Back & Laughing in the Face of Nerfs.

Well, it's been a while since my last post.

I had a week's annual vacation to take last week, and without coffee breaks and lunchtimes spent in the dreary industrial estate where my office is situated, I just didn't have the motivation to update this thing.

Instead, I played Fable 2 and read with a sigh the reactions to our latest nerfs. It's not the nerfs themselves that bother me, sure they're far-reaching, but Wow is a constantly changing game, and numbers go up as well as down. No, it's the reaction from a community I had thought until now was reasonably intelligent, mature and thick-skinned that has really depressed me.

And then I realised today that it mostly was. Most of the people who I've looked to for intelligent and reasonable responses to the changes have given them. However, they've been drowned out by the overwhelming sea of "ZOMG we sucks nau", or "lol, I reroll Warrior" posts.

For the most part, I can see where Blizz has been coming from. They've tried minor changes and bug fixes to balance Retribution and when it didn't work, they went and turned the biggest knobe they could find to see if that fixes the problem. It's not brilliant science, but it's a move out of desperation, which is a relatively human thing.

And now they're waiting for the smoke to clear to assess the effects of these changes and to help those worst hit. I can understand that, and even with the game being released in a little over a week, we still have 3-4 weeks before there'll be serious raiding at 80. That's hopefully going to be enough time to collect data and assess the best fixes to make. That assumes that we do need these fixes at 80.

For what It's worth, I'm staying Prot and levelling Prot. I did it 1-70 back when things were nowhere near as good for us as they are now. When they open up dual speccing, I'm going to grab Retribution as Ulu's second spec, but only because it'll make one-tank fights smoother to have as much DPS as possible.