Patch 4.2 class balance explained

Posted on by agd.tanya
General (Switzerland)
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Got quite a few comments to make on Ghostcraweler’s explanations of changes in 4.2

General

  • We removed the threat caused by buffs or crowd control because we wanted to make communication and coordination easier in dungeons, especially among strangers using Dungeon Finder. We want the challenge of a dungeon encounter to be the encounter mechanics, not marking targets. We also think this change will be a quality of life improvement for tanks, who inherited a lot of the responsibility for explaining fights, marking targets and otherwise setting the pace.

I’m breathing a sigh of relief with this one. You get a random looking for dungeon group. Tank’s still marking & a trigger happy mage sheeps to bring the entire pack on an unsuspecting tank & a healer who’s still drinking…. Cue wipe.

Death Knights

  • The nerfs to Obliterate and Howling Blast were made because Frost damage was too high in both PvP and PvE. Note that these values were hotfixed — you shouldn’t see damage drop further when 4.2 goes live.
  • The Might of the Frozen Wastes change was a small tweak to help keep one-handed Frost relatively competitive with two-handed style.
  • The Unholy Might buff was to help catch Unholy up to Frost in PvE. Interestingly, we didn’t nerf Unholy damage at all in 4.1, but you can still see a small drop in their DPS because so many talented DKs went Frost. I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does theoretical higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?

Good question. It seems as if a spec is theoretically 0.1% better then people think a raiding dps needs to be that “better” spec unless requested to be another spec for the raid for buffs,etc. Then again you see the you need to be spec X for lower gear levels & spec Y for higher gear levels.

Rogues

  • We nerfed Cloak of Shadows because it felt like Subtlety rogues could counter both casters and melee specs too easily. This change forces them to choose between Cloak of Shadows and Combat Readiness.
  • However, we wanted to compensate rogues for this PvP nerf, and we concluded rogue damage in PvE was also too low, so we buffed their damage overall.

via Patch 4.2 class balance explained.

Rogues…. my favorite class. Thank you to Ghostcrawler for explaining why Cloak & Combat Readiness were going to be changed so they share a cooldown. Not going to be great in PvE raiding though. And THANK YOU for noticing PvE damage for rogues as too low & working to correct that. Saw a lot of 10 mans that were working on heroics that did not want to take a rogue. As a rogue you are the lightest armored mêlée class (kitties pick up talents to increase their armor even though it is the same gear), & with the lower dps than the plate classes (dps warriors scale up on dps charts very well with just weapon upgrades) raid leaders just didn’t want to take rogues that much with taking more damage therefore more likely to die plus lower dps meant rogues were sitting the benches.

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