Three nerfs in Patch 3.3 (Rogues, Death Knight, Warlock)

As it stands since Patch 3.3 was released there have been three nerfs deployed to the servers. All of these were hotfixed just recently (yesterday) and the explanation given for each seems to ring true in my ears.  We’ll see how long they stay and how the whole thing pans out, the WoW community is known for one other thing besides their loyalty and that’s their knee-jerk homicidal and emotional angst.

After evaluating damage dealt in instances and PvP over the last two days, we are going to deploy three changes. There could always be more along the way. These hotfixes should hit sometime today (Dec 10).

Hunger for Blood now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%. We wanted to increase Assassination rogue damage, and we were succesful, but we overshot the mark. We buffed Hunger for Blood back when Assassination needed a damage boost, so we’re more than happy that this talent won’t account for such a huge dps increase. Because of the nature of hotfixes, it is unlikely the tooltip will change to 10% right away.

The poison change in itself was a step in the right direction for Mutilate (which is my favorite and current spec) but I’m not experienced or familiar enough with the class to really get into it here. Perhaps Jim or one of the other stalwart Rogue readers of mine can chime in?

Scourge Strike can now crit only once. The Shadow portion of the damage cannot separately crit. We wanted to keep the double crit mechanic as a way of making Scourge Strike do more than just being an attack that hits for equal part physical and Shadow damage. The change just proved to be too bursty in PvP and provide too much sustained damage in raids. The Shadow portion Scourge Strike will continue to be increased by effects that currently boost Shadow damage.

I don’t have much to contribute here since I don’t have a Death Knight at all let alone at Lv 80 nor have I ever spec’d into Unholy when I did play a Death Knight. But the concept of an attack that can double crit both physical and shadow damage makes it really powerful against all types and DKs are resilient enough already that I don’t think this nerf is going to crush any souls.

Rolling Corruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely. This is really more of a bug fix than a nerf. The problem here was that players could inflate the initial cast of Corruption and have the spell tick for that damage indefinitely as long as it was refreshed. This resulted in some “jaw dropping” damage. Technically this was a tricky one to fix but we wanted to keep the Glyph of Quick Decay and were able to ultimately find a solution. When this fix goes live, the hasted Corruption should correct itself to your current haste within a tick or two of the spell being refreshed.

Bug fix.

Ideally, we’d rather make changes while we’re still in PTR before a patch goes live, but in the end we’d rather make changes than allow something imbalanced to continue just because we didn’t change it pre-patch. To the community’s credit, some players predicted these issues might become a problem. We appreciate the feedback as always, even if we don’t always immediately make changes suggested by the community.