Blizzard has not been announcing many nerfs and when they do they are brought with buffs. Because of this it’s not entirely always clear what your DPS will look like in the next patch. Simulationcraft has been a very consistent predictor of DPS changes post patch. It uses a similar calculation to that Blizzard uses for internal testings and provides an updated model of what DPS will look like in 4.1. As of now Simulationcraft looks like this.
This theorycrafting is done in the BiS gear that will be made available with the patch.
I think it’s time for blizzard to figure out WHERE they are balancing. All classes and specs have different scalability and grow at different rates. A fire mage for example cannot touch a destro lock (both in equal gear) until the mage gets a decent amount of crit. Basically at around mid level progression everyone will have equal DPS… and then things change. What they need to do is draw a curve for every single class. So let’s say warriors start off pretty heavy on DPS. Then as they get gear their haste/crit/mastery doesn’t scale up as well as everyone else’s. Boom problem solved.
Of course it’s not quite that simple. Haste represents a unique problem for largely ranged DPS classes. Blizzard made a change to haste so that it would add ticks to dots.
Basically in Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard introduced a change so that haste would make dots tick faster. This made sense as a DPS increase as people were refreshing their dots automatically. The problem arose that once people cleared ICC they actually capped their haste. At some point you have so much haste that your direct damage spells no longer reapply dots in time so either you come up with one of these silly drain life specs or you cap your DPS. Blizzard made a temporary change to make more direct DPS moves (spammable ones) reapply dots, but really this couldn’t be permanent. I can remember Blood Lust being popped and having dots ticking at a rate of three seconds up time.
The “fix” in Cataclysm was to make it so that after you hit so much haste you would gain extra dot ticks. This presumably would mean you would always be able to reapply your dots with direct damage spells. However the change made it so that haste as a stat bursted in value as opposed to slowly made gains. Mastery and crit steadily get worse by point invested. Haste however will burst up every 10% adding an extra tick of the dot.
This simple fact makes balancing specs hard because 10 haste can literally make the difference between 20 dps and 2k dps.
We’re probably going to be stuck with this Simulationcraft or something like it. Scariest thing to note is that there is a 10,000 DPS difference. 1,000 DPS is understandable but 10,000 is just a bunch too much. That’s like a full extra person in the raid in difference. As of right now it’s not TOO bad for most classes. The current balancing seems to be around making sure fire mage AoE is equal DPS to that of everyone else. It may be a dumb goal considering they did not want to make AoE damage an important factor in this expansion.
TheGameGuru.Me 