Recently in Nerf Category

The air has grown chilled, the waters stilled. The signs point to the event that has been anticipated with bated breath. Prepare yourselves, for... 3.0.3 is nearly upon us. The downtime is extended right about the same length of a usual patch maintenance, and people are preparing. While it is hard to know what the patch will actually hold, since even WoW Insider is only quoting the PTR notes, which could have changed in the 3 week or so run that the PTRs had.

We know that many Ret changes were hot fixed, which Siha points out were done without PTR testing, and other changes are so small, like the Hallowed Be Thy Name change, that they are unlikely to not make the patch. The Druid talent reset is pretty much a given, along with many of the changes to their talents. Other than that? Well, anything could happen. WoW Insider got something right, though, that Patch 3.0.3 is most likely going to happen, even if we haven't seen the typical 'thanks for testing' message on the PTR forums. 

Note: WoW Insider is using guesses and labeling Test Realm info as confirmed patch info. This should be noted, but isn't. PTR notes at launch can differ wildly from live patch notes.

A few days back, when the first ret nerf hotfixes came in, the ones with the JotW changes, I had a short comment based conversation with Zach Yonzon, who is WoW Insider's resident Paladin expert, where I railed against the changes, while admitting that it is quite possible the dps changes were needed for PvP. Zach admitted that the JotW might need some looking into, which is a decent shift in his opinion. As the nerf bat kept swinging, Zach tried valiantly to see Blizzard's perspective.

I too was trying hard. Very, very hard. I don't PvP, so it could be reasoned that I do not understand the playstyle's minutiae. 36 hours ago I was all ready to give you my thoughts on what I thought would be the last swing of the nerfbat. At that point, I felt like I was back about 1 month ago. I was killing stuff about the same speed, I was running out of mana about as much, it felt like the only thing that had changed was I had a few new spells, and a few things had differed. Then came the word from Ghostcrawler on the Beta forums that they weren't done yet.

Apparently the already significant nerfs to Divine Storm, all of the seals and judgments, Judgment of the Wise, and Hammer of Wrath, as well as nerfing the spec down to equal to where they were before 3.0.2 and making Retribution Aura critical to a Paladin's dps, they still feel that there is more swings of the nerf bat in store. To make this worse, the 'if's and may be, and only if's seemed to count for little, since the hot fix went live either before, or very shortly after the post. So much for warning us, GC.

So now, we the DPS Retribution Paladins, long called lolret, and retardins, are back in the basement. Instead of nerfing us to the ground, they have once again nerfed us into the basement. They balance level 80 talents to a one month level 70 game. They tell us one time that we are fine in PvE, then the next time they tell us we were too good, too powerful, and must be nerfed. I, like Zach and many other Retribution Paladins, am tired of the nerfs. As of last night, after this nerf went live, I was literally worse off than I was 30 days before. It took me a lot longer to kill mobs, I ran out of mana significantly faster, and my dps was barely noticeable. Grats Blizzard, you have undone months of good will.