Don't Nerf Crusade, Buff Divine Purpose

#1 - Jan. 21, 2017, 4:48 a.m.

and do something with holy wrath. I dunno what, just something.

Your concern isn't how much damage ret is doing, it's how we're doing that damage.

Designer Notes: Retribution's total damage is looking quite strong in 7.1.5, which is fine on its own. However, how that damage is delivered matters quite a bit as well.

So don't nerf our only good and fun 100 talent, buff the useless ones. On top of it being good, it's extremely fun. We love the fast playstyle of crusade, and taking away the haste is gonna make it more boring.

If you'd like us to have good sustain, buff Divine Purpose to be useful. it could be taken more on marathon fights where big burst doesn't matter as much, and you could leave crusade alone, which is exactly how precisely 100% of rets like playing right now.

RNG in a spec is good and fine. You proved that with Blade of Wrath, which (until the recent divine hammer buff) was usually the go to ability, even for cleave(better holy power generation). And to be quite fair, Blade of Wrath is a super good talent.

This whole "Hmm they're only using crusade, better nerf it" philosophy isn't going to fly. Especially considering it's still going to be a mandatory talent, because the other two are worthless.

#72 - Jan. 23, 2017, 2:04 a.m.

We are definitely keenly aware that people feel better when we fix a problem by buffing something, rather than fixing it by nerfing something. If you look across classes and talent rows in 7.1.5, you'll see the great majority of balance issues were addressed by buffing underperforming talents. There are a few factors that go into this decision though, and it generally has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

One issue when balancing a lopsided talent row is whether we want the overall power of the spec to go slightly up or slightly down in the process. In the case of Retribution during our tuning adjustments for the opening of Nighthold, we intended to slightly nerf the topend performance of the spec (essentially, the performance of players stacking trinkets/relics/legendaries that all build around Crusade). I know there's no easy way to deliver that message, but hopefully it's at least worth clarifying that it's not some accident of how we chose to balance the L100 row. Players say "why couldn't we buff Divine Purpose instead of nerfing Crusade", for the very understandable reason that the former wouldn't have resulted in a slight DPS nerf. But we were conscious of the slight DPS nerf when we decided to do it this way.

Another factor is that there are sometimes limits on how powerful we want an individual talent to be, regardless of balance within the row. Divine Purpose and Crusade are both very strong talents, that have a significant impact on the rotation and playstyle of the spec (and as mentioned, on gear/talent/relic/etc. decisions), even at their current strength. Balancing Retribution L100 at an even higher point would start causing more issues--Divine Purpose would allow strings of multiple free finishers very often, Crusade would continue to represent a majority of the spec's damage within a cooldown, and Holy Wrath would have to get even more bursty to try to compete with the other two. Sometimes we have to be careful about addressing all balance problems by buffing two talents up to match the highest one, because it can lead to a lot of power creep on the importance of a single talent to an entire DPS rotation.