Why weren't they fixed?

#0 - Nov. 1, 2010, 5:49 a.m.

In a recent post, Crabby (GC) said:

Q u o t e:
The only PvE specs we felt were dreadfully low in the previous expansion were Arms warrior, Frost mage, Subtlety rogue and BM hunter. If we can fix those for Cataclysm then we'll be in pretty good shape and the onus will be on you to be a capable enough raider that folks want to raid with you.

Now, I'm not QQing that they weren't fixed, I'm just wondering why, if the Powers That Be were aware that these four were far behind the other classes and specs, why weren't they boosted to make them more in-line with the rest? I mean, I'm not saying they had to revamp them or add anything new, but just tweak the numbers on a couple of abilities or talents to increase their dps output to that of a similar nature to the rest of the game.

Is there a reason why this wasn't done, and is there a risk of this happening again? That is, if, in Cataclysm, halfway through the expansion or the latest tier of raiding, a class or spec starts to lag behind by a considerable margin, will they be left to rot like the aforementioned 'Foul Four' in WoLK, or will they be given some TLC?

Just curious, since I'm switching my main from a Hunter to Shadow Priest, I'm a bit worried I'll be left behind if my spec becomes uncompetitive, as I can't switch to a different dps spec anymore (I'm sure Ret Paladins have a similar concern).

Ghostcrawler

#41 - Nov. 1, 2010, 5:35 p.m.

When there are multiple specs that fill the same role, as is the case for Fire vs. Frost mage or Arms vs. Fury warrior, we have found that some players will play their favored spec because they like the theme or mechanics, as long as the damage difference isn't too significant. Sadly, those players also seem to be in the minority. Many others will respec, regem, etc. for even a slight *theoretical* (very important word there) gain in dps.

If you recall earlier in the LK patch cycle, we attempted to bring Marks and Survival hunters up to the Beastmaster level. We didn't get the numbers quite right though, so what happened is that many hunters felt like they had to switch out of BM and into Survival. (Let's please not turn the rest of this thread into a lecture about how if we had only listened to *your* idea for tweaking hunter damage, everything would have turned out fine.) We heard from many players how frustrating that was -- to wake up one day and have to learn to replay their class because the anointed highest dps spec was now a different tree completely. Players are much more tolerant of huge, sweeping changes between expansions than they are in between patches.

If you look at the patch history of the rest of LK, there were many tweaks to Subtlety, Arms, Frost and BM. We were cautious though, because we were trying to avoid driving everyone who played those classes to have to switch class to class. We were trying to get the dps elevated without going over, and that's just a very small target to hit.

We learned from this mistake though, and part of the overhaul of the talent trees was specifically to make tweaking a lot easier for us. The passive talent tree bonuses are just one example, but we also did things like break our old rules for how spell coefficients relate to things like cast times, and the budget of a talent point in general. We wanted to develop a system that gave us more knobs to adjust and more fine-tuning we could deploy in between expansions to adjust specs that are low without going over.

Here's hoping it works.