World of Warcraft: Midnight has had some trouble with its class balancing—some of this is fair enough, given Blizzard completely redesigned the game’s specialisations (there’s close to 40 of them) to better suit a world without UI mods. This had, uh, some consequences.
Consequences like, for instance, five bears rocking up to your dungeon and flattening it with absolutely no regard to the holy trinity. See, the Guardian druid tank spec received some buffs to help it maintain threat, as bear players were struggling to keep mobs hitting them as nature intended (thanks, WoWHead).
About two weeks ago, Blizzard wrote: “Guardian Druids have continued to overperform in single target contexts, while experiencing difficulties with threat and sustained damage outside of cooldowns. With these changes, we’re aiming to reduce burst potential and transfer some of that power into more reliable and consistent abilities to aid in generating and maintaining threat.”
That’s all well and good—Midnight’s also been struggling with a burst-based meta that saw a lot of classes’ power being funnelled into big damage spikes, which doesn’t feel great in solo content especially.
The buffs, largely to the spec’s damage with Thrash (200% to its direct damage, 100% to its bleed damage) quickly resulted in five Guardian druids rocking up to a level 20 Mythic+ dungeon key and managing to “time” it, which just means beating the dungeon within the stringent time limit. For context, gear rewards cap out at level 10.
Just hopping on over to the warcraftlogs of the run, and oop, yep. There’s Thrash on the top tank of the group accounting for 59.38% of their damage. Anyway, Blizzard quickly stepped in to revert the change yesterday, with community manager Kaivax writing:
“Our recent adjustments to Guardian have made the Elune’s Chosen build stronger than intended. We’re going to take steps to bring this back in line with realm restarts during scheduled weekly maintenance this week.”
Reactions have been pretty funny, all told. Here’s a thread on the WoW Subreddit directly blaming these five bears for getting the class nerfed:
Guardian druids right now from r/wow
Honestly, while WoW’s recent problems with its latest patch have been… let’s call them not great, I think this sort of chicanery is to be celebrated. Not on Blizzard’s part, but the players’. I just think it’s neat to see folks trying absurd things just because they can. And also because Blizzard buffed one of their abilities by 200%. That also.
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