Limitless power

The power increases characters get in WOW are weird.  For example, in the next patch I am going to see roughly a 17% increase in my personal damage output.  This isn't me finding new gear or doing something different, just patch changes making me drastically more powerful.  That kind of increase is so noticeable that it makes hunting for upgrades in the game itself feel kind of silly, since at best I can hope for 1% upgrade on a given item, and that is not something that comes often.  If I feel like I could actually get better by convincing the developers to change things in my favour I would be far better off going to the forums to whine rather than actually play the game.

That isn't actually how it works though.  The forums are already full of whiners and the developers mostly ignore what they read there anyway, which is good, because it is mostly contradictory and stupid.  There are good ideas I could share, but those ideas are probably already there.

But even if whining isn't actually the way to go it does feel silly that I will experience such a massive change without actually doing anything myself.

These changes are good ones though.  Ret paladins are getting a 12% base damage increase, and we are losing our Blessing of Might buff which grants 3% more damage to three different people.  That extra 3% damage is meant to make up for our legendary items being nerfed, but since I don't have any of those legendary items I am just getting a 9% net buff from this exchange, though admittedly I now can't give out 3% more damage to 2 other players.  However, a legendary item that I do have which is currently total rubbish is being buffed to give me something like 6% bonus damage.  Also there are a couple talent changes that should give me 2% or so more damage also.

I really like the removal of the 3% damage buffs.  It doesn't particularly feel fun, it makes damage meters and damage recording weird, and randomly adding more stuff you have to do before pulling is stupid and annoying.  The legendary rebalancing is good overall because the people who got super lucky at the outset are now going to be a lot more in line with everybody else.

I am not complaining about the changes - there aren't as many changes as I would like, but the ones that are being made seem on point.  But it does feel strange that the best way for me to advance is to simply sit around and wait for the game to define me as better rather than work hard to advance myself.

This is a good argument for the developers not stepping in and altering things constantly.  People want to feel in control of their own destiny, and although fixing major balance problems is good, stepping in to do that a lot has its own problems.

I want to feel like getting better is a thing I do on my own, but I recognize that there are changes to be made for the improvement of the game, and those have to be made.

The thing that is for sure is that no matter what changes are made the forums will be full of people trying to advance their characters via whining and complaining.