World of warcraft
How bad is Class Balance in World of Warcraft? – Dratnos and Tettles Discuss
Today Dratnos and Tettles discuss the state of Class Balance inside of World of Warcraft on a meta level. How bad is it really? Should Blizzard do something to improve it in the future? Is this the correct approach for an MMO to take?
DPS Rankings – https://www.wowhead.com/news/shadowlands-dps-rankings-in-season-3-week-10-mythic-sepulcher-of-the-first-ones-327014
BDK Nerf – https://www.wowhead.com/news/upcoming-class-and-item-tuning-on-may-3rd-blood-dk-nerf-windwalker-buff-326908
Guardian Druid Nerf – https://www.wowhead.com/news/upcoming-class-tuning-on-the-weekly-reset-guardian-druid-tier-nerf-326523
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Feral urgently needs a buff in aoe. Since Mythic+ started in Legion, every Feral is branded as an idiot to play the class, because our dmg is laughable for the effort you have to put in.
What it boils down to is as Tettles mentioned: Predictability. And with predictabiility is consistency. Why the hell did Bears get smashed and DKs got a modest nerf? The seemingly arbitrary inconsistencies of fine tuning vs broad changes is too much.
To Dratnos's point at 12:12: I disagree, There should be ways implemented in the game that allow you to refund things like legendary crafts (which there currently are) and then transfer the materials to an alt should you want to change mid patch. There's a bunch of ways to migrate stuff like soul ash/cinders etc, losing the gold on the actual white item is fine, but I think Blizzard (although current patch has done more of this and better) is still far too hesitant to allow you to focus on one main and essentially feed an unlimited amount of alts from that to get them to equivalent power shouid you want to multiclass or swap main.
Were they to do that, the argument that "people may quit patch if nerfed mid patch" shouldn't be relevant.
Of note: People still might if the class they enjoy gets nerfed and they don't want to play any other class, but frankly, that's niche.
They've already admitted that they make arbitrary changes in order to have the appearance of caring about 'balance'. Stop playing this trash game.
Dratnos is a FOTM reroller so its no surprise he is less frustrated with balance than Tettles. I honestly think Dratnos needs to emphathise more with those playing more niche specs, or who can't feasibly keep rerolling. Dratnos needs more Feral etc friends. 95% of his takes are good but he sounds so out of touch with most players here. There are some DPS specs that have never been meta in M+, and many often barely even viable. He also says he felt his guild had the freedom to play whatever, but I'd imagine his guild also declines all apps from said specs, e.g. has he ever had a Feral in his roster? (Ok admittedly they are good in raid now after the tuning several weeks into the raid, but you get the point).
Dratnos' defense of the balancing of this patch is fuckin' cringeworthy. He's literally being presented with the raw data that there's a higher discrepancy between the top and bottom specs on boss damage than any recent patch, and still he sits there going "Yeah, this patch is good". Dude, cmon. Be honest in these videos please. "Oh the data is skewed because the top players aren't playing these specs on single target" YEAH, THEY'RE NOT PLAYING THEM FOR A REASON DUDE. All the proof you need that his takes are shit is this comment section.
Class balance is fine except for the balance class. #buffMoonkin
blizzard has the ability to buff and nerf things in certain instances so they could easily change specs for m+ without touching raid and even if they had to, FUCK raids, they fucking suck and they should not have as much of an impact on both m+ and pvp as it has
I would like to see Blizzard move away from their stance that they don't like doing large balance changes during a tier. They should just swing away with the buff/nerf hammer when and where it's needed. If this creates an issue with secondary systems like legendary commitment they should just let people reforge legendaries after each balance patch – like the way we used to get a free respec for talents in older expansions.
I know this video was specifically about spec vs spec balance. But they should also being taking this approach to talents and leggos. It's a failure of game balance if you have a talent that is just dead in all end game content for an entire expansion.
I'm sorry to disagree with the destro thing… But the class is not broken… The TIER SET is what its broken… Try to play destro with only 2pc and You Will see the crap that it actually is
But one thing that You guys are not seeing is that destro is Only shines in really high keys with good Tanks pulling huge… The majority of the players are in the 15 Range or below are never even able to SEE those numbers. I personally enjoy a lot a design in which the higher the risk the higher the reward… Probably they should make some classes that same treatment of "better scaling" with higher keys and bigger pulls
Definitely would be more cool with buffing classes instead of nerfing them.
Even if there’s inflation of higher keys, people will only get one shot by mechanics even more, which would help balance out more group dps from non current meta classes
Been saying the same thing. Like for Fury, they're pretty solid in AoE but weaker in Single Target.
So buff Single Target, and slightly hit their AoE with the Whirlwind. Buff Rampage but tone down the Whirlwind a tad "
Whirlwind causes your next 2 single-target attacks to strike up to 4 additional targets for 45% damage."
Or with Disc, pretty weak in dungeons right now so buff up Sins of the Many's damage and increase the dropoff so it doesn't touch raid at all
I hard disagree with Dratnos, he comes at this argument from the perspective of a person whos class is sitting near the top – talking about how any tuning that knocks you off the pedestal would be bad, but he fails to also mention how if you are in the bottom bracket, likelihood is you will be there until the next tier, or at least you wont ever be reaching the top. it goes both ways and having what i consider to be minimal balance over the course of 8+ months isnt very interesting to me, no meta shake ups, cookie cutter classes & build comps.
I think classbalance is pretty good overall. Every class has it's place in every part of the game. The only thing that is bad in terms of raid is utility-balance. Some classes bring 2-3 nice utility and can even be stacked, while others has none.
However, SPEC-balancing is horrible. And I think that's a problem. That's why I feel almost everything that Tettles said here. Sooo many specs feel dead in some parts of the game. I mean, we are not talking about bringing them from bottom to the top. Just make them viable, because that is IMPORTANT in a competitive game – I'd say a majority plays the game that way and that's why it matters.
Okay, I see and understand an argument of: "There always have to be the best specs and if you tune too often and too high, some people (the "meta-players") have to switch more often." I really understand this point. BUT, as Tettles also stated, rather how the specs are standing to each other, the most important thing is the OVERALL DISTANCE FROM BOTTOM TO TOP. In some very good patches, this difference in raid was barely 10%. That was awesome, you could play the "worse" specs in much higher raiding guilds. 10% is what they should aim for, 15% max. for m+.
I raid mythic and I do not really care, where my spec is standing in the ranking. But I DO care, when st-damage is 25% or more worse than others, like ww. Or your aoe-damage is barely tank-level, like assassination. Some specs are SO bad in some things, they can't really participate in many groups.
So more specific tuning changes please, from my side. And for your own sake blizz, take PI out (only for priests or something).^^
Also, i think they should even buff underperforming covenants. The more diversity whe have in the game, the better (not only in gender blizz ^^)
I think buffing every other spec to be on pair with Destro Locks has much more to it then just the pure image of balacing.
If you nerf Destro it will, maybe, destroy some peoples fun. BUT if you buff every other spec to be just as good as Destro everyone has more fun and Destro players do not lose anything.
So everyone wins. 🙂
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Please buff holy pala.
我知道暴雪不會聽玩家說話 不過還是想抱怨 雖然這個抱怨已經有五年之久。魔獸不論是職業平衡跟角色本身好不好玩 要改善這兩個核心問題就是PVP跟PVE要完全獨立分開製作才有改善的可能………6.0-9.0這個問題一直沒有改善（7.0算最好玩的時候可是問題還是存在）阿 我忘記這間公司從來都不是聽玩家意見做修改的 我又做夢了
BM hunter tier bonus is so bad that aura buffs arent gonna fix it….
For me the problem is more that a lot of the abilities that we get from various borrowed power sources (tier, legendary, covenant ability, soulbinds, conduits), as well as secondaries interact with each other in unpredictible, non-linear ways. For instance for destro lock, the tier set feeding into resource generation with all the extra infernals that pop from the sky (in addition to that you get back with Soul Conduit and Inferno) is not really comparable to a season 1 or 2 destro lock that had to work hard for its soul shards. So an aura nerf (or even a rain of fire damage nerf) to compensate this kind of degeneracy (and I say that as someone who plays destro lock as his main alt this patch) just feels like putting a plaster on a wound, when the issue with Rain of Fire is not about the damage it deals, but the amount of times you can cast it per second.
Kudos on the tuning suggestions @ Tettles.
Kinda sucks that it took your spec to not be OP one time for you to come to that conclusion – especially when a lot of us have been saying the exact same thing all expac (when we were on the bottom) – but glad you could make it to the fairness party. Try to stick around.
They should just ban the top two most popular specs on live for the MDI for all 3 roles
they need to just make separate modifiers for raid, pvp and m+ so they can buff classes specifically where they need it
Tettles is way more on the money and Dratnos is defending Blizzard way too much. I only do M+ and got lucky to main hunter. I like to play MM but being forced by my group to play Surv of course. M+ balance is completely off. why not implement different auras for M+ like for PVP ? that way classes can be tuned separately for raid and M+.
I firmly believe Blizz should bring all classes/specs up to the same level. Additionally, if they can exclude these buffs from PVP they can exclude them from m+ and etc as well. M+ is not a mini game for a huge majority of players. It needs to be taken much more seriously then it is by the Developers and treated as something entirely distinct and separate.
Don't know why they can't balance every week. never nerf top specs though, always buff under performing specs. that way top spec players don't feel they wasted their time and have to reroll and bottom DPS specs are being made viable
BUFF ARCANE MAGE
Lock main – i don't like the playstyle of destro, nerf it to shit. rather have aff be the best in both m+ and raid. aff is more fun to play imo
Can't wait for PI to either go or just be self only or make it raid wide hero.
Balancing DPS around this stupid skill has been just horrible this expan and gets worse each tier we go.
They need to stop tuning once or twice early patch then never again. And they need to tune things specifically for what they want. WW monks have insane AoE damage, they are really good in m+ for their utility, physical damage buff and insane AoE damage they bring, they did bad single target. So why not buff their single target abilities? Their mastery, things that increase their ST and don't touch their AoE rotation. But took the easy 4% damage buff across the board.
Same with warlocks, if they are dealing bad ST damage, why not buff Chaos bolt only, and nerf rain of fire since the AoE is borderline stupid.
It feels like they first don't care at all about m+, only single target fights and then we get things like a warlock or surv hunter dealing 25k overall DPS in a key, 80k+ dps on packs, and then in single target they are only 1-2 k dps behind specs that are strong on priority damage. If you are dealing 80k dps in AoE, then your single target should be 1/3 of what an assassination rogue or enhancement shaman is dealing in single target or light funnel. And talents should tailor your build to focus on AoE ST or Funnel and focusing on one should make you lose a LOT of DPS on the others, and not just be a little bit behind, if even at all.
Blizz only cares about the raid, while m+ is just left to deal with their balancing mess. Hell why did they even need to cap flame shock at 6 targets for fire nova if we are gonna be fighting against stuff like destrolock and survhunters?
I really don't mind if I were to do low AoE damage on an enhance shaman, but then I should compensate on single target by a LOT and not just be 1-2k dps ahead, that is just bad design and I hope they pay more attention to m+ because it is the best thing in WoW since bfa. I don't mind dealing less overall, but I like to feel useful in the key and not a "he did good, but a sub rogue would do more damage".
Is class balance that bad? For healers YES. Druids are stupid powerful right now, the most mobile healer should not have the highest throughput. And look at MW being ignored for basically forever but hey with a new healer they will get the attention they need right???.
Then you have Rshaman which becomes great ONLY with shit healers or running with 1-2 healers missing. They have such slow long casts that require targets to be stacked AND low hp otherwise shamans are probably the lowest hps healer. Take a look at Halondrus Mythic statistics for healing done, our "strength" isn't healing stacked targets ITS OUR WEAKNESS. Ah but its okay because "they have the best healing cd", yeah thats what everyone wants be be, a 3 minute 6 second cd. That must be why they got brought to RTWF, OHWAIT we got NERFED in CN 4% overall and 10% healing rain nerf because 2 shamans got brought on SLG and sludge because it looked like rshaman was gonna be op but were still behind Hpala, druids were overlooked and disc was rediculously op and oh look blizzards favourite healing spec (hpala although you could argue disc (but it gets nerfed more often)) stayed OP for another patch, do I hear 3 expansions number 1 or 2 healer? Yeah sure Hpala got brought a bit more in line in this patch but thats ONE patch and ONE COVENANT they found away around the nerf with unholy and still get brought to RTWF as per usual.
Rshaman needs a mastery rework or tuning to be more powerful closer to 50% hp and tail off under that instead of just getting stronger, when you ignore mastery unless when your raid drops healers it shows you need to have a look at things.
Also could all healers mastery add damage please? Shamans – lower health, more damage.
Holy priest – Stacking dot similar to their healing mastery.
Monk – For the love of god make fistweaving baseline with ATotM and increase their damage, you buffed their aoe by 30% and its still weak and their single target isn't anything special. Remember they have no damage reduction and paladins do more damage still. Let MW have a niche. Also add a way for fist weaving to target ranged, 20 yards is nothing when dps don't even know how your class heals. Maybe add 2 stances, one perfers healing mele close and another stance that prefers healing ranged first so they can tailor it to their raid comp.
Rdruid – Yeah I hate them right now because of how strong they are, what I can say is they should be able to do more dps, maybe bring back cat weaving or something or bringing that talent back that allows them to do massive dps for a short window, but don't make the cd 5 minutes again. Make it something that can be done every 30 sec – 1 minute.
Pala – Really good spot right now but still has the most amount of utility and bring the highest dps and its passive dps. They still have too much.
"balace is good this patch, ye" yet re rolls to a blook dk
Tuning should happen weekly.
The problem with the frequent tuning, is that sometimes we just need to develop the meta. The meta is not cemented in weeks of play, or even months. Destro entered the patch virtually as it is, was the least played spec, considered the worst in the tier, and suddenly skyrocketed in value as people actually started playing it. The 5% aura did not do that, though it definitely exacerbated the winning margin, a margin that people perceived to be the exact opposite.
Ret is now raid rank #5 with no notable buffs, up from scraping the bottom. I’m sure there are plenty more examples
The destro aura buff, and the second bear nerf, were rash, and we needed the meta to be played and developed to get more accurate tuning data. Neither the devs or the players are perfect arbiters to a spec’s true value to the game. Do we need to police every class, making sometimes wayward tuning in a desperate attempt for an impossible parity?
I think the state of the game balance is great. All classes have viability in achieving most of the game’s accomplishments, with a little wackiness at the top sometimes, wackiness that changes from major patch to major patch, making a meta story that is shortlived in the perspective of the game’s lifespan.
I DIDNT SEE PEOPLE COMPLAINING WHEN DESTRO WARLOCKS WERE LAST ON DPS SINCE 9.0, IT WAS TIME FOR THEM TO SHYNE
I like Tettles take, because he's being critical of the process without being overly critical. Not sure why Dratnos thinks everything is sunshine and roses. Set bonuses were not done well – at least from a balance perspective. Some specs got 30% boost from their tier sets while others got less than 10%.
Also, Tettles is absolutely correct about aura buffs being a mistake. At the time Destro got the 5% buff, they really just needed a Chaos Bolt buff. Instead we got uber-powered Destro AoE. BM keeps getting aura buffs, but are still at the bottom. BM needs the tier set addressed, because it's the only tier set in the game with no AoE damage and weak single target.
I think the balance is a huge problem currently and they are way too slow to buff and nerf specific specs.
Imagine you look at the character select screen, and you pick hunter because you want to play an archer archetype. Then more specifically, you love the idea of playing with your beast companions, you've been playing this archetype for 15 years and you love it. Then everyone tells you that you're fucking stupid for not playing the melee version of the class that just arbitrarily does twice as much damage but all you want to do is play with your devilsaur pet and shoot people with your bow.
I just want to play my BM hunter without getting laughed at because I'm not survival.
I personally still say from a pure "fairness" point of view that since Blizzard doesnt seem to have the abillity to not have 1 or 2 massively overpowered classes each season that Feral should have kept it's damage triple dipping "Bug" (specifically wording it like that since double dipping with Frenzyband was a thing in Season 1 Shadowlands too) from PTR. It would have been Ferals first actual time to shine since MoP.
you can tell that Dratnos is not a massive M+ advocate XD Surv Hunter and Lock "slightly" outshining ret pala lol double the damage is bonkers, and i don't think M+ can be referred to as a mini game, its the future of the game, its much more accessible for the average player, its super easy and simple to get into as a new player to the game, your never locked behind a wall of realm and guild locks like raids if you want to do the top content, and your not weekly locked from loot and playing like you are in raids. Playing with 20 of your friends in a raid is great and by far the most fun in the game but there are so many gates to be able to play raids that its going to become less and less popular, if they are not going to make all tiers of the raid, cross realm and play with anyone from day 1 then blizzard would be much better next tier in focusing a lot more in its M+ community makes super fun dungeons and balancing the classes around M+ over raids
Personally, I would love to see more class/specs brought into high end M+. Hell, I'd love to see a world where you guys are talking about team comps more than "Oh they brought a havoc vs rogue" or "They are using X tank vs Y tank." It would be cool to see a world where you guys are talking about how "this comp brings a fury war and enh sham and how they want to pull trash and execute bosses is completely different than the other team who brings a mage and a boomkin." It would just make the game more interesting and community based, instead of meta chasing.
Love these deep dives! Bigup Tettles and Dratnos