World of Warcraft players are protesting the state of the game by filling the group finder tool up with the word "PROTEST"

World of Warcraft players are protesting an upcoming balance patch through the in-game group finder tool. Sole players, listing themselves for mythic plus dungeons they have no real desire to complete, in distress due to the knowledge that their classes will see nerfs, and their damage parses will be reduced at Blizzard's hands.

There are a lot of class changes, nerfs and buffs, that will happen due to this patch, and going through them all would obviously take some time. In short, many of the best classes at single target DPS have seen buffs, or have seen little to no changes at all. On the other hand, classes found near the bottom of the DPS rankings have remained unchanged, or bizzarely been nerfed. You can see the problem in the handy image created by Allyparser on Twitter below.

It's safe to say this hasn't gone down super well among the community, resulting in the aforementioned protest. Many DPS are taking a stand here, by filling the group finder tool up with dungeon listings titled "PROTEST", with group notes explaining that they don't like the patch. This protest has also been co-opted by others that are frustrated by the mythic plus system in general, plus how hard it is to get into groups as a DPS.

Okay, but why is this a big deal? WoW players know why, but maybe you aren't super aware. In World of Warcraft, the DPS rankings of classes are quite important, and when your class/spec is especially bad you may struggle to get into high difficulty group content. Let's say that, as a hypothetical, Arms Warriors are way better than Fury Warriors. In raid competitions you want at least one Warrior to provide a raid-wide buff to the rest of the group. So, if a competitive raid leader has to pick between two good Warriors - one Fury and one Arms - they'll pick the Arms. This makes getting into a good guild as a Fury Warrior quite hard.

If it gets especially bad, a raid leader may just throw all DPS Warriors in the trash and favour of a Protection Warrior tank. Puttng hypotheticals aside, if you look at the image above, you can see that Warlocks in general find themselves at the lower half of the ranking. That means regardless of the specialization, why bring a Warlock at all to a raid or even high-difficulty dungeons? Add on top of this that Warlocks haven't been touched by the patch, and you can see a portion of why people are upset. Also note that Elemental Shamans remain untouched, despite them being at the top. Oof.

Will these protests do anything? No, probably not. But the group finder tool is about a good a place as any to protest these changes, except from the next Blizzcon, I guess. Fingers crossed that by the time the next balance patch comes around things will be better. If they aren't, then just press N buddy, play another spec. Unless you're a Warlock, in which case I hear that New World just released a massive update that sounds fun.

What are your thoughts on this protest? Let us know below.