Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

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Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Naethyn » Tue Oct 28, 2008 7:50 am

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 7901&sid=1
I know many of you asked good questions before the posts hit their limit. I am not convinced that my answering many of these questions would calm anyone down, but I'll give it a shot. If not, when the paladin community has gotten it all out of their system, I'll still be here.

Also realize that there are probably a couple hundred questions at this point and I can't answer them all. Here are a few common themes:

I thought we were supposed to be bursty?
Yes, that's the design. It's also a tough design to nail because if you're too bursty the opponent doesn't even get to respond.

You reviewed our class last because you don't care.
We overhauled the entire class. We rebuilt the way Seals and Judgements work, and by and large it's a good change. Paladins got a lot of attention for Lich King. your response suggests to me that the correct way to balance the game in the future is to make a class terrible early on and then buff it so that players are happy and excited instead of fuming and disappointed. Trajectory is everything.

I thought you didn't want us to run out of mana.
We didn't want you to run out of mana in three hits, especially in a sustained dps fight. What we don't want is for a paladin to kill someone and move on to the next enemy without losing any mana. I'm a little surprised so many people deny this was going on or that it was a problem.

We think we have your mana in a good place now, but mana is one of those aspects of the game that requires a lot of adjustment and there are many classes right now who would still like us to further review how mana is working for their class. If you're running out of mana too fast, believe me, we'll hear about it and we'll adjust it if we weren't "surgical" enough this time around.

But we don't care about Battlegrounds.
A lot of people do care. And if you don't care about them right now, I'll warrant that's because they don't offer the rewards that Arenas or raiding do. This is something we want to address in the future.

Again, though, we think Ret was out of line in several situations. Other classes are OP in some situations too, and we have either recently nerfed them or are still discussing how we want to address those classes as well.

Look at all the other classes in here laughing at us.
Well, they're jerks. Many of them probably suspect they are OP too and have so far escaped the nerfbat. So far. We want Retribution to be a dangerous class to go up against. We don't want to see BGs with 30 Retadins on one side, which is actually something we were seeing. Yeah, I know it sucks that people say Lolet. It sucks when people say huntards too. That doesn't drive people away from playing either class. We're always going to have some amount of competition in this game, either directly in PvP or the damage race in PvE. If I can read 1200 angry posts from Ret pallies today, you can blow off some inane gloating from warlocks or warriors. We delete the trolling comments when we see them.

Why didn't we compensate Holy and Protection first?
We want Holy to have better dps than it did in BC, but that's a secondary consideration compared to them being good at healing (which we believe they are). We are also still committed to Protection being able to tank anything that a warrior can. Consider that the boss armor changes hurts warrior threat more than it does paladin threat. The net result should hopefully come out equal. So far I'm not aware of a boss fight in the game where a paladin MT struggles. As I said, though, this is something we're working on right now.

Why did I describe our initial attempts to nerf Ret as surgical?
Because that's what we tried to do. In retrospect, we were so worried about nerfing Ret too much that we ended up not fixing the problem. We should have done more sweeping changes initially.

Why did we say Ret was fine for so long?
Because we didn't want to have to nerf the spec. Ret players were having fun. We thought and hoped that some well publicized bugs were to blame for the excess damage. As I've said, if I wait to post until we're absolutely 100% certain, you're just not going to get as many posts. Many posters have said they appreciate getting occasional developer communication and insight. But that is going to come with some risk that things are going to change. As I said, I'll caveat it more in the future.

That you're somehow paying to beta test the game.
First, I don't really think we'll ever get game balance to a state where 90% of you would say "Yes, it's perfect! Don't touch a thing!" Second, it's an MMO. Things change. The game evolves. We are always going to be changing things on our end as well. Players would be just as happy as not enough changes as some of you are with too many changes.

You may also have noticed that we nerfed level 70 raiding and that the level 80 raids are pretty easy compared to our past instances. We wanted to make sure we weren't shining too harsh a light on balance differences until everyone had plenty of time to get used to the changes -- more time than even our large beta can offer. Nobody should get parked at the curb in Naxx, and by the time Ulduar and later instances come on line, I predict we will have made many balance changes.

We don't believe you because we've been at the bottom of the barrel before.
There's not much I can do to get you to believe me or not. I try to be honest so my words carry some weight, but I also try to joke around a little so you know I don't take myself too seriously. I don't know how many other ways to say that it sucks that your PvE wasn't competitive in BC or that you weren't a major Arena force. That's not where we wanted you to end up and not where we want you to end up this time. I'm not going to show you my daily tasks or how I spend my time so that you can oversee my progress and make sure it doesn't happen again. Sorry. The best thing you can do is point out situations where you're struggling so we can investigate. Most of you haven't even had a chance to test with these changes yet.

You're nerfing paladins because of PvP.
Read my initial post again. Ret PvE dps was also too high.

Our numbers are different from yours.
That's going to happen. We compare data when we can. I think you'd agree that the game balance would be pretty interesting if we automatically made adjustments whenever anyone suggested them.

You said I wouldn't get banned.
You're still going to get banned for explicit language, death threats or the like (thank you very much for those BTW). Try and make your point without resorting to text that will violate the posting regulations. Call me a jerk, if it will make you feel better. It boggles my mind that I actually need to point out that AIDS comments and the like aren't appropriate. If you're smart enough to raid or do Arenas on your character, you're smart enough to know how to make an intelligent post.

Added one more for clarification:

You only tested in Naxx, but paladins do bonus damage against undead.
Yes, we know that. We tested under a lot of different situations with and without undead and with different levels of gear and buffs present. I use Patchwerk as an example a lot because players understand that it is a very simple boss fight in which there is no running around, adds or damage to the raid.


Well after reading that I'm not to worried. Avenging wrath adds 20% dps every 2 minutes for 30 seconds.

The biggest change is the Judgement of the Wise. This will make it so either paladins must get healed to get mana back or drink. I've been in the opinion that the best change they made was making it so ret pal didn't need to drink.

It's the burst dps that is the true problem and none of these nerfs address that in any way. In fact they are making the damage bonuses bigger for those burst crits. It makes no sense.
Maeya wrote:And then your head just aches from having your hair pulled so tight for so long...
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Tuggan » Tue Oct 28, 2008 9:17 am

Paladins were crying more about this in just a few days than the warlocks did since they announced talents for wotlk. :rofl: I can't believe how many were defending rets current state.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Taxx » Tue Oct 28, 2008 10:39 am

Paladins were ridiculously overpowered and the only people who didn't think so, were paladins. It's going to take a while till any semblance of balance is back.

I'm pretty pissed about the whole end-game balancing with hybrids right now. There's almost no reason anymore to play a straight dps class since they want the hybrids to do everything just as well.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Harrison » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:12 am

Terrible playtesting on their part. How the fuck do you make changes that drastic without fucking testing them properly for balance issues?

Morons.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Arlos » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:14 am

The straight DPS classes are still coming out ahead on the DPS meters for the most part, especially hunters. There's still tweaking to be done, to be sure, though.

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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Taxx » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:28 am

Arlos wrote:The straight DPS classes are still coming out ahead on the DPS meters for the most part, especially hunters. There's still tweaking to be done, to be sure, though.

-Arlos


It's nowhere near balanced at geared level 80, and no, straight-dps classes aren't always coming out on top...some of them are.

Harrison I'm going to ignore you since you don't have a clue what you're talking about and just want to shit on WoW.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Harrison » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:33 am

Except I would wager that my overall knowledge of gaming and mechanics far outdoes yours...

The fact I hold a level of disdain for a watered-down MMO doesn't mean I don't follow its progress.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Taxx » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:40 am

/yawn until there's any other MMO that is REMOTELY as balanced and fun and as slick to play, I'll keep on playing. It's expansion time, it will take a while to balance out, but they've already gotten the glaring imbalances out of the way now. Next it's down to the fine tuning....and the expansion isn't even released yet.

Until then, I'm not going to sit on my xbox and play with kids playing Halo online.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Harrison » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:48 am

I honestly hope you aren't implying that I'm a halo player.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Taxx » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:52 am

no, I'm giving you my online options here

I actually don't even own halo

AoC is fun up til level 20, Warhammer is a horrible mess right now and totally and completly unbalanced as far as the classes go (plus my computer needs a bit of an upgrade to run it smoother). So yeah, I'm going to play the best MMO available on the market right now by far.
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby leah » Tue Oct 28, 2008 11:53 am

oh hai i am almost level 67 lol
lolz
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby Drem » Tue Oct 28, 2008 12:00 pm

you play WoW? :rolleyes:
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Re: Retribution nerfs in the latest beta build 3

Postby leah » Tue Oct 28, 2008 12:05 pm

pfft don't judge me. josh pays for my account, and it's been active since last easter, so clearly i don't play very often.
lolz
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