Don't ask for balancing classes. Ask for the Burning Crusade.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

This thread truly reeks of "you think you do, but you don't."

All I see here are threads about what people want changed about Vanilla.

[Methodd]

But bugs are essential part of vanilla experience. Do you want to rob people of their experience? Go play retail then.

Trying a little too hard

[Charge me Doctor]

It's not "bad balance", it's a different approach to class design. I take it that you don't like it because you can't top raid DPS charts (the only part of the game you seem to be interested in) with your kitty, but there is far more to Vanilla than raiding, and you are fundamentally changing how the game would play. "Man, this is chess and I am a bishop, why is the queen so much more powerful? Buff pl0x".

So, changes according to old class design are fine?

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Nice try, but between all the items that are now in separate tabs or UI, reagents, consummables, tradeskill items, gear to swap for some classes - and with the biggest bags being 16 at the time - inventory space was at a premium. And then you could be a raiding warlock or a hunter (pet food, arrows) and be truly SoL.

quest items, ores/herbs stacking to 5. 10 slot bags. Good times.

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Sure you can choose to have multiple kinds of mounts. But realisticly you only used one. You maybe had a few non-battle companions but you realisticly only bring one, to deal with the limited bagspace you had.

Don't tell me how to play my game, i had 4 pets in my bags. And after blizzard swapped costs on mounts and riding around people stopped having just 1 mount

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Bug fixes or exploits should be fixed. Class tuning & balance should not nor should most any of the other changes these vocal people have about what should be changed about vanilla.

what about class changes/buffs/nerfs according to vanilla design? is it that wrong that hunters now will be top DPS, instead of warlocks in MC/BWL? (i mean, even blizzard themselves already did that in vanilla by buffing melee-mana-less classes). Is it that bad if paladins won't be able to be mana-immune in naxx gear? Is it that bad to have invisibility back for mages and be able to cast pyroblast out of it again? (never actually seen that one, but people playing beta were talking about it back in vanilla) Or open locks via magic (heck, even add a farmable resource to do that, fuck rogues you know)

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Any time before AQ, Hybrids were literally unable to do anything except provide buffs to other healers/tanks/dps and could literally AFK the rest of the way.

But GOOD hybrids were also auto-attacking boss!

[Soon-TM]

So, changes according to old class design are fine?

Yes, ideally. But many of these "balance" folks won't be happy with any less than complete raid DPS/HPS normalization across all classes. Which is definitely NOT Vanilla/BC class design.

[digichi]

One thing I wholeheartedly agree with is that the class design philosophy in BC was better. Nowadays they try and make each class balanced in relation to every other class. Back then it felt much more like individual balance wasn't as important because of all the cross-class dependencies and mechanics.

Sure, Enhancement Shamans or Shadow Priests weren't pulling insane numbers on their own, but they were still brought because of how much better the rest of the raid would perform with them present.

^ this

Tbc was one of my fav points in WoW, just because of how the classes felt.

[gaymer77]

what about class changes/buffs/nerfs according to vanilla design? is it that wrong that hunters now will be top DPS, instead of warlocks in MC/BWL? (i mean, even blizzard themselves already did that in vanilla by buffing melee-mana-less classes). Is it that bad if paladins won't be able to be mana-immune in naxx gear? Is it that bad to have invisibility back for mages and be able to cast pyroblast out of it again? (never actually seen that one, but people playing beta were talking about it back in vanilla) Or open locks via magic (heck, even add a farmable resource to do that, fuck rogues you know)

Um hunters weren't "melee-mana-less" back in vanilla. They actually utilized both ranged attack power (given from agility while stength was a melee attack power stat) and spellpower (given from int) and most of their attacks were MAGIC based attacks. Also back then they did have a mana bar not a focus bar like they do now. Paladins should NEVER have been mana-immune as you say. They are a mana using melee attacker if they went ret (lawl) or prot (bigger lawl). I loved fighting paladins on my priest back in vanilla or even BC because manaburn = win!!! Also mages didn't have invisibility in vanilla. That was a BC or Wrath spell. The only class that could cast anything while stealthed were Night Elves using Shadowmeld until Blizzard changed the way Shadowmeld worked. It was possible for a NE hunter to cast aimed shot while stealthed and not pop out of it until the cast went off & follow it up with some arcane shots to kill someone before they even knew they were there or what direction it came from. They were worse than freakin rogues ambushing or cheap shotting you because at least with a rogue you could see them as you were stunlocked and dying. or immediately after he 1 shotted you with an ambush. The only way a mage could hit you without you knowing it was if they were POM/pyro and used their instant cast POM to hit you with a pyroblast.

[Charge me Doctor]

Um hunters weren't "melee-mana-less" back in vanilla. They actually utilized both ranged attack power (given from agility while stength was a melee attack power stat) and spellpower (given from int) and most of their attacks were MAGIC based attacks. Also back then they did have a mana bar not a focus bar like they do now. Paladins should NEVER have been mana-immune as you say. They are a mana using melee attacker if they went ret (lawl) or prot (bigger lawl). I loved fighting paladins on my priest back in vanilla or even BC because manaburn = win!!! Also mages didn't have invisibility in vanilla. That was a BC or Wrath spell. The only class that could cast anything while stealthed were Night Elves using Shadowmeld until Blizzard changed the way Shadowmeld worked. It was possible for a NE hunter to cast aimed shot while stealthed and not pop out of it until the cast went off & follow it up with some arcane shots to kill someone before they even knew they were there or what direction it came from. They were worse than freakin rogues ambushing or cheap shotting you because at least with a rogue you could see them as you were stunlocked and dying. or immediately after he 1 shotted you with an ambush. The only way a mage could hit you without you knowing it was if they were POM/pyro and used their instant cast POM to hit you with a pyroblast.

I was referring to times when fury and rogues weren't even close DPS-vice to warlocks. So yeah, before one-handers normalization bullshit. hunters and warlocks were the shit for raids. Hunters didn't stack spellpower because both multishot and aimed shot didn't benefit from it. They also didn't need mana, because of FD+drink and didn't need to stack much int, because they need exactly enough mana to spam aimed shots and multishots to run out of mana in 30 seconds.

Paladins were mana-immune in naxx gear thanks to how their talents worked, your critical heals restored mana spent on an ability and naxx gear gave you a lot of crit. Prot and ret specs are trivial and i wasn't talking about them

Mages had invisibility before vanilla release and blizzard scrapped that. Also there were draft mages. And rogues and hunters had block. And warlocks were wearing leather and could actually resurrect people. You know, blizzard scrapped a lot of interesting stuff before vanilla was even released. I don't mind them implementing it back into wow classic. And yes, hunters had focus (basically energy) before vanilla was released and was replaced with mana

[Aliven]

^ this

Tbc was one of my fav points in WoW, just because of how the classes felt.

No to good if you were vending machine aka mage. So much fun bein vending machine in TBC and nothing more. Oh and occasionaly polymorph something. Such fun. Everyone roled a mage to be a magic cook right?

[gaymer77]

I was referring to times when fury and rogues weren't even close DPS-vice to warlocks. So yeah, before one-handers normalization bullshit. hunters and warlocks were the shit for raids. Hunters didn't stack spellpower because both multishot and aimed shot didn't benefit from it. They also didn't need mana, because of FD+drink and didn't need to stack much int, because they need exactly enough mana to spam aimed shots and multishots to run out of mana in 30 seconds.

Paladins were mana-immune in naxx gear thanks to how their talents worked, your critical heals restored mana spent on an ability and naxx gear gave you a lot of crit. Prot and ret specs are trivial and i wasn't talking about them

Mages had invisibility before vanilla release and blizzard scrapped that. Also there were draft mages. And rogues and hunters had block. And warlocks were wearing leather and could actually resurrect people. You know, blizzard scrapped a lot of interesting stuff before vanilla was even released. I don't mind them implementing it back into wow classic. And yes, hunters had focus (basically energy) before vanilla was released and was replaced with mana

You realize that "they had such & such spell or ability before vanilla" is an invalid argument? What was given to classes for vanilla is what's important as THAT is the game not what "could have been". Yes hunters could feign death & drink (except boss fights midway through vanilla when Blizzard changed the way people went into combat in the whole zone when a boss was engaged) but they would literally lose DPS when they did this. Drink =/= doing damage. I'm assuming you didn't play a hunter in vanilla or know anything really about them because you seem to not know how the class played back then now. I also never said they stacked spellpower or int. I said they utilized both ranged attack power (agility) and spellpower (int) because the bulk of their damage came from both sides of the spectrum. Arcane shot (which did more sustained damage than aimed shot & multishot), traps, serpent sting, and improved serpent sting benefited from spellpower while autoshot (which was reset when a spell was used & wasn't fixed for a very long time), multishot, volley, and aimed shot (assuming you were MM & not BM) benefited from ranged attack power. Finally I don't know what YOUR progression was during vanilla but warlocks and hunters did just fine in all tiers of raiding. I happened to raid everything while it was current content with the exception of AQ40 which I skipped over after coming back form a break because of school.

[Deleted]

You always worked the cards you were dealt.
Having a maximum of 4-5x 16 slot bags where totally enough for reagents, consumables, multiple gearsets and etc. Sure it was premium but you acually did have the bare minimum bagspace.

Well, obviously. I mean, millions of people played even back then, so it's not like it was insurmountable, but also not a "non-issue" - you had to be pretty mindful of your inventory back then, esp if you had to collect some quest items, go farming herbs etc. It's one of the many things that I hope will stay true to the original, because I want Classic to be as close to Vanilla as Blizz can do, because for me it's a museum piece. But looooooots of whining is to be expected from people who will be shocked to see they have like 30 slots on their char total for a long time (it's not like mooncloth bags were cheap from the start) and have to deal with low-count stacks of profession items, quest items, reagents, oh my.

[Charge me Doctor]

snip

The way to DPS as a hunter was aimed>auto>multi>auto, if you did it differently it means that you did it wrong. SS wastes a debuff slot and deals piss poor damage per mana spent, as well as arcane shot is useless waste of mana. It doesn't mean that you couldn't play differently, but it clearly inferior DPS

Replenishing full mana to be able to continue spamming aimed shots and multishots is better than continuing to auto-shot while waiting for your mana to tick up.

And no hunter didn't pick aimed shot, it's the best ability for DPS that hunter has, it's mandatory.

[Deleted]

Asking to rebalance all classes of vanilla is stupid, especially since people probably don't know how vanilla was setup.
I also wouldn't want their to be dual specs as that would have a big impact on what you will be facing in pvp/ outdoor compared to orignal vanilla.
Other conveniences like inventory management I don't mind. Don't want an LFG system but i wouldn't mind easier transportation and no mob respawning.


Vanilla wasn't balanced around raiding or purely one thing. It's was balanced on one spec/class is good at this aspect of the game and another about something else. Their was also this thing if your good at all things but master of none.

Outdoor content was also an important aspect of which petclasses were extremely good at.
PVP was more of a rock paper scissor thing, mages owned melee but got ripped by warlocks and shamans for example. And melee were really good at fighting warlocks and healers for example.

Now their were some anomalies that mainly occured due to high gear and perhaps ever growing focus on raiding. Through gear warriors became better dpsers than rogues in raid for example, and pvp although a bit more bursty was still decent. I think vanilla gave some of the best pvp experience sofar.

It was however good they made some important balance changes in TBC. If they didn't change dps balance 50% of the population would probably be playing mages, rogues , warriors. Resilience was a good thing because it made oneshotting others less prevelant allowing for more skill to go through.
But to be honest TBC was quite bad with balance, it was more a pathway to Wrath which in my opinion had the best class balance especially pvp. Although i still enjoyed vanilla pvp more.
MoP also had a really good balance in raidng and Cataclysm first raid tier had the most fun balance phylosphy (every spec has a fight that their superstars in).

The best thing TBC did was dungeons and karazhan. And the worst was probably introducing Arena as that made pvp balance too restrictive.

[Demithio]

Yes, ideally. But many of these "balance" folks won't be happy with any less than complete raid DPS/HPS normalization across all classes. Which is definitely NOT Vanilla/BC class design.

Well not really sure who would expect that from classic WoW. I imagine some might, which is just ridiculous. However, personally I wouldn't mind seeing TBC class enhancements in classic. Just don't get confused with people that want to see some TBC style adjustments added and those who may want to turn it into the slop we have today.

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No to good if you were vending machine aka mage. So much fun bein vending machine in TBC and nothing more. Oh and occasionaly polymorph something. Such fun. Everyone roled a mage to be a magic cook right?

It was actually somewhat fun being a vending machine and public transportation during TBC. I actually got a lot of tips as well (thats when gold was worth something). It was part of the class and the RPG element of the game at the time.
And to add to this, notice how that RPG class element has vanished from current WoW. Sad.

[Soon-TM]

those who may want to turn it into the slop we have today

You can spot a couple of those specimens ITT. BTW, I also liked the sheep/kite/water part of being a Mage before WotLK. It's far more fitting to the support/illusionist archetype which I mistook the class for back in Vanilla.

[Demithio]

^ this

Tbc was one of my fav points in WoW, just because of how the classes felt.

By far my favorite time in WoW as well. The classes and the way they were setup was just right. We had just about every class / spec in our raids because they all brought something different and useful.

[zelvar]

By far my favorite time in WoW as well. The classes and the way they were setup was just right. We had just about every class / spec in our raids because they all brought something different and useful.

Totally agree but i hate flying and space fi/goats and easy arena gear
Why didnt they make fp faster and 300% ground mount :/

[Thimagryn]

Yes, ideally. But many of these "balance" folks won't be happy with any less than complete raid DPS/HPS normalization across all classes. Which is definitely NOT Vanilla/BC class design.

I want balance but I don't want normalization or homogenization. My problem is that there is no actual design to support the intended 'Hybrid' gameplay. At most, Ret can be an off-healer since all they do is auto-attack and have nothing else to press or cast, but they end up wasting their time with weak heals and having to cast between attacks. They might as well go Holy. Feral can't heal in forms and Shapeshift takes a 1/3rd of your mana pool, so it's not very effective at all. If they want these Hybrids to be Hybrids, then make it so.

Vanilla changed so much from 1.0 to 1.12 that Hybrids have no designated roles (only healer 1.7+). 'Support' is what we call a class that doesn't fit in the Holy Trinity.

[Soon-TM]

Not true at all. I want balance but I don't want normalization or homogenization.

My entire point is that the design of all classes shifts in every patch of Vanilla to the point where there is absolutely no consistency between the playstyle of 1.0 to 1.7 to 1.12 due to talent overhauls and itemization design that changed over time. I'd like to see balance changes come in to actually define the class as what it should be rather than the 'Innervate-Bot/Buffadin -> Support/Healbot -> Actual Hybrid' [patch progression that was born out of a clear lack of direction. It's literally a case of Blizzard not knowing where to fit Hybrids in the Holy Trinity so they cut them short in all aspects and left it at that. Being able to do anything but not do anything well is not a role.

While I agree that Vanilla's is certainly not the best rendition of hybrid classes, the line must be drawn somewhere. Since BC was brought into the discussion, I remember the BC forums being chock-a-block full of Enh/Ele shammies, Ret palas and kitties QQ'ing about not being able to top DPS charts.

What did Blizzard do? They caved in, and that's when hybrids stopped being hybrids. Come WotLK, even in an undertuned af raid such as Naxx, an enh shammy couldn't cast but two (maybe three if ele) slow and inefficient heals before going OOM, a ret pala couldn't off-tank for !@#$, ditto for kitties. But rogues were benched all the freaking time, since, all things equal, why bring the rogue when you can bring the rogue with brez and innervate? And I'm talking just PvE, since kitties were actually nerfed in PvP in WotLK, and nerfed hard.

So no, while BC may have been an improvement (which I can agree with), it didn't actually solve anything, especially after Blizz started pushing arenas and raiding down everyone's throat precisely in WotLK... "Bring the player, not the class"

[ManiaCCC]

I want balance but I don't want normalization or homogenization. My problem is that there is no actual design to support the intended 'Hybrid' gameplay. At most, Ret can be an off-healer since all they do is auto-attack and have nothing else to press or cast, but they end up wasting their time with weak heals and having to cast between attacks. They might as well go Holy. Feral can't heal in forms and Shapeshift takes a 1/3rd of your mana pool, so it's not very effective at all. If they want these Hybrids to be Hybrids, then make it so.

Vanilla changed so much from 1.0 to 1.12 that Hybrids have no designated roles (only healer 1.7+). 'Support' is what we call a class that doesn't fit in the Holy Trinity.

Can you specific few balance changes you would propose?

Oh and Hybrids were hybrids in PvP. If you ever played against good Druid, you would see how hybrids really worked..and worked very well.

[Thimagryn]

So no, while BC may have been an improvement (which I can agree with), it didn't actually solve anything, especially after Blizz started pushing arenas and raiding down everyone's throat precisely in WotLK... "Bring the player, not the class"

I agree with certain points of that. Parts of the problems were solved, others simply arised as a result but that is due to the direction of the changes that started with TBC and resulted in Wrath. The homogenization was good and bad depending on where you stand. In TBC, hybrids were distinct from Pures and bring something different to the table. They didn't need to overgear the content to be able to function in their role.

Can you specific few balance changes you would propose?

Oh and Hybrids were hybrids in PvP. If you ever played against good Druid, you would see how hybrids really worked..and worked very well.

I've addressed PVP many times. PVP would not be affected by PVE changes if they were mainly controlled by itemization and stat weights. There is the issue of people using PVE gear in PVP and doing something like using all STR-gear to get crazy burst, but overall that can always be balanced through talents such as nerfing heals across the board (for Hybrids) and gaining that back through baseline talents in other specs. Now I'm not suggesting outright that we do this, as I don't know how much any change affects PVP overall. People tend to abuse any borderline exploit they can like Shamans with 2H or using proc-enchantments on fast weapons etc. I can't directly address balance in that respect, and I would defer to Blizzard designers to handle the separation between changes that affect PVE and damage control for PVP.

My primary concern is addressing three simple issues

1) Clarity on the intended design for Hybrids is in Raids. ie- you can off-tank and off-DPS and we will give you appropriate gear in all raids to support this; or we only want you to support/heal and we will lower shapeshift/casting costs on heal to better support this Hybrid play.

2) Address stat balancing overall, as well as itemization. Druid and Paladins are kings of white damage and scale poorly with yellow. They are great early in dungeon blues and greens, but epics offer very little in terms of useful stats to bolster the white-damage scaling. Either boost the itemization or increase yellow damage, or as the suggestion above, keep the white damage (with better scaling) and yellow damage is traded off for utility healing. The latter direction should flesh out a Support/Utility role as intended design rather than the afterthought as it exists right now.

3) Talents updated to support Hybrid gameplay (whichever they think is optimal for 'Vanilla experience'). This is where all 'Hybrid Tax' should be controlled. This can be addressed multiple ways.

a) If they want to allow Feral Druid to DPS and Tank, then Talents will be the gate that prevents a competitive DPS and Tank Druids from ever healing competantly. No gear-swapping for EZ off-tank/off-healing, this would keep closer to TBC-style Hybrid 'Pure' roles (85% Pure's DPS/Tank efficiency, 15% provided by raid support stats/buffs). Global nerf 50% healing for all Hybrids in Raids and Dungeons while 100% healing is retained through mid Resto/Holy talents.

b) If they want Ferals to be Jack of all Trades as per mid Vanilla, then have talents to support. Ie allow Feral to cast Resto and Innervate in forms. This can be balanced in PVP by simply not allowing Feral Casting when PVP flagged.

Consider Talents to be a shifting-scale. An optimized DPS build could perform at 85% Pure's DPS (talents boosting better yellow damage, Heart of the Wild scaling) with 15% coming from support buffs on others (Leader of the Pack). If you want a Utility build with better heals then your DPS remains at ~65% (less str scaling without HotW, weaker Yellow damage), you don't provide Leader of the Pack and your heals are back to 100%. In the utility build, you gain strong heals but you are limited by your Mana pool. The more damage you want, the less heals you can cast during a raid. The more heals you can cast, the less damage you can deal. Overall, a Utility build scales less with STR so you are giving up damage by not taking those talents.

In my opinion, a Hybrid that chooses to be a 'Pure' (ie itemizes away from Int, takes all tank/DPS talents) should not be punished for having the ability to cast heals. Weaken those heals in raid and we won't have that argument. We also need to add in gear options in early raids, as Epics were not tuned for any role at all.

As for PVP, I don't want to touch any of that balance because I am not a PVPer and my opinion on the matter is moot. I simply think that any changes to PVE can be controlled separately from PVP through whatever technology we have available today. Talents, Gear, Raid-buffs/nerfs, PVP flags are all potential controllers for this.