen but we are also smart enough to know they are only predictions.

Q u o t e:
I'm really sick of reading your dribble dude. Seriously.
One ** posts a log file showing 6.5k dps and your like it was the lottery one minute and the next your freaken destroying the spec. Take some meds and be constant will ya. Every weekend I'm watching the TG fury warriors destroy everyone on DPS, and everyone is pointing this out and you've been ignoring it.

Then I am happy to relieve you of the burden of having to post in these forums. If you had followed the news at all before ranting, you would see that we nerfed Fury as well.

Q u o t e:
Those one minute Patchwerk kills are what you're basing your nerfs off of? Wow. Simply Wow.

Despite some of your attempts to write it off as an edge case under constrived circumstances, DKs were one of the highest -- perhaps the highest -- dps class in the game, in addition to being dominant in PvP. Most players knew nerfs were coming and I have hinted at it plenty. More insightful players are saying yes, they expected nerfs but the nerfs went overboard. That is *always* what players say. :)

DW always dominates in classes for in which it is an option. This is not the first time we have attempted to scale back DW DKs, but previous nerfs and ability changes were not successful. It is that hard to reign in DW damage.

If we never again see DKs pick up one-handed weapons, then we will make changes to prop up that playstyle more. But I have tried to be very clear that we do not want to see the entire DK class gravitate towards DW as the only sensible way to do dps, and that is exactly how it was trending. We needed to change the trees so that something existed besides hybrid builds trying to skim the best talents off of all three trees. That meant the deep talent trees were not competitive, which is why we made so many changes. (And no, when DKs were already doing 6000+ dps, we weren't going to inflate those talents to compete with hybrid DW builds.)

I will also offer this: While we are happy that we've had so much success not having a single tanking tree for the death knight class, I wonder if it was a mistake to also try and do the same thing with dual-wielding. Perhaps it would have made more sense to stick several DW talents in say deep Frost (though it could have been any of the trees) and left the other two as 2H dominant. It would have been a lot easier to balance. That isn't the direction we are going for 3.1, but it is an interesting idea and maybe my suggesting it will spawn some discussion.

Overall, this class is still in amazing shape. While I can understand if you just really loved the DW playstyle, I think some of the drama on this thread is a tad overblown.

Ghostcrawler

#256 - Feb. 25, 2009, 9:10 a.m.

You can argue with me all you want, and many players do. Look around.

You need to find a way to do it however without adding "I am really sick of your dribble, dude." Come on. Do I really need to point that out?

All of the designers who work with me and for me argue about the game all the time, but nobody crosses the line. There is no name calling. Why? Because it would be unprofessional and a distraction and eventually get you fired. Being anonymous on an Internet forum does not divest you of the responsibility to treat other people decently.

Let's cut that discussion off and stick to death knights, shall we?

Ghostcrawler

#352 - Feb. 25, 2009, 6:43 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC, how "finished" (for now) are the talent trees we're seeing on the current 3.1 PTR?

They aren’t finished at all. However, I would not turn that into many threads saying “Oh, the next PTR build will fix all these problems. Let's just wait to discuss then.” We want feedback now or we would not have put the PTR up.

Q u o t e:
While I realise you're privvy to far better information about specs than we are, all evidence that exists to the player base points away from people rushing in droves to DW after 3.0.8 dropped. Yeah, there was a craze for DW in early January, but after 3.0.8 there's no indication it's more popular than Blood or Unholy 2H builds.

We don’t put much stock in the “rushing in droves” phenomenon. The way theorycrafting has evolved, there are leaders and there are followers. Someone demonstrates the build with the highest potential dps and a whole lot of people adopt it verbatim without trying it for themselves. Then someone comes up with a better build and everyone adopts it. It’s isn’t quite that extreme, but it’s close.

Some players will only take the highest dps build, even if it is tortuous to play. Some players will take an easier or more fun build if the dps loss isn't huge. Really, trying to make too strong a connection between popularity and power is fraught with peril. There is a correlation, sure. But it isn't 1.0.

Q u o t e:
Removing Howling Blast entirely from the Hybrid DW builds, AND nerfing it, makes deep Frost no more desirable than before (that I can see as of yet) and while I'm waiting to see if Unholy Blight can make up for the loss, it certainly feels like the ability to take DW and then go into Unholy for some more damage and be competitive with 2 hand seems to have vanished for the time being. Almost a third of my damage came from an ability which has been entirely removed from our reach.

We are still messing with Howling Blast. It’s a fun ability -- especially when it’s OP :) -- but it’s also hard to get it in the right niche. It either makes you want to replace Obliterate or Icy Touch depending on the numbers. Maybe that’s okay for a 51-point talent, but then not many DKs will actually be using Obliterate.

Q u o t e:
Like you said, I'm sure the player base will try to come up with something new -- they're already working on it, and I'll probably spend the bulk of my week trying various things out on the PTR -- but why make us do that rather than just nerf the abilities that were doing too much damage and leave the build intact? Without Howling Blast any Dual Weilding Builds just dont look as Shiny as going back to a 2 hander and doing Full Blood or Unholy, and ... I already have a 2 hand DPS toon in a Ret Pally.

That’s all I’m really saying. I want to give the community a chance to chew on it for a bit. Changing things immediately after so little time would truly be the kneejerk reaction we are so often accused of making. Maybe some of you are so bright as to be able to immediately conceive of all of the possible build options now, but I will say again that the current hybrid builds took some time to evolve and dominate. On your second point, only Retadins and Arms warriors use that style though, while shamans, rogues and Fury warriors all DW. (Hunters do a little of both but are largely in it only for the stats, as are Ferals.) That is one reason why we want DKs to both DW and 2H.

Q u o t e:
If anything, don't expect GC to respond at all; this forum is to discuss with other players, not to have Blues answer every single one of your insecurities/theorycrafting/QQ's. GC said he reads everything in these forums, and him reading it is enough. IF he responds, great: we can get an idea of what the developers think on the issue.

I’d sticky this, except I think we’ve said it over and over. But, thanks.

Ghostcrawler

#370 - Feb. 25, 2009, 7:28 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Wait, what? You don't put much stock into people rushing into a flavor of the month, but 32/39 needed nerfs because you thought everyone would gravitate away from 2H DPS?

It's a cause and effect issue. You can't conclude that a spec is the highest possible dps spec just because it's popular. However, if it is OP, it's probably going to be popular. :)

As dear Dr. Wu, my logic professor, liked to say:

If you drink whole bottle of scotch, then you be drunk. However, if you are drunk, we do not know if you drank scotch or vodka.