[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Maybe the crustaceans were found to fit the Nerub'ar style. Armoured spiders and all that. The preview looks good, but luckily I don't need it myself. I even managed to survive in pretty close proximity to some spiders IRL, although I didn't fancy it.

My friends are going to play the new expansion, so by the peer pressure I will give it a try. I am cautious with my enthusiasm though. WoW has already promised many times to improve and the results were mixed. To add an insult to injury, my class was butchered during Dragonflight and ended up really unfun to play.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Some people I read are making jokes about what people who are afraid of both arachnids and crustaceans should do? I found it a bit whimsical at first, but then I thought, they are rather similar in appearance indeed, so maybe there is a truth to that comment.

True, but WoW should really be trying to gain the trust back at this point. So maybe they'll deliver more this time around. What did they do to your class though?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch The problem was mostly with the tuning. They messed up so badly, that to get "okay" numbers (which were still below what other healers were getting!) you needed to ignore most of the class mechanics. Just spam one spell like it was The Burning Crusade again. That was just bad. With proper tuning it's supposed to be a hybrid melee/ranged healer using both hard cast and instants.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka But isn't it the usual dance for the devs to make a new patch that mixes everything up and then watch how It does and work out the bugs and tuning as they got thereafter? In an ideal world, those would be ironed out in testing, but we ain't there. What I mean is, with some luck, it will get fixed soonish?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch The problem is that well, Blizzard rarely fixes the tuning for real. There seems to be some bias from the devs too, some classes get a lot less love than others. Shaman community has given up to the point they rarely even take their pitchforks out.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka You know, it's curious, after you mentioned that about the Shaman, I dug out those parody songs that Ian Ziraldo did about WoW classes years ago. You know, "That's the World of Warcraft That You Play!" songs. Here is the first one:

He did two of those, the first one 17 years ago, and then a remake with new classes and different lyrics 10 years ago. And it was interesting how the lyrics for the Shaman class changed over the years:

17 years ago:

Shaman!
You are the most overpowered class,
All you have to do is cast Frostshock to win.
Remember to keep Reincarnation up,
And it will take ten Alliance just to take you down.

And then 10 years ago:

Shaman!
The thing you do best is help your friends during battles and fights
LAME,
Your patience will be tested by routine,
Prepare to die, you're a tool, at least you fought and tried

The point is, Shaman's predicament is so well known that it made it into parody songs, and 10 years ago already at that. So yeah...

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Even the reincarnation became a meme as "shaman's defensive cooldown". Because they are really lacking on the toolkit to survive any extra damage and modern WoW has a lot of 1-shots or near 1-shots if you don't use a defensive cooldown. You can figure what happens to shamans.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Maybe it is hard for WoW to find balance. I mean, with so many classes some are bound to be better than others. Granted, this is the case with most games these days that have classes. But given how old WoW is and all those patches and updates, it may now be too big to nimbly change?

Or maybe it is a lack of unified vision? I do not know, but how many of the people who started WoW all those years back are still part of it and is there an overall creative direction? From what I've read, the last few updates gave the impression of each pulling the blanket and not part of a more coordinated plan. But maybe those are just the articles that I read.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch The balance keeps changing every expansion and sometimes between the expansion patches too. So it's not that they don't have opportunities to fix the class. The lack of unified vision is more likely to be the reason. Some classes are suffering from identity crisis because they kept getting dramatic changes all the time.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka But hey, at least on an objective artistic level, WoW now how you describe it is a semi-accurate metaphor for how the world is...