Nerfs: Math is fun

So, we here at WoW Insider get letters. Some of them are great story suggestions, some of them are good things to know, and some of them are, well, not very well thought out. A case in point. An email from a hunter wondering why we did not have sufficient coverage of the "ricidulous" hunter change in the previous patch, that apparently "sucks huge." Especially since "mages got buffed and locks were untouched."

I sit at work all day, and read these when I get a spare moment. This letter just kinda stuck sideways in my brain. Besides the bad spelling, bad grammar, and so on, well, let's look at the claims here.

A hunter nerf. Since I play a hunter, I was somewhat concerned, but rather than waging a vast war on the Warcraft forums, I sat down with my good friend Excel and poked the numbers in. For a hunter at level 60 with 1000 ranged attack power, which is a decent value for a marksmanship spec hunter without a lot of epic gear, this is a decrease in damage output of 17%. Which sounds like a lot, until you realize, it's a nerf of 70 hit points on a non-crit against an unarmored target. Seventy. Hit. Points. There was another damage reduction to the marksmanship tree involving Multi-shot. The talent reduced the critical hit chance bonus some, but it also reduced the base damage bonus. How much? My good friend Excel and I came up with 2 percent. The interesting thing about the change to multi-shot is that it actually scales DOWN with gear, so the better your ranged weapon is, the less effected you are by the change.

So, yeah, a fairly sizable nerf to an instant-cast spell with a reasonably short cooldown that was extremely mana inefficient. The other change, the "multi-shot" change, was a gimme. Basically this is the kind of change hunters should be thankful for: it looks really bad to anyone who doesn't play the class, but, in reality, it's a very small change in the amount of damage done. The change in critical strike percentage is actually worse, but even that's a very small change.

Now, let's look at the rest of the list.

"Mages got buffed." No. Mages got nerfed, hard. The damage coefficient change means that their spell power gear is not worth as much as it was before. This is a change that will hurt more as more damage gear is added. So from a gearing up perspective, this is a far worse nerf for mages than the multi-shot nerf is for hunters. The counterspell change must be what the correspondent was referring to, but that was actually a bug fix, apparently counterspell was put onto a cooldown in 2.0.1, and the cooldown was removed now.

"locks were untouched" Fair enough, in this patch there were no changes to the warlock class. That's because in 2.0.3 they had a 27% across the board nerf to all spells that do damage over time, which for many warlocks is the majority of the active casting bar. Also, pet damage output was reduced significantly, but armor was increased. So warlocks got huge nerfs to two very popular talent trees. And not that long ago either.

The change I didn't particularly care for was the change to the priest DoT coefficient. Any hunter who whines about their damage reduction because they are trying to level really should play a priest up to, say, level 30, then respec to Holy or Discipline and see how fast you can level. I have a lot of respect for the priests who are healing me in raids right now, because keeping enough points out of the shadow tree to have excellent healing while we all n00b it up in Hellfire Citadel means they aren't going to level very fast at all when they're trying to solo.

So next time before you head off to the forums to complain about hard nerfs, you may want to consider loading up a spreadsheet and actually looking at what's going on first.