Memorable Ghostcrawler Quotes

Ghostcrawler has been very active on the forums, outlining what nerf we're gonna get and how hard they're gonna ram it up our ass. For those who've missed some of the quotes he's said from Blizzcon, the Beta forums and paladin forums in general, here's a little list.


"We do very extensive testing on all aspects of combat balance. Remember, as a large company we have access to testing capabilities far beyond that of the average player. As developers of the game, we also have access to a large number of tools that we don't make public."
Emboldened part: Really?

"The design was not in truth to nerf Ret pallies into the ground. That should be obvious.
No? Your latest changes sure shows otherwise.

If you are not getting owned by them at least sometimes, then they were nerfed too hard.
Uh-huh...
If you are still getting owned by them all the time, then they weren't nerfed hard enough.
OR you could just be such a bad player that needs to L2P? Why does everything have to revole around us being shafted time and time again? Enough already, for God's sake. If you don't know what to do with the paladin class, then hire someone who does! Your knee-jerk reactions and hotfix nerfs are over the top.

"I think we're in a sweet spot at the moment, but I've also thought that before, so let's just see how it feels for a few weeks. :)"
And by weeks you mean months or years, as you properly showed previously.


"We LOVE Ret paladins."
Hahahaha.

"We need to start getting more testing on these changes right away to see what they do to Retribution in PvE and PvP."
Right away? What the hell have we been doing during Beta and the PTR's if not testing?!

"We were worried Arms warriors were doing too much damage, sometimes, when the RNG was in their favor. We attempted to fix that by lowering the proc rate of Sudden Death, but of course the RNG aspect just went up when we did that. We still might try alternative implementations, a 50 rage max Exectute perhaps, but we will probably not mess with it until we see Arms at 80 on Live in PvP and PvE to get a better idea of how the build is doing."

Good to see you're doing the same thing to all classes.... oh wait!

"I also want to stress that we do not make balance decisions based on the QQ of other classes."
No, of course not... That would mean the public outcry of people who weren't used to getting owned by a paladin or outdamaged by one had nothing to do with the current nerfs we've received, right? RIGHT?!

And to quote Zilea:

"We are now less than 2 weeks from the release of WotLK, and as Blizzard scrambles to nerf all of the overpowered classes in record time (not even applying the changes to actual patches, but hotfixes), you have to wonder what happened the past year and a half as druids ran wild without not more than a glance as they tore up the brackets. Were Blizzard employees asleep at the switch?"
No, they were busy playing those druids to care much about every other class.


"We think we know how to adjust Arcane to make their rotations work better in PvE (which will also help the PvP burst at the same time). It involves changing a couple of spells though so it will take some time and isn't the kind of thing easily hotfixed (as it will make tooltips incorrect)."
But it's perfectly fine for paladin tooltips to be misleading and incorrect, right?


"We still feel like we're ahead of where we were on Burning Crusader with a more experienced team. So we're not yet panicked about having enough testing time."

Another lovely quote from GC when people started to ask why Paladins weren't given a pass of their skills / Talents during Alpha Testing.

"I'm attempting to post this early since the Ret community felt totally surprised last time."
The nerf came hotfixed in about an hour later. So much for early posting...


"On bosses in PvE, they could hit every button that was up and still have mana left to be very high on healing meters. So we do think the mana regen was too generous in both PvP and PvE cases."
That's Judgement of Light and the amount of mana we have or had left has absolutely fuck all impact on how much JoL heals for.


"We are also sympathetic to the notion that if Ret can't do insane burst damage, that the spec might need other tools to be viable in PvP. We're exploring this now..."

WE ARE WAITING!!

"We want to be very surgical about what we do."
Surgical as in attempting to fix a rat infestation with a tactical nuke...

"We want everyone to be within 5% of each other in terms of DPS."
Everyone but paladins, amirite?

"We don't want to balance a class around "well this guy can do a lot but runs out of mana really fast." That's not a fun mechanic."
No? Then why nerf JotW to 15%? Contradicting yourself much?

"Yes, we could hire 10 or 30 or 100 more class designers and have them all posting happily away in the forums. I don't think this actually improves class design though. With the group we have now, it is very easy for us all to get in one room and discuss ideas and just otherwise stay in tight sync. I think we would lose that by adding a lot of additional designers."

Guess it's time to start looking for those Dev's as you've clearly no fucking idea what you're doing anymore.


"Here is just a big brain dump on Arcane mages. Warning: I am not specifically talking about any changes we might make. We might make none at all. But here are our thoughts at the moment.

1) It's fun to be able to run around and do instant Barrages.
2) Barrage does a ton of damage quickly, possibly too much, and it can't be interrupted.
3) Locking Arcane out of its school is very painful for them (no Blink etc.). Does this balance them at all?
4) Arcane Blast feels a little awkward to use and doesn't do enough dps.
5) One way to change Arcane would be to require you to build up 2 Blasts in order to get the big Barrage numbers, kind of like a Shatter Combo if you will.
6) This would make their PvE rotation more interesting too.
7) Is there enough skill involved in doing Arcane PvP, or is it all just killing time until Barrage's cooldown is up?"

It's good that paladins don't have such issu- oh wait!