First, let me say that I'm the guild leader of a guild that has been farming heroic Lich King and heroic Halion for the past 2-3 months. I'm posting on behalf of my guildmates, several of whom have legitimate concerns about the state of their class now. Initially, I think everyone was very excited about the new patch. A lot of us are enjoying having an opportunity to try out the new mechanics, specs, and gear customizations. But now, things are starting to go downhill pretty fast. With the strong majority of us that have beta access, we've started reformulating our roster for the release of Cataclysm. As of right now, it seems way too risky to have 2 fury warriors (Haniel and Keytar) and 2 ret paladins on it (Warel and Toragon).

Luckily, we lost a fury warrior today because he resented his class enough to quit, removing the need of a decision from the officers. With this patch, his DPS was cut in half. He has beta access, and he hasn't seen his damage improve at all. We approached our ret paladins and asked one of them to reroll a melee class. One already had a death knight alt, and so he elected to do it. While his paladin is in nearly full BIS gear, his "just stepped into Icecrown Citadel" death knight is easily beating him. The ret paladin that we asked to stay ret is having serious considerations of quitting as well. We also have a resto druid who is now solo'ing heroics thanks to the combination of thorms, Gift of the Earthmother, and Nature's Ward, and a feral dps druid that does more damage in bear form on AoE fights like Dreamwalker and Deathwhisperer.

I don't blame the fury warrior for quitting, or the ret paladin for thinking about it, because frankly, I don't see how it would be fun. We play the game for the personal challenge of maximizing our output and completing challenging encounters. We want our raid spot to feel meaningful, and right now, I have several guildmates who don't feel it is at all. Not only that, but it's hard to even justify allowing them to raid for the next 2 months. We gave the tap on the shoulder to our fury warrior yesterday: you'll finish shadowmourne, and never use it. She'll be raiding on her shadow priest alt. When we have 5 raiders that have lost 5-10k dps, it's hard to justify bringing them at all. To put it bluntly: fury warriors are more of a liability than an asset.

I can only imagine what this is like for the PuG raid atmosphere, which hasn't really drastically changed. This patch was meant to give people time to practice the new flexible raid lockout system, and yet we're already seeing in Zul'jin trade chat "No rets, dps wars, or ferals" for the new ICC PuG's.

We have 12 raiders with beta access. Both of the Ret Paladins have been explicitly told to start learning a new class in preparation for the testing of raid instances.

Look, I'm not trying to complain here. In fact, I'm more just trying to bring to light that the decisions we are making right now as a response to the current state of the game. At this very moment, these players have never been more unhappy in this game. Please give them something that either revives hope now, or does so in Cataclysm.

Reply from Ghostcrawler:

Blacksen,

We respect the posts you have made and the feedback you have given us over the years. Nevertheless, this is the kind of thread we have to lock.

We are continuing to adjust balance. We have made several changes already today that players will notice. We have to be cautious about these things. We don't want to massively buff someone whose low damage is caused by a bug. We don't want to say nerf Fire mage crit chance now only to have it be too low when they start to level. We don't want to buff classes now only to have to turn around and nerf them at 85. Some of the issues we're observing now were not happening on our internal servers, the beta or the PTR. It's a very complicated game, and that's totally par for the course.

But we are making some changes, and many of them quickly. The patch has just barely been live for 24 hours now. It was a pretty major patch in terms of game mechanics changes, and as always when this happens, we have problems that crop up and need to be addressed. The fact that groups were able to raid at all after such a major patch is pretty remarkable. I am personally very sorry for anyone who is so upset about their current dps that they would quit after years of play. We'll get things worked out.