As I wrote about previously, Blizzard recently released Patch 3.1 and there were some problems. The other day Blizzard decided Death Knights needed a hot fix:

We hotfixed a change to the amount of healing provided by Death Strike.

Originally, this ability was something you would use only situationally to heal yourself at a cost of damage. Since then we have redesigned the death knight class sufficiently to where Death Strike was a major rotational ability for Blood. Given how much the attack is hitting for, we think the amount of healing it provided was too much.

Healing still scales based on diseases and the damage is unchanged. Blood retains its other tools to heal.

I play a Death Knight and we have three trees of abilities: Blood, Frost and Unholy (each giving the player a different play style). As I was reading, at first, I thought “Another Blood spec fix”. I’m spec’d Unholy/Frost and I’m used to the Blood tree getting changes. The changes in the Blood spec should not impact me because I’m not spec’d Blood. It took all of one second for it to hit me: Blizzard nerfed Death Strike – an ability all the spec’s can use because it is not talent based.

I was nerfed, as Unholy/Frost spec, because Blood was over-powered.

Note, Ghostcrawler did not say the healing was too much for Death Knights in general. It was too much for Blood, which has other ways to heal themselves. When they nerfed Death Strike, they had a really good time destroying the ability. They’ve made it absolutely worthless. The funny thing, it does more damage than I expected it to do. The talent was supposed to hit for less damage and heal the player – the sacrifice the Death Knight had to make while within melee range of a mob. The Death Knight would hit for less damage, get a heal while still fighting (taking damage). Now it hits decent and heals less.

Thank you Blizzard.

I’m sure you’ve experienced problems like this outside of games. At work, a change in one department ends up diminishing productivity in your department. Make one change on a web site and create three security problems. One of the main reasons why this happens is because we tend to take the easy route to fix the problem instead of “really” fixing the problem. In Blizzard’s case, the code to check “If Blood Death Knight, heal for X maximum, if Frost/Unholy heal for Y maximum” is more complicated than “reduce heal to Z maximum” across the board. Fixing the “problem” in one department is fine but it takes more time to analyze work flow through all departments to ensure the fix will not have negative impacts in other areas. Why not quickly fix that web site problem instead of taking an hour or two to hack test the code?

In the end when these short-cut type decisions are made, the price ends up being higher than if the time was taken to resolve the issue correctly was implemented in the first place. In Blizzard’s case, they have almost 30 pages of comments from people voicing their frustration and anger at a “fix” that should not have affected them. They will either have to explain/fix the problem or deal with the fall out – players finding other ways to achieve their goals by using/manipulating other abilities/talents or dropping the class all together. Either way, it leaves a bad impression for the players that aren’t Blood spec’d…

And that’s a position, as a business owner, you don’t want to be in. If the bad impression stays too long, people will go elsewhere.

EDIT: Ghostcrawler made more updates today. There are two that are relevant to this article:

Number 1:

As several players above demonstrated, Death Strike ignores the third disease if you are Unholy and have a third disease. It does more healing with two diseases up than with one disease or no diseases up.

Number 2:

We don’t think Death Strike was overpowered for Frost and Unholy. We’d like to get it in a place where those DKs can use it again. To do that we need to make some changes that will take a little longer to get in place. But we can’t make it overpowered for Blood in the meantime.

Another 30+ page discussion. Take the time to do it right or don’t do it at all. Considering a new patch came out, that was heavily tested, this is borderline ridiculous.