This change is pretty obnoxious. The way they implement these huge changes is just ridiculous. Why would you hotfix something like this during U.S. raid times? Why would you not put it on the PTR first, get some opinions (which are going to be all bad) before putting it live. I like the cover-up excuse of them saying this was an intended change at the beginning of BC and now all of a sudden figured out how to fix it. Bullshit asshole.
I really want to think they had a good reason for this other than looking at some random WWS' of guilds and listening to some pvp crybabies. WF isn't even that huge of an issue in pvp, why do people complain about it?
Whatever though, this time I doubt it will be reverted despite even more crying about it than when it was supposed to be implemented in Naxx since both factions now have it. The only thing to really look forward to anymore in this game is trying to max my DPS in raids and it just sucks having a random hotfix out of the blue for no reason being put into effect just to have myself nerfed. Oh well.
As a raid leader, this is a very troublesome change. And not just the change itself, but the method in which it was delivered. A nerf that is (seemingly - correct me if I'm wrong) this significant should be tested.
And if Rogue damage "needed to be reigned in," (I disagree, but that's another issue) then they should nerf Rogues, not Shaman. =/
That said, this was done simply to modify the amount of dps that melee classes were able to do with it. This wasn't a spur of the moment change, but something that had been planned for awhile. This does not negate any plans or discussion that was held during BlizzCon like some seem to feel. There are positive changes for Shaman coming as we said.
Funny how blizzard avoided mentioning this change at blizzcon, yet all they did was talk of good positive things. Chances are they'd of been booed off the R&D and other panels since this will affect overall raid damage. (I imagine sharaz is even worse not until 2.2)
My guess: Blizzard watching arena games at Blizzcon. If not that, something at Blizzcon stirred the pot.
Maybe the of the mages/locks complaining about how out of hand melee dps is getting in raids? This is a perfect chance for them to reverse the change, and make elemental shamans better, so the buffs they bring can match an enh shaman for melee.
I think blizzard is paying too much attention to the buzz of some WWS logs that are not the standard, which last for maybe 3 minutes and melee are getting absolutely spoiled with bloodlust. That is not the norm.
Maybe they did want to nerf melee haste (achh) but they were too lazy, becauase if they did do that, they would need to re-itemize BT/Hyjal because all that gear would be pretty bad now.
I'd really hate to see what melee DPS would have looked like at TBC launch if this had gone in as they had planned. Without the glancing blow changes it would have been an even bigger disaster than it already was.
If you remember, a few months before the expansion release, they tried removing windfury from all yellow damage attacks. This lasted less than a week on the test realms when they realized that it would make it completely impossible for horde to raid, since it greatly lowered the threat cap that was already lower than what alliance had due to blessing of salvation.
Around 2 weeks later they announced that horde would get paladins and alliance would get shaman. It took the attempted windfury nerf for Blizzard to realize how good Salvation was and how much the horde relied on windfury. So now they're getting back to this nerf that they wanted to do 8 months ago, except they made sure heroic strike can still windfury. This change really has been 8 months in the works.
By the way, I don't think putting this change in with the initial release would have changed anything, because all raid bosses were untuned then. They would have just tuned them to a different health total.
Didn't we just pass a weekend with a huge Arena tournament at Blizzcon (and the attendant parsing and review of logs and such from those matches that any smart developer would undertake?) This definitely seems like a, "Stormherald/Warriors with Windfury were way better than we intended in the tournament, NERFBAT." The hotfix nature of it lends even more to that kind of explanation.
Yeah, but (at least from what friends at Blizzcon told me) the absolutely dominant 2v2 team was the Siphon Life + Soul Link Lock with a Holy Paladin. Teams involving Warriors tended to just get wrecked by the combo.
This change was in the works, according to blue, since the release of TBC and they did not once mention that in any of the panels? Rank cowardice. Disgusting.
This is a significant hit to Warrior and Rogue DPS and a hit to Shaman utility. And it was hotfixed live, not tested first? Not a word of it at Blizzcon? This strikes me as something *extremely* relevant to class balance.
I think your numbers are off somewhat: pre nerf I claimed 30% increase in total damage (no theorycraft, just real world observations). Post nerf, a very simple calculation would be 1/3 of that benefit as the dps cycle of: auto, slam, instant has only 1/3rd white damage. The change in rage limitations will decrease it further.
The issues is not that Windfury totem needed nerfing, you're right the buff was always way too big, it is that classes have been balanced around having this huge buff. Now that it's taken away, all classes(spec's) that rely on it need to be rebalanced.
I am completely baffled by Bliz's decision to implement this change, without putting in _something_ to counter the huge dps hit.
I don't think it's that strange they did not test it in the PTR first, it's clearly overpowered and had to be toned down alot. BUT, I assume they have had some thoughts about giving something in return for raid dps but they want to see how it plays out before mentioning it to the community. If even whispered something about a buff in some other area they know the crowd would expect it even though Blizzard in a couple of weeks think the nerf turned out alright and no buff is needed.
As for the warrior TPS decrease, I'll release the revised version of the TPS sheet shortly*. I've always got the feeling druids out TPS us alot mostly due to the amount of rage they get by doing damage ("2h" vs 1h) but I've yet to see a druid TPS sheet, nudge nudge wink wink. I get the feeling on Voidreaver when we run with 2 prots and 2 druids it's not really that huge a difference when I strap enough +hit. And that's without WF.
I've never had any problems with arms being The PvP spec and fury The PvE spec, although I dislike the fact that you really have to be full prot for raid tanking when the damn druids have almost the same build for optimal cat dps and optimal tanking...
Rant rant rant:
It's clearly a PvP nerf and I hope they plan on changing other stuff as well such as bloodlust duration (40 sec, gimme a break), efficiency of the mana drain skills, -armor stat also being ridiculous in PvP, and some other stuff making me too bored to play at the moment..
Not sure if anyone posted this yet but I didn't see it while reading the thread:
Ok, all. Here's a bit more for you all as far the reasoning why this fix wasn't in sooner and to clarify that this also is intended to affect Slam:
With the release of The Burning Crusade, we had intended Windfury Totem to only work with normal auto-attacks and “on next swing” abilities such as Heroic Strike and Cleave. We uncovered the reason this fix did not work, and it was corrected with the Windfury Totem hotfix this week. At this time, Slam is intended to not work with Windfury Totem. We have no plans to return it to working with Windfury Totem.
We just weren't as clear as we would have liked in our original statement so hopefully this clears things up for people a bit more.
Retune? fat chance of that. Theey didn't even put this on test, indicating they think they already know everything they need to know about consequences.
Maybe the of the mages/locks complaining about how out of hand melee dps is getting in raids? This is a perfect chance for them to reverse the change, and make elemental shamans better, so the buffs they bring can match an enh shaman for melee.
I'll never understand the mentality of people that scream for nerfs to X class because they do more damage in PvE. Hey moron! That damage helps you kill this here boss! Mages/Warlocks should be asking for PvE *buffs* to their own class. It worked for Hunters. It took forever, but Hunters are finally doing respectable damage in raids, and no one had to be nerfed for us to get there. =)
Sorry for the rant, but this always gets to me. =/
PS - I'm not calling anyone here a moron, rather that's directed at those who call for PvE nerfs.
At what point gearwise do melee really start to take off? I beat our warlocks and mages but by a slim margin.
This change is puzzling to me because it seems like a move towards 'why bring melee at all'? I will wait and see how it shakes out though.
Somewhere around fully decked with ssc/tk gear i'd think, with complete domination occuring at the medium bt/hyjal equipped level, and "nerf please' at the high end of bt/hyjal gear.
Personally I was only wanting a nerf(or a buff of other classes) that effected scaling/high end stuff. It makes no sense for feral druids to dominate greens/blues, locks to to dominate post shadowweave to mid t5 and for rogues to dominate late t5 onward.
Here's a WWS on Aran from last night, hopefully I'll have a better benchmark (Gruul or VR) later this week. This should be a decent comparison...3 minute fight, and there is me and a 33/28 warr (Chimichanga) both fighting.
Pretty noticeable, only 10 WF procs (I'm guessing, Windfury Attack and 1 extra attack through Windfury attack seem to be the same thing?) over 3 minutes. Granted there is some moving around, but I could easily expect 3-4 more procs if SS still proc'd it.
The glaring issue is Chimichanga only got 3 windfury attacks over the entire fight.
Compare those stats with our Karazhan from Tuesday (before the hotfix).
We didn't have WF on Maiden, or that'd be a pretty solid benchmark (grounding was down).
On Moroes, you can see that DPS is overall lower (and Chimi is offtanking, I believe with a 2 hander since we had a pally tank), but that's due to switching.
The thing that seems to be a huge issue to me is the disparity over these two fights. On a 3 minute Shade of Aran kill I proc'd 10 windfury attacks. On a sub 3 minute Moroes fight (somwhere around the 2 min 20 sec mark) I proc'd Windfury 25 times. On the same fights, Chimichanga (2hand with 33/28) proc'd windfury 3 times on Aran, 15 times on Moroes. Anyone who is better math wise/combing data can do so, but on the surface it looks to be pretty bad.
Edit: And just for posterity, here's our Gruul from Aug. 5th. Posting this now in anticipation of posting our newest one from this coming Sunday.
Windfury, along with BoK, is the only buff that scales with gear. Kings is for everyone. I think they just wanted more control on the variance of dps (with and w/o WF) and it happened to coincide with a needed PvP nerf.
I'll never understand the mentality of people that scream for nerfs to X class because they do more damage in PvE. Hey moron! That damage helps you kill this here boss! Mages/Warlocks should be asking for PvE *buffs* to their own class. It worked for Hunters. It took forever, but Hunters are finally doing respectable damage in raids, and no one had to be nerfed for us to get there. =)
Sorry for the rant, but this always gets to me. =/
PS - I'm not calling anyone here a moron, rather that's directed at those who call for PvE nerfs.
Sure, this is true ina vaccuum. But at the same time, everyone wants to feel USEFUL in a raid. I don't particularly want to be so inferior as to make me doubt whether I should just step out and get a rogue in my place. And while it would be nice if that could happen with buffs, the reality is that nerfs are more commonplace in development, and the encounters are already tuned. If an encounter expects XXXXXX Raid DPS and the rogues can give off 80% of that with the other classes hitting perhaps 50%(numbers extremely fabricated), then buffing the other classes could easily throw DPS far far higher than expected and trivialize encounters, while dropping the rogue DPS could leave you with enough to complete the encounter. It's clearly more complex than that, but it's a simple analogy.
Just a few I could dig up on my break here at work. Hope this sheds some light on the problem.
EDIT: Changed Kael'thas to Solarian because they weren't really accurate. I did almost 200k more damage and 2 more minutes of combat on one compared to the other.
And if Rogue damage "needed to be reigned in," (I disagree, but that's another issue) then they should nerf Rogues, not Shaman. =/
it's the same method by which they nerf pretty much every class whose damage "needs to be reigned in," honestly. The primary justification for the Shadow Weaving nerf (15% => 10% at 5 stacks) was that "Warlocks are doing too much damage"; one of the panels at BlizzCon involved a mage asking if the coefficient nerf on Imp. Frostbolt/Fireball was going to be reverted, since mages were being out-dps'd in raids. Their answer involved, among a couple other things, "We're looking at reducing Shadow Priest DPS since they should not be out-dpsing mages." Never mind that they aren't, unless the mages are absolutely terrible.
I don't really understand that concept though. I realize that they don't want to unbalance pve encounters by buffing DPS too much, but they're clearly very willing to unbalance it by nerfing DPS.
08/10/07, 1:24 PM
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