Class Hotfixes – 3/12

Lead Systems Designer Greg Street (Ghostcrawler) wanted to give notice of several class hotfixes that went live last night along with the reasoning behind those changes.

Hotfixes:

Mage: Nether Tempest, and Living Bomb have their damage increased by 40%. Both spells now deals 70% of its damage when used against other players, down from 100%.

Mage: Frost Bomb damage have been increased by 40%. Frost Bomb now deals 60% of its damage when used against other players, down from 80%.
We’re happy with the relative power of Arcane, Fire and Frost mages in PvE to each other, but all three specs are below where we want them. We were hoping that once groups got past the first few 5.2 raid encounters that benefit a lot from multi-dotting that we’d see mage DPS climb, but it’s not there yet. We don’t want to change rotations or force players to change specs, so we wanted a relatively passive change.

We decided to buff the bombs because it affects all three specs relatively similarly and is as close to a passive form of damage as mages have. Had we buffed the cast-time nukes, the risk is that mages would lose even more DPS on high movement or high multi-dot fights, which wasn’t our intent. If these buffs aren’t sufficient, we will happily make more, but we’d rather make a few buffs a few times in a row rather than over buff then have to nerf it back down.

Warlock: Corruption damage -25%.

Warlock: Doom damage -25%.

Priest: Shadow Word: Pain damage -25%.
We want the dot specs to do well in multi-dot scenarios, but Affliction, Demonology and Shadow were doing too well on multi-dot fights and are still quite competitive on non-multi-dot fights. Balance druids, so far, are where we want them to be.

Death Knight: Howling Blast secondary target damage to 50% of primary target (down from 65%)

Death Knight: Rune Strike damage +25%.

Warrior: Shield Slam damage +25%.

Warrior: Deep Wounds damage for Protection only, +50%.
We’re keeping a close eye on death knights. Frost and Unholy are both performing really well, but Frost was higher than we wanted during cleave-type scenarios. They will still be quite good at cleaving even with this change.

Tank DPS is a difficult metric to measure because some tanks care a lot about their DPS, and work to maximize it, while others are content to fill the more traditional tank role of worrying about survivability and boss control, and pay less attention to their DPS. Therefore, it’s challenging to analyze logs and determine whether you’re seeing the full potential of tank DPS or not. For now, we think warrior and DK tank DPS was a little low, so we took steps to adjust it.

Remember, it’s not a goal that every spec do exactly equally well in every possible encounter, and in fact we think that would be boring. We just don’t want things to get so extreme that certain specs feel like they aren’t meaningfully contributing to the group’s efforts. All of this means that raid performance is a somewhat subjective call and we’d like to ask that you keep that in mind as you offer your feedback.

[Edit #1 to clarify Frost Bomb's damage in PvP.]
[Edit #2 to clarify Nether Tempest and Living Bomb's damage in PvP.]

Any word on when Chi Wave is going to be fixed? As it stands we are lucky to get full duration in a raid setting.

Our developers are aware of an issue with Chi Wave’s heals not bouncing correctly and are working on a hotfix to correct this.

Hotfixes:

Mage: Nether Tempest, Living Bomb, Frost Bomb damage +40%.

not sure if this is serious.

PVE-wise it's understandable, but when frost bomb had to be nerfed to do 20% less dmg in pvp environment, and now you are buffing it by 40%?

Is there really no other way to balance out pve damage, because it really is not fun having something over powered as frost bomb for pvp...

Providing a clarification over PvP damage concerns.

Frost Bomb now deals 60% of its damage when used against other players, down from 80%.

03/12/2013 04:29 PMPosted by Cyous

Frost Bomb now deals 60% of its damage when used against other players, down from 80%.

Effectively a 5% buff in PvP then?
(1.0 * 0.8 = 0.80) - pre-buff
(1.4 * 0.8 = 1.12) - post-buff
(1.4 * 0.6 = 0.84) - post-buff with nerf

That seems fine, to be fair.

That would be correct.