ouch

no the dev's do not know what they are doing cause they do not listen to what the player's who know what they are talking about, are talking about.

Lol, your post made me laugh Cilir... You are soooo stupid =) Ofc the dev's know what they are doing... They CREATED them, and they play world of warcraft, i can assure you... Now, when they nerf/revamp a class it's mostly to fix flaws, that later turn out to buff them against another foe, but as they cant fix bugs like these overnight, they have to include them in the next patch. This is a known issue for developers... Fixing a problem often creates two new ones...

Lol, your post made me laugh lieten... You are soooo stupid

Personally, I think this theory has its flaws, but I see more merits than the previous system. With the old way of doing things (specifically reviewing one class at a time) it seems that they would do a great job of revamping the specifics of that class as it relates to PvE combat. The priest review is a great example of that. The shadow tree was already a great leveling spec, but the discipline and holy trees were nightmares to even think about doing anything other than being a holy-bot. However, with the priest review, a whole new set of specs were opened up to the priest to try out before they were railroaded into the inevitable raiding-holy spec. The main problem, that I saw, with this class-review patching was that it did not allow the developers to accurately balance that class to all other classes. They may have thought "I the future, we are going to buff this class, so we can buff the competing classes now". The community would, of course, not see this thought process, and the to-be-buffed classes would cry foul.

I see this as being very advantageous to the overall balancing of classes. For the most part, the developers have been able to line the three trees of all nine classes to focus on what they envision the strengths and weaknesses of that class entail. Some trees still need a little work, but by and large it just seems that some numbers need tweaking, but nothing that screams to need a total revamp.

My only beef with this is that they are more likely now, then ever, to include changes into the game that do not get reflected in the patch notes. I, personally, really hate looking at the "Official" Patch Notes included with the actual patch, and then having to go find the actual patch notes on some other site (like Curse!!!).

But that's just my two cents. -Aeryn

In software development, there is a traditional quality control problem - developers have a difficult time testing their code. This problem has several aspects to it:

- It's virtually impossible to test, by yourself, things you haven't thought of.

- Most people don't want to break things they've made. If a programmer is subconsciously aware of a problem in his or her code, but not consciously aware, that programmer will most likely avoid testing the condition that triggers it. There are a few programmers who are seemingly immune to this - I've met one. I've met many programmers - hundreds, maybe thousands, only one of which did not have this issue. I've tried to fight this tendency, but it's very difficult to work around.

- When two programmers work on a project together, they each make assumptions about the other's code - assumptions that they are usually not aware of making, and their counterpart usually receives little to no indication of some of them. Neither will know to test around these assumptions, unless the test methodology goes after every edge condition. Even then, they may not recognize the edge condition in question. This principle compounds with every programmer you add to the team. While there are practices and techniques to reduce the impact, you cannot make it go away.

- There are some programs which call for object oriented design (you can mould *any* problem to an OO design, but there are some which require no moulding.) These are generally programs which have clearly discreet objects, many of which are similar to other objects to greater or lesser extents. For these programs, object oriented programming can have one of the densest functionality to code ratios. While working on a game master aid for an RPG, I frequently found that new functionality I wanted was actually already expressed in code I had already written - I wrote my test case, ran it, and much to my surprise it worked, despite my having not written any code to handle it (I find writing test cases first tends to help define exactly what I'm trying to do.) In such a dense environment, it is easily possible to fix a bug in a routine, and despite it fixing issues for dozens of other parts of the code, it breaks something, because somewhere there was code that depended on the old behavior.

For a project as large as World of Warcraft, there can never be such a thing as a developer who knows all of the consequences of everything they do. Game developers actually playing the game matters very little, as they'd generally not be inclined to try different things on their own than they'd try while working.

However, the new strategy is probably a lot better, because they're making smaller changes, and so less likely to change the balance even farther the other way around.

They originally gave survival hunters Lacerate as the top talent for their tree.

How can anyone think such a design decision are made by people that actually put time into thinking what they want to do with the classes?

Priests get continually nerfed into the ground in blizzards attempts to rangle in the warlock class ... and now tell them that they won't get a review to address an ever increasing number of issues. Priest PvP survivability is at an all time low and hybrid classes have completely encroached into priests PvE territory. Other then the fact that priests have fort there is almost no need for them to be in the game.

Personally I think blizzards tend to ignore the thoughts and views of there customers to much, this may reduce the tendency to over adjust classes but will not solve the lack of communication or lack of explaining any changes they make even then some of the "like the recent hunter changes" go against things they have stated in the past and also against what they're doing for other classes.

if there is on thing I really dislike about blizzard is the fact they rush through changes that effect any class. whats the point of having a TBC beta going for 4 months+ and releasing it STATING that the new class balance is around lvl 70 then nerfing a class before anyone has got to 70? the change being purely around it being slightly overpowered at lvl 60...

You have put together a very good description of the difficulties of testing code. However, class reviews have little to nothing to do with actual coding. The software works and is pretty much bug free. A priest casts Shadow Word: Pain, and it'll get cast without crashing the client, server, or anything else. That is not the problem that Blizzard is facing. These class reviews are for balancing issues, which only comes from actually playing the game (and talking with others that do).

I think the biggest problem is that people tend to confuse the back-end developers (the people you described) and the balancing developers (the ones the article is talking about).

Seriously, you can't decide the quality of the designers based on stuff they had over a year ago. Because then you have to look at the original concept of hunters (anyone remember Focus in the beta... oh the horror). Look at the great adjustments they have made as they went through and tuned all of the classes. Now that the game has been out for over two years, Blizzard has really decided where they want each class to be placed, and how they want the classes to behave. Now all it takes is the constant balancing among the classes based on the different talents specs and gear stats.

Erm...

You mean stuff like:

Paladins having a tree where all the talents are about dealing damage, yet the class is not allowed to deal comparable damage to damage dealing classes? And don't forget their standard blessings of a whopping 5 minute duration and raid blessings that require reagents of a whole 15 minutes duration.

Hunters having less and less gear to choose from, still don't have a well defined role in raids (Aside dps, but the horror if they actually compete with other dps classes), and their survival tree is just broken compared to the other 2 trees? Also pets still have to be blessed individually as Blizzard decided to remove them from the warrior stack when paladins blessed.

Priests that are holy specced are still gimped in anything but acting as healbot, and healing is boring as it ever was (More boring now, actually, as they removed incentive to downrank heals).

Warriors and Paladins have to spec deep into a tree to be able to tank good, loosing up solo grinding abilities, but druids get most of it by taking talents they can use very much while sologrinding.

Hunters and Warlocks still just got one bag less than everyone else to store things in, cause their class mechanics force them to use one whole bag slot for class-stuff.

This is where Blizz wants classes to be 'based'?

You may say 'look at the changes that have been done so far', and I will respond : "Look at all the money I've paid to participate in what seems to be a beta since the developers keep changing the basis they want to build the game from".

When they started charging money for it, it was supposed to be a finished product that would be expanded upon.

Not a beta test where they would forever change the in-game basics because they had no idea what they really wanted to do in the end.

They got something wrong in their mind if they come out with a new like that Btw gonna reroll WAR Cya blizz