Oh gods!!! It's broken!!!1!!one!!!1!!!eleven!!!!1

Yes, 4.0.1 is seriously broken.  Well, maybe the patch itself isn't but most of the classes seem to be pretty messed up.  Some classes are ridiculously overpowered where others are aching from the nerf-beating they got.  

I know quite a few players are frustrated, many of which are talking about quitting the game altogether.  I'm guilty of wanting to throw my computer at someone's face over this most recent patch, but that's for a few other reasons as well.  

But there is some good news coming from Blizz Devs.  They've recognized that melee classes took a considerable pounding in this patch and caster classes have gotten buffed quite a bit.  Things were unbalanced and they realized it.  From Blizzard's Cave, I bring you...Ghostcrawler:

Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010   10/13/2010 05:38:58 PM PDT

Rather than try and address multiple threads, I'm just going to plop our current thoughts in this one post. Please excuse the brevity. 1) We think Fury, Arms, Feral cat and Retribution dps is too low and we will be buffing them. 2) We think mage dps is too high, especially Fire, and will be nerfing it. 3) We think Shadow priest dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Shadow Word: Death spam, which is tough on healers. We'll be fixing that. 4) We think Destro warlock dps is too high, but that's largely a result of Searing Pain spam, which is tough on tanks. We'll be fixing that. 5) As we suspected, PvP dps is just too high given that the health pools of Cataclysm haven't kicked in yet. While competitive PvP is over for the moment, we still want the environment to feel better so we will be buffing resilience. This change might be reverted at level 85. There will probably be more changes after another night of raiding and BGs. Many of the bug fixes we have made today will affect dps as well. Stay tuned. Ghostcrawler Lead Systems Designer

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• Re: Class balance as of Oct 13, 2010   10/14/2010 11:14:38 AM PDT

We made many changes yesterday. A lot of these were bug fixes, and many bug fixes will affect damage one way or the other. So just because you don't see a specific change referenced below, doesn't mean it didn't change. With that said, here are the specific changes we made in reference to my previous post: 1) We buffed the base points and coefficients of many warrior dps abilities. We didn't do as much to tanking abilities. We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Ret abilities. We buffed the base points and coefficients of many Feral cat abilities. 2) We lowered the base points and coefficients of many mage abilities, but lowered Fire more than the other two. 3) We nerfed Shadow Word: Death, but it is possible we didn't nerf it enough. It should not be Shadow's biggest spell. 4) We returned Searing Pain's damage to its 3.3.5 levels. 5) We increased the benefit of resilience by 50% for players level 80 and below. The tooltips will probably not reflect this change. We don't have any other changes to announce at this time. I am reluctant to mention additional classes or specs that we are looking at currently for fear of instilling excitement or panic. Ghostcrawler Lead Systems Designer

 That's a post on the WoW forums directly from Ghostcrawler, so hang in there kids.  Things will get better.  


Another important item I wanted to mention:  BE KIND TO YOUR TANKS!  Tanking mechanics have changed drastically.  Gone are the days of powerful AoE tanking.  Sorry, folks.  


I got suspicious when I popped into bear form and noticed a six second cooldown on swipe.  Yes, you read that correctly.  6 (six) VI second cooldown...on Swipe - a bear's MAIN AoE threat ability.  After seeing that Tuesday evening, I thought I'd dig a little deeper so I stopped by The Big Bear Butt's blog to find out more.  Go ahead.  Click the link.  You know you want to!


At any rate, it SEEMS like we're heading back to focus fire/tank assist now.  We did it before.  We can do it again.  In all honesty, the tanking shift has revived the itch to get back into tanking so much right now.  You have NO idea.  I remember tanking in Burning Crusade and I remember loving it.  I got away from tanking in Cataclysm because the whole AoE thing was just frustrating to begin with.  Everyone had huge AoE damage and it took me a little while to adjust from focus-fire tanking to AoE tanking.  AoE tanking was easy though.  There was no challenge...

Step 1.  Enrage
Step 2.  Charge
Step 3.  Swipe-swipe-swipe-swipe-swipe
Step 4.  ......
Step 5.  Profit.

NOW, we're getting back to what tanking always used to be and I can't help but be a little excited about it.  I miss HAVING to manage threat on more than just my focus.  Swipe took care of that and tanking became a little too "auto-pilot".  Now, we're reverting back to tab-targeting to keep everyone focused on us.  Personally, I welcome this change.  AoE tanking made most of us lazy and I welcome the challenge of learning wtf2do again.  

Am I going to try to relearn it here in the final days of WotLK?  Not on your life!  Wrath is very AoE friendly.  I'm hearing rumors that Cataclysm will be much more friendly to the not-so-AoE tanking we've got now after 4.0.1.  We shall see.  


Anyway, the whole point of this post was to say, "Keep your chin up and hang in there.  They're trying to fix us" and to ask that you be mindful of the changes in tanking mechanics.  Your tanks will appreciate it.  And hey, dust off that old polymorph spell.  You might want to toss that into the mix here soon.


With much love,
Des