Dev Blog: Balance in 1.17.2

[Tscosomaz]

2. make glancing blows unavoidable

Making Glancing Blows unavoidable ("expertise" contribution of +weapskill already not working on emu) will make +weaponskill a pointless stat unless you are a dual wielder and even so the damage output impact would be lower than other stats. As you correctly said, better nerf 2 classes damage output (mainly warrios, but also rogues) than boost all the others.

Probably the best "balancing" solution.

[Imonobor]

Its not a big thing, but priests "inner fire" still have the old old addative of "Attack power" from when priests were intended to be a semi melee character in the very first draft of wow.

I have never encountered a priest that actually uses melee for anything other than striking judged mobs/bosses for mana regain. And then you dont use AP to hit with anyway so it dont matter much.

Cant this be changed to something a little more fun?

Spell power good but slightly boring.
Heals rest of party for 20 % of dmg taken, a bit more fun in 5 man dungeons.
"hand of god" moves the priest to the designated tank and transferes some of the aggro on him or give the tank the next strike, kinda like intervene. Really usefull and good.
Random effect, "Sheild", "Greater heal", "Fade" or freeze enemy in place with a shackle animation. Id like this wild card the most.

Literally every priest should be using melee, at least while leveling. The melee swing timer is not reset by shooting with a wand, so you can weave melee hits inbetween for really good mana-free dps while your dots eat the target and you're safe insids your power word: bubble.
Leave my AP alone. I wouldn't mind some SP tho

[Shambakriger]

It’s insane how people just start assuming the worst as soon as any new change/nerf is proposed
This is a whole patch focused on class balancing, made with the help of a council of veteran players. Do you really not think that the devs have thought about these basic objections you come up with?:P

I’m interested in how the devs will make it work, disparity between different racials is fine and unavoidable, but it’ll be nice to narrow the gap a bit. Also my main problem with weapon skill racials is more so that they’re boring rather than op

[Pars]

If weapon skills are getting rebalanced for races it would only make sense for racial abilities to get some changes too.

Agree! The Human racials compared to any other races becomes really bad. Either add a new racial or nerf the others.

Perception & Diplomacy is quite weak compared to Blood Fury and Hardiness or War Stomp and Endurance.

We hope that this post provides some clarity to the direction we are taking in our design for 1.17.2 and onward.

If you will choose the direction to nerf a few instead of lifting others in the name of balance you should remove racials all together.

[Sanserof77]

Suggestion: add some stats to Edgemaster's Handguards, so people who spent 2k+ gold on that item aren't completely shafted

[Schwrop]

Weapon Skill

• Adding +5 skill bonus rewards from various sources.

Would there be a possibility to somehow implement a book of +5 skill bonus to druid form "invisible" weapons? Guess it's a bit crazy cause the invisible cat/bear weapons don't have a word about it's existance in-game.
Or maybe, instead, druid forms could be made to benefit from Unarmed skill. And in turn, from +5 skill book if that weapon proficiency is gonna get it

[Calli]

With these proposed changes to Racial Skills you will:
A) Have a nerfed +3 skill on human which will allow the war to get the +5 source and have base +8 skill
B) Do not allow war to have the extra +5 skill and then make human be the worst race to use swords/maces

either way the changes sound good on paper but even giving it 5 minutes of thought makes it fall appart but I guess we will have to wait and see how it turns out...

Hopefully it will be A, that makes sense. I wonder about the ranged weapon skills how that will be solved to stay fair to trolls, highelves and dwarves.

[Geojak]

So what's the new weapon skill formula. Some people here math and would rly appreciate it. I assume lineseising means that +5 doesn't suddenly jump you to +3 hit.
Let balake leak it if you don't know the details since I assume he is an insider

[Geojak]

It’s insane how people just start assuming the worst as soon as any new change/nerf is proposed
This is a whole patch focused on class balancing, made with the help of a council of veteran players. Do you really not think that the devs have thought about these basic objections you come up with?:P

I’m interested in how the devs will make it work, disparity between different racials is fine and unavoidable, but it’ll be nice to narrow the gap a bit. Also my main problem with weapon skill racials is more so that they’re boring rather than op

This happened because Akalix stayed so obscure. If you dotn give the details, then critical player fill it out in there heads. He could have just be less vague

[Toaomb]

Love all the "What do you mean changing the way weapon skill vs def skill is calculated? It was so simple and well documented before!!!! You just:

. . . Get a certain amount of decrease in glancing up to 308 where it doesn't reduce further, and you get an effective 3% hit at the 305 threshold, but the first 1% additional hit chance you have from gear doesn't actually apply to your chance to hit an enemy until after this threshold, making that first 1% hit chance increase from gear meaningless so you don't equip that gear until you have 2% hit instead, and then you actually have a very seldom documented increased chance to both hit AND crit an enemy after a certain other threshold of weapon skill (over 315 or so) etc. etc. etc. it was so SIMPLE and EASY and WELL DOCUMENTED BEFORE WHY DID YOU CHANGE IT AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

[Bogyone]

• Linearizing Weapon Skill vs Defense Skill to make the breakpoints much more clear.

Could you provide a formula please? It is linear now and based on the difference between attacker's weapon and target's defense skills, isn't it?

[Jannus]

If weapon skills are getting rebalanced for races it would only make sense for racial abilities to get some changes too.

Yes exactly this. I think they will try to balance racials (especially human).

Good lord I hope they balance out the night elf racials somehow, getting 50% faster to your corpse (while still having to wait out the full death timer before you can revive) and being able to be in stationary stealth lvl 1 on a PvE server while having no in-combat racial abilities, 1% dodge AND 10 Nature Resist is OP as hell, I wonder what they can do to nerf this imbalanced race so other mere mortals can even begin to compare to night elves.

[Likaleo]

This is not a good change, in my opinion.humans/orcs are always the go-to for maximum melee damage. This leads to the population of each faction being skewed in favour of these races, which is lore accurate.

Remember, when everyone is special, noone is.

Well said sir. I agree and could not say it any better

[Ovaron]

This is a whole patch focused on class balancing, made with the help of a council of veteran players. Do you really not think that the devs have thought about these basic objections you come up with?:P

Yep, I think so. Some members, or at least players who got invited to the council did moan about weapon skill for quite some time in discord shizocraft. They picked a RPG race for various reasons, but still wanted to be competitive in the minmaxing game.

Game is nearly 20 Years old. Everyone who is interested in this retro game knows how this game is working. You have to pick the race with what you want to play later in mind.
So devs are now "rebalancing" the whole weaponskill system without going into detail. This isnt a very good communiction and leaves room for speculation and maybe frustration.

If they dont touch the other racials and would offer a race change - welcome to troll melee world (for pve at least).

[Justlord13]

For what rogue can use axes? When paladin's staves, dual wield in such case?

[Toaomb]

This is not a good change, in my opinion.humans/orcs are always the go-to for maximum melee damage. This leads to the population of each faction being skewed in favour of these races, which is lore accurate.

Remember, when everyone is special, noone is.

Well said sir. I agree and could not say it any better

Completely disagree, having less options is never a better choice. Having to be shoehorned into a single race is not
"special," it's taking away a lot of the RPG character building aspect of the game that gives you freedom of choice. I think this is a step in the right direction and you can derive nuanced class/race rock paper scissors without racial weapon skill having a stranglehold on your ability to gear late game.

"If everyone is special no one is" doesn't really apply to weapon skill specifically, because weapon skill is already not a nuanced mechanic with choices- it is a 1 dimensional hit or don't hit the enemy mechanic. "If everyone is special no one is" more-so applies to the issues of giving every character an invulnerability, healing, infinite mobility that is normally unique mechanically to each class.

[Alyss]

We're aware that this is exactly the reason players pick these specific races. We want to keep that "niche" of specific races alive while also removing the "I HAVE TO pick this race if I want to be any good at x or y" without resorting to racial-swapping as that plays more into homogenization and the "everyone is special" narrative.

Take away the reason people play humans, you get no humans.
If you're going to create a warrior schism like that, there better be books giving the rest of us the /racials/, else you're just creating an overclass of Orcs and Trolls that have both the best racials and the weapon skill on point, while the rest of the races remain suboptimal, even with weapon skills.

The only reason somebody'd play a Human anything is the swords or maces skill. Give that to everybody else and what's the point of playing anything other than Horde, with their superior racials?

[Sanserof77]

This is a whole patch focused on class balancing, made with the help of a council of veteran players. Do you really not think that the devs have thought about these basic objections you come up with?:P

Yep, I think so. Some members, or at least players who got invited to the council did moan about weapon skill for quite some time in discord shizocraft. They picked a RPG race for various reasons, but still wanted to be competitive in the minmaxing game.

Game is nearly 20 Years old. Everyone who is interested in this retro game knows how this game is working. You have to pick the race with what you want to play later in mind.
So devs are now "rebalancing" the whole weaponskill system without going into detail. This isnt a very good communiction and leaves room for speculation and maybe frustration.

If they dont touch the other racials and would offer a race change - welcome to troll melee world (for pve at least).

No it's a good change. Characters doing 30% less dps because they picked the wrong race is not good game design, and it should have been changed from the start.

Only people getting shafted are people who picked Orc / Human because of the racials, and would have picked another race otherwise and people who spent lots of gold to make their race viable (Edgemaster's Handguards). Hope these people get compensated in some way.

[Piacrt]

No it's a good change. Characters doing 30% less dps because they picked the wrong race is not good game design, and it should have been changed from the start.

30% is a major overstatement, for rogues its like 40 dps at the very top tier., which is more like 3%

All this does is screw over min maxers who are picking a race specifically so they can perform at the pinnacle of the content, so that some high elf warrior can feel better about themselves.

[Ovaron]

This is a whole patch focused on class balancing, made with the help of a council of veteran players. Do you really not think that the devs have thought about these basic objections you come up with?:P

Yep, I think so. Some members, or at least players who got invited to the council did moan about weapon skill for quite some time in discord shizocraft. They picked a RPG race for various reasons, but still wanted to be competitive in the minmaxing game.

Game is nearly 20 Years old. Everyone who is interested in this retro game knows how this game is working. You have to pick the race with what you want to play later in mind.
So devs are now "rebalancing" the whole weaponskill system without going into detail. This isnt a very good communiction and leaves room for speculation and maybe frustration.

If they dont touch the other racials and would offer a race change - welcome to troll melee world (for pve at least).

No it's a good change. Characters doing 30% less dps because they picked the wrong race is not good game design, and it should have been changed from the start.

30%, come on man. Dont be this drama queen.
Some people chose a Nelf for style, some a Helf for fancy tbc wibes, undead/orc/tauren for pvp. But dont tell me no one knew about weapon skill in this old game.
But I get it, this design team is catering to the "all equal" modern times - and okay, so be it. Let all melee be horde then if the other racials dont change.

At least it will boost the donating for the shareholders, when they renable race change.

[Sanserof77]

Yep, I think so. Some members, or at least players who got invited to the council did moan about weapon skill for quite some time in discord shizocraft. They picked a RPG race for various reasons, but still wanted to be competitive in the minmaxing game.

Game is nearly 20 Years old. Everyone who is interested in this retro game knows how this game is working. You have to pick the race with what you want to play later in mind.
So devs are now "rebalancing" the whole weaponskill system without going into detail. This isnt a very good communiction and leaves room for speculation and maybe frustration.

If they dont touch the other racials and would offer a race change - welcome to troll melee world (for pve at least).

No it's a good change. Characters doing 30% less dps because they picked the wrong race is not good game design, and it should have been changed from the start.

30%, come on man. Dont be this drama queen.
Some people chose a Nelf for style, some a Helf for fancy tbc wibes, undead/orc/tauren for pvp. But dont tell me no one knew about weapon skill in this old game.
But I get it, this design team is catering to the "all equal" modern times - and okay, so be it. Let all melee be horde then if the other racials dont change.

At least it will boost the donating for the shareholders, when they renable race change.

There's still going to be people completely new to Classic WoW and they won't understand the weapon skills, stop gatekeeping. And I didn't know this private server had shareholders, that's news to me.

[Foobs]

It's cute they think it's because racials that people choose humans.

They thought they knew better about PVP and went with a PVP server and look where their at now with that ghost town of server.

[Likaleo]

This is not a good change, in my opinion.humans/orcs are always the go-to for maximum melee damage. This leads to the population of each faction being skewed in favour of these races, which is lore accurate.

Remember, when everyone is special, noone is.

Well said sir. I agree and could not say it any better

Completely disagree, having less options is never a better choice.

But you have same amount of options tho its not like current system has less of them. But if you want to be top dps you need to be orc/human for the dps rasials. And having horde with alot of orcs is good for rp.

Reality is that there will allways be top race for melee class and people will allways go for it. You can still go for gnome rogue if you want and thats okay but you cannot expect same dps output from all races

[Toaomb]

Well said sir. I agree and could not say it any better

Completely disagree, having less options is never a better choice.

But you have same amount of options tho its not like current system has less of them. But if you want to be top dps you need to be orc/human for the dps rasials. And having horde with alot of orcs is good for rp.

Reality is that there will allways be top race for melee class and people will allways go for it. You can still go for gnome rogue if you want and thats okay but you cannot expect same dps output from all races

Having to play orc/human to be competitive in your class as melee means there is only 1 option for you per faction: orc/human. That's bad game design. Sure, the other races have different benefits, but so do orcs/humans that also make them interesting without the increased damage. The original Vanilla weapon skill changing how you itemize your character is a bad way to make the game work and actually does significantly lower your damage at end game. Think about it: Hitting something = doing 100% damage and not hitting = 0% damage for that hit. At higher levels of play where your hits can proc effects and other things, not hitting 3% of the time (equivalent to the racial weapon skill bonus, roughly) actually accounts for not doing damage at all on 3% of your hits and proccing your weapon bonuses less often which also reduces your overall damage

[Toaomb]

Completely disagree, having less options is never a better choice.

But you have same amount of options tho its not like current system has less of them. But if you want to be top dps you need to be orc/human for the dps rasials. And having horde with alot of orcs is good for rp.

Reality is that there will allways be top race for melee class and people will allways go for it. You can still go for gnome rogue if you want and thats okay but you cannot expect same dps output from all races

Having to play orc/human to be competitive in your class as melee means there is only 1 option for you per faction: orc/human. That's bad game design. Sure, the other races have different benefits, but so do orcs/humans that also make them interesting without the increased damage. The original Vanilla weapon skill changing how you itemize your character is a bad way to make the game work and actually does significantly lower your damage at end game. Think about it: Hitting something = doing 100% damage and not hitting = 0% damage for that hit. At higher levels of play where your hits can proc effects and other things, not hitting 3% of the time (equivalent to the racial weapon skill bonus, roughly) actually accounts for not doing damage at all on 3% of your hits and proccing your weapon bonuses less often which also reduces your overall damage

So fiery weapon might not roll over your Deep Wounds ticks, crusader enchant might not proc, trinkets might not proc, double hits from Hand of Justice, double hits from Ironfoe/Thrash Blade/etc., double hits from pally ability, triple hits from windfury etc. are all affected by the racial hit bonus thing and make a significant difference later in the game

[Toaomb]

But you have same amount of options tho its not like current system has less of them. But if you want to be top dps you need to be orc/human for the dps rasials. And having horde with alot of orcs is good for rp.

Reality is that there will allways be top race for melee class and people will allways go for it. You can still go for gnome rogue if you want and thats okay but you cannot expect same dps output from all races

Having to play orc/human to be competitive in your class as melee means there is only 1 option for you per faction: orc/human. That's bad game design. Sure, the other races have different benefits, but so do orcs/humans that also make them interesting without the increased damage. The original Vanilla weapon skill changing how you itemize your character is a bad way to make the game work and actually does significantly lower your damage at end game. Think about it: Hitting something = doing 100% damage and not hitting = 0% damage for that hit. At higher levels of play where your hits can proc effects and other things, not hitting 3% of the time (equivalent to the racial weapon skill bonus, roughly) actually accounts for not doing damage at all on 3% of your hits and proccing your weapon bonuses less often which also reduces your overall damage

So fiery weapon might not roll over your Deep Wounds ticks, crusader enchant might not proc, trinkets might not proc, double hits from Hand of Justice, double hits from Ironfoe/Thrash Blade/etc., double hits from pally ability, triple hits from windfury etc. are all affected by the racial hit bonus thing and make a significant difference later in the game

And so now Troll is best class for melee damage? very well then: start to balance that issue as well! Maybe give a drawback on the attack speed increase like reduced healing taken or increased resource cost to use or an exhaustion after use / movespeed penalty or something

[Czxddl]

The adjustment of weapon skills is great.
Human and orc race skills are too powerful now，but canceling them directly will lose differentiation.Weakening them is a good way, such as changing skills to+2,+3.By comparison, the Dark Night Race only dodges+1%.Pursuing the ultimate damage, humans and orcs are still the top choices.

[Kingalion]

About weapon skill change :
I don't think that the racial bonus is that overpowered so that its the determining factor for picking a race, at least it wasn't for me. Diversity and variaty is needed. And if all races had the same racial bonus wouldn't that make picking a race a cosmotic thing only ?
I really hope somehow this desicion is reconsidered.

[Ovaron]

something

stop quoting yourself, wont cleanup this for you.

The benefit of weapon skill is reduced glancing damage penalty, hit is just a positive side effect. Do you even play melee?
And Akalix stated +5 from various sources - You can read it like you can have maxed weapon skill of +15 - absolutly erasing the weapon skill racial

[Bigsmerf]

Just give other races weapon skill racials... Everyone gets a buff, and orc/human players aren't absolutely fucking gimped. And don't tell me that would take away the "RP" and "flavor" because like-... Certain races are more proficient with certain weapons? It would just add on to their identity AND viability.

[Galun]

Most affected race: G O B L I N

Exit Strategy is a bad joke.

[Marafado]

ohhh this "ballance" is a pain in ass for the raid loggers/gold buyers ;p

for example the wep skill wrist users need to be compesate by turtle staff, this fools can sell their ass to the chinese to use it hehe

[Xudo]

Can some warrior record DPS on mannequin with and without Edgemasters? All other gear should be same. How much does it actually add?

Which races will be best warriors next? I think it will be gnomes and trolls.

[Liljon]

Without any concrete details, this has me more worried than excited. Nerfing weapon skill racials how? Adding in more ways to obtain weapon skill how? Making defence vs weapon skill more linear how?

Bottom line - racial abilities are a relic of the past and are frankly horrible game design, so I am all for outright removing them, but it has to be compensated by something, and frankly I am not looking forward to having to swing Thunderfury on my human paladin with Edgemasters. And you guys might have a 200iq genius solution, but it was not shared, so as I said at the start - I am more worried than excited, because you just announced a massive change and left everyone hanging by the fringes. The same goes for Axe Rogues - are there going to be any talent changes to make Axes equal to or stronger than sword / dagger / mace?

At the end of the day, if you guys make it so that race changes don't matter any more for weapon skill (which would be great), I'd like to ask for a free race change to undead / tauren for my paladin. Thanks.

[Quidoba]

Our philosophy has always been focusing on enhancing and polishing the existing identity of classes and specializations, rather than reworking or replacing them entirely.

This is reassuring to hear. Both from the idea of sticking to vanilla+ (where we get to have the loved vanilla experience, but extend it into new content/exploration). Also from the perspective of preserving some of the class/spec/build identity we've already assumed within our respective niche in TWOW.

I also support any effort to avoid homogenization (both in itemization and specs). I understand this is incredibly difficult especially when trying to balance.