Blizzard, A Humble and Pleading Request.

#1 - Feb. 12, 2011, 11:16 p.m.

Re-posting from the warrior boards because this is a shorter and more concise version and this is apparently the spot you go if you are hoping for a blue response.

Re-posting this from the Euro boards because many of the points raised in it are quite intellegently presented. There are good and useful ideas to help fix us in pvp without unnecesarrily nerfing us, rather harshly, in a way that directly contradicts what you were I would think aiming to do with the 4.0.6 patch.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1710231789?page=1#12

In summation no one is arguing that fury did too much burst after the changes to raging blow and master went live. I could easily kill another character in 2-3 seconds if they couldn't get away from me and I had CS on them and DW + Reck + a trinket up. However, as has been raised in great detail on the ej boards, the mmo-champion boards, and here, our pvp burst potential was broken but our pve dmg was by no means in anyway overpowered.
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From the MMO-Champ boards:

1) http://www.simulationcraft.org/Raid_T11_372_406.html
2) www.stateofdps.com
3) The fact out of 260 records, warrior dps holds only 1 of them on worldoflogs.com

We aren't topping anything nor should we be. We're competitive at the high end but still behind a handful of specs and competitive with most others. We're at the upper mid of dps right now as opposed to lower mid pre-patch, there is nothing to indicate otherwise. The only thing we are excelling at right now is heavy burst through using all cooldowns in a 30 second window, thats causing problems in arena and also causing us to do very well for heroics which are short fights, which may lead some to believe what we do on a heroic boss is at a sustainable rate to a raid, it isn't.
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So basically, the raging blow nerf is fine. It was op. Just like Marksman Hunters aimed shot is, but you don't want to hurt them unfairly in pve so you are going to compensate them in another way (Probably through aspect of the hawk) that allows their net dps to not drop severely in pve while limiting their burst potential in pvp. I applaud changes like this, as they enhance the overall gaming experience for all players. However, one sided nerfs done from a pvp perspective that end up unfairly punishing a large segment of one Class in terms of their PvE viability I am less inclined to applaud. They end up negatively affecting the game-play experience of at the bare minimum tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of fury warriors world-wide. I beg of you to please consider attaching a correlating long term dps increase for us PvE folks to compensate for the nerf to our burst dmg in pvp. As it stands right now you are lopping off close to 1,000 dps per raid boss from a class that was no where near dominating the meters as it was. And as we have a lot of hindrances on us that ranged dmg dealers don't in most raid encounters and bring a lot less general utility than almost everyone else to the group our raw dps is pretty much the only reason for us to be there. If you take that away from us what purpose do we serve?

I get that I could simply respec to Single Minded Fury and probably not lose too much dps over-all but that would turn the fury tree back into a cookie cutter spec. It would defeat the entire purpose of having tg and smf, and I though that the idea to give us two separate specs that were each individually viable within the fury tree was one of the best that I had seen since vanilla. Don't go back on that and break it now so that there is one spec that is head and shoulders above the other. In fact the entire reason for the single minded fury buff in 4.0.6 was that tg was parsing our so much higher than it. Now in the current incarnation they are incredibly close to each other in net dps. With this nerf to raging blow and no accompanying tweak to something that will benefit tg the gap will baloon out overnight again and Fury warriors will be pigeon holed all over again.

Sorry, my own little diatribe on this may of gotten a big long-winded. Please just read the thread from the Eu boards and pick one single idea you like to accompany the raging blow nerf. Don't just hit us in the face with the nerf bat again when I am finally having so much freaking fun :(. Please :(.

Daxxarri

Community Manager

#17 - Feb. 14, 2011, 10:16 p.m.

After 4.0.6 went in, Fury was doing more damage than projected, and higher dps than we wanted for the spec. Essentially, the 4.0.6 changes for Fury weren't intended to be a damage buff to begin with - we just wanted to make the mastery more appealing and de-emphasize Heroic Strike. Instead, we saw Fury damage jump up more than could be accounted for from factors like the metagem change. It also seems that Raging Blow had become very strong after the mastery change. So, we made the decision to reduce Fury damage, and Raging Blow became a good place to make that adjustment, since that allowed us to address both the PvE damage issues and the PvP burst concerns at the same time.

We think the verdict is still out over whether Single-Minded Fury has become a clear choice over Titan's Grip. All the evidence available right now is theory crafted, but we still want to see how performance shakes out in actual play. If the theory crafting turns out to be correct, then we'll consider adjusting Single-Minded Fury then, probably a reduction. In the meantime, it's probably best to stick with whichever play style you find the most fun, or at least, have the most appropriate weapons for. It's good to keep in mind that there are more two-handed weapons with strength on them than there are strength heavy one-handed weapons, though there's also probably more competition for those two-handers as well.

Daxxarri

Community Manager

#66 - Feb. 14, 2011, 11:19 p.m.

no offense... but how did you not account for this?

No offense taken. World of Warcraft is a complex game, and due to all the factors involved, predicting performance changes over the whole playing population and in every feasible scenario can be challenging. We run the numbers to predict dps under several different conditions and then compare those estimates to empirical data (generated in house and collected from live games). Most of the time, that data gives us a pretty accurate picture. Still, there are a lot of Fury warriors out there with various mixes of gear, talent specs and skill levels, and despite the projections, damage went up for a lot of those players more than we expected.

Daxxarri

Community Manager

#100 - Feb. 15, 2011, 12:29 a.m.

Some of you have expressed some concerns regarding Fury AoE, so this is a good time to mention that we're looking at area of effect damage for a lot of specs, Fury included. So, it's on the radar.

We feel that warrior dps is about where it should be, and that the class continues to bring valuable output to a raid and will scale well in the future as well.

Single-Minded Fury and Titan's Grip were really close in the wake of 4.0.6, which was a good place. Now it's possible that SMF is doing better than TG by a wider margin than we're comfortable with. We don't want to eliminate choices and see a rush on SMF, and we'd rather see players choosing the weapons they'd prefer. If that means bringing SMF back into line with TG, then that might be the course of action we take. Nothing is necessarily guaranteed or imminent though.

Daxxarri

Community Manager

#119 - Feb. 15, 2011, 1:21 a.m.

My only "beef" with this nerf, is that the PTR had been up for a month and a half, and Raging Blow was nerfed once during the PTR (about halfway through), and then there was no word on a nerf despite the amount of time the PTR had been up. Four days after the release of the patch, Raging Blow received a 20% damage nerf. Why was this not done before the patch was released? It's understandable that you guys either miss something like this, or miscalculate something, but Raging Blow was clearly still a problem after the initial nerf to the first damage increase to Raging Blow, it just wasn't voiced because not many people were playing the PTR. Did you guys just not pay attention, or were you waiting for enough people to voice their opinions on the changes to Raging Blow so you could see if Raging Blow really needed a damage reduction?

A lot of players on the PTR correctly predicted the problem, yes. But players always predict problems, many of which never materialize. The feedback from the PTRs is valuable, but we don't expect it to result in a perfect assessment, and we've learned that we can’t and shouldn’t just accept everything at face value. Players that post concisely, objectively and provide a lot of verifiable evidence of their claims tend to provide the most valuable information, and the kind of feedback that we're far more likely to heed. When concerns are raised, we discuss them and run tests of our own, and decide whether a change is warranted or not.

In this case, we were aware of the concerns being raised about Raging Blow burst damage in PvP. We agreed with the arguments that it required a lot of cooldowns and stacked mastery to get going, and even then enrage could easily be removed by several classes. We didn't believe that this would lead to Fury dominating PvP, and we didn't change it at the time because we didn’t want to nerf Fury’s PvE damage over a (possibly overstated) PvP concern. We also didn't want to risk making mastery a poor stat again, which was the most significant issue we were trying to fix. When Fury’s PvE dps proved higher than our target, then Raging Blow was the obvious candidate to decrease since a reduction there was likely to solve all the issues that we were hoping to address.

Daxxarri

Community Manager

#126 - Feb. 15, 2011, 1:32 a.m.

02/14/2011 5:25 PMPosted by Loveriel
Going live and making people take gear, invaliding it a couple days later then making them take different gear, then invalidating that gear... I mean is this reasonable game design to you guys? You realize that Warriors are pissing away raid drops and arena points due to all this nonsense, yes?

None of the gear in question was "invalidated". Made marginally less efficient, perhaps, but certainly not invalidated. Hyperbole doesn't help the discussion, and makes it more likely that valuable feedback is lost in the shuffle.