Patch 4.3 Class Balance Remarks from the Devs

Man, it must be an interesting job to be the guy in charge of class balance…

The Devs (specifically Ghostcrawler) discuss what’s happening with the various classes in the 4.3 patch. Not all specs are covered and Rogues aren’t covered at all. I have no idea what that means. This is a clip from part 1, part two is below this:

Part 1:

Back in June, I wrote a blog explaining the context behind some of the changes in the upcoming patch that might not be intuitively obvious. That blog ended up being one of the most popular ones we’ve ever done; even players who disagreed with the specific changes appreciated our explanations for what we were trying to accomplish. Therefore, we’d like to continue in that fashion and we figured there was no reason to wait until 4.3 was “on the shelves” to get the ball rolling.

One note before I dive into things. If you haven’t read the previous blog, “Rate of Change,” now might be a good time. There are some changes that we want to make to class mechanics or balance in general that we don’t think are fair or appropriate to spring on players in the middle of an expansion. These include things like the power of interrupts or the active mitigation model we want to implement for tanks. We’ll get there, but in short term we fundamentally believe that it’s important to pick our battles.

On with the show. Note that most of these changes are mechanics changes. We have not yet finished enough testing to be confident in our benchmark damage, healing, and tanking numbers for 4.3. When we finish those, and when we see what some players are capable of doing on the PTR (or even what they theorycraft or sim based on PTR numbers) there will be additional changes. Off the top of my head, I’d say Fury warrior damage is almost certainly too high and Resto druid AE healing (ignoring the effects of Tranquility of course) is also too potent.

You’ll also notice some classes aren’t mentioned at all. It’s possible we’re just happy with them, but it’s more likely we just haven’t gotten to them yet. We don’t want to hold a PTR until every single thing is done, because that minimizes test time.

Melee DPS

Overall, we think melee DPS in dungeons and raids is still too low. We think melee DPS is fine in PvP, and we think melee DPS is competitive against ranged specs against target dummies, but in actual encounters with all of their moving pieces, melee falls behind. To attempt to adjust for this imbalance, we have improved the benefit to attack power given by the various raid buffs (Blessing of Might et al.) to melee only. Hunter DPS is fine, or even high in 4.2, so we didn’t want this buff to extend to them, which is why the AP benefit is now 20% for melee attacks but still 10% for ranged attacks.

Vengeance

As promised, we allow for this tanking mechanic to now ramp up quickly when the tank is taking damage.

The rest of the above post deals with class specific changes, see it here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3615095

Part 2 goes into more details. Again, not all specs are covered and Rogues aren’t covered at all. The changes to the Mortal Strike type of effects (reduced healing on the target) should cover Wound Poison, though.

Mortal Strike (and similar debuffs)

We dropped the healing debuff from 50% to 10% some time ago, but were convinced at 10% that it was hard to appreciate the effect at all. We want to try Mortal Strike et al. at 25% to see if it feels useful but not mandatory. If 25% is too much and 10% is too little, then it may mean the entire mechanic may not have much of a future. We decided to only change the debuff for the warrior, rogue, and hunter, restoring the original relationship between “strong” and “weak” MS that we had in Lich King.

Click through to see the class details: 4.3 class changes

There will be thousands of comments on the above posts, might as well click through and add yours. QQing doesn’t help, but if you can add some solid evidence to support your remarks, then go for it.