MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Nerf Philospohy. GC can agree.

2008-09-07 00:10:12

I believe the reason we got nerfed like we did was because of one simple philosophy.

"It is easier to start with less and add more, than to have too much and take away."

Basically, they put out some numbers, and they ended up being too high. They tried messing with them from there, but they ended up with some crazy balance issues.

So now, they kinda put us on a base level they can work up from. They can add a little here, a little there, till it finally feels good, whereas when you start top and go down, you're kinda taking a shot in the dark as to how much to lower it. I definitely believe we'll be seeing some buffs over the next few builds, but they'll probably be easy going, rather than the radical changes we saw in SS and HB.

What do you say GC?

Avayle

2008-09-07 18:09:09

Re: Nerf Philospohy. GC can agree.

"Holy expletive! DK dps is through the roof. They're getting 10K SS crits in greens!"
"What do we do?"
"Geez. I don't know. Let's just change a bunch of numbers and hope something sticks."
"Okay, how about Scourge Strike? Should it be 20% of weapon damage?"
"Or 15%? I have no idea. Flip a coin?"
"What about Might of Mograine?"
"Just pick a number. I'm sure it will be fine."
"Should we compare them to other classes?"
"No time for that. Just make some changes and we'll try again."

That's not actually how we do our jobs. ;)

We have spreadsheets -- huge ones. We have values for characters in greens and raid buffed with epic gear. We have estimates of mob damage and health, character downtime, the benefits from enchants, gems and glyphs. We have conversion rates of mana to runic power to energy to rage. We look at damage per second, efficiency, button presses per second, typical rotations, movement vs. standing still, mobs vs. players and every other variable we can think of (and there are a LOT of them).

In the end we come up with an estimate for what an attack should do. We come up with a budget for talents and spells just like we have a budget for items at a given level. Sometimes those estimates are wrong because we forgot to take something into account, or because there's a bug in a talent or spell somewhere that messes up the calculation.

And then we do lots of testing, and to get a reality check on our tests, we compare them to the numbers people are reporting from the beta. Repeat as necessary.

I've said this in a few posts: that our numbers can sometimes be wrong (as is the case almost any time you deal with numbers), but the methods we use to arrive at them are absolutely not sloppy.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-07 22:46:59

Re: Nerf Philospohy. GC can agree.

I wasn't trying to put the smack down on anyone. My apologies. There was a suggestion in some of these posts that we took a chainsaw to the DK numbers with no goal or method in mind. Not to single people out, but...

Q u o t e:
It seems like they didn't really know what was actually wrong, so they just decided to change everything.

Q u o t e:
Honestly all they really had to do was change frost strike/plague strike to what they are now, and lower howling blast a bit and it probably would have been fine. Those were the abilities that were overpowered, NOT death and decay, icy touch, plague strike, etc etc

To use just one example, Plague Strike was overpowered. Its damage calculations didn't consider how much larger the Blood Plague ticks had become. It may not seem like a big issue since it isn't a hard hitting spell, but it was a very efficient one for the rune cost and it's not above the realm of possibility that some clever player out there would one day discover "Hey, you should never spend a U Rune on ANYTHING but Plague Strike." Spells get used in ways we never intended or predicted all the time. The only protection against that sort of thing happening is to balance all the spells, not just the high damage ones.

I have great confidence in our method of balancing the game. It is scientific and rigorous, and as such it's going to be a lot more robust than a single player who runs around and hits some mobs and says to themselves "Yeah, that feels right."

But at the same time, I'm not naive. I know we can cause or fail to fix balance problems, and some of those have been whoppers. Some were bugs, some were issues we didn't consider, and some were just incorrect assumptions.

When all is said and done, if warriors, warlocks, hunters and druids are hitting for 2500 to 3000 dps, then death knights will be too. I don't think that is happening yet, but it's pretty hard to tell at the moment why that isn't happening. We'll get there. Having most (but not all) talent bugs fixed and players in Naxx is providing a lot more good data than we had a month ago.

Ghostcrawler