A couple of weeks ago the World of Warcraft PTR has been updated with some highly experimental, and equally controversial changes. Since there are far too many balance changes to simply cover in a paragraph or two, let's just say that several classes suddenly found themselves completely neutered in not just damage output, but in terms of rotation as well. And given the World of Warcraft team's now legendary inability to actually communicate with their playerbase, these changes predictably resulted in a whole bunch of anger and confusion.

Thankfully, the PTR (Public Test Realm) has recently been updated with a brand new batch of changes, most of which are aimed at complementing the previous ones. You can read the full list over at MMO-Champion, because trying to get actual data from Blizzard is nigh impossible, but before you do just be aware that these changes are not yet numerically balanced... at all! As stated by WoW's Game Director himself, they are currently trying out some experimental mechanics changes to see if they work or not, so don't expect any of this to actually go through in their current state. Here's the full quote:

"Basically no numerical tuning based on 7.1.5 changes has been done yet: in test builds and development, the primary initial focus tends to be on qualitative design changes, both to allow for time to iterate on them, and because there's a much smaller development window during which we can make large changes to text in tooltips (since everything needs to be translated for the game's different regions before a patch can be finalized).

Numbers changes are best done when designs are closer to final (there's little point fine-tuning something that may get ripped out entirely next build), and can be done very late in the PTR cycle. Raid tests like this help tremendously with that process."

As a final note, I really do hope the World of Warcraft team finally learns their lesson and starts to treat their playerbase with even the tiniest bit of respect. Jeff Kaplan and the Overwatch team have so far been absolutely brilliant in terms of communication, and even if they screw up they are quick to admit their mistakes and try again, and this is the sort of philosophy I would like to see the WoW team adopt as well. They've been saying this is their goal for quite a while know, so who knows, maybe it'll actually happen by the time the next expansion rolls on by!