World of Warcraft class rebalance detailed

Blizzard has gone into further detail on how and why it intends to rebalance World of Warcraft's classes in an upcoming update, to the usual roars of "nerf", "OP" and "rage quit".

In a developer blog post on the upcoming patch 5.4, lead systems designer Greg Street ran through the proposed changes to each class, many of which are already included in the public test of the update.

The full post is well worth a read, as are the patch notes, but it's a little difficult to parse for general interest readers; in short, some of the changes have whipped players into a frothing rage.

"I know it can feel like the developers are out to punish players sometimes, but really our primary goal is to keep everyone having fun," Street said in his accompanying notes.

"That includes redesigning awkward mechanics and buffing weak spells, but it also means nerfing overpowered mechanics so that other classes or specs don’t feel as if they can’t compete.

"I won’t pretend that we’ll get everything perfect this time around either, but we should be closer. Please keep providing us with specific, constructive feedback. We still have time to respond to feedback, even after the patch launches."

Thanks, Polygon.