The state of spec balance is terrible.

[trapmaster]

I tried out feral and honestly, I AM NOT "FEELING" the positive. Even resetting traits and have proper gears and i still feel like my feral claws hit like wet noodles. You know, blizzard's just wasting our time the class you loved turned into ass and it's not fucking fun. Honestly, Bfa should have been free to market instead 60 dollars something like that cuz greed is their all FUCKY FUCKY they do.

[antelope591]

Everything you just wrote is simply wrong. ToT and SoO put together had one hard boss, and that was Lei Shen 25HC. Every other boss was considerably easier than your average Mythic boss today.

And my list about modern classes that are harder than their MoP counterpart was about BFA, not Legion. I only stated that they were even harder back in Legion.

Frost and Fire Mages are infinitely more complex today than they were back then. The only Mage spec that was hard during MoP was Arcane with its endless minmaxing potential because of the interaction between their Mastery and the Tier set from SoO.

If anything classes have been "smartened up", to turn your own phrase around All the OP utility they had back in MoP has been vastly reduced, or in some cases, completely removed, while the actual rotational complexity have either stayed mostly the same, or become more complex, not less.

Siegecrafter, Thok, Klaxxi, Garrosh easier than any Mythic boss in BFA...did u even play MoP are u just pulling stuff out of your ass lol. Lets not even mention the fact that G'Huun and Jaina are the only 2 bosses that could be considered all that difficult in the so called super complex BFA raids. Maybe throw in pre nerf Fetid which was only hard due to bullshit RNG

[Relapses]

Siegecrafter, Thok, Klaxxi, Garrosh easier than any Mythic boss in BFA...did u even play MoP are u just pulling stuff out of your ass lol. Lets not even mention the fact that G'Huun and Jaina are the only 2 bosses that could be considered all that difficult in the so called super complex BFA raids. Maybe throw in pre nerf Fetid which was only hard due to bullshit RNG

He's not wrong. If you're going to discuss raid difficulty in MoP you need to be specific as to which raid size you're referring to... 10M or 25M. Many of SoO's most difficult encounters were completely different between raid sizes which led to one of most disappointing raid tiers I'd played. Post MoP, Blizzard has been designing Mythic encounters around a single raid size and these fights are, by a wide margin, much more consistently difficult and interesting than anything from Cata/MoP.

[Nitros14]

He's not wrong. If you're going to discuss raid difficulty in MoP you need to be specific as to which raid size you're referring to... 10M or 25M. Many of SoO's most difficult encounters were completely different between raid sizes which led to one of most disappointing raid tiers I'd played. Post MoP, Blizzard has been designing Mythic encounters around a single raid size and these fights are, by a wide margin, much more consistently difficult and interesting than anything from Cata/MoP.

Having done Heroic Ragnaros 25, I can assure you there hasn't been anything in BFA yet as hard as that.

Legion had mythic Kil'jaeden, probably the hardest WoW boss ever made though.

[RobertMugabe]

Generally speaking, a healthy gameplay recommendation is, play what you think is cool or you like. If you are good enough, your performance will be good enough for any content of the game. You should roll the best performing classes for certain content only if you are gonna do the most high-end part of it, aka 20+ m+ keys or push mythic raiding clear early in the opening of the tier. Many players mistake that they need to play the best class, but they don't need to play them, if they are not pushing high-end content boundaries in competitive manner. That's my view of it.

Many players need to play the best class, because in the pug world, not everyone gets invited either or want to join your group (if you're a dead spec).

All this "play whatever you want unless you're going for world first"-BS on MMOC needs to stop. It's actually the pugs that care way more about this.

[Relapses]

Having done Heroic Ragnaros 25, I can assure you there hasn't been anything in BFA yet as hard as that.

Legion had mythic Kil'jaeden, probably the hardest WoW boss ever made though.

I agree, H-Rag was on another level. But even then, Geyser was the hardest part of the encounter and Blizzard's gone on record to say that the commonly used "triangle" strat guilds used to handle it was not the way they intended that mechanic to be done. However, H-Rag was an exception not the rule. IMO, consistency is the most important metric when discussing the quality of raid encounter design and that's where post-MoP's fixed raid size has stood out.

[Sezh]

In both raids and mythic+.

This expansion has really dropped the ball.

So many dead specs.

As long as you understand that spec balance has never been better in the history of the game, I have no problem with what you're writing. Although I disagree.

[Nitros14]

As long as you understand that spec balance has never been better in the history of the game, I have no problem with what you're writing. Although I disagree.

The thing that stands out about this tier is that it's almost always the same specs at the top for every fight, not just the absolute variance.

Battle of Dazar'alor, the raid, is very poorly balanced between specs encounter wise. The same specs always shine.

[Sezh]

On an absolute level, the difference between first and last was less as recently as Tomb of Sargeras according to warcraft logs.

But the thing that stands out about this tier is that it's almost always the same specs at the top for every fight, not just the absolute variance.

Battle of Dazr'alor, the raid, is very poorly balanced between specs encounter wise.

I was more thinking in terms of recent years compared to older expansions, but yes, comparing the very most recent raids I think Blizz have failed somewhat to foresee certain specs being vastly superior on certain fights in this raid.

[shyguybman]

Only if we forget the op "ignore pain = ignore mechanics" in emerald nightmare progression.

You mean the 2 weeks warriors were good the entire expansion? :P That was promptly nerfed (literally) within 2 weeks of EN going live meanwhile they let Blood DK be a juggernaut for the last year of the expansion in M+ and guardian druids reign supreme pretty much the entire expansion in raids.

A tank shouldn't be able to do this: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/217319161?t=29s

[M1r4g3]

In both raids and mythic+.

This expansion has really dropped the ball.

So many dead specs.

Its not just balance, its the class design itself, its pruned so hard and the rotations are so dumbed down and limited that you cant overcome your classes weaknesses just by playing better like you could in mop(in most cases).
They are designing the classes around the worst players so they can feel good about themselves when the game carries them with its systems, same way it does in HotS/Overwatch, which is also why they are failures as esports.

[Ange]

You mean the 2 weeks warriors were good the entire expansion? :P That was promptly nerfed (literally) within 2 weeks of EN going live meanwhile they let Blood DK be a juggernaut for the last year of the expansion in M+ and guardian druids reign supreme pretty much the entire expansion in raids.

A tank shouldn't be able to do this: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/217319161?t=29s

DK tanks allways could fail horrible with the active mitigation relaying on the timing of your deathstrike healing.

Do you really think for a second the current Protwarrior +30%-base-DPS over every single Tankspec and Thunderclap AoE nonsense is something to stay? There is no skillfloor or skillcap visible, just about every Protwarrior plays the same, there are no outliers at all.

[klepp0906]

? Spriest is 9% ahead of BM on aggregate mythic logs. Warlocks and Ele Shaman are way ahead of most specs.

2/3rds of Hunter specs are way behind, death knight and mage specs are suffering too.

Almost no one plays Sub, Arcane, Feral, Survival or Fire. Which you might attribute to the dire state of class design as well.

And that's just raids. Mythic+ balance is far worse, which admittedly it was terrible in Legion too.

not 9%!!`11111

ooiiii for homogeny! go!

[saidolol]

did some 10/11/12/13 spam earlier this week, had 10 diff boomkins, 9 sucked.

[burek]

Its not just balance, its the class design itself, its pruned so hard and the rotations are so dumbed down and limited that you cant overcome your classes weaknesses just by playing better like you could in mop(in most cases).

MoP is the outlier there, not BfA. It was like playing god mode and it was stupid. Casting while moving, immunities everywhere, all sorts of shit. Current design is more in line with all other expansions, and even better than some. For example, my class was nothing but spamming shadowbolt until wotlk. And then in wotlk affliction was just juggling 5 dots. Current one also has 5 dots + haunt, but they are coupled with resource and cooldown management and used in a much better way. And so on.

[anon5123]

Class balance has been shit for a while, OP. One of the reasons why I stopped playing retail; class balance is awful and swings like a pendulum with every major patch.....or you just have your class' major issues ignored over and over while the devs apply shitty band-aid fixes.

[Kaver]

It's really fun when people talk about specs they have no idea about.

Gingi was BM for escorting duty, a role people have quickly realised is not actually needed. Dmg wise, BM is bad and is only going to get worse. The more comfortable people get with fights (whether on long prog bosses like jaina or on farm, though farm is pretty meaningless) and the more gear people get, the worse BM will get. BM still scales VERY badly.

It's not like how things are now, is how things will stay. BM is actively getting worse comparatively, each week of gear people get.

Those who still play BM, do so because either they can't movement manage, their MM gear is very bad and their BM gear is good, they don't care about playing what's best or good or decent or they're delusional and think BMs mobility makes them do more dmg than other specs.

In saying that, the worse you are, or your guild is, the better BM will be/look. So for lower level guilds, it's a 100% viable option, because of how easy BM is in raid, and how tanky it is, making it really good for lower guilds where your healers tend to be pretty bad.

Gingi played BM for many fights in BoD. He would also play BM on Jaina no matter what.

But BM is just not a serious spec. It is so faceroll that it can be played by a monkey with no eyes.

[Khallid]

Give a shittiest spec to a very good player and he will outperform most FoTM re-rollers.

^^ Pretty much.

I'm pretty sure by definition only bad players reroll to FoTM. No reason to switch if you can play well with the class you like.

[shyguybman]

DK tanks allways could fail horrible with the active mitigation relaying on the timing of your deathstrike healing.

Do you really think for a second the current Protwarrior +30%-base-DPS over every single Tankspec and Thunderclap AoE nonsense is something to stay? There is no skillfloor or skillcap visible, just about every Protwarrior plays the same, there are no outliers at all.

By the end of Legion BDK didn't even need a healer (source, look at the MDI time trials 1 tank 4 dps) and we already saw how stupid they were in the beginning of this expansion. And you can argue the same for prot warrior, the ones with horrible shield block uptime get trucked. It's easier to screw up being a proactive tank rather than a reactive one.

[Tikishock]

Spec balance isn't that bad. What is bad is the level of meta slavery that is occurring at anything outside top 1%. Everyone now is a sim whore meta slave. Play what you want. Don't put up with people demanding you play best class/spec for H or non top 100 mythic. Its absurd but the community can just change its toxic attitude.

Quoted for truth. Meta slaves are ruining this game.