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

[Thorbalt]

Love how no one in these threads ever played in classic. Take a look here:

http://realmplayers.com/RaidStats/Ra...0H0I&realm=All

and see that war/rogue is 30% higher than mage/lock/hunter or more every time

[Deleted]

Not the point. The point is that this is the second patch. They had alpha, beta, 7.0, 7.1, and the 7.1.5 PTR to balance things. After all that, after a 2 month PTR, they then find it necessary to make some pretty drastic changes after 4 days on live?

What this says to me is that they haven't invested in QA tools to simulate things. After all, the live game just takes a lot of different builds, places them in situations and calculates outcomes. They could easily automate that - copy over a bunch of actual character profiles for each class and spec, install them in a sim, deploy changes to that server and run it.

No, it won't be perfect, but it would be closer than what they do now.

You cant simcraft your way to raid encounter balance

[shaunika123]

I wanted to make the same thread. What the fuck were they doing with hunters. They had a few weeks/months to balance the classes. Second day of the new patch -> uhm, we're changing our minds, we're buffing hunters now.

better than nerfing assa rogues based on bugged logs really >_>

Love how no one in these threads ever played in classic. Take a look here:

http://realmplayers.com/RaidStats/Ra...0H0I&realm=All

and see that war/rogue is 30% higher than mage/lock/hunter or more every time

difference is that back then utility mattered A LOT

mages gave int buff, warlocks gave soulstones, healthstones, could summon, hunters were essential for pulling a lot of bosses etc


now it's dmg or bust really

[Kokolums]

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.

That's nothing. During ALL of vanilla wow, there was a raiding bug with buffs and debuffs where a mob or player could only have x amount of them on at one time. This caused all kinds of SERIOUS mechanics issues, like warlocks being told by raid leaders not to DoT up everything lest they knock off more important debuffs like sunders or something. This plagued the game all the way the entire vanilla version of WoW. In BC they upped the allowed limit slightly but it STILL wasn't enough. I can't recall but they FINALLY fixed it in late BC or maybe it was WRATH. WRATH! Can you believe that?

Your complaints about Icefury are amusing considering the massive problems the game used to be saddled with.

You can read the sad tale here:

https://www.engadget.com/2012/11/09/...debuff-rights/

[Shammyrock]

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.

Icefury got buffed because it was moved into the LVL 100 talent row and had to compete with Ascendance and LR

[Marrilaife]

I find it baffling no one figured out stuff like blooddrinker talent for blood DK was overtuned as hell? I mean really, launch live a talent that does 1/3 of your total dmg and hits for millions? Or the opposite things like buffing cobra shot by 42%, I mean the whole time no one thought "this ability is a tad bit weak"...?

But yeah, I think the worst is what they're doing with MM hunter, first they tried super hard to pigeon hole them into patient sniper - sidewinders playstyle and then they decided it shouldn't be a dominant playstyle, let's tear it apart to the ground... but didn't figure out what exactly should be a suitable replacement for it. We have a spec going into 3rd raid of the expansion in a state that smells of early beta.

Spriests same stuff, but since their numbers are high, no one really complains how they're reworking whole spec mid expac, just that they should be nerfed (or shouldn't, if someone plays a spriest).

Prot warriors with removing focused rage, adding devastator and reshuffling or reworking many talents again feel like a class reworked mid-expac. That stuff should be done during beta...

[Mangusei]

SWTOR is amazing at balancing (at shit at everything else). Just steal some of their devs responsible for balance. And fire Holinka.

[Deleted]

It's silly though. Boost Execution Sentence so that it's the best ST talent on that row, nerf it a few days later by no less than a flat 15%. I mean, they do test these things right? There's nothing complex about it, they clearly overbuffed it and should have seen it beforehand.

[FelPlague]

There is a very big difference between faster changes and not waiting till the next expansion, and actually testing the ptr. You know, the whole point of it.

Now they can just delete ptr/beta as obviously it's not needed at all for balancing.

If this is their definition of faster changes... by just throwing +50% around.... thats just weak damage control

its allmost like the ptr and beta re not for fucking balancing, and they are actually for fucking idk... testing the game and find bugs?

[Deleted]

Except for a few outliers the game is fairly balanced and they have kept their promise not to swing balance too hard. Not sure whats the point of this thread, isnt there enough of this already?

edit and its always the same. Shit players complaining about their pet spec because they are too lazy to learn how to play it. "I'm an ultraskilled ninja gamer, naturally its the games fault im underperforming."

[Gadzooks]

If you look at it from an economic standpoint, it makes sense. They don't want the game to be (fully) balanced. The FotM rerollers keep the game populated, and they'll get bored if the meta becomes stale - thus, constant rollercoaster in the top tier DPS.

The point of the PTR also makes sense if you look at it the same way. It's not there to ensure balance, it's there to ensure hype for the upcoming patch.

Do you really think make classes this unstable, and making wholesale changes to classes *after* important spending decisions have been made in their shiny new Artifact system is a good business model? And, doing it while a tier is ongoing?

A common complaint of ex-players is having to relearn and regear ever expansion, now you're looking at relearning/gearing mid-tier. You think that makes economic sense?

I'm not baiting or mocking you, I honestly cannot see how you can come to this conclusion.

[Pull My Finger]

What would you know about balancing? Seriously. Stop whining.

[TickTickTick]

Not to play devil's advocate (cause I find the balancing silly too), but PTR is more for bug fixes than balancing in general. Ofc there are some balance tweaks, but the data they are basing it is simply too small to make accurate decisisions 100% of the time. Makes sense to balance a little bit after the patch hits, when they have much more data. We should be grateful the patch hit one week before NH, and not at the same time.

[Berndorf]

One thing to keep in mind though is that certain skills aren't balanced around themselves. They are balanced in the overall scheme of the class/spec. Cobra shot wasn't really under powered before just as it isn't over powered now. Its w/e Bliz thinks it needs to be at to get overall hunter damage where it needs to be. They just as easily could have buffed a different skill to accomplish the same thing. Cobra shot wasn't buffed before it was underpowered. It was just buffed to bring overall hunter dps up which could have been done with any skill.

[Segus1992]

Do you really think make classes this unstable, and making wholesale changes to classes *after* important spending decisions have been made in their shiny new Artifact system is a good business model? And, doing it while a tier is ongoing?

A common complaint of ex-players is having to relearn and regear ever expansion, now you're looking at relearning/gearing mid-tier. You think that makes economic sense?

I'm not baiting or mocking you, I honestly cannot see how you can come to this conclusion.

The underlying implication is that the Blizzard 'balancing team' is at least to some degree incapable of the balance the playerbase wants, and as such the second best option they see is to keep the players that are still interested shuffling about and checking out changes and so on.

It's either that or simply that they're incompetent. I don't think that's a sensible conclusion, but it's a possibility of course.

[kamuimac]

Look at the announced nerfs and buffs.

We are talking about +40 or -40% buff/nerf to several classes. That is so severe i can not see how this was not tested on THE PTR WHO WAS ONLINE FOR MORE THAN 2 MONTHS??? What is the point of a ptr? Basicly nothing.

Patch is live for 4 days and now this. It makes me /facepalm and laugh at the same time this incompetance of Blizzard.
It was the same at launch of Legion. Some specs so low they got buffed by 20-30%. A year in beta had no use it seems....

They need to stop hiding behind "at launch we have more data" Take blooddrinker nerf of dk. 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

are you surprised ? its quite clear for anyone who has been playing this game that their tunign team completly and utterly sucks and hiring bunch of 15 year olds woudl give better resoults probably.

[Lorkin]

No, this is not true. If you believe it is please provide names and dates of when they moved from one team to another. Keep in mind the size of the WoW team is something close to several hundred people.

https://twitter.com/_johnyang/status/720010999898771457

I move from the @Diablo team to the @Warcraft team a few months ago. I've been focused on making Legendary Items for the Legion expansion.

He's not the only one that moved over.

[Murderdoll]

Ever since they were able to hotfix more and more, PTR has been less about balance and actual testing.

I just cannot understand why they would look to make balance harder and harder for themselves with legendaries and the the current iterations of gear if they simply cannot balance as it stands already.

[Deleted]

Blizzard do not the same resources anymore and their most qualified designers left.

[xanzul]

There is a very big difference between faster changes and not waiting till the next expansion, and actually testing the ptr. You know, the whole point of it.

Now they can just delete ptr/beta as obviously it's not needed at all for balancing.

If this is their definition of faster changes... by just throwing +50% around.... thats just weak damage control

So faster changes are only faster if you approve of the changes? That isn't how words work.