This is going to be brief because Scott Jennings (Lum the Mad) over at Broken Toys summarized it better than I could ever hope to. Suffice it to say that this is yet another case of the tail wagging the dog over in Irvine.
In the interest of full disclosure, the character that I most recently played as my main was a Lock.
In summary, what Blizzard has done is in response to the calls for the Whaaaambulance that Locks are overpowered in Arenas is to propose a paradigm shift in the class. Been busy itemizing your lock to use STA to build your HP so you could recharge mana and survive longer? Um, yeah. Seems like they think you need to be an INT class now.
This seems like a serious overreaction on Blizzard’s part. How many of the total population of the game play Arenas? In spite of that, Blizzard is willing to nerffify locks beyond recognition in the interest of balancing that aspect of game play in complete detriment of what I perceive to be the vast majority of players who don’t even participate. This makes me so happy that the only time I play WOW any more is to romp around with my kids on our noob BE’s doing silly quests. It’s hard for me to commit to a game where they seem so willing to keep hitting the reset button on (choose one) your favorite class/playstyle/dungeon/gear. I understand the carrot and stick idea. This seems more like TNT on a stick.
Yes, this is probably an overreaction by me. Do yourself a favor, read Lum’s article and some of the linkage (in particular the first one in the article) there to deeper info, try to put yourself in a Lock’s shoes, and see what I mean.
Nerf Death Coil
More than mere tweaking after release is almost always a bad idea. The industry needs to grow out of that habit.
It’s developers’ own fault that they have to make drastic changes after release. They need to open their eyes and realize that competition and cooperative gameplay can be fun without ridiculously flattened odds.
I wonder if it doesn’t boil down to underestimating your audience. I honestly don’t think that the devs really understand their audience. We all know people who will find a way to exploit every weakness in any situation. At my work, it is with our compensation plans. They set a number and then we find every way to beat it and exploit the plan to maximize our payouts. It is the same in MMO’s. I think Genda had a post somewhere in the archives about SWG and the beastmasters (or whatever the heck they were called). You had low level characters running around with dual rancor pets slaughtering mobs WAY above their level. I don’t really think the devs every considered that people would do that. Result…Nerf. It happened with Everquest numerous times. The problem with this “balance” nerf is that they ALWAYS swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. They take a class that may have been slightly overpowered and instead of tweaking their spells or maybe setting reset timers on some of the spells, they completely change the class and make them the weakest class in the game. If I understood the article correctly, it wasn’t just the Locks. It was also the priests. Does that mean there is a nerf coming to a priest near you in the future…? You can pretty much bet on it.
It seems like they are just taking the easy way out with this. Instead of actually sitting down and looking at how these people play and modifying spells or abilities to take away or at least even out the advantage, they are going from one guardrail to the other with this decision. What happens to all that gear now? Too bad if you are a mage trying to buy INT gear now. Locks and Mages will be rolling on every same drop now. Guess they are going to have to do something else to Mages to make that fair now. Of course…now there will be a lot of stamina gear out on the AH…but I wouldn’t DE it yet…it has been my experience that the outcry from these nerfs often are louder than the original outcry and results in a “roll back” to the original.
We will have to see if my theory is played out…
Creature Handler was SWG
I’m glad I’m in the LotRO crowd here – PvE is the main game and PvMP is the add-on. The dev team has communicated that they will not nerf players for OP, but that they can, and will, nerf MP if they are OP. Creates a nice balance and doesn’t kill the PvE crowd. And, with no gear in MP, it removes some of the pain.
Perfect, no, but better than WoW.