The problem with balancing classes around mythic raids

[united]

You totally left out pvp where the spriest and disc priest are heavily nerfed because of some inane mythic raid where dots add up faster. 1 or 2 encounters breaks classes. Spriests need the spirits for both damage and insanity generation the nerfs hurt.

And who are you to say people need or don't need buffs/nerfs because they do wq, or islands and stuff. They're not paying for you to be balanced because you want to be the 2% who do mythic raids. fuck mythic raids. total waste of time and money.

You also left out Mythic+ where our overlords the druids get buffed but priests get nerfed again.

You shouldn't say anything anymore you're totally wrong.

Blizzard should leave you 2% mythic raiders in the lurch and just make a fun game. mythic raiding and buffing/nerfing classes based on it ruins the game.

I couldn’t agree more.

[Gasparde]

You have to balance around someone who knows what they're doing, and sadly that's pretty much only the case in mythic - if you don't do that you'll simply never have anything close to balance in your game.

Like, ideally these nerfs in 1 place were accompanied by buffs in other places, ideally we wouldn't have that silly system of some classes need to have a clear an defined weakness to make up for their clear and defined strengths............ while there are classes that don't have any weaknesses and are just always good....

It also sucked that we're living in this world where a single nerf can easily result in your character suddenly wanting a completely new set of gear with all new stats... in a world where they've so deliberately made it hard to get the most impactful pieces of gear... but that's just Blizzard being incompetent and unwilling to move away from their treadmill systems.

You have to start balancing around something at least somewhat constant. If you balance around lil worldquesting Timmy you'll just end up with certain specs not being viable for anything in the eyes of the community or certain specs being so op that everyone wants to bring nothing but these specs - if you balance around lil worldquesting Timmy you might as well remove mythic raiding and rated pvp altogether because we'll know exactly what things are gonna look like. Again, it'd be great if there were compansation buffs for the nerfs to 'broken' abilities... but that's just not Blizzard... because Blizzard has a stupid approach when it comes to class balance in this game.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

You totally left out pvp where the spriest and disc priest are heavily nerfed because of some inane mythic raid where dots add up faster. 1 or 2 encounters breaks classes. Spriests need the spirits for both damage and insanity generation the nerfs hurt.

And who are you to say people need or don't need buffs/nerfs because they do wq, or islands and stuff. They're not paying for you to be balanced because you want to be the 2% who do mythic raids. fuck mythic raids. total waste of time and money.

You also left out Mythic+ where our overlords the druids get buffed but priests get nerfed again.

You shouldn't say anything anymore you're totally wrong.

Blizzard should leave you 2% mythic raiders in the lurch and just make a fun game. mythic raiding and buffing/nerfing classes based on it ruins the game.

If the game isn't fun because of small buffs/nerfs here or there, then the game probably wasn't much fun to begin with.

Objectively, balancing matters less when it comes to WQ, because they are so ridiculously easy, it just doesn't matter.

[Somewhatconcerned]

such as WQs taking longer than previously...

Sarcasm or is this a serious metric now??

[Sangfoudre]

Sarcasm or is this a serious metric now??

I gagged a bit reading (and commenting) that earlier. With L3 crucible, WQ are a joke now. Even most of Nazjatar ones.

[Osmeric]

how do you even tune round not playing perfect? Is this possible?

You look at your server stats at what "average" players are achieving, and balance around that.

[LordVargK]

Interrupts? Every melee/tank spec has an interrupt on short CD, ranged on 24 to 30s (elem excepted). Except demonology, every spec has an interrupt.

okay, you're right. my mistake.

But my point was, that the reasoning "back in the day, not every class could do everything" might have been feasable, because there were much less mechanics to be dealt with, even when handling trashmobs. but today you either trivialize the content or you give classes the tools to deal with difficult encounters.

[Krille]

You look at your server stats at what "average" players are achieving, and balance around that.

How do you balance around something that is extremely trivial and doesnt require you to play your class optimally anyway?

[BananaHandsB]

Idk man MoP had some pretty good class design/balance

Seeing as challenge mode dungeons were nowhere near the level of competitiveness as M+, this point is moot. Doing challenge mode golds back then, was essentially like completing a +10 now (even easier than most +10 from my memory, and yes I did them all in MoP). To compare BFA tuning to MoP we'd have to set the max M+ to +10 tops and scale the difficulty of raids down significantly (making balance much more forgiving).

Simply put, the game was different in MoP and balance was much more forgiving due to the relative difficulty/competitiveness of the content. Not really comparable to today's game. Things may have seemed more balanced, but take it to the extreme M+ and mythic raid levels people are playing at today, and the imbalances would become just as apparent then as they are now.

[Raone]

I’m not asking for perfect balance. I’m asking them to stop balancing around only mythic raids. Purposely misrepresenting what I’m saying isn’t an argument.

They don't though, if they did Mistweaver/Resto Druid/R Shaman wouldn't be this far behind, yet they are for entire expansion with no changes in sight.

I mean rogues are still OP as hell for soloing soak mechanics in raids, hunters still are meh damage and they only ever bring one, still class stack Warlocks (and recently SP's)like crazy, bring very little to no melee most fights ... they don't balance around Mythic Raiding at all ... and as for M+ ... how many seasons has it been bring as many rogues as you can?

Arena however ... yes they do balance around that, because anything fun or overpowered can't exist there. I honestly believe the moment they focused on arena being an Esport is when class direction started going downhill.

[Osmeric]

How do you balance around something that is extremely trivial and doesnt require you to play your class optimally anyway?

You look at your server stats at what "average" players are achieving, and balance around that.

[BananaHandsB]

You look at your server stats at what "average" players are achieving, and balance around that.

If you balance solely around the average player, you get extreme outliers, which can make designing challenging encounters virtually impossible as guilds will just start stacking the outliers.

[Osmeric]

If you balance solely around the average player, you get extreme outliers, which can make designing challenging encounters virtually impossible as guilds will just start stacking the outliers.

We could play tiny violins for those wanting those encounters.

[CrawlFromThePit]

What’s the percentage of players that actually do a full mythic clear? 2%? 3%? And yet in 8.3, ALL of the class tuning changes have been around mythic.

Priests are getting nerfed heavily. Shadow is having shadowy aspirations nerfed to uselessness, and the strength of all their offensive spells nerfed by 8-10 percent. Congrats, they won’t be nearly as ahead of everyone on niche mythic fights... but you made them even worse in PvP and mythic+.

Disc is also getting nerfed heavily, with their atonement taking a hit, again. I mean seriously they’re supposed to be the healer that heals by doing damage, you’re making them worse at that because of a meta for a single raid?

WW is getting hefty buffs. A class that is already strong in PvP will be made even stronger because they’re *check notes* middle of the pack in mythic raids.

But here’s my favorite... they’re buffing the high noon Azerite trait. This is a trait that resto druids (the kings/queens of mythic +) already use, but because they focus all their balancing on mythic raids nobody cares about, these devs are actually buffing the best healer for mythic + while continuing leave the other healers in the dust.

I say blizzard should stop balancing around elitism (mythic raids) and start balancing around content that the majority of people actually do.

1. First of all, calm down.
2. Doing mythic raid is not elitism, get that out of your head.
3. These changes only affect the top % of players doing the highest rank possible of PVP or M+ just like the top end of mythic raiding. The majority of players in every feature of the game can succeed by using any class and forget they have their fishing pole on. So these changes probably don't affect you at all.
4. PvP has different balancing so there's big chances that whatever gets out of control because of these "mythic raiding only changes" will get rebalanced for PvP
5. Following point 5, before doing the PvP balancing they need to finalize the PvE balancing first
6. Will they balance things correctly? Of course not, they have failed for 15 years it's not gonna change today, so why even keep crying about it? Just accept that the game will never be properly balanced and move on.

[Sangfoudre]

Almost everyone I know clears mythic every tier.

This kind of argument is rotten to the core.
And it's false, a vast majority of people (95% or more) don't ever see the final raid boss in it highest difficulty before nerfs and gear make the fight far less difficult.
Mythic Jaina has been killed by less than 2000 guilds. As of today (october the 28th). It's very few people, so maybe eeeeeveryone you know but you don't know everyone.

[Redroniksre]

Yeah, i will argue to the death that i think the gearing system and content delivery should not be for the 5% of the players that do Mythic, but when it comes to tuning there is really no reason not to do it based around high level play. Most people doing Heroic and under are not skilled enough to push out a 10% difference when balancing hits, so even their theoretical maximum is likely not going to be reached. For those of us who don't participate in raids, the effect of the balancing will be barely noticeable, and really a non-issue.

This kind of argument is rotten to the core.
And it's false, a vast majority of people (95% or more) don't ever see the final raid boss in it highest difficulty before nerfs and gear make the fight far less difficult.
Mythic Jaina has been killed by less than 2000 guilds. As of today (october the 28th). It's very few people, so maybe eeeeeveryone you know but you don't know everyone.

Last hard number we had (WoD) had normal Blackrock foundry with a 30% entry rate, but only a 12% clear rate. This drops down to a 20% entry for Heroic, and a 9% clear rate. Raiding has not been remotely popular in a long, long time.

[BeepBoo]

You could balance around that, which would lead either to marginalization of the DoT aspect of said classes (which already affects design by shifting damage from DoT to Direct damage) or you could just nerf their damage overall, making them useless in single target fights.

All this shows is a lack of vision or ideas on how to solve the problem.

You can keep dots relevant and balanced for multi-target and single target: Just have it impossible, mechanically, to stack max dots on everything that's up.

Something like "A warlock will only ever get 10 dots up at one time strictly because they won't be able to cast the dot more than 10 times before the first iteration falls off. You can put them all on one thing or 1 on 10 things."

Boom. Warlock now still spends time being a dot maintenance class from a gameplay standpoint, but performance is centered around maintaining those dots and is agnostic to how many enemies there are.

[Elkfingers]

If the classes are balanced in the context of maximal performance, they're balanced in every other scenario too. If you're balanced doing 100% of your potential output, you're balanced achieving 70% of that too. That's how numbers work.

The idea that you'd somehow be able to use different parameters is mad.

Is the plan to determine some metric to measure relative difficulty of each class, and then scale the output up and down depending on how easy/hard it is for a shit player to fuck it up?

Do we balance every class purely around a 3-4 second burst window to standardise the length of time WQs take?

Would it be better, maybe, to scale down the complexity to just one button for each class that does a set amount of damage when you press it? That would certainly balance things at the lower-end.

What the fuck, exactly, is the plan of action here?

[united]

1. First of all, calm down.
2. Doing mythic raid is not elitism, get that out of your head.
3. These changes only affect the top % of players doing the highest rank possible of PVP or M+ just like the top end of mythic raiding. The majority of players in every feature of the game can succeed by using any class and forget they have their fishing pole on. So these changes probably don't affect you at all.
4. PvP has different balancing so there's big chances that whatever gets out of control because of these "mythic raiding only changes" will get rebalanced for PvP
5. Following point 5, before doing the PvP balancing they need to finalize the PvE balancing first
6. Will they balance things correctly? Of course not, they have failed for 15 years it's not gonna change today, so why even keep crying about it? Just accept that the game will never be properly balanced and move on.

Amazing. Every word of what you said is wrong.

[CrawlFromThePit]

Amazing. Every word of what you said is wrong.

Nice claim, now prove it instead of being offended.