Heavy Handed Patches and Playing DPS Classes

What is interesting about these "my class is such a roller coaster" responses is they tend to only happen with classes that are powerful. With classes or specs that are considered underpowered, the community tends to beg for any kind of change at all and will happily relearn all their buttons just because they really want to play that character.

I'm not trying to dismiss the OP's sentiment, because it's a totally valid way to feel IMO. I'm just pointing out that it sometimes gets used as justification for why we shouldn't nerf a class.

"You're making me relearn my class."
"It's not fun for me to play my class anymore."
"This change went against the design you said you had for us."
"This change goes against the class descriptions on the website."

Those are all valid points, but obviously we felt the change was necessary despite all of those points and they are rarely going to convince us to undo the changes. (Though we might try to address those concerns in other ways.)

I'll also throw out that the community tends to assume that 99% of the changes we make are for balance reasons. There are a lot of those, but we also make changes just because we don't like the way mechanics are working out.

Q u o t e:
For a lot of classes it seems like the game is still in beta.

If you want to play a game that doesn't change a lot over time, you might consider something other than an MMO. :)

Q u o t e:
But making changes cause YOU don't like the way it feels?

To be clear, that's a YOU plural. But yes, we will absolutely make changes because we don't like the way something feels. That is in fact our job.

Q u o t e:
No. There used to be class reviews (i.e. between version 1.0 and 2.0), Blizzard took their time to consult widely with the community and each class affected before making big changes. This approach respected customers/players, it was superior to the current experience. After 2.0 you (Blizzard) guys started making major class changes every other patch and hotfix with much, much less community consultation. In a nutshell, there just isn't time to consult anymore when you set a pace like this.

I remember those class reviews and my recollections are not as rosy. For starters, I don't think the community felt any more consulted then than they do now. There were just as many responses about how the changes made were not what the community was asking for.

Second, while the class that may have been the focus of that review felt special, it had a huge downside too. Classes assumed and expected huge changes just because that's what everyone else received, even when the class designers didn't think certain classes needed many changes.

Third, if you didn't get what you wanted, or your class was left in a bad state, you were going to be waiting a long time before anything changed again.

Those are the reasons we don't do class changes like that anymore. They weren't perceived as a rousing success.

I'm not saying the way you feel is invalid, because it seems clear that you feel that way. But one of the things I hear from players constantly is: why can't you make balance changes and fix bugs faster? Players are very impatient when they feel weak or clunky (in PvP or PvE), and rightly so. We have been working systematically to be able to make more changes more often because that is overwhelmingly what players are asking for. It's not like 50% of players want changes more often and 50% want them less often. I mean it is overwhelmingly for the first category.

That is why my earlier response was the somewhat bemused statement that it is typically the OP classes who wonder why they can't be OP just a little longer. Hey man, what's the rush?

But if there really is this relatively large population of players who would be happy with the status quo for several months, even if the status quo was not balanced, I'd like to hear more about it. How many of you would rather us patch less often, with all that that entails?

Q u o t e:
Do you think you patch quickly? do you think you solve the issues quickly?

No, to both. We would patch much more often if that was feasible. It's not, at least at the moment. WoW is a big chunk of software and making a patch involves just a hideous number of people. The consequences for making sloppy changes is severe, and I am talking much worse than your class feeling weak. I mean things like servers crashing or thousands of in-game tickets.

But it drives me nuts when there are bugs in the game that are easy to fix (not all of them are), or balance problems we think would be easy to address (again, not all of them are). I think most designers would love to see any fixes they make go through in real time (with appropriate testing of course). We are improving our process though. We are able to hotfix more issues and get smaller patches turned around faster (like 3.09, the small patch that you have now).

That is why I am interested in hearing from players who think that is a mistake -- who find the roller coaster aspect to be the greater of two evils.

We appreciate the feedback. Really.

A few quick answers:

1) Players are always going to disagree with the specifics of some of our changes. It is unrealistic to think otherwise. So I am less interested in: Do you like the changes we make? (Which is how some players answered) and more interested in your tolerance for the pace and magnitude of changes.

To use a specific example, many players were frustrated with how the early Arena season played out, and we think they had a right to be. We also think things are in a much better place now (though not perfect by any stretch). As much as players like to joke about it, resilience was definitely part of that. But our class changes made a difference too. I'm not sure those frustrated players would have stuck it out if we hadn't made changes. I think there was less of a cry from PvE (though there definitely was a cry) because PvE was pretty easy. I don't think that is going to be the case coming up in Ulduar and I think you will a lot more heated debates. You might notice the not-always-polite discussion about tanking equality at the moment as a preview. (Okay, that wasn't a quick answer.)

2) A lot of the churn you are seeing is in the new DK class and in the specs that were, frankly, neglected for a long time: Retribution, Survival, Elemental, Discipline and Balance to name a few. When you change major spells and mechanics, as we did, there is going to be a period before you reach equilbium. I wouldn't expect the degree of change to continue as it has been lately. We'll try not to give you such whiplash.

3) Related, this is the first major patch after a new expansion, so there are going to be a lot of course corrections. Furthermore, because we had to wipe talents to integrate dual spec, we took the opportunity to tweak a lot of the class trees. I would not expect the next content patch to have anywhere near this amount of change.

4) We have started documenting the hotfixes more prominently here in the forums. We aren't doing that for the PTR though because of the number of changes. Hotfixes are sometimes hard to document because it's not always clear when they are going to go out, and because of their nature, they are sometimes made on weekends or late at night. We really aren't ever trying to sneak changes past the community or "stealth nerf." I think the chance of us succesfully pulling that off would be so slim as to be not worth the trouble. You guys find out any change almost immediately so there is no motivation to hide it.

Q u o t e:
This is by far the most concerning issue in my opinion. Not specifically for fury, but for the game in general. First its "All DPS will be equal" "No wait, we lied, pure classes will be larger, but only by a very small amount" then "No a skilled hybrid will outDPS an average pure (implying the the DPS difference is little to nothing)" then the patch notes roll around and there are a massive buffs to almost every pure class and a lot of nerfs / changes to hybrid DPS. This type of intent rollercoaster led me to completely re-roll to a healing priest. Between the fact that Blizzard hasn't been changing their mind constantly on where they want healers to be, and the fact that priests outcry seems to be heard a lot more than other classes I figured it was a great change to make.

I can understand why you might feel those are dramatic course corrections, but from our POV the LK design hasn't changed. The design was basically: let's get rid of the tired notion that some specs are only there for buffs, meaning their damage must be low and the buffs overpowered. Everything else fell out of that single design change. We also don't lie about our plans for the game. That's a pejorative term used by players when they don't like our changes. I caveat the heck out of everything I say for precisely that reason.

Q u o t e:
I don't like the changes I see in 3.1 - but I've learnt that this forum is not a place for feedback because the last time complaints were made, they were met with bans, even though later events proved us right.

I suspect most forum participants, even the ones who have been banned, will disagree. We don't ban players for disagreeing. We ban them for being rude, insulting and otherwise displaying the kind of behavior that chases good players away from these forums. You can disagree without being rude. In fact, that is the best way to get us to read your point. Address other players (and us) the way you would address a co-worker (or a teacher if you are still in school). You should not and cannot generally call your co-workers names or you'll be fired. That is the way you communicate in civil society. That is the way we are asking you to communicate here. It's not a tough concept. :)

Q u o t e:
Personally the biggest problem for me is not following through on MAJOR updates that you said you would be implementing. Obviously small changes that are announced early might change, but this is a little ridiculous.....

Okay, but you realize the result of that request is not that we will cram a half-baked feature into the game. The result will be that we won't announce major update plans since the community gets upset if we don't deliver.

Q u o t e:
I believe a DK is overpowered, you believe a DK is not overpowered. Now a Dev cannot satisfy us both.

This is the problem. They cannot satisfy "our concerns" because there are a billion opposing concerns.

You are asking for something that is silly. They do what is right for the game.

Yup. This is what I meant about not satisfying everyone. It is also pretty typical to see posts that say “Hey developers, I know everyone is saying we are OP and are posting theorycrafting and parses to back that up, but they are wrong.” That is very difficult feedback to manage..

Q u o t e:
Right now I get the impression that they are only paying the tiniest bit of attention, similar to when you are on the phone with someone you are not particularly interested in talking with so you just make small noncommittal noises to the things they say.

You are getting numerous responses from designers every day on these forums. That is new for WoW. Now we are not going to make every change you request, largely for the reasons stated in my previous response. We're not going to directly respond to every thread, one because it's probably impossible, and two because the goal of these forums is to have a discussion among the players in which we can also participate. It is not for all WoW players to have a one on one conversation with me or any blue.

Q u o t e:
According to those hunters that actually decided to compete in Arena, they were in a happy place also. FINALLY they could join a team and actually COMPETE with others.

I do want to point out that even though we over-nerfed BM (and admitted it) that there were many posts decrying how hunters were going to continue to be terrible in Arenas and none of our changes were going to address those problems. Those posts were also wrong in retrospect. It isn't as simple as the community is always right. Witness the DK above who doesn't understand the DK nerfs. He is part of the community. We believe in this case that he is incorrect that DKs did not need to be nerfed.

We don't generally discuss banned posts, but I see nothing in that quote that anyone would have found problematic. Are you sure it was that quote and not a similar one you made at the same time? The mods tend to be pretty gentle to people who aren't repeat offenders.

On the broader topic, as I said earlier, we don't just make number changes. Sometimes we change mechanics because we don't like the way they are playing. Not all of the changes we make are reactive. *You* may have liked the way something worked out, but opinions like that are subjective, and when the developers don't like it, it's probably going to change. In those cases especially I try to offer our thoughts so that nobody feels totally bewildered. It may sometimes feel arbitrary and will certainly feel subjective, but it's also just part of game design. We aren't doing our job if we don't try and improve parts of the game we think can be improved.

I don't want to turn this thread too much into general Q&A, but in the Ret example, we wanted to do a couple of things. One is prune some of the talents because there was too much motivation for Ret to try builds like 0/0/71. Another was we weren't happy with how little signature attacks like Crusader Strike and Divine Storm were doing. It seems messed up that a paladin could just skip those and only alter their dps by in some case single digits. We realize the risk is that you do 8000 dps of burst in 3 GCDs. I think things will feel better when all the 3.1 changes are in. It's tough to communicate that message because on the one hand, all the changes aren't in and we tried to be clear about that. On the other extreme, if you say that message too often then players think "Oh, I get it. All of those changes I suggested will show up in the next build." I suspect this is one of the reasons the developers had the big blue wall of silence for so long. :)