Blizzard is absolutely terrible at balancing: point of a PTR?

[Chemii]

How many of you actually went on the PTR, tested conclusively and provided feedback on your class though?

I can't imagine the sample size they get is anywhere near what people think.

[Zan15]

How many of you actually went on the PTR, tested conclusively and provided feedback on your class though?

I can't imagine the sample size they get is anywhere near what people think.

A Simple SIM should have told them how bad it was for a few specs and how great it was for a few more.

Strange that the community can build a simulation but bliss can't?

[Sencha]

Can't agree more with you OP. Looks like they can't (or don't want to) do simulations internally.

[l33t]

You can't really achieve full balance with so many classes and combinations.

Please, don't be a naive child. Blizzard is a multibillion dollar company with dozens of years of experience in game development. Of course they can achieve full balance... but what good it will get them? Basically, with this pseudobalance rollercoaster, they force idiots to fotm reroll over and over and over and over again - giving blizzard their sub moneys, while other idiots whine about nerfs (or demand nerfs) on various internet media, giving Blizzard free advertising. Win+win for Blizzard.

[Lochton]

Please, don't be a naive child. Blizzard is a multibillion dollar company with dozens of years of experience in game development. Of course they can achieve full balance... but what good it will get them? Basically, with this pseudobalance rollercoaster, they force idiots to fotm reroll over and over and over and over again - giving blizzard their sub moneys, while other idiots whine about nerfs (or demand nerfs) on various internet media, giving Blizzard free advertising. Win+win for Blizzard.

Not really about being naive. A full balanced gameplay has yet not happened in WoW, and even if so, it would start ruining the combinations and setup to achieve certain actions.

And to be honest, if you are the flavour of the month, then even a full balance wouldn't save you.

[cFortyfive]

Not many play on the PTR. Those who do either aren't currently subscribed and still want to play at max level or are testing specific content like raids. Those testing raids are often out for world or server firsts so will use whatever they can to their advantage. So if one spec does massive damage compared to another, they're less likely to say something because they can stack that class.

Sounds a bit as if you'd presume they gather no data whatsoever and are absolutely reliant on feedback every step of the way.

Nighthold was NEVER a release raid. Shows how much informed you are.

the release of the nighthold raid was scheduled outside of any patch schedule and was already tested on beta. Jesus nitpicky peasants.

[Pufster]

I rolled MM hunter this expansion just for fun.

I am having fun.

My class is at bottom of charts right now and could really care less.

I, like majority of WOW players dont raid competitively.

I think OP, like the majority MMO posters is a whiny lil beatch who is butt hurt cause now he cant post recount after every boss fight to prove he has the biggest dick and is much more comfortable posting on MMO to bitch and complain. 1-4% of WOW players care about such things. I know this true simply because I thought about it.

IF YOU ARE THAT BUTT HURT... JUST STOP PLAYING !!!!!!

Have you actually read the post? It talked about the nerfs AND buffs and the severity of it. It wasn't about *whine my class is nerfed* it was how about this all got handled.

It was that ptr is useless. They bring out weekly builds that are clearly just for show. 4 days after live they make humongous changes that are just so retarded. Just introduce it immediatly on live back in november instead of doing a ptr for show that doesn't have any meaning.

Just face it. Blizzard is clueless about balancing. When they need to introduce +40 or -40% to certain specs 4 days AFTER a patch got live that they tested for more than 2 months, that's ridiculous and shows they don't know what to do.

From one extreme to the other.

[Bigbazz]

Maybe the goal is not 100% balance?

Well clearly the goal is some form of balance, they make balance changes on the PTR (often at the bewilderment of players) then it goes live and just as players predicted and notifed blizzard during the PTR the balance is terrible and the issues are blatant, then Blizzard makes a bunch of knee-jerk balance changes as a reaction to what they would already know if they payed attention to PTR feedback or theorycrafter predictions.

Blizzard are simply incompetent at balancing because they have neither the tools nor the in depth spec understanding to accurately predict and balance specs, players have vastly superior spec/class knowledge than the guys doing their jobs at Blizzard because players spend vastly greater amounts of time studying and practicing the specs to understand them at a high level. If Blizzard had better tools for simulating actual performance, or they actually listened to a lot of the feedback provided through testing and engaged more actively then this wouldn't be such an issue.

The spec balance in each expansion has been generally quite bad, with occasional blatant issues running wild... What's crazy is that at least in PVE if you scratch out the entirely dead specs during these periods the DPS balance was vastly superior in TBC/WOTLK than it has been in more recent expansions, Blizzard are certainly not getting better at it.

[Deleted]

I suppose that's partially because a lot of people who are really concerned with balance also often happen to witness first hand what's happening there.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...t=90&boss=1962
I can absolutely understand why being close to a 100k behind a spec isn't acceptable. And that's an encounter as patchwerk as it gets these days. Now maybe add what kind of class kit some classes have versus what others have and I see absolutely no reason to pretend it's actually not that bad.

The lowest classes on that log are undertuned in my, (and blizzards opinion, as they just got a big buff) so that log wont look like that in a week from now(then again, NH is out next week so it does not really matter). I said that after the hotfixes it does not look that bad, maybe i didnt formulate myself correctly.

The only outlier that is not nerfed in that graph is retri paladins, alltho i will say that assasination rogues are hard to judge, might be the bug people abused or general overtuning. With the bottom nerfed however, its gonna be closer, then again, set bonuses could jumple everything up.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

They dont listen to feedback.
So yes

If that was the case, they wouldn't of removed the greater blessing nonsense for Paladins. They do listen, it's probably a much more complex reason why class balance is what it is today.

[l33t]

The spec balance in each expansion has been generally quite bad, with occasional blatant issues running wild... What's crazy is that at least in PVE if you scratch out the entirely dead specs during these periods the DPS balance was vastly superior in TBC/WOTLK than it has been in more recent expansions, Blizzard are certainly not getting better at it.

But the attitude of players has changed A LOT. Back in TBC I don't remember massive shitstorms because say elem shaman wasn't topping meters 24/7. Nowadays, if some spec deals 30k dps less than another spec it instantly becomes A FUCKING TRAGEDY AND BLIZZARD HAS LITERALLY DESTROYED MUH CLASS OMG UNSUB case.

If I were Blizzard I'd just let people own the meters in turns. That's at least honest.

[Deleted]

Well clearly the goal is some form of balance, they make balance changes on the PTR (often at the bewilderment of players)

As someone pointed to me earlier in the thread, it seems they're shooting for 10%-ish variance.
Don't think they've ever perfectly hit that with all classes, they seem to have had hard time dealing with outliers in previous tiers (HFC, BRF).
Majority of the specs seem to land within 15%-ish variance though, so *shrug*

[Sastank]

You can't really achieve full balance with so many classes and combinations.

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Eeeeh, no. I've seen worse..

Could have at least listened to feedback for 2 months on the hunter changes. Now look, they're "looking at MM playstyle" and buffing hunters next week already.

[dope_danny]

Because i would wager a good 80% of the userbase cannot raid without guides from the ptr ready day one. Its a demo to gauge interest.

[kevincuomo]

12+ years of developing classes and specs and somehow they get worse and worse at it, it's actually so bad that i (casual mythic runner) can tell LONG before things even get released how BAD it is going to be.. yet people who do this for a living cannot see it. It's actually amazing how blind they are.. it's almost as if not one single person at Blizzard even plays the game or does arenas etc... there is NO excuse for that level of blindness to the facts.

[Deleted]

Just look at the shaman's spell Icefury. It's coefficient was buffed from 180% to 900% that a buff of 5 times. Now are you telling me it took them 5 months to figure out it needed its damage buffed by 5? I can understand buffing abilities by 10-20%, but when spells are being buffed so drastically it tells me they weren't even in the ballpark to begin with.

Doubt you'll read this, but no it was buffed that much because they moved it in the talent tree to compete with vastly more powerful spells than it was previously. It went from being some mid-tier PvP esque, add prio talent that noone took, to being one of our big three spec-defining level 100 talents. Hence the buff.

Please don't wave flags of fake evidence when you don't remotely understand the context.


To the OP and the thread, if it hasn't been said already, Blizzard usually wait for actual results in raids and PvP numbers to pour in after release to do the final testing pass. Has always been that way. And one of the first posters was right, they rotate "the OP" to keep the game interesting. Nothing wrong with that. Hell, we all remember when our spec was OP, it's a fun little moment. Be thankful that this time round, it hasn't really affected anything negatively.

This is not it at all. I use your example of Ele shamans. When is the last time they were even competitive in single target to start an expansion? Shit, how about top five?

Firelands, Elemental was #2 if I remember correctly. Since then, highest we've been is the bottom half of the table. (Excluding 6.0 launch, the last 4 weeks before WoD hit in prepatch, we were #1 using Earthquake single target because of broken mastery. Again, a fun moment. Didn't mean shit.)

In the case of Elemental, we bring nothing to the raid, we have no immunity or useful cooldown (Bloodlust really doesn't count, you only need 1) and our damage is shit. So it's very difficult not to be asked to reroll at the top. Elemental is a spec played mostly in PvE remember.

[Thzz]

Have you actually read the post? It talked about the nerfs AND buffs and the severity of it. It wasn't about *whine my class is nerfed* it was how about this all got handled.

Look at the announced nerfs and buffs.

. Even a monkey could see that a skill that can crit for 2,5mil was ALOT for a tank. But noooo, let it launch and then shit on the dk's by nerfing it hard instead of actually testing it on ptr

whaaaayyyyyy they took away my 2.5 mil crit. and now Im not leet anymore. so ill start a thread on MMO and complain and say Blizz is dumb.

tissues are in the bathroom, bro.

[Nnyco]

This expansion had the worst balancing of them all. So many classes/specs went up and down so fast its sad.

vanilla/tbc?

[Uselessrouge]

You can't really achieve full balance with so many classes and combinations.

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Eeeeh, no. I've seen worse..

when? i cant remember a time when the balance was so bad , apart maybe wotlk frost dk that could play with cast sequence macros and be#1

[Deleted]

People should just play like shit the first week after every balance patch. Like really tank the numbers. Then when their class get their panic buff they can start playing properly and looking like gods.