Class Balance & Hotfixes - 10/18

Rather than try and address multiple threads, I'm just going to plop our current thoughts in this one post. Please excuse the brevity.

1) We think Fury, Arms, Feral cat and Retribution dps is too low and we will be buffing them.

2) We think mage dps is too high, especially Fire, and will be nerfing it.

3) We think Shadow priest dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Shadow Word: Death spam, which is tough on healers. We'll be fixing that.

4) We think Destro warlock dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Searing Pain spam, which is tough on tanks. We'll be fixing that.

5) As we suspected, PvP dps is just too high given that the health pools of Cataclysm haven't kicked in yet. While competitive PvP is over for the moment, we still want the environment to feel better so we will be buffing resilience. This change might be reverted at level 85.

There will probably be more changes after another night of raiding and BGs. Many of the bug fixes we have made today will affect dps as well. Stay tuned.

We made many changes yesterday. A lot of these were bug fixes, and many bug fixes will affect damage one way or the other. So just because you don't see a specific change referenced below, doesn't mean it didn't change.

With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post:

1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn't do as much to tanking abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities.

We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities.

2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two.

3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn't nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow's biggest spell.

4) We returned Searing Pain's damage to its 3.3.5 levels.

5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change.

We don't have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic.

Here are some more recent changes:

Shadow Priests – we lowered the damage of Shadow Word: Death, except when the target is at the 20% wounded state, at which point it will do full damage. We also fixed a bug where the energize from Masochism was causing too much threat. (This is just a clarification on the above note -- we have not nerfed it twice.)

Balance Druids – we lowered the base points and coefficients of several Balance spells, especially Insect Swarm.

Affliction Warlocks – we lowered the damage of Drain Soul slightly.

We are going to take the resilience buff down a little.

It should end up as a 25% buff from where it stood originally, not a 50% buff. For point of comparison, maxing out resilience before our first hotfix reduced damage by ~50%. After out hotfix, the damage reduction with max resilience was 80%. With this most recent change, damage reduction with max resilience will go down to 60%.

Part of what is going on here is that we don't want newly leveled characters to explode in PvP, while still making sure that well-geared characters aren't invulnerable. The current resilience curve makes that a tricky thing to balance. Perhaps in the future resilience needs diminishing returns so that it doesn't keep getting better and better the more you have.

While we don't have any additional announcements to make at this time, there are some additional balance tweaks we're working on. Some of our adjustments at level 80 ended up causing certain classes to be overpowered or underpowered at level 85.

We have pushed a hotfix to improve hunter damage.

Specifically, we increased the damage of the signature abilities (Chimera Shot, Black Arrow, Explosive Shot, and Kill Command) by 15-25%. This will both improve overall damage-dealing and make sure that these abilities are prioritized higher than other shots. We think this will bring hunters to a good enough state until they hit 85. Aspect of the Fox and Cobra Shot solve some specific issues at higher levels. Marksman hunters may still trump Survival and Beastmaster hunters until they’re 85, since their rotations rely a little on Cobra Shot.

My resilience post above was confusing.

We had buffed resilience by 50% and then lowered it by 25%. This is a 12.5% buff from before the patch. To use clean numbers, if you had 40% damage reduction, we buffed it to 60% (a 50% increase) and then lowered it to 45% (a 25% decrease).