Raiders & Blizz: Thanks for Gutting Alchemy

#0 - May 25, 2007, 5:33 p.m.

Seriously, thanks. It's good to know that the game will be balanced around high-end raid content at the expense of players leveling toons and max-level players uninterested in raiding at the end-game level.

If Alchemy was the cause of high-end PvE imbalance, the Alchemy nerf should have only affected people who choose to do high-end PvE. For example, players should only have the new restrictions if they're in a raid of ten or more people. This across-the-board Alchemy nerf is a poorly executed, short-sighted pseudo-fix to the actual problem of buggy, imbalanced raid content.

Insisting that Alchemy be nerfed in order to present balanced, beatable encounters boggles my mind. That's basically stating that the end-game is balanced around a single profession. Crippling that profession instead of actually tuning your raid design is a weak fix.

Nethaera

#5 - May 25, 2007, 6:04 p.m.

We addressed a lot of balancing issues with dungeons in this last patch and really wanted to take a bit of the burden off of alchemists and guilds in needing to farm so much. Many of the encounters that people were relying on multiple flasks and elixirs for are now a bit easier and do not require the same amount of preparation as they did previously.

So in effect, we did two things this last patch: we balanced the high-end raid content to be a bit more reasonable for people to be successful in, and we changed the ingrained feeling of "required" potions, flasks, and elixirs by making them a more selective addition to a raid rather than a masive requirement.

One major complaint that people had was the amount of time they spent farming for materials and how expensive it was to raid. By making the changes we have with alchemy, this has become less burdensome. Yes, there are always those that don't mind farming, but in this case, we felt this change had the most benefit overall.

As you say in your own post, raiding should not hinge on a single profession and these changes ease the perception a bit. The profession is not crippled by this and is still very viable.