Upcoming class and item balance changes
There has been a lot of good discussion lately concerning various aspects of the DPS status quo. Some classes are putting out too much compared to their cloth counterparts, and others have suddenly found themselves too powerful in certain areas of the game. Blizzard recognizes this, and this evening the Lead System Designer, Ghostcrawler, came out and enumerated a few things Blizzard believes are true.
Ghostcrawler has left the door open to these class and item balance issues being fixed (if Blizzard decides to pursue such fixes) in either a hotfix or through an upcoming patch. Chief among these changes are an increase in warlock DPS, a decrease in rogue DPS, a change in protection warriors to limit their utility in PvP, and refinements to Icecrown Citadel weapon procs.
When looking over this laundry list of areas to change, it's important to remember that Ghostcrawler is not promising a fix, and that he and his team are not ready to share specifics. He has not promised you the pony, so don't be mad if some of these changes don't happen.
Ghostcrawler's full statement after the break.
From Ghostcrawler:
As many of you have suspected, we think rogue damage is too high. We will be making hotfixes to lower the maximum damage output of Assassination and Combat rogues. The Combat nerf will be slight. Both specs should still do just fine on damage meters (assuming skill, gear etc.) but shouldn't be beating out other specs to such a large degree.
Other things on our radar that you might see soon -- none of these are promises and we have no specific changes to announce yet:
Some of these changes, should we decide to pursue them, can be handled via hotfix and others will be made in an upcoming patch.
We usually don't make such general announcements before we're ready to share the specifics, so we'll see how this works out.
Warlock damage in PvE is a little low.
Protection warriors have too much utility and damage for PvP. (We don't want to hurt their tanking in PvE of course.)
We are considering adjusting (not replacing) the Elemental 4 piece Tier 10 set bonus.
We'll continue to refine and look at the Icecrown weapon procs.
Other stuff (yes, we've heard your concerns), but these are the big things we are focusing on at this time.
