I've had a longstanding beef with Blizzard over how they've been handling Shamans in WoW, and its nice to see that same design philosophy is alive and well at the company.

But those recent xp nerfs are just a bit too far reaching and a little bit too dear. For those of you who aren't caught up on the recent hotfixes, they recently nerfed xp for monsters that have a HP coefficient less than or equal to one.

The change, at least the spirit of it makes sense. Nerf minion monsters xp. Straight out of the DMG 3.0 or 4.0, scrawny monsters should give less reward. Make sense. Until you get to the part where they just nerfed anything with an HP coefficient of 1.0 which is supposed to be the average baseline HP that monsters have.

So this tells me a few things.

1) They have spreadsheets and they know how to use them. Which frustrates me even more because I, like a lot of people, have been waiting patiently (some more patiently than others) for them to fix two-handed weapon DPS since the 2.0 patch.

2) According to them, the average HP of monsters is higher than the coefficient rating of 1.0, which is infuriating because these monsters with an HP coefficient of 1.0 or less comprise something like 95% monsters ****** since launch.

3) Typically bandaid fixes are supposed to actually accomplish a certain design goal, and this one was meant to disincentive the repeated running of things like COTA over other things like the much more fun, e.g. ascending of the silver spire. Now maybe nobody has tried the silver spire yet, but from the data that the community has put forth Cavern of the Ancients is still top.

4) Rather than taking the time to fix some bugs that were actually affecting their players negatively (like that nasty bug in Caverns of Frost), they took the time out of their day to affect their players negatively by doing some very bad math, very quickly, on what I can only assume was a napkin at a bar where they had been drinking quite heavily.

5) There is at least a dozen different ways this [the xp nerf] could have been handled. But Blizzard, here is a list of reasons why this one is the worst.

A) The changes, as they were explained, are not very well documented, and as they have been explained provide no incentive for the players that have been acting as a precursor to this nerf to change their behavior.

B) The changes were not very well documented or explained. There is no list of monsters affected, there is no list of before and after xp totals, I can't even have an educated kneejerk reaction about this because there is no raw data to look at. This is in spite of the community team doing an excellent job trying to explain the changes on the forum.

C) Just... why? RoS launches in 65 hours. This is something that can be hotfixed at ANY TIME! Why choose now? It does nothing but make me want to open a support ticket and ask for a refund of the money I spent on ROS. Should have at least waited until wednesday for everybody's checks to clear (figuratively speaking) or for that refund window to close in most regions on the 15th. When most of us preordered we were sold a bill of goods, much the same as when we buy a new car. A dealership wouldn't slash the tires on a car they just sold.

D) I can't help but feeling that Blizzard is gonna make us wait 22 months to have the underlying problem they were trying to get at here addressed. But since you said these swarming monsters are the problem, please remove said swarming monsters from the rifts or just allow us to turn them off in the graphics options, then you can concentrate on actual encounter design instead of just swarming us with poor monsters that couldn't afford to go to monster college.

tl;dr, Blizzard sometimes makes me angry.