Don’t take this as an announcement that the release of patch 4.3 is imminent. While we have
completed a lot of work, it’s just hard to know at this stage when the patch will be ready.
Nothing is set in stone until the actual patch, and even then we still have the ability to hotfix any
major problems that we missed or caused.
First, here is the link to Part One of our balance explanations. We’ll discuss additional changes
below.
In particular, you may want to pay attention to my comments about rates of change. While we
do overhaul mechanics when we think it’s warranted, we try to save as many of those as possible
for expansions. As exhilarating as it can be for players who log in regularly to suddenly be able
to look at a talent or spell in a different light, it can also be frustrating for players who maybe
took a break in between patch 4.2 and 4.3 to have to relearn rotations or re-gem their character.
In particular, we try to be really conservative when buffing spec B of a class upwards to compete
with spec A of the same class. We have gotten it wrong before, and forced a large number of
players to swap specs. Ideally we want you to play the spec you enjoy the most and not the one
that does the highest DPS, but asking you to continually swap specs to achieve that highest DPS
is an unreasonable thing for us to ask.
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.
Death Knight
We decided not to prevent or discourage block capping for paladins and warriors, because it
would have required several corresponding changes to compensate for such severe nerfs and
the risk of getting things wrong or asking players to change gear was just too great. Instead, we
decided to buff DK and druid tanks to improve their ability to handle streaks of bad luck. In the
DK’s case, we increased the armor bonus of Blood Presence.
Druid
As mentioned above, we increased the Stamina bonus of bear form in order to reduce the
chance of tanks being killed too quickly by bad luck. We also changed the armor bonus for
bears at lower levels by removing the mechanic that mimicked the warrior and paladin transition
from mail to plate. Bears were having difficulty surviving in low-level dungeons, which honestly
we don’t want to be that challenging. The armor change should not affect end-game tank
balance. We changed the Glyph of Shred so that Feral druids wouldn’t need to vary their
rotation in situations where they could not Shred (such as on Ultraxion). We changed the
pushback on Cyclone because we decided that it was appropriate for DPS casters to not have
pushback protection on heals, and for healers to not have pushback protection on nukes, but
that utility spells should be protected for both roles. This will be a small PvP buff for caster
druids.
Hunter
We provided a modest DPS buff for Beast Mastery and Survival hunters to help them catch up
with the Marksman spec. As I mentioned above, we wouldn’t consider it a success if we made
every Marks hunter respec to Survival, so our intent is to get close without going over. BM also
suffers from a lack of AE damage, so we increased the damage of two of their AE pets.
Mage
We offered some buffs to Fire mages to help them compete with Arcane. Frost is viable in PvE,
but at high-end raiding we understand that its damage isn’t perceived as comparable to Arcane
or Fire. The problem is that Frost has a lot of control and survivability, and if their damage were
also identical, there would be no reason to choose Arcane or Fire. Note that the 5.0 talent design
is partially to fix this specific problem, where specs have either higher DPS or higher utility.
Paladin
We continued to adjust Holy Radiance for its new 4.3 design. We want paladins to be a viable
group healer without suddenly becoming far and away the best AE healer. We also want Holy
paladins to continue to care about Holy Power and Light of Dawn and not revert to just
spamming Holy Radiance. We changed Beacon of Light largely because it was unclear which
mechanics were supposed to cause the Beacon transfer. This is a change from our previous
design, which allowed Protector of the Innocent and other forms of healing to benefit from
Beacon. We want Beacon of Light to remain a powerful spell, and it will be even with these
changes, but putting slightly less focus on Beacon will allow paladins to still shine in situations
where Beacon isn’t operating at its maximum effectiveness. For Retribution, as we suggested
previously, we lowered the crit chance of Hammer of Wrath to reduce burst but increased
sustained damage through Two-Handed Specialization and Seal of Truth.
Priest
Most of our Holy adjustments were discussed in Part One, but we did buff Guardian Spirit to
make it more competitive with Pain Suppression. The Shadowform glyph was strictly a quality of
life improvement requested by several Shadow priests.
Shaman
We have slightly unnerfed the initial Wind Shear nerf, but we still want it to be much harder for
a healer spec to have such a potent interrupt. Wind Shear (originally Earth Shock) was balanced
in the hands of a Resto shaman as a tool for coping with enemy casters in the absence of a
magic dispel. While a priest could remove an ally’s Polymorph, the shaman’s only recourse was
to prevent it from ever landing in the first place. But in a world where Resto shaman gained the
ability to remove magic debuffs, the net result was too potent. We nerfed Elemental’s tier 12 set
bonus because it was so powerful that shaman risked passing over their tier 13 set bonus. We
increased the passive benefit of Shamanism and Fire Elemental scaling to help compensate for
this nerf. There are many other shaman changes discussed in Part One.
Warlock
We increased Demonology and Destruction’s DPS to be more competitive with Affliction, and
increased the duration on Improved Soul Fire to make that buff a bit easier to manage. We also
fixed a long-standing bug that caused the Doomguard to do too much damage, so Demo’s buff
also needed to offset that.
Warrior
We believe we have fixed “charge jumping,” where a target who jumped ended up in a different
location from the warrior. The warrior should now end up next to the target. We needed to nerf
Fury’s DPS slightly to keep them from being ahead of other melee DPS.
Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. His first hunter
pet was a crab named Sushi.