Upcoming Warrior Nerfs, Warlock Improvements, Blue Posts

Warbringer (Source)

In the next content patch the current plan is to change Warbringer a bit so that it no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares but Intervene would remain unaffected.

We'll see if any further changes come down the pipeline.

Shield Slam (Source)

We are also considering some changes to Shield Slam to where it won't affect players in normal tanking gear but it will affect the scaling of block value for those who are stacking it. This isn't guaranteed as we still want to make sure it doesn't have a real negative effect on PvE, but in turn we may have the threat caused by Shield Slam just straight increased. We'll see how this goes as we test it internally.

Tier-10 bonuses (Source)

The 2 piece Tier 10 bonus is fine for now. The additional damage for those abilities leads to more threat which helps in PvE content. It's not very common for people who are tanking to be stacking shield block value so it should have a minimal impact on players in normal tanking gear.

Warlock Improvements

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

As Ghostcrawler mentioned in the “Balance Adjustments” thread for 3.3, we would like to buff warlock PvE damage for all three talent trees. We have a few changes in mind we can share with you and welcome your feedback. That being said, of course these changes are not yet implemented and are subject to revision or reversal before the next minor patch.

Affliction: While some warlocks will no doubt disagree, we think the damage output of Affliction in PvP is pretty good. Therefore, we want a buff that will increase sustained damage after a ramp-up period. The specific change we have in mind is to allow Shadow Embrace to stack up to 3 times for a total of a 15% damage bonus. The current healing debuff would change to 10% per stack.

Demonology: We want to double the damage bonus of Demonic Pact granted the warlock. To avoid making this an all-around buff to raid damage, however, the damage bonus provided to other players would remain unchanged.

Destruction: We want to double the damage bonus provided by Empowered Imp.

As a further buff to both Demonology and Affliction, we’re testing out the effects of doubling the damage bonus of Improved Shadow Bolt in the Destruction tree.

Again, these are preliminary ideas. These changes might be revised or reverted before going live. Just the same, these are not necessarily the only changes we are willing to make and your feedback is appreciated. :)

Is spike damage too high in ICC? (Source)

60K damage in less than a second sounds as if you aren't handling some of the fight mechanics right. No tank could realistically be able to survive that and no healer would realistically be able to heal that.

Now, healing is going to be tough on some of these encounters. This is not Halls of Stone. If it takes a few weeks to beat some of the Icecrown bosses, that's not the worst thing in the world. You might have to gear up a little or look at your normal healing strategy. We see a lot of the same complaints about Northrend Beasts when that content was new, but of course players figured out how to heal through that too. Just make sure you aren't calling every situation in which your healing is being challenged excessive, unpredictable burst damage on the part of the bosses.

Ghostcrawler on why some balance changes take longer than others (Source)

It's not an insurmountable obstacle, but it does take time. Except for those players who just love to be overpowered all the time, the sense I get is that most players would like for us to be able to tweak numbers as quickly as possible. If they're weak, they want to be not weak tomorrow, not a week from now, not the next patch day. I don't speak Russian or Korean, so when we change a tooltip it has to go out to people who can translate that text. It takes time, which means you won't get your balance adjustment that day, and possibly not until the next patch.

My initial comment wasn't necessary that HfB is super compelling gameplay, though as you've seen above plenty of players of various classes complain about their 51 point talents too. It's the nature of feedback to some extent. We embrace it, but we do so knowing that some huge percentage of feedback (about any topic, not just WoW) is going to be negative.

What I was reacting to was the sense that adjusting HfB was somehow lazy or inelegant when in reality it's the kind of thing we need to be able to do to all specs and that in fact is our future plan, though not through 51 point talents.

Rogue

Impact of Rogue nerfs (Source)

Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.

I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is.

Warrior

Upcoming Protection nerfs (Source)

There are numbers in between 1 and 10. Players have a bad habit of viewing everything in terms of extremes. Yes we want Protection to be viable in PvP and most likely it still will be. Nerfing them because they are overpowered is not the same as them being useless.

Expecting the forum-visiting WoW community to ever come to a consensus on anything is unrealistic. That said, Protection warriors in PvP wasn't one of the arguments where there were a lot of very passionate souls on both sides. Many players suspected or were outright convinced that Prot was overpowered at worst or at least really frustrating to play against. On the other hand, we've posted several times that if the totality of their beef is just seeing Prot in PvP at all, then they're out of luck.

These arguments are somewhat similar to those rogues saying "But we're supposed to do high damage" and seeing nothing wrong with being 1000 to 2000 dps higher than others in their group. Yes you're supposed to be in PvP. You're not supposed to own PvP.

If you're one of those players with no interest in PvP and just don't want to see your tanking potential hurt, then I am slightly more sympathetic, but then again you should know what I'm going to say by now. WoW is a game with PvP and PvE components. Just because one of those isn't of interest to you personally doesn't mean we should neglect it. (And as I've said, we aren't interested in nerfing Prot warriors who are actually tanking.)