Beta Class Balance AnalysisSome updates on other recent changes:
Death Knight (
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Blood DKBlood Boil, at very high AP from Vengeance, was hitting harder than Heart Strike. Blood DK DPS was also on the high side. So, we adjusted Blood Boil damage:
- Changed the damage of Blood Boil; base damage went up by 388%, AP Coefficient went down by 42.7%.
- Reduced the damage bonus to Blood Boil from Crimson Scourge from 40% to 10%.
Frost DKSince buffing Death Strike a few weeks ago, it was actually competitive with Obliterate for DW Frost DKs. Since Death Strike is only intended to be used rotationally for Blood (but should still be useful for the healing, at a DPS loss for Frost / Unholy), we made the following change:
- Reduced the damage of Death Strike from 280% weapon damage to 200% weapon damage and gave Blood a hidden passive which increases Death Strike damage by 40%. This results in no change for Blood, but a 28.6% nerf for Frost / Unholy.
These changes also have the side effect of making Death Siphon hit harder than Death Strike at 55k AP and Heart Strike at 65k AP with a Tier 14 normal weapon which has an ilvl of 489 (it's the same for heroic weapons as well except the break point goes up but never higher than we will realistically have with Vengeance).
Was this intended?Yes, we’re fine with Death Siphon being a DPS gain in the situation where you have high vengeance but don’t care as much about your defenses. It should never win on defensive value though.
Also, did you dislike Blood being able to sacrifice survival for more damage by replacing Death Strike with Heart Strike?Not at all. We intend for Blood DKs to do two Heart Strikes instead of a Death Strike when they don’t care as much about their defenses and would rather do more damage. All tanks can trade defenses for more damage, at a steep cost. DKs’ tradeoff was much MUCH better than the other tanks before, so we reduced it. Two Heart Strikes is still more damage than one Death Strike, just not by as huge a margin as before. It should be similar to the other tanks.
I'm just curious if there's a reason to impliment the buff as a hidden passive. WOuld'nt a passive icon in the spellbook for improved deathstrike help new players understand that a Blood DK's Death strike is not the same as a Unholy or Frost DK's Deathstrike? I'm not sure I see the point in 'hiding' this information from players.We can add the passive visibly to the spell book or just change the tooltip for Blood.
Druid (
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Feral DruidRake was potentially able to beat Shred, with high mastery, so we moved some damage from Rake to their direct attacks:
- Increased the damage of Shred by 25%.
- Increased the damage of Ravage by 25%.
- Increased the damage of Mangle by 25%.
- Reduced the damage of Rake by 17%.
Hunter (
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Survival HunterWe wanted to make Explosive Shot more powerful than other shots, such as Arcane. To do so, we shifted some damage from their DoTs:
- Increased the damage of Explosive Shot by 20%.
- Reduced the damage of Black Arrow by 25%.
- Improved Serpent Sting now increases the damage of Serpent Sting by 50%, down from 100%.
Surely this wasn't the sole reason for deciding to nerf Serpent Sting? Personally, I was quite enjoying hunters having something that actually resembled a dot, rather than what serpent sting was and now continues to be: something you only use once per fight (except when target switching). I'm just curious if that's your design intent, and whether having some form of multidotting utility was seen as overpowered.No, we actually like Survival getting a bit of the multi-dot style. This change shouldn’t invalidate that.
Was it also intended that this change bring down SV's AoE damage? I'm not sure how we were doing at 90 AoEwise, but this definitely has a significant impact.There was also a recent bugfix which significantly increased Survival’s AoE damage. The instant damage from Improved Serpent Sting would not be dealt if there was already a Serpent Sting on the target that was greater than 15 sec long. This meant that during AoE, when casting Multishot repeatedly, only some of them would trigger the Improved Serpent Sting damage. We fixed that, which also of course increased their AoE damage significantly. The nerf to Improved Serpent Sting and this bugfix offset each other.
Monk (
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Brewmaster MonkIt’s a bug that Keg Smash doesn’t refund energy when it misses. We’ll get that fixed. (
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Lower-level Class Balance Issues & SolutionsSome things to keep in mind:
- Since this game was first designed, we've had to deal with a certain degree of non-balance at low levels. This is a result of the fact that every class and spec obtains their abilities one at a time as they level (as opposed to, for instance, getting 8 new abilities at level 20 and then nothing until level 30, when you get another 8 new abilities). This is complicated by the fact that some people will twink and use heirlooms, and some will not.
- We have to find tweaks that we can make that don't force us to then make wholesale changes at level 90.
- What we're really focusing on here is abilities that hit too hard or too weak (relative to how they feel at 90.) Again, we hear you loud and clear that overall, melee abilities are running low and healing is running too hot.
- When the solution is "I need very-high-level ability X at a very low level," we're at an impasse, since we have to hold back some abilities and only make them accessible at a higher level, and we want those abilities to feel well-earned.
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World of Warcraft 2I really hope they will do it some day, but if they do it, they won't do it sooner than 5 years, at least. The idea is basically the same game, but with way better graphics, new features, new NPCs/Items etc etc. It would be cool, because the skeleton would be the same, but the rest would be new.But that doesn't sound like something that would require an entirely new game though, but of course that is just my personal opinion. As I see it, these things could just as well be upgrades to the current game through patches and expansions, much like what we have seen already in the game's evolution from its release until today.
I think something more would be required in order to rationalise the end of WoW in favour of WoW II. (
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