Population imbalances in BattlegroundsWe've been discussing the population imbalances in Battleground matches a lot lately. If you read the Battleground Q&A we did a few weeks back, you may remember Cory Stockton mentioning that we have a lot of plans for Battlegrounds -- including rated, performance-based Battlegrounds providing access to higher-quality rewards -- actively in the works. We'll be discussing more of this at BlizzCon, but I'll add that the issue of faction imbalances in Battlegrounds you mention is something we recognize as a problem and plan to address when we're prepared to roll out some revitalizing touches to the Battleground system.
Many of our plans are not fully conceptualized to the extent that I'm able to share details with you at the moment, but I'm confident you'll hear more at Blizzcon and perhaps the weeks to follow the event. (
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Class representation and game balanceSay we did some extensive data extraction from Ulduar and found that only 5% of guilds use Feral tanks when learning hard modes. Assume for the sake of my very contrived example that we could somehow select for those guilds with a potential to beat the encounters, but that the encounters weren't on farm yet. Assume that the sample size was somehow large enough that the statistics are not at fault in any of this data collection. (I'm trying not to let you Kobayashi Maru your way out of being able to resolve the scenario.)
Now, let's also assume that we convinced ourselves beyond a shadow of a doubt that using a competent and appropriately geared Feral tank made most of the hard mode encounters significantly easier. Assume that the community also felt the same way -- that it wasn't a dark secret.
The fair thing to do from a balance point-of-view would be to nerf Feral tanks. This will likely cause the percentage of them to drop from say 5% to 2% or virtually nil. A game designer should look at that and say: Yikes!
You can argue that maybe the bear is just a horribly frustrating spec to play and so nobody does it despite its advantages. I don't really buy that though. Players tend to say that about all of the classes, and I don't see a lot of evidence that Ferals are somehow unique in this regard. Furthermore, many of our players will do things that are soul-crushingly frustrating if they think it might confer to them a small advantage, which is often why we nerf such things -- to save players from themselves so to speak. It's just hard to resolve how, in this particular example, why more guilds don't go stampeding towards druid tanks if they are overpowered.
It's a tough question -- what to do with the overpowered but underplayed spec, assuming it doesn't have any crippling gameplay flaws? What do you do with the spec that is wildly popular but underpowered? Do you make them somehow less fun (even if it's relative) so players try out the other specs? I think saying "just make all the specs as fun!" is a cop out. We try to do that all the time, but I don't think that will ever result in as many shamans as warriors.
This is why I say we don't balance around representation. We don't tweak numbers until we have 25% of each tank in Ulduar.(Or should the number skew higher towards DKs since they have more than one spec? Or should the numbers skew lower for paladins and druids since fewer races can be them?) But we do have to consider representation when we're making changes. (
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"Bring the Player, not the class" and raiding homogenizationWe don't think that's true. Some of you guys seem to always head for a purity of game design where things would look very neat in a table or plotted on a graph. But we're not trying for a design where every possible raid comp is equally viable. We don't need to support a design where the raid of 8 mages and 2 dps warriors is as effective as the raid with 10 Holy paladins.
All we need to accomplish is to give groups enough flexibility to be able to bring the players they want while still getting all of the big buffs and enough of the smaller buffs. And we've done that. In the Sunwell days, the rosters of most progression-oriented raiding guilds (basically the ones trying today's equivalent of hard modes) were very similar. Now they are quite diverse. We don't have 30 specs represented yet, but we have 4 tanks, 5 healers and at least one dps spec of every class. That's more class diversity in raiding than WoW has ever had before. If you look at the guilds doing hard modes, they have pretty different rosters these days and that's even more true of the normal modes.
If you're new to raiding in WoW, that's awesome because a lot of people are and we made a big effort in LK to make that happen. But talk to the groups that did Sunwell and the frustration they had in trying to build their raids. The first thing these guys said to us when they heard about a new class was "There's no room in my raid to take any."
If you're looking for that one thing that's going to get you a raid spot, I'd shoot for a reputation that you know what the blank you're doing and some good friends. (
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Druid (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Comparing Restoration Druids and ShadowformI think the best way to explain it is that when the Shadow priest has a model to follow – there are dps casters and in this case, a class with healing capabilities is deciding to turn its back on those abilities in order to be more like those casters. You can debate the relative power and utility of say Shadow priest and warlock, but at a high level there is a lot of overlap there. Now consider the Resto druid who decides to go Tree of Life. He is becoming a new type of character – he isn’t like the other healers, because they aren’t giving up buttons (except for those already absent from their talent tree). The Resto druid is giving up buttons, and for what? To be as effective a healer as the others. (You can argue Resto druids are overpowered if you’d like, but it certainly isn’t the design that Tree of Life allows druids to be the best healer in the game). (
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Tree of LifeYup. But honestly I think even before LK that Tree of Life wasn't situational enough -- it was just strictly a mistake to be in it nearly all the time in PvP. As I said with the Balance example above, it might work better if you decided "Okay I am going to be in Tree form for a little while because of the situation." It's a pretty different model, but imagine a druid changed forms at least once or twice a battle. That feels a little more like the shapeshifting druids from Warcraft lore. (
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Balance druids and shiftingYeah, we agree. That is what I was getting at with the druid as a shifter. The idea is that a Balance druid would sometimes leave Moonkin form, but we haven’t made it easy enough to do so. We also don’t want to just adopt a model where say you shift to caster form to decurse and shift back – that just means your decurses take 3 button clicks (or a macro). It should be more tactical than that – do I want to be in Moonkin form for a little while, or would I rather be in caster form (or possibly even bear or cat)? (
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Priest (
3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Healing as a ShadowpriestI think you could make a few changes and insure that Shadow priests were about at the same healing level as say Ret or Elemental. You’d still have to decide if their healing got any better just from dropping Shadowform. If not, then there is probably no reason to ever drop Shadowform, and it should just be a passive talent not a spell. If so, then you'd have to make sure the spec wasn't too powerful over all as a backup or emergency healer, especially in PvP -- remember, we'd be talking about a Shadow priest who heals as well as Ret when in Shadowform, but better than that when not in Shadowform.
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