Lessons learned from nerfing Ret

Alright, I'll bite. This should be interesting.

Q u o t e:
Lesson #1: balancing the game around population and representation, as a way of development, is dead. Achievements have tied players more tightly to their characters, regardless of class, and getting us to reroll is only going to get harder as achievement points pile up. It will take some amazing incentive for me to reroll to another class; about the only reroll I am even considering at this point is the new hero class. I barely play my non-main toons outside of using their professions for the benefit of my main.

Our goal is not to get players to reroll. Some people like having lots of alts and some stick with a single character for life. Both are perfectly appropriate ways to play the game. We do try and make sure we know what we're doing when we ever buff a very over-represented spec or nerf a very under-represented spec. Some players, typically those with an axe to grind, have spun this as our balancing around population.

Q u o t e:
Lesson #2: if a change garners calls of "the sky is falling!" then the absolute last thing you should do is admit that the sky is, indeed, falling. Stop. Figure out why they are purporting the sky is falling. If you can track the same data they are, chances are you've figured it out. Once you have, you can admit the sky is falling, but soften the blow with "but we're currently working on this and this to balance out the change somewhat."

Players play their "sky is falling" card a little too often. It makes it pretty hard to detect trivial changes from gigantic ones.

We needed to nerf Ret pretty hard for PvP reasons. Some of you just aren't going to accept that change was needed, and I suspect it would take several long threads to convince you otherwise, so I'm not going to spend a great deal of effort in this thread trying to do so. I know it is frustrating that we have had to nerf Ret so many times this expansion. It is frustrating for us too. We keep trying to not overdo it and we keep underdoing it.

We did make the changes with some longer-term changes in mind to get Ret to be less about huge upfront attacks that will hopefully give Ret players some more intersting options with regard to Seals and special attacks. We're not there yet, but we have changed paladins dramatically for LK and it's going to take some time.

Q u o t e:
Lesson #3: arena is going to destroy this game if it continues to get top consideration. Your metrics cannot show arena in any better place than the publicly available data (public data would have to have a sampling error of over 10% for this to be true, and I seriously doubt that is the case). Even internationally arena is poorly-participated in compared to battlegrounds and raiding. It should be obvious, by now, that arenas should be treated analogously to heroics: the pee-wee leagues of real PvP.

It's not a very strong argument to say you don't like something and therefore we should remove or downplay it when it should be pretty clear that thousands of players do like it. Fewer players participate in Arena than raiding, but that shouldn't surprise anyone because we made a concerted effort in LK to get a lot more players into raiding, and it worked. I'm not sure it's a good idea to try and push a lot of players into Arena. We would like to get a lot more players into PvP, but I suspect many of them would have more fun in Battlegrounds. Arena isn't for everyone, and it doesn't need to be. Some players really enjoy it and we understand why. If you want to participate in these role forums however, you aren't going to be able to just dismiss PvP (or PvE) concerns just because that play style doesn't interest you.

Q u o t e:
Lesson #4: never say one thing and the very next patch do the opposite. Players may have short memories for this sort of thing (obviously not true, thanks to Blue Tracker), but the time span of the release of the Paladin Q&A and this slap-in-the-face nerf could not possibly have been closer in development time. You had to have been working on these changes, at least in theory, by the time the Q&A got done.

I'm never going to refuse to do something we think is good for the game because it might upset the community. Sorry. My goal is to make a good game, not placate the community. Those two goals overlap, but not by 100%. Sometimes we say things that are right at the time but on which we later change our minds. It happens. Calling that breaking promises or whatever is typically the response of angry players maybe hoping that catching us in a gotcha will get us to undo the changes. It won't. If you're looking for immutable truths and laws that are constant, I suspect you're not going to find them in a succesful, evolving MMO. :)

Q u o t e:
Lesson #5: when you're dealing with a significant portion of your population, the best thing is to not rile them up. People are always asking why Ret gets so much attention. The answer is obvious: because Ret is such a high percentage of the population. When you attempt to "correct" this -- and I find this laughable in the face of rampant server faction imbalances and population dereliction on low pop server -- you should expect proportional backlash.

There are a lot of Rets, but we try not to play favorites. Players on these forums will tell you that we are too mean to paladins or too gentle with them. It all depends on your perspective. Again, fear of community wrath isn't going to keep us from doing the right thing by the game. We do want to make sure that the players playing Ret play it because they like the playstyle or the notion of the paladin class and not because it's an easy road to victory.

Q u o t e:
Lesson #6: it has been plainly clear to the players of Paladins for some time that the CLASS itself needs to be reworked from the ground up. Our core mechanics are still very much buffing/support. This is painfully obvious if you spec 0/0/0 and look at your options. This needs to be changed, and all Paladins changes need to stem from this driving need, once the Ret changes are reverted.

Nah, we just don't agree. This kind of argument creeps up often on every single class. We did make a lot of changes to the Seal and Judgement system for LK, and we're really happy with those changes overall. Like any big set of changes, they have taken a lot of iteration to complete the design. If you don't buy that, just look at the amount of change the DK class endures every patch. There are some problems we still have to solve for Ret (make sure Seal choice feels meaningful, find a niche for Crusader Strike, give low-level paladins something to do besides autoattack, etc.) but there are problems we still have to solve for all the specs in the game. From my perspective, too many players seem to feel victimized or seem to feel they are the only class with a legitimate claim to those feelings. It's a game so emotion factors into it. It just factors in too much on many of these forum posts. :)

Q u o t e:
I like how GC says he doesn't agree that PvP balancing (mind you mid range 2s arenas, not top class), is hurting PvE, but in the 2nd part of his post agrees that they had to nerf Ret hard for PvP reasons.

I don't think you are interpreting my comments the way I intended. PvP balancing affects PvE balancing all the time. The opposite happens too. My comments were more about how it's pretty futile to say "I don't care about PvP, so you should just make changes that affect PvE and not care about the consequences."

WoW is a PvP and PvE game. We're not asking you to participate equally in both. We are asking you that if you want to participate in class mechanics and balance discussion that you not just dismiss one or the other as irrelevant.

I'm also not saying that if your PvE damage sucks because of a PvP change that we're okay with that.

Backing up, a lot of PvP players have become really frustrated trying to handle high burst damage from a class that can turn around and remove a lot of the crowd control used to counter them and even prevent a lot of incoming damage. They're talking about you (and sometimes DKs). Unless we're willing to go in and take apart the defense mechanics (which to be fair, some players have advocated), we have to reduce the burst damage. A stacking dot is a great way to reward sustained damage at the expense of burst.

However, as we have said, the goal was not to nerf Ret in PvE. Ret paladins may have been slightly behind in Ulduar, at least until they got very good weapons. We think the Seal changes will elevate Ret's sustained PvE damage over where it is on Live. If we're wrong, we have knobs to turn, such as increasing the amount of the dot or ways to apply it. We understand many players are concerned about short fights or fights where you have to retarget. To be fair, a lot of classes have the same problems. If anything, we are adding more ramp up time to more classes as a way of toning down PvP burst. The Feral druid who has to peel off of Hodir at 4 cps in order to free an NPC is going to be pretty frustrated too. Deciding when it's worth it to do so or when you're better off not changing targets is one of those skills that makes you better or worse at the game.

Movement fights are a slightly different issue. We make you move in PvE because it's a challange. You're not supposed to be able to trivially overcome it.

It's also not fair to characterize all of the Ret changes as for PvP only. As one example, we have struggled with the damage recoil on Seal of Blood for some time. Players didn't seem to particularly like it. It felt like a liability in PvE and it didn't add a balance offset to the abilitiy in PvP. So we removed the mechanic.

Given the tenor of this forum recently, I suspect a lot of this will fall on deaf ears. But my hope is that it will reach some of you and you'll understand our point of view a little better. I'm going to resist the urge to respond to the foamy at the mouth types, but I'll keep reading the thread.

Q u o t e:
I'm curious as to what kind of process determines priority when addressing class issues each patch. While I don't expect Ret to get more attention than any other spec, the former (crusader strike) has been lackluster since it was introduced (~3 years now), and the latter has been a concern for leveling paladins since WoW was released. On the flipside, divine storm doing holy damage was hotfixed within hours of 3.0 going live (I know I'm playing the victim card, but it's relevant).

There's no formula you can plug tasks into that will stack rank them into the order you attack them. A lot of variables are at play. To name just a few:

-- Some problems are easy to solve. Some are not.
-- Some designs are easy to implement. Others require new code.
-- Sometimes we know a problem will go away with a future change. There wasn't much point trying to balance Seal of Blood once we knew we were putting a bullet in it (unless it was really causing problems, which it wasn't).
-- Some problems affect a lot of players. Divine Storm blowing people up affected all 10 classes. Crusader Strike being uninspiring affects just one.
-- Magnitude of the problem comes into play in other ways. Paladins autoattacking as they level is a little boring. On the other hand, paladins have one of the lowest death rates and in fact one of the lowest rates of a player abandoning the low level character. Maybe the defenses and healing come into play. --Maybe players just like paladins. On the other hand, warriors die a lot and seem to get abandoned more often. Maybe they are too fragile or have too much downtime at low level and none of their cool moves (I'm talking more Charge and Overpower, not Heroic Strike) is enough to save them.
-- We are people so there is a human factor too. Sometimes a designer just gets excited about working on one change and wants to pursue it.

Q u o t e:
I think you misunderstood this portion. He was pointing finger specifically at Arena, saying that you (Blizzard) should not be focusing all of your effort there in proportion to where the majority of PvPers are in ... which are Battlegrounds. You should be spending less time on Arena and more time with where the majority of players are. Makes sense, doesn't it?

I will agree that we need to focus more on BGs. And to be fair we are in this very next patch, and there will be more announcements at Blizzcon.

However, to play devil's advocate, PvP balance issues manifest themselves a lot more sharply in Arena than in BGs. I don't think it's appropriate to spend 75% of our PvP time on BGs because 75% of the players are there (I made those numbers up). Things like diminishing returns on crowd control or dispel protection are just a lot less of a big deal in most BG encounters because there are more breaks in the fighting, you're fighting different people, and the strategy has more going on than just killing the other guy. I love BGs - don't get me wrong. But they tend to be more sensitive to say map issues than class issues. (Though again, because I know it will be taken out of context if I don't caveat it, class issues can definitely affect BGs.)

Q u o t e:
I think it's funny paladins are complaining now. GC just admitted that they kept "Undernerfing" you on purpose.

I think that's spin. If anything, we undernerfed on accident. I can think of at least three points in time when I had to say on the forums "We know these nerfs may feel harsh, but we have to finally solve the problem." And sadly, each of those times, the "very punitive nerfs" ended up not being that at all.

Q u o t e:
Any PVE Ret with Half a brain Loved Blood. I would take Blood back in a heart beat over "the new dps seal"

There were a thousand threads on how Ret paladins thought they would lose raid spots because Blood mandated so much more healing on them. It's fine that you didn't feel that way, but I don't think it's fair to characterize that issue as trivial. It was important to a lot of players.

Q u o t e:

So are we balancing these PvE numbers around the best players, the middle, or everyone, because pretty much anyone can tell you that for as much DPS the best Rets can do (see Lightfire from Refuge, or Barrelroll from Fusion), most other classes can demolish it.

We balance around players in starting gear and the best gear for a particular tier. We put more emphasis on the starting gear because the content is more difficult then. By the time everyone is done with their gear sets, the content is usually on farm.

You're not going to persuade me much with "Ret is the lowest dps" arguments. I can point you to threads by just about every class in the game (maybe not rogues) arguing their dps is too low. Over the course of a raid the size of Ulduar there are enough encounter differences that players trade spots on the charts a lot. Every class has at least one spec, and some more than one, for which dps differences between them and other players have a lot more to do with skill and gear than class mechanics.

Q u o t e:
Well, it's because Arena was touted as the next big thing in e-sport and with such lucrative prizes being involved (I think last fall's MLG gave the winners $50,000 to split 3 ways?) there's bound to be more attention and scrutinizing given to that area of PvP.

The number of players who realistically have a shot at rewards like that is pretty tiny. I think players who play Arenas do so for a number of reasons, including:

1) They think it's fun.
2) It's possible to earn very potent gear, and the only real PvP avenue to do so.
3) They like being able to make progress in WoW through a short weekly time commitment.

Players who don't like Arena tend to underestimate the number of players in that first category.

The second one is the biggest problem: players who don't enjoy Arenas but feel pushed into them in order to progress their character. One step we made in LK was to make the equivalent epics in the PvE content a lot more accessible. One misstep we made was in the earlier seasons making it much easier to get gear by losing your 10 matches than it was to try and learn the raid content. That attracted a lot of people to Arena who probably were not the intended audience.

Q u o t e:
But you said Ret DPS is too low yourself!
You are confusing the Ret community so much lately.
First you say Ret DPS is too low, now you're saying its not?
First you say you will be bringing up Ret's DPS via SoV change, then you nerf SoV to be worse than live DPS.

You're trying to read too much into my words without looking at the context. I was replying to a few posts in a row there basically saying "it's a truth universally acknowledged that Ret dps is the lowest damage-dealing spec in PvE." That's either an attempt to distribute misinformation or a misunderstanding of what is really going on.

We do want to make sure Ret's PvE dps is high enough for those players without great weapons (on which the spec is perhaps too dependent). We want overall for your dps in 3.2 to be higher than in 3.1 in equivalent situations and gear. We think it will be, but we'll keep an eye on it. So far most of the posts I've seen on the subject seem overly concerned with the ramping issue.

Q u o t e:
Again, your thinking isn't in line with the majority of your players. A large majority:

1) It's great fun if your class has a combination that facerolls everyone else
2) It's the only way to complete a PvP set. In order to compete, you need most of a full set.
3) Is not an arena centric argument. You can do that in other avenues.

As an aside, your argument would carry more weight if you had added something like "My suspicion is..." I am skeptical that you have any evidence what the majority of our players want in the way of PvP.

Regardless, I agree with you and have acknowledged that we have allowed PvP to become too synonymous with Arenas and not BGs. I still disagree with you on point #3. One of the strongest design features of the Arena is that the rewards come down to how well you play, not how long you grind or farm. There honestly aren't a lot of places in the game like that.

Q u o t e:
Wintergrasp is your "new" pvp content, and if i'm not mistaken, most players sit afk outside the gates for their 3 "marks of epics".

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. Wintergrasp has been pretty succesful. In fact, it's been a victim of its own success to the point where we are having to implement steps to keep too many players from joining in the fight at once and causing unreasonable lag. Like anything, it's not going to be for everyone. Overall however feedback has been very positive. I don't feel the need to put a spin on that, because I don't mind admitting areas where feedback has been negative, like the balance in the most recent Arena seasons.

Q u o t e:
Mr. Crawler,
Most Ret Paladins concerned with this most recent change don't care much for PvP, I don't know why you're trying to turn this into a PvP discussion thread.
We need to know what you think about the PvE side of Ret with this latest nerf.

It sounds like you're trying to tell players with PvP concerns (like the posters I quoted above) that those concerns aren't valid here. I'm saying Ret's balance is heavily tied into PvP. I don't think you can not discuss it.

Q u o t e:
The Feral Druid can Ferocious Bite for instant damage or refresh his savage roar, what can I do? let my stacks fall off?

If you want to be pedantic, a typical good Feral would never Ferocious Bite in PvE and if she already had Savage Roar up but not Rip (a common occurence since the former is prioritized) then she would sacrifice a lot of dps to lose that Rip. Now, stepping back, I think it's easy to take examples like this and argue which are apples and which are oranges. The point I was trying to make was that we don't consider long ramp up time to be a bad thing. The game could probably benefit from more of it. Yes your dps will be lower when you can't just keep banging on the same boss for 3 minutes. I'm not sure that's a huge design flaw, provided your dps makes up for it in other ways. Other characters do much better on fights where they can generate a lot of AE damage (say Unholy and perhaps Fury). As long as Ret's overall damage doesn't fall so low as to be a liability, we don't think it will be an issue. I understand some of you feel differently. A Fire mage going into a dungeon where several mobs were immune to fire would have a problem. I'm not sure "Don't bring a Ret to this dungeon because it doesn't have a lot of long ramping fights" is going to be a mantra. We'll see.

Q u o t e:
I don't think anyone would care about the length of ramp up time when the more pressing concerns is that it is entirely based on auto-attacks.

You seem to be reading different threads than I am.

Q u o t e:
GC - the ramping *IS* the issue. THe ramping is the problem. It's the most complete and massive nerf you have ever announced for the class. You must see why. You must. You're a smart guy, with lots of experience in this game, and on the dev team. You *must* know the impact this will have on the spec.

Just compare your response to the previous one I quoted. Some things stated as facts or consensus would be better expressed as opinions.

Also be careful with the hyperbole. I could say "Ret was the most overpowered spec we've ever had in the history of WoW." It's certainly an eye-catching statement, which is the bonus of hyperbole, but it also would make players scratch their heads, which is the downside.

Q u o t e:
maybe because sov was a dps boost until you screwed the ramp up and made dps worse than live.

Yes, and Ret paladins were emailing us saying "Thanks! My PvP damage is going to be higher than ever with new SoV design." That suggested that our changes were not going to have the desired effect.

Q u o t e:
I'm curious to know how you feel about Ret Paladins using fast one-handers to stack the DoTs faster, then switching to a two-hander.

I have seen the speculation. We discussed it a bit and think it's unlikely that would really pan out as a dps increase given how much damage you'd lose from the two-hander. If you're in a situation where you manage to acquire a really great one-hander and two-hander then it will be interesting to see if you can make it work. It's not the intent though.