Lol rogue HfB nerf

I suspect a lot of this talk is just grumbling over being nerfed in general, but I'm not quite sure what all the fuss is over Hunger for Blood. From a design perspective, it's really nice to have a knob that is so easy to tweak like that. You don't have to go potentially break other talents. You don't have to change base points or coefficients in ways that affect other specs or even lower level members of the class. In fact the mastery system for Cataclysm works somewhat similarly, giving us the ability to adjust numbers independently without causing a cascade of undesirable effects.

To use a different example, consider Affliction locks. We want to buff their dps as I said, but we want to do it in such a way without giving them a big boost in PvP where they do pretty high damage. We don't want to over buff Destruction or Demonology (because we want Affliction to be a real choice) so we can't easily touch spells that overlap or talents that those other guys might use. If we had an Affliction talent ("Hunger for Green Fire") that let us easily tweak them up or down, then in turn we could make adjustments more easily and with less risk.

(Let's not turn this into an Affliction thread. I just wanted to illustrate the contrast between an easy to adjust and hard to adjust tree.)

Q u o t e:
Yes but this was the easy way out.

Believe me, you want the easy way out. The easier a change is, the more likely we can get it out quickly. For example, if it doesn't require a text change, then it doesn't require translation into all the languages that WoW ships in. In return, we can make adjustments to the game in a more timely manner instead of you having to suffer balance problems for very long.

Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:

...if it doesn't require a text change, then it doesn't require translation into all the languages that WoW ships in.


Just out of curiosity, is that really a problem in today's multinational corporate world? Real question, not snarky.

It's not an insurmountable obstacle, but it does take time. Except for those players who just love to be overpowered all the time, the sense I get is that most players would like for us to be able to tweak numbers as quickly as possible. If they're weak, they want to be not weak tomorrow, not a week from now, not the next patch day. I don't speak Russian or Korean, so when we change a tooltip it has to go out to people who can translate that text. It takes time, which means you won't get your balance adjustment that day, and possibly not until the next patch.

My initial comment wasn't necessary that HfB is super compelling gameplay, though as you've seen above plenty of players of various classes complain about their 51 point talents too. It's the nature of feedback to some extent. We embrace it, but we do so knowing that some huge percentage of feedback (about any topic, not just WoW) is going to be negative.

What I was reacting to was the sense that adjusting HfB was somehow lazy or inelegant when in reality it's the kind of thing we need to be able to do to all specs and that in fact is our future plan, though not through 51 point talents.

Q u o t e:
blizzards solution was

F) destroy the sun.

Tempting new signature.

When players equate a 7.5%ish damage nerf to destroying the sun, I'm not sure what hope we have to ever make the forum community happy. :)

Q u o t e:
You go on saying you don't have to tweak anything else when you have HfB as a knob...yet u go and mess with nerfing poisons...

Exactly. Because tweaking HfB wouldn't nerf Combat.