It’s been three weeks since Blizzard launched the new Cataclysm expansion and broke record books as it sold more copies in its first 24 hours than any other PC release to date. Part of what made this third and latest World of Warcraft expansion so popular is the exciting revamp of Azeroth and the talent trees for all classes.
Far from resting on their laurels (general reception to the class talent changes have been positive), Ghostcrawler and the rest of his design team are already planning to tweak them some more based on the data they’ve gathered in playtesting in the live realms.
Ghostcrawler said that the healing situation in PvE dungeons and raids “is working out pretty much as intended” leading us to believe that the out-of-mana dilemmas most healers are complaining about will stay for good during the whole Cataclysm expansion.
Tank balance overall also “seems good at this point in time” based on the threat numbers and the equal use of all four tanking specs–Protection paladins, Feral bear druids, Blood death knights and Protection warriors–even up to the progression-level Heroic raids.
This leaves us with the damage dealers, which Ghostcrawler admitted as needing the most work in terms of PvE balancing. This is not surprising given that more than half of all specs in the game are damage dealers, but what players are furious about are the allegedly wide gaps in performance between top DPS and bottom rung DPS specs.
Meanwhile, PvP balance has gone to a less burst-dominated paradigm with the decreased strength of Mortal Strike debuffs and larger health pools. The focus of developers now is devising possible nerfs to offensive dispels like Purge and Spellsteal, which have been deemed “too powerful” in the current match-ups. Crowd control, interrupts and self-healing effects might also get reduced duration in the next round of patches.
For a more detailed reading on what the class design team is looking into changing in the near future, read the full blog post on the official community site here