24 h to fix locks vs 5 months for dk/pally

Our new policy will be that if any spec or class is ever unbalanced, all other specs and classes will get a one week period in which to be unbalanced just so everything is fair. We hope that if everyone is unbalanced for a period of time that ultimately the game will be balanced. Ponies for everyone!

So who wants to be first?

Okay, since there were several replies who think the original question is really intresting and legitimate, I'll answer it. For the record, I don't think many players are interested in the answer (though some are). I suspect the real issue is that most locks agree Conflag was overpowered (though again we see a few who feel differently), but since being nerfed isn't fun, they want to have something to vent about, and venting about other classes not being nerfed is an attractive candidate.

Why did we nerf Destro fast and Unholy / Holy slow?

1) We did make several nerfs to DKs and paladins since LK shipped. None of them ended up having enough of an effect.

2) Part of the reason DKs and paladins were dominant is because burst damage was high and they could survive it with their cooldowns. Burst damage isn't as high now and people have more resilience.

3) Yet nerfing their cooldowns was risky. Nerf a DK's cooldowns too much and he can't tank. Nerf a paladin's cooldowns too much and you risk him not being able to tank (though it's less of an issue) but you could very well kill him in PvP. Bubbles are huge for paladins in PvP. Similarly, there wasn't another paladin healing tree, so nerfing Holy too much might just mean paladins can't heal (or Rets can't do damage -- and there are plenty of Rets who still think they were caught up in Holy nerfs).

4) On the other hand, nerfing Conflag doesn't hurt locks in PvE. Why not? Because they have other specs they can do that do great dps. If the DK tank's spec gets nerfed, he's done as a tank. That player has to reroll for dps, or just stop PvE. (Yes, I understand you might love Destro and hate Demo and Affliction. That's still not quite the same as someone who is there to tank or heal and not to dps at all.)

5) Nerfing say Icy Touch in a vacuum would have hurt DK PvE dps. (Though in retrospect, we probably should have done it anyway and just lived with the PvE consequences). The problem really wasn't Icy Touch itself, but all of the talents that the PvP DK build could cherry pick to improve Icy Touch. Moving those talents around is not the kind of thing we can hotfix. Again, even if Destro was totally dead for PvE (which I think is an exaggeration), the lock has other options.

6) Other DK fixes would also have involved moving or removing talents (Shadow of Death), glyphs (Blood Boil), or enchants (Razorice). Again, those are hard to do without a major patch. The pet ghoul of Unholy is an enormous dps increase. Why? Because pets gain group buffs, but guardians (the standard ghoul) don't. That is hard to hotfix because there is nothing in between 0% of buffs and 100% of buffs. Moving that talent deeper (or removing it) were the only possible fixes.

(continued)

7) Let me elaborate a little more on that last point, because it's actually a difficult problem with the DK class. DKs don't have a resource system like mana. They generally aren't limited by cooldowns because of the rune mechanic. Unlike most other classes, they don't have a whole slew of "makes X cheaper" or "lowers the cooldown of X" talents. Their talents tend to be complicated, adding extra effects or procs. Those are hard to hotfix. The three trees share some abilities, but their talents push them off in very different ways. If you nerf Blood Strike's base damage, you might make it useless for another tree. It's hard to tweak DK numbers the same way you can every other class.

8) DKs were a new class and paladins were redesigned. We didn't have the extensive history upon which to draw on them. With rogues or mages, the design space is better understood. Constantly when we discuss those classes a designer will say "No, that would put them in the situation they were in before, which had these problems. Let's not go there again." With DKs especially, it wasn't always clear what the long-term ramifications of changes were going to be. Remember, Unholy became so powerful in part because we buffed the crap out of it coming out of Beta, because all the DKs were Blood and Frost and found Unholy gimmicky and disjointed. We test the changes, but that is no substitute for what happens when millions of players start playing dozens of hours a week with the changes. Stuff is going to come up the way it keeps coming up for the five-year old classes, just more often.

I hope that explains it a little better. I don't expect you guys to give us the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this. I wouldn't if I were in your shoes. But it should at least occur to you that when you see an apparent inconsistency, the reason for that inconsistency is unlikely to be "Oh that didn't occur to us" or "We just feel arbitrary." It's fine to ask if you're legitimately curious, and hopefully we can answer some of those questions. I would not immediately make the leap from legitimatey curious to conspiracy theories about class-ism.

This was a long response and it will no doubt spawn lots of questions and assumption challenging (and more conspiracy theories). I've spent a ton of effort on this issue today, neglecting other classes in the process, so I might not have the bandwidth to handle much further exploration of the wall of text above. Apologies in advance.

Q u o t e:
I guess where I'm unclear is why can't DKs and Ret Pallies just be slowly toned down until you figure out what the right level is?

Let's say you gave them an across the board damage nerf of 2% and just see what it does.

Need more? Do it again. Do it every Tuesday until you find the "right" level because holy crap they're unbalanced as hell and have been for months.

That's a tempting approach, but I fear that a week would not be enough time to notice a difference and we might be at the -20% point before we realize we should have stopped weeks ago. It also likely would have hurt tank threat generation without additional changes.

More importantly, probably, is that we've found making discrete nerfs once or twice is generally better received among the community than seeing a new nerf for your class every week. We've been down that road before. Obviously, we aren't afraid to make you upset when we think certain changes are the right ones, but all things being equal, there are plenty of reasons not to make life painful for our players (even if you personally don't have much sympathy for DKs and pallies).

Also, keep in mind that hindsight is 20/20. DK / Holy is what everyone complained about at the end of 3.1 (and rightly so), and especially in 2s. But early on, Ret, Arcane and Assassination were also in the "instagib" category, and mid-season it was Survival hunters. While some players will always complain "Oh, if only we had listened to THEM" not everyone had drilled down to Unoly / Holy being the dastardly duo until some of those other problems were addressed.

Q u o t e:
I just would like to know, on a more emotive level...do you think there is something to the fact that warlocks have felt angry and ignored for so long..I believe shammans, priests and warriors feel similarly. We feel like we are classes that are just being gunned for, regardless of whether nerfs are warranted or not. We feel that contrary to your stated opinion you are far more willing to just "nerf us" and figure out later on if were viable or not...while others dk/paly/mage you do so with such a fearful measured hand in case you over nerf.

1) All classes feel that way. You can easily find posts for every single class / spec in the game that they are ignored / that we don’t understand them / that we are out to get them.

2) We are sensitive to players not having fun with the game. That’s ultimately the most important issue. However, we just don’t want to give much legitimacy to the strategies of players being “angry and ignored.” You’ll see every thread using that approach to attempt to fish for buffs. Broken record here, but if you have concerns about your character, please mention them. If we agree, there is a good chance we’ll address them. You don’t need a strategy. You don’t need justification. You don’t need compensation. Your argument entirely rests on its own merits. Not having fun is a fine merit. Feeling that the developers don’t love you is not.

Q u o t e:
And I don't understand your comment about 'not everyone' identifying Unholy/Holy as being the dominant combination - players WERE complaining about Unholy from the start of the season. Holy paladins were also identified by A LOT of players at the start of the season.

I’m saying the earlier complaints were about Unholy, Holy, Ret, Arcane, Assassination and depending on who you believe, Survival, Arms and Feral (and maybe even warlocks). We made changes to all of those classes. We think those changes fixed most of the problems except for Unholy / Holy (and maybe Ret). I was disputing the notion that everyone was saying “DKs and paladins are the whole problem.” They were just left over after we fixed (for the most part) the other problems.

Q u o t e:
This is class bias. You could've just as well nerfed Blood and Unholy cooldowns and told all DKs to tank as Frost until you could fix them, which is essentially what you're telling Destruction Warlocks to do - to pick another spec because one was too good at PvP.

Yeah, we could have done that. I’m not sure it would have fixed the problem. The cooldowns weren’t just VB and BS (the Blood and Unholy tanking cooldowns). They include things like Lichborne, IBF, AMS and maybe Frost Presence itself. Those aren’t spec issues, but core abilities or easily grabbed talents.

A few players above explain this pretty well too.

Q u o t e:
We're pissed because you didn't compensate/balance us in relation to any of these changes.

We generally don’t compensate for nerfs.

Q u o t e:
Please just admit you have no idea what you want to do with Warlocks and leave us alone. We're tired of your "fixes."

Unfortunately, it’s not appropriate for me to ever reply “It’s not the class, it’s you.” Therefore, it would also be nice if you confined your arguments to the changes themselves and not try and insult us in order to make your point. Cool?

Q u o t e:
Paranoia about conspiracy theories aside, I think most of the non-over-the-top-always-mad-about-everything players really appreciate this type of feedback.

I’ll try to do more. But as you can see, it was a lot of text, which takes a lot of time, which means fewer responses to other threads. I also had to do it all off the top of my head without the benefit of being able to look stuff up (because I wasn’t at the office), so I probably made mistakes. Those are the reasons I don’t do it more often.

Q u o t e:

Two reasons,this team or a majority of them created DK's. They went to the financial people at the parent company and convinced them to spend the money to do so.

Can’t believe I am responding to this, but this is also the team that created the other 9 classes in the game. Furthermore, if you’re trying to argue that making a class OP is a smart business decision, you have to be prepared to drive away players who aren’t that class. Unless we get DKs to be 95% or more of the population (YOU MEAN THEY AREN’T THAT ALREADY?) that would not be a wise strategy.

Q u o t e:
A month of this and nothing was mentioned by the devs about it being OP.

We don’t have long forum discussions about every change we do. We made changes to tone it down on the PTR. They ended up not being sufficient. It sucks but it happens.

Q u o t e:
But you've shown you CAN hotfix the damage aspect of talents. So I don't understand why something like Black Ice wasn't hotfixed with a balancing hotfix applied to Tundra Stalker.

Like I said, I’m just not going to have the bandwidth to debate the counter to all of my points in detail. Sorry. I’ll pick one of them though. One of the things I said is that there is a difference between making strategic hotfixes and overhauling a talent tree. The latter isn’t appropriate for a patch – it requires too much testing and iteration and delays the patch (if not subsequent patches). Maybe Black Ice and Tundra Stalker would have been sufficient. Maybe not. Maybe it would have taken 3 other talent trees. Maybe Frost with Tundra Stalker, Black Ice, Killing Machine etc. would have just turned into the IT spamming monster.

Q u o t e:
GC, I respect you a lot for what you are trying to do here. But with this you are basically admitting defeat as a developer. You are essentially saying there is no need to design for 3 trees, because the others can still do the same role. And this is sad for all pures. I know that you can do better than this, and so we expect you to rise to the occasion.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not ideal. We are in that position with Frost mages being too low in PvE compared to other mages. Our goal is to make all specs viable in PvE and PvP. That is a very lofty goal and we’re not going to get there overnight. In this case, we didn’t think the bad we would get from Destro potentially not having identical dps with Affliction was as important as the bad we would get from leaving Conflag as is.

Q u o t e:
For a long time, you took the stance that 2v2 was impossible to balance around, and that you had no desire to do so. Seems that is changing though...

2v2 is hard to balance, but it’s a goal, otherwise we wouldn’t offer it as a way to play. Balancing 1v1 may be impossible, which is one reason we don’t support duels as Arenas. (The other is that WoW is intended as a social game.)

Q u o t e:
Go to arena junkies or sk-gaming and educate yourself, rets highest representation for 3v3 was 3% over all realms and even less over 2k, so try and educate yourself and stop bringing ret up when you !#@%@ about paladins, were not op in arenas and never have been, when you say so you just look stupid.

There is an argument (with some merit) that Holy is better than Ret, so many potential Rets went Holy. If Holy got massively nerfed, all of those players might respec Ret and suddenly you’d see Ret representation shoot up dramatically. I’m not offering that as fact, because it isn’t, but it’s one of the things we have to consider when we make changes. If you buff class A and nerf class B you cannot assume class C will stay exactly as it is in Arenas. Maybe C was countered too hard by A. Maybe C was only viable because it was a good counter to A. See my point?

You are also accepting as blatantly obvious that Ret is underpowered when many players disagree with you. You can't just say "I'm right; they're dumb" as a compelling argument.

Q u o t e:
What happened was that the numbers they thought might equal out, did not do so, and it became grossly apparent when it hit such a large testing pool (live servers).

Yep.

Q u o t e:
What made the community upset is you didnt wait for a major patch to fix Arcane and Mutilate, you just "hotfixed" in a ninja patch without testing and left more OP specs on live(aka shadowfrost/holy) untouched for the whole season..

We don’t buy the argument that because you can’t make something perfect (nerf all the problem children) you should do nothing (not nerf the ones that were easy to nerf). If we waited until every part of the game was perfect, you'd probably be on patch 1.9 right about now. We are far harder on our design than the community is.

Q u o t e:
How about moonkin? I think it's impossible, but maybe, JUST MAYBE, blizzard may be feeling cruel enough to give us enough buffs to make us feel OP. Then take it away. Hey, at least then we'd feel how every other class has been able to feel: OP at some time.

Okay, moonkin can be OP for two weeks.

Q u o t e:
I'm fairly sure you'll get quoted and told you're correct, but I feel compelled to point out that complex total solutions do not necessarily preclude implementing simple bandaids where possible.

Totally (and it is a good quote). But we did make simple bandaid fixes. Dropping IBF's amount absorbed (and scaling from defense) was a relatively simple change. It also wasn't sufficient. Preventing Shadow of Death in Arenas was a simple change. Dropping Conflagrate's multiplier was also a relatively simple change. We'll see what it does.

You can armchair quarterback these decisions if you want, but even at the time we made them there were DKs posting how certain they were that they were now doomed. They ended up being wrong. "Why didn't you make the OBVIOUS change?" is not usually a very compelling argument. If it was obvious to us, then we would have.

Q u o t e:
Thanks for the massively length replies GC. I can tell you that you've really enlightened at least one person about the thinking process of the designers and that it's not all in vain to post this, knowing full well that it's using up time you could post elsewhere.

Cool.

Q u o t e:
From that example, what I learned from your thinking process was that you were fully capable and willing to make rather large nerfs, for balance's sake, over a series of hotfixes until you thought it was within the realm of balance. But now your comments seem to suggest that you don't agree with this and that's why DKs did not get simultaneous nerfs like Ret did. It seemed to me that both Ret and Unholy were in the same spot but one received continuous hotfixes while the other was allowed to linger.

I tried to explain that the Ret changes were relatively simple. We made some relatively simple DK changes, and they didn't prove to be sufficient. We made the more complex changes when we could (this patch) and made sure we had some more "hooks" to make additional adjustments as necessary. Perhaps the TLDR version is just that DKs ended up being overpowered and also difficult to patch -- a dangerous combination. We'll try to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Q u o t e:
Maybe I'm misreading it, but basically it appears ret is being kept UP because with holy possibly balanced they are worried that a lot of FotM holy will reroll back to ret and see a big increase in ret representation.

My point was that Ret might be overpowered, but Holy was so much more overpowered that the Rets rerolled. Looking at just representation, you might come to a potentially incorrect conclusion.

We are receiving a ton of feedback (not just through these forums) that Ret burst in PvP might be out of control again. If you think Ret is weak in PvP, you should know that a lot of players disagree with you.

Q u o t e:
GC, your first answer is pretty good on many levels, but there is one part that makes no sense. You repeatedly state that "locks have other options to DPS" if destro gets a pve nerf but then go on to say "nerf a DK's tank spec and he's done as a tank" when all three DK trees are supposed to be able to tank. How does this make any sense?

You might have missed the responses, but the answer was that nerfing the tanking talents would not have fixed the problem. The cooldowns are core abilities. If we thought we could have slain DK dominance in PvP with a side-effect of making Unholy a terrible tank, that would have been acceptable. Making all DKs terrible tanks would have crossed the line for us.

Q u o t e:
i my self, and a lot of the warlock community; feel that we have been the target of constant changes. It's been a very bad perception, i guess thats where a lot of the anger stems from, im speakign as a warlock for the past several years my self. I have yet to see a patch where something was not nerfed or some other mechanic was introduced to another class to nerf one of our mechanics.

The flip side are the classes that post patch notes and say “See? We only got 5 changes. Warlocks got 20!” There are downsides to being the target of constant change and there are downsides to not having enough changes. I’m not sure there is much we can say or do to convince some players that we’re not out to get their class. I’ve stated our case over and over. They have to ultimately make up their own minds.