World of Warcraft’s next expansion is almost here and with it will be a mountain of changes to how the game is played. Not only has Blizzard pruned many of the combat mods, or addons, that people have relied on for years, but every class in the game has seen significant changes to how they work.
With so much in flux, Blizzard has come out with a blog post to set expectations for how balance updates will go in the first few weeks of the expansion. Apart from any emergency tuning that might be needed should something be absolutely broken, Blizzard isn’t going to issue any balance updates until March 17, a little over two weeks into Midnight. That date is also when the first season of the expansion starts, so it probably wants to level the playing field as much as possible before players start tackling the most challenging endgame dungeons.
Blizzard has made a concerted effort to reduce the amount of busywork for the most complicated classes. Addons that told you when to press certain abilities are largely gone, so its goal was to make classes more intuitive on their own. The results haven’t all been winners. Some players think certain classes have lost some of their identity or nuance, while others love the ability to actually understand what spells to use and when. However, Blizzard’s general philosophy of unshackling the game from addons seems to be generally well received by everyone—it’s just going to take time for all the kinks to be ironed out.
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