World of Warcraft players are protesting an upcoming balance patch via the in-game group finder tool. Solo players are listing themselves in Mythic plus dungeons with no real desire to complete them, and they’re stuck knowing their class will be nerfed and Blizzard will reduce their damage analysis.
There are going to be a lot of class changes, nerfs, and buffs happening as a result of this patch, and it will obviously take some time to get them all done. In short, many of the best classes for single-target DPS have received buffs or barely changed. On the other hand, classes near the bottom of the DPS rankings remain unchanged or oddly nerfed. You can see the problem in the handy image below created by Allyparser on Twitter.
iGamesNews
It’s safe to say this didn’t go over well with the community, leading to the aforementioned protests. Many DPS have taken a stance here, filling up the group finder with dungeon lists titled “Protest” and explaining their dislike of the patch with group notes. This protest was also taken up by others who were frustrated with the Mythic Plus system in general, plus how difficult it is to get into groups as a DPS.
Okay, but why does this matter? World of Warcraft players know why, but maybe you don’t. In World of Warcraft, the DPS ranking of a class is very important, and when your class/spec is particularly poor, it may be difficult for you to enter high-difficulty group content. Hypothetically, weapons warriors are much better than rage warriors. In a raid match, you need at least one warrior to provide raid-wide buffs to the rest of the team. So, if a competitive team leader had to choose between two good warriors – one with Fury and one with Weapons – they would choose Weapons. This makes it very difficult to get into a good guild as a Fury Warrior.
If things get particularly bad, the raid leader may throw all DPS warriors into the trash and switch to protection warrior tanks. Assumptions aside, if you look at the chart above, you’ll see that Warlock is in the bottom half of the rankings overall. This means that regardless of specialization, why take a warlock to a raid or even a difficult dungeon? Add to that the fact that Warlock hasn’t been affected by the patch yet, and you can see part of why people are upset. Also note that Elemental Shaman are still unaffected, despite being at the top. coin.
Will these protests have any effect? No, probably not. But I guess, aside from the next Blizzcon, the Group Finder would be a good place to protest these changes. Fingers crossed everything will be fine when the next balance patch comes. If not, then just press N buddy and play another spec. Unless you’re a warlock, I hear New World just released a massive update that sounds interesting.
What are your thoughts on this protest? Let us know below.