Feedback - SoD PVP Damage Nerf

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Dear Blizzard,

I rarerly write post but I feel like the comments on the community post of the damage nerf aren’t always that constructive or balanced. I’ve played open world PvP this weekend as well as battle grounds as a “ret/prot” paladin, so this is the perspective.

My experience:
As per my own experience, I do feel ridiculously tanky as i have no fear running into groups of 3 to 4 people. And start hammering on that. Even though from my perspective thats nice, this must be frustrating for other players facing me.

The effect of the damage reduction:
In the basis, if the goal was to slow down PvP overall and make it less bursty, this has been accomplished which is good as a basic premise. However, having that said, a set of other problems come to light.

Warriors take an extra hit due to the rage, this is the problem overall with them which I can image makes them frustrating to play. Obviously this problem is bigger throughout of classic, so it might be good to leave them out of this discussion overall. A seperate fix will be required for this.

*EDIT → SCRAP THIS - See warrior feedback Below

Healing overall
Overall, the nerf put in place of 50% seems a bit too stiff in comparison to healing which is in place. Very practically, youre currently running around with 5 people trying to kill a healer.

If you want to move down this route, healing also needs to be slightly downscaled to balance the scale (perhaps not 50%, but more in the 25% mark). Finding the right number might be some trail and error.

Alternatively, you could think of adding more healing reduction abilities to other classes aswell, however this would become a more complicated fix overall.

Hybrid classes:
Hybrid classes get really pumped up by this change. Healing off damage abilities (like shadow priest, health drains and self healing) are very disproportional. It can take 15 seconds to dps down just for a single insta heal to top them back up again.

The shaman is exceptional problematic at this moment as their damage allows them to pull of powerful instant cast healings, and this is even more amplified by the current change. The combination of good damage, high tankiness & instant heals make this class just a huge spoiler for PvP.

As a specific suggestion for shaman, try to see if you can amplify riptide through healing specs or remove the ability that maelstrom be used with healing spells.

In short:

  • Tune the numbers of the damage aura
  • Tune healing aswell / Think of implementing more healing reductions through runes
  • Class tune hybrids (Mainly shamans, but locks, spriest and others face the same issues)

Happy to hear you’re trying things, but like always, complicated situations don’t have simple solutions.

Good luck!

6 Likes
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i played warrior the whole weekend and it was great. Its true, that the rage generation is sick, but its 10000x better to life more than 2 sec, so i finaly can start to play pvp.

in my opinion blizz just have to reduce healing effects by about 25% but let the 50% dmg reduction live.

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While rage from damage dealt is indeed lower, this is incorrect. The difference in rage generation between a white swing dealing 150-200 damage and one dealing 200-250 is 1/2 at level 50. When you take into consideration weapon speed, the difference is entirely negligible.

In reality, rage generation for Warriors has skyrocketed because of how durable they are and due to how the rage per damage taken formula works. Many small hits generate far, far more rage than getting hit for 3k once, not to mention that being alive is a prerequisite for rage generation, a critical component that was often missing for Warriors before the damage reduction aura.

On my Warrior if I have a healer in any medium scale engagement like a BS fight in AB, I struggle to find ways to dump rage, not generate it. I cannot recall a time in recent history where I had as much fun as I am having now playing a Warrior in pvp.

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I’m surprised to see such a post from a paladin player, usually they are similar to shaman players and other burst-y classes trying to defend their right to one shot everyone and not care about their game experience.

I think the issue with SoD right now is that we got too many retail players that don’t understand how classic era used to work and refuse to accept that this game-mode is built around classic era, not around retail era which they hate and where they don’t even play most likely for hating it in the first place.

This change is far from being great, I believe I much better solution would have been introducing better stats, more damage reduction and even possibly resilience to PvP sets since grinding rank7 is not such a huge deal, nor is it hard to achieve.

Overall I’ve enjoyed playing my warrior for the first time in PvP on SoD game mode, but I’ve had issues with healing classes and also had funny moments where I was mining on my lvl 50 priest and was getting harassed by a lvl 42 rogue sapping, blinding and CC-ing me over and over to steal my mines without me being able to do anything against him, granted that I was on healer spec but still 8 levels above him.

From a warrior’s PoV I would say reducing the damage reduction buff to like 40%, the healing by like 10-15% and increasing the rage generation when hitting (not when being hit) would make the game enjoyable as a warrior - I couldn’t say it would do the same for all the classes though.

The only other issues I see with this change is that you are not able to free-up farming spots to let’s say farm consumables, you do not have the damage to contest the farming spot, and many classes can’t compete on killing speed with a shaman or shadow priest either since their PvE damage is insane still.

I still think a better solution would be tweaking the PvP sets and giving more stats to the classes underpreforming in PvP, such as warriors. Maybe even the emerald sets in some cases.

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this is the way

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the damage reduction has to be cut in half. screw that warrior’s idea to nerf healing, he is just fishing for a buff for his own class.

lower damage reduction aura to 20% and see how things play out.
don’t touch healing, you will regret it.

IF (and only IF) healing is still super oppressive at 20% damage reduction aura, its time to scrap the idea entirely and try something else.

blanket auras is the lazy man’s solution and a super toxic way to design anything.
just look at the list of problems it caused…

2 Likes
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you have high expectations on the impact of these posts. I would be surprised if a single Blizz Dev actually read these lines ever.

I think the purpose of the (EU) forums is largely therapeutical

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I think they do read the forums and do at times listen to constructive feedback. I believe shamans nerf is already on the way thanks to the feedbacks and in the near future, which is a really good thing, it’s a start.

Past 1 single raid (debatable) this entire game works around PvP, while grinding, while gathering, while questing while doing anything else. Therefor a little more balance is required.

As far as I could gather, the small portion of population demanding 1 shotting PvP due to their lack of skill playing any class requiring more than the press of 2 buttons is starting to get ignored, because the overall population of the game is in decline, and this is a business after all, and businesses focus on income and therefor the majority of the costumers rather than the minority.

Blizzard overall got big issues, their decisions lately impacted lots of their games, up to the point where they even had to cancel blizzcon this year, knowing that even last year they could not sell the tickets like in previous years, as well as having to cancel their “New MMO” and many other things.

Some of the changes Blizzard did to SoD were great though, such as banning GDKPs, focusing hard on banning the gold sellers and the bots (got lots if in-game mails from blizzard saying actions were taken against the bots I’ve reported).

The big issue still remaining is the actual class balance which I believe is not a huge priority for them right now since they got lots of content they need to prepare for phase4, think we got like 7-9 dungeons coming up and about 7 raids so I can imagine the work they need to put into changing all those items on top of those that are not part of instanced content. It makes sense but the price paid for not having balanced classes might be too high.

Big issue remaining is affecting one’s ability to progress though, you will never see a warrior or a paladin being able to farm 3x Winterfall furbolgs (lvl 54-57) at the same time in Winterspring like a shaman or a shadowpriest can, that means less income, less progress. That is a singular example, there are many farming spots that are not accessible to every class and they will start next phase with a lot less gold, being able to afford less things that concerns their progression, having issues maybe even with consumables in this current phase.

Balancing in any shape or form is required in order to keep their costumers happy and the majority of their costumer base is not playing shamans or shadow priests, so not reading the forums and not listening to their feedback while the game’s population is declining would just be bad for business.

2 Likes
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and the actions of Blizzard so far - including the cry for help on ERA bots, RMT, SoD balance and so on - fill you with confidence on this ?

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Hi All,

Cheers for the constructive replies here. Eventhough I’m probably at the good end of the PvP spectrum as a parlly, e.g., I can actually win a 1v1 against some shamans, I’m not oblivious what this means for other classes. My perspective on warriors was based on some assumption so thanks for chipping in ;).

Overall, I still think the damage reduction to a certain degree is not a bad idea. Note that classic always has been bursty, but we shouldn’t move into retail territory here by overdoing it.

I think a good ratio between healing reduction and overall damage reduction is good to put in place (through whatever means). The low effort solutions for Blizzard would be by just tuning the damage reduction buff and healing reduction buff.

The reason why I think you need a ratio and not just a 25% reduced buff on damage is because you want to slow down the overall interaction. It’s hard to say what will be good.

Class tuning and gear changes will be inevitable for PvP, however, this might be a larger endever based on the fact that the lvl 60 patch is coming up.

Hope this helps the devs! Still loving SoD sofar!

Flies away

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Yes, in my opinion they did a great job resolving the the RMT issue and part of the bot era issue, is far from perfect but seeing they do something about anything gives me confidence that they will eventually ™ get to class balancing once they will see it more of a priority instead of the RMT/Botting priority they got now.

I do not think the devs are incompetent though I sometimes make bad jokes around the forum, I believe if they would really start working on it they could get it done, they most likely know what to do and even how to do it, they just don’t seem to care for it right now.

I guess it all depends on the company’s policy and what they are forced to prioritize since they most likely don’t make decisions themselves but rather follow strict orders.

I believe the lead developer is capable of good changes if allowed to do them.

Even vanilla was far from perfect in its early stages, we needed lots of patches to get something close to a balanced game, though I do feel they were listening to more constructive feedback back then, because there were less trolls around and less drama queens looking only for self gains.

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sadly since pets still take 100% damage lock is unplayable in pvp atm

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Hell no. They must change 50 % dmg reduct. It changes almost nothing. Strong classses remain stronger, and weak classes even more weak. Before nerf I at least had a chance to kill warlocks, priest, shamans as ret pala. But now i cant even kill backpedalers and mouseclickers cuz hybrids got insanly tanky…
As example warlocks can just stay afk cast nothing and still kill u without even dropping 50% hp

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I don’t agree. Rage should be normalized once and for all.

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Why do you have “retail players” in another category. If you were another class I might agree with you. Warriors feel great with this change but they will never be the classic-era broken warrior in this iteration. You are not supposed to be able to kill a healer alone though but I agree healing should be toned down

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You have retail players in this category bcause they hate the state of retail, a state that they’ve contributed towards creating.

Not denying my bias towards this damage reduction making my warrior class more viable, it’s almost surviving as it normally should, but at the same time is not broken or unkillable, it still got issues and it still requires skill to manage the rage, dance with the stances and choke down on consumables.

You are supposed to be able to kill a healer alone in vanilla as well as classic era, that’s the point of having Mortal Strike. You don’t have to believe me, there are tons of warcraft movies available on youtube nowadays, check maybe Laintime PvP or Pat PvP or other warrior PvP from vanilla era and see it for yourself. Not only were you supposed and able to kill healers 1v1 but also the paladins regardless of their specs.

Check for example “High Warlord Laintime Vanilla Warrior PvP” which is somewhat balanced PvP with him fighting rogues with Thunderfury and other well geared people, then compare to this iteration. (Note that those videos are from old vanilla where you barely had any access to information and addons).

Warrior didn’t use to have paper gear. https://youtu.be/LFkSidbQu2o?si=fMJWoxCPszcTEYQx&t=219

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Good point! Classic is still classic, this is not retail

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Nerfing runes that give healing spells to do less on dps specs is fine, just make it so that healing specs don’t suffer for it. Resto Shaman isn’t the bomb when it comes to healing in PvP, but at least , with P3, it is worth queuing a BG as one.

Nerf the base healing but buff the healing power coefficient so that the spell performs the same for the healing spec.

Don’t take the spec back to the stone ages of P1,2 when it was a meme and the only real healer to take in PvP was a priest.

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This was a very well written post, I may not agree with all of it but the core is definetly there. Thank you for taking the time and actually providing some real constructive criticism.

Personally I do feel that the main issue with the frustration I have experienced in PvP atm is that as a PvP lover I am queing with players that barely take interest in it and are forced to play due to gear being gate keeped behind honor rankings.
A good pvp player will make full use, were possible, of the kit they posses and abilities to win fitghts (cc, mana drains, dispels, target priority etc).
SoD players have got way too used to the idea of one shotting most classes that they are moving away from the strategic mind of PvP and refuse to re-learn the basic or adapt.

I hope we will see some tuning to this tested adjustment as it is overall, imo, a good starting point!

Ps. Shamans need a huge pvp nerf =)

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I tried the 20/21/0 sac Metaa build you should give it a go…the passive 3% life with 5-6k hp every 3s is op with the 50% damage nerf.

Pets are absolutely useless. The only issue is you get banished a lot. The positive is that you can leech HKs while immune.