by Hotstreak - 9 years ago     show comments

Patch 2.2.0 went live yesterday and everyone rejoiced…well, not everyone. Barbarian players got quite a surprise yesterday when they heard the news of Mortick’s Brace being removed from the patch. These bracers activated every rune for Wrath of the Berserker and was one of the main synergy pieces for all of the new barbarian builds on the Public Test Realm. In light of the uproar, I thought I would take some time to give my two cents on the situation.

I have to say that in my opinion this situation was handled pretty poorly and was the very definition of a knee-jerk reaction. Although, I do feel their reasoning behind it all was understandable but what I don’t understand is how they put themselves in this situation when these new items have been going through a lot of testing on the PTR. Nevalistis took some time to sort of explain why they suddenly removed the bracers from the game.

We weren’t happy with the final iteration of Mortick’s Brace on the PTR, so we have disabled it from dropping with the 2.2.0 patch. We may revisit this item in a later patch. Unfortunately, the early version of the patch notes that went out did not reflect this change. However, they have since been updated.

We sincerely apologize for the confusion!

Like I said, it’s understandable that these bracers were removed from the game. They were borderline overpowered and offered way too much for just one item slot but, the problem with this is that every single new Barbarian build was tested on the PTR with these in mind. Everyone expected these bracers to be included with 2.2.0 because Blizzard didn’t ever indicate otherwise. I feel like these bracers should have been removed during the PTR to at least allow players to test the new builds and sets without them.

Which would have allowed players to give more feedback on how the new sets/builds felt without them and that could have possibly lead to a new not as OP item to replace them or tweaks to the actual bracers themselves. There was zero testing time for the impact that the removal could have on the viability of the new sets. Now, if whether or not the new sets are viable after the removal remains to be seen. But if they aren’t then that is a huge design flaw with the sets that never got any testing or tweaking time during the PTR. Which could result in yet another PTR for next patch that is all about testing and tweaking existing sets.

Maybe some some of the outrage could have been alleviated by at least giving the players a heads up via a blue post or even a reddit comment before the patch went live. But instead it almost appeared as an undocumented change that hardly warranted anything more than a quick tweet from John Yang.

PSA: Mortick’s Brace was removed from Patch 2.2 and will not drop.

• These bracers would have been best in slot, period. No exceptions.
• Barbarian players would have been pigeon holed into using them if they wanted to stay competitive in Grifts.
• There are already too many slots that offer little to no item diversity and this would have made it worse.
• Mortick’s Brace would have single handedly made Raekors builds bad for people who enjoy it and want to stay competitive. Which hurts build diversity even more.

Bottom line is, these extremely powerful bracers would have done more harm than good and I just hope that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. I am fine with the removal of items that don’t meet design expectations but, this whole situation could have easily been avoided by removing the bracers during the PTR testing and not after along with better communication.