WoW has not seen these levels of ineptitude with balancing since Ghostcrawler was in charge.
A man who “nerfed” mages in PvP, by reducing Frostbolt damage by 20%, but increased the damage of Ice Lance by 150% and removed Deep Freeze from the Global Cooldown.
We are currently dealing with these levels of ineptitude. These developers, have no clue at all what they’re doing to balance this game, and that has been shown multiple times already in a very short space of time with SoD. They destroyed phase 1 PvP with a buff that sent a single spell through the moon, leading to 7 Moonkins per BG. Instead of nerfing this, and admitting their mistake… they instead decided to completely remove the concept of premading so that you couldn’t just stack the overpowered classes.
They then doubled down on these untested buffs. Increasing the damage of Shadow Word Death, increasing overload proc rates, increases basically all spell coefficients… Instead of immediately realising that these spells are now absolutely busted, and need to be nerfed heavily to be balanced… Their decision is to double down and buff the other spells instead.
Warriors are great in PvE but not in PvP for the entire phase 1? Instead of looking at the root causes of warriors being great in PvE (High rage generation, Deep Wounds abuse, Weapon scaling)… And why they are bad in PvP (Casters burst damage being insane, CC/Slows lasting far too long, only 1 class with a dispell and it costs a lot of mana so absolutely 0 uptime), they instead try to fix it with 1 thing… Giving PvE bosses insane amounts of armor so that physical damage kinda blows as a whole.
As predicted going into this. It’s exactly what Blizzard has been for the past 10-14 years. The absolute bare-minimum effort, for the absolute, max profit.
It’s just all so incredibly lazily done, there is no thought gone into any of the changes other than,
“We want people to like Elemental Shaman so let’s make them overpowered this month”.
The thought process on what players enjoy, or will enjoy, is, as always, the most effort-free remedy possible. One section of the playerbase complains the loudest, so they get buffed to be the next fotm so that they will shut up complaining. Instead of balance, they’re catering… Pretty standard for a “body1,body2” caving company.
This experiment, SoD, it’s already over. Blizzard, as a whole, is a dead company.