Did You Feel That? Yeah, You've Just Been Hotfixed.

I hope you enjoyed the immense power of the Glyph of Holy Light while it lasted. After a couple of evenings of Naxx/Sarth/Maggy-25 it's now down to an 8yrd radius, which is still a net buff from 3.0.3 but will have the same issue as '0.3's Glyph. Yes, large hitbox mobs causing even melee characters to be out of range will remain a bane of this Glyph.

Ghostcrawler:

This glyph is vastly overpowered. We are hotfixing the range from 20 yards down to 8 yards.

In its current form it has basically become "proc a Circle of Healing" in the same patch that we nerfed Circle of Healing. (Source)

The logic of the statement is sound: to make Holy Light an extremely powerful AoE heal without a cooldown in a patch which nerfed CoH and Wild Growth (?) sends the wrong message. My solution would be to keep the range and put an internal cooldown on it instead; right now it is still a "proc a Circle of Healing" effect but with a much smaller radius. In the long term, linking this to Holy Shock would be much more sensible. The debate will be endless though, and we'll come back to the reality of poor quality Glyphs and a lack of Paladin AoE heals for fights which require that particular mechanic. It also sheds light on an issue which will has tended to be overshadowed, that passive effects tacked on to active abilities have the potential to scale well beyond what you had in mind. That's a topic for another time however, perhaps when we get more Glyphs.

Still, yet again a hotfix has been applied, which got me thinking. Always dangerous...

In a different time overpowered abilities could go whole patches without being modified, with even the most gamebreaking imbalances waiting until 'the next content patch', especially if imbalances made the ability bad rather than simply 'too good' (old SoC and JoC being examples). It's possible that a change in the WoW game engine has allowed more flexibility in terms of timing, tying less functionality to the client or providing for much more subtle interaction between game client and server. Whatever the reason, hotfixing abilities will almost certainly continue and spike just after major patches.

What's the up-shot of this policy? On one hand it has meant that even minor bugfixes are more likely to be applied quickly where possible, and a more dynamic approach to correcting game bugs can never be a bad thing. None of us wanted to go through longer than necessary periods with obviously broken abilities such as Judgements of the Wise. Obviously overpowered abiities can also be nerfed as soon as they are exploited and without long-term harm to the gaming experience of others, a necessary feature in a game with so much competition and mutual antagonism between classes in given roles.

However, there are some unintended side-effects of this new found dynamism. For starters the game engine technology hasn't caught up yet in that you can hot-fix an ability but not the skill or talent description. Because of this no-one takes their talents and skills at face value any more, to learn how an ability really works you have to carry out empirical testing or rely on someone else's testing. Sometimes the differences between description and functionality are so significant that a developer post is required to understand what is going on. The Ret tree between 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 is a prime example, but I'm sure that every class can point to abilities which need to be heavily researched in order to be exploited properly. Such confusion in the player-base and a lack of consistency is a bad thing of course, and will only damage Blizzards continued aspirations for WoW to be recognised as a professional E-gaming tournament game.

More fixes are coming. Be vigilant.