The problem with balancing classes around mythic raids

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

Haven't seen anyone state that casuals don't matter. But this guy is claiming that casuals doing worldquests should be the only thing that matters.

I just said I don't agree with him lol

- - - Updated - - -

Everyone in the game matters, the "casual matters" group wants to scream "CATER TO US" in everyones face, uninterrupted, because they're the biggest group of players. Ironically, WoW of all games cater a lot to the casual playerbase, they're just greedy and want everything, not just the majority.

Yeah thats how every group of people behave. Sometimes it has some amount of merit, but definitely not here, in this discussion.

[Hctaz]

As somebody who has done serious raiding since before they even had more than one difficulty... I agree that they shouldn't need to. They've put themselves in a situation where they have to. They can't afford not to because then mythic raiding will be busted as shit. I don't know specifically when the shift started, but I know there were problems going back to Wrath with certain specs being absolutely busted for certain mechanics. Disc priest was basically mandatory for Heroic Lich King as that one spec could invalidate the entire Infest mechanic by just throwing up PW:S on everybody before hand. I'd say that playing Classic WoW has shown me that raids are still fun to complete even when you can one shot most of the bosses. Honestly there's just a lot of fun to be had clearing out raids and getting some epic gear drops.

I think the mistake was making the hard mode a toggleable difficulty. Ulduar was pretty fun. I know it could be annoying when people accidentally activated the hard mode or had to actively stand there and wait because they completed the Thorim gauntlet too fast... but they could have iterated on the design they had come up with instead of scrapping it entirely and making the whole thing on Mimiron button press before the raid even starts. I think there is a lot more fun to be had when the heroic mode is seen as entirely optional and not a separate difficulty.

I guess a good example would be Legendary difficulty from Halo 3. I knew a lot of people who were not satisfied beating the game on... whatever it was below that. Heroic?... anyway, I knew a ton of people who were not satisfied beating the game on that difficulty DESPITE IT SAYING, "This is the way Halo was meant to be played." It was clearly the intended balancing. But then you slap on a Legendary mode and suddenly every gamer who considers beating a game on a lower difficulty to be inferior is going to touch that mode. Natural progression is bound to follow. That game mode that was made as an optional thing and probably wasn't tested or balanced correctly is now seen as the actual true way to play Halo. Now you have to balance everything around that mode instead of Heroic.

I think hard mode raiding should have remained as a completely optional thing offering SLIGHT (if any) power rewards but mostly cosmetic stuff like mounts. When you make it part of the game, you create the need for the game to be balanced around it.

TL;DR adding a toggleable raid difficulty was a mistake and hard modes should have remained optional like in Ulduar and reward only cosmetic stuff. Creating a separate difficulty means you are embracing that difficulty as "the true way to play the game" and you create a need to balance your game around that mode. See above post for Halo 3 reference.

[Osmeric]

Everyone in the game matters, the "casual matters" group wants to scream "CATER TO US" in everyones face, uninterrupted, because they're the biggest group of players. Ironically, WoW of all games cater a lot to the casual playerbase, they're just greedy and want everything, not just the majority.

Every individual player matters, which means large subgroups matter more than small subgroups. Casuals have that weight to throw around just because they are so numerous. It makes no business sense to damage the playing experience of the large groups of average players, just to cater to the small group of elite players.

[BeepBoo]

But if the decision is made to balance around the average play, what the really good players do is irrelevant. And this is as it should be, as the average players are much more numerous.

This is false. All this will do is lead to "average players" getting shunned even harder than they already do while having no chance to compete with good players who will be gods among men. Say the game is balanced around the average person and that person does 20k. Say good players do 40k on a spec that is blatantly OP in the hands of a skilled player (but balanced just fine in the hands of an average player). Why the hell would I ever not bring the OP good players? "Because it's not NECESSARY!" isn't a good enough answer. Necessary has nothing to do with it. It's not necessary for me to drive a lambo instead of a civic. It's not necessary to make 1 million a year instead of whatever it takes to live a normally fulfilling life. "Necessity" is a pathetic motivator for what people will seek. They'll seek what is best and easiest for what they have access to.

[Erolian]

As somebody who has done serious raiding since before they even had more than one difficulty... I agree that they shouldn't need to. They've put themselves in a situation where they have to. They can't afford not to because then mythic raiding will be busted as shit. I don't know specifically when the shift started, but I know there were problems going back to Wrath with certain specs being absolutely busted for certain mechanics. Disc priest was basically mandatory for Heroic Lich King as that one spec could invalidate the entire Infest mechanic by just throwing up PW:S on everybody before hand. I'd say that playing Classic WoW has shown me that raids are still fun to complete even when you can one shot most of the bosses. Honestly there's just a lot of fun to be had clearing out raids and getting some epic gear drops.

I think the mistake was making the hard mode a toggleable difficulty. Ulduar was pretty fun. I know it could be annoying when people accidentally activated the hard mode or had to actively stand there and wait because they completed the Thorim gauntlet too fast... but they could have iterated on the design they had come up with instead of scrapping it entirely and making the whole thing on Mimiron button press before the raid even starts. I think there is a lot more fun to be had when the heroic mode is seen as entirely optional and not a separate difficulty.

I guess a good example would be Legendary difficulty from Halo 3. I knew a lot of people who were not satisfied beating the game on... whatever it was below that. Heroic?... anyway, I knew a ton of people who were not satisfied beating the game on that difficulty DESPITE IT SAYING, "This is the way Halo was meant to be played." It was clearly the intended balancing. But then you slap on a Legendary mode and suddenly every gamer who considers beating a game on a lower difficulty to be inferior is going to touch that mode. Natural progression is bound to follow. That game mode that was made as an optional thing and probably wasn't tested or balanced correctly is now seen as the actual true way to play Halo. Now you have to balance everything around that mode instead of Heroic.

I think hard mode raiding should have remained as a completely optional thing offering SLIGHT (if any) power rewards but mostly cosmetic stuff like mounts. When you make it part of the game, you create the need for the game to be balanced around it.

TL;DR adding a toggleable raid difficulty was a mistake and hard modes should have remained optional like in Ulduar and reward only cosmetic stuff. Creating a separate difficulty means you are embracing that difficulty as "the true way to play the game" and you create a need to balance your game around that mode. See above post for Halo 3 reference.

The Halo example is actually a terrible one. Legendary existed in every Halo game before and after H3 and the game was never balanced around it. The game is balanced around multiplayer. The other dumb part is that Blizzard isn't even balancing around mythic raiding. They're balancing around players who actually know what they're doing and the content they actually produce. In this case its super easy to figure out if you notice that almost all PvP, raiding, and m+ is at the very least cleave if not full on multidotting and then take a peak at what is actually being nerfed. I don't know if people just went blind or something but single target has been the niche for just about a decade now and letting multidot classes run wild with the current balancing makes no sense since most of the encounters/designs that Blizzard uses are going to favor that gameplay style

[Osmeric]

This is false.

What was false? The rest of your word salad didn't explain.

[Gaidax]

Every individual player matters, which means large subgroups matter more than small subgroups. Casuals have that weight to throw around just because they are so numerous. It makes no business sense to damage the playing experience of the large groups of average players, just to cater to the small group of elite players.

You make it sound as if said majority even gives the flying fuck about all this shit.

[Great Destiny Man]

You make it sound as if said majority even gives the flying fuck about all this shit.

Eh, it's the same old story. People identify as casual and that somehow qualifies them to know the thought process of every casual player on the planet.

[Relapses]

Spicy take irrelevant to the discussion: I wish wow was based around everyone having at least 80apm. Or at least high enough apm to where people's twitch-reactions could be incorrect, or the ability to even keep the pace would cause differentiation among players.

The reduction of APM, the dumbing down of specs, the increased reliance on your whole group to do mechanics properly or you wipe, and the massive rng in gear has led the game away from the skill-based competitive PVE raid sim I knew and loved.

If I wanted to play a high-APM Moba I'd boot up and play a high-APM Moba. I don't really understand this sentiment at all.

[villie]

Some of these responses are hilarious, what would you have them balance the game around instead???

The only complaint i see of merit is the current disparity in the healer meta for 15+ keys and up with Rdruids starting at 42% of representation rising to 70% at keys of 20+, sure that needs looking at and tuning other than that, the balancing of the game is as it is becuase of these reasons:

1. Raiding. If you are not in the 1% doing Mythic difficulty raiding then balancing is irrelevant and not something you should even bother being concerned about since below Mythic difficulty the content you are doing is so much easier that it is nothing to do with min/max numbers and everything to do with your ability/skill as a player. If you are struggling with content you should look at your own performance and not that you are doing 5% less damage/healing than other classes.

2. PVP. If you are below 2-2.1k rating again balancing is largley irrelevant even more so since pvp largley is comp dependant. You can have a spec that is not performing well in raids but is a total power house in pvp, i.e WW monks for example in the right comp. Having said that you can almost pretty much play any comp to 2k rating if you have the will and skill. However at high rating balancing becomes of massive importance due to the level of play meaning single mistakes can cost you the match and having broken damage/healing due to inflated numbers can hugely affect the meta so it needs to be balanced around this level (look at the recent nerfs to resto druid for example). It is a total impossibility to balance PVP around world pvp or battlegrounds, the sheer amount of variety, randomess just makes that totally impossible.

TL-DR: If you are not in the 1% Mythic raiding bracket or high rated pvp then balancing largley doesn't matter and will not stop you from beating/playing content at lower PvE difficulty levels/PvP rating, period.

[BeepBoo]

If I wanted to play a high-APM Moba I'd boot up and play a high-APM Moba. I don't really understand this sentiment at all.

What's to understand? The game is most enjoyable when you're spamming spells during hero. Wow's biggest appeal to me was the fact that it offers a unique competitive experience in the form of a cooperative PVE environment instead of direct PVP, coupled with the fact that I enjoy twitch-based gameplay. Limiting a genre to a specific style of play or apm is idiotic. There can be cross over.

A moba doesn't feel like a raid.

[Djanco]

if you dont mythic raid then what does it matter how much damage or healing you do? so you can outperform people in island expeditions? explain.

as was stated earlier, the game isnt even balanced around mythic raiding or m+ or anything but players who know what they're doing (with optimal gearing), and the content blizzard actually produces.

[docterfreeze]

I don't think they're doing much balancing at all, no matter who they're balancing around. Affliction is the only spec getting a couple of their garbage talents buffed but every spec needs that treatment in multiple talent tiers. Some specs have been using the same talents for the entire expansion because some talents have no competition.

Same with azerite. Marksman hunter for example got their lethal shots talent changed late into uldir to get rid of the 2 button build. It relied on the steady aim trait and ever since that change steady aim has been trash with no compensation buffs. Rapid reload is even worse, it has never been good. It's supposed to be a marksman trait but beast master is the spec that gets some use out of it. Any azerite piece that has rapid reload will only have 1 usable MM trait in one ring and three BM traits. I'm sure other specs have similar useless traits.

[lollerlaban]

Idk man MoP had some pretty good class design/balance

Laughs in Warlock, Monk and Disc priest.

- - - Updated - - -

If I wanted to play a high-APM Moba I'd boot up and play a high-APM Moba. I don't really understand this sentiment at all.

You're more than welcome to play the specs that have 40% downtime, meanwhile we can enjoy actually pressing buttons

[Relapses]

Laughs in Warlock, Monk and Disc priest.

- - - Updated - - -


You're more than welcome to play the specs that have 40% downtime, meanwhile we can enjoy actually pressing buttons

It doesn't have to be one end of the spectrum or the other. All I mentioned is that the Soul Swap mechanic from SoO felt more like role-playing as a professional Korean StarCraft player than it did a MMO. I get it, some people like that. I didn't. And I don't think I'm in a minority when I say that. There are plenty of games which can scratch that particular itch if I have it, I just don't see how WoW benefits from catering to this type of playstyle.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

I think hard mode raiding should have remained as a completely optional thing offering SLIGHT (if any) power rewards but mostly cosmetic stuff like mounts. When you make it part of the game, you create the need for the game to be balanced around it.

If you put mounts and things behind Heroic/Mythic, people will say they are forced to do those raids for that cosmetic stuff.

[Weatherwax]

Was it satisfactory in every bit of the content? You know, people in Wow community had always complained about everything in every xpac ever. 5 or 10 years after, everything is said to be the greatest xpac/dungeons/balance... When you hear guys telling vanilla has a good class balance.
Beware of nostalgia. Older xpac are like your first coitus, you feel it was great but you'll be unsatisfied if you were to have it right now.

Class-wise? Yes, it was satisfactory in every bit of the content. All classes were actually fun to play and performed well enough to be able to be used in any content.

Just check the graphs, people running heroic raids (which was the top tier content) didn't obligatorily have to take only the exact same comp every damned run because if you didn't take the EXACT SAME CLASSES AS EVERYONE ELSE you couldn't progress at all.

[Hctaz]

If you put mounts and things behind Heroic/Mythic, people will say they are forced to do those raids for that cosmetic stuff.

And? It’s only cosmetic. It doesn’t affect your gameplay in any way. They lock plenty of cosmetic only items behind insane grinds (which is all that mythic raiding is anyway).
I’ll gladly kill Mythic Argus but damn you to hell if you think I’ve unlocked more than two of the Argent Tournament mounts or completed the Molten Front quests.

Those are hard in their own unique way.

[Sangfoudre]

Class-wise? Yes, it was satisfactory in every bit of the content. All classes were actually fun to play and performed well enough to be able to be used in any content.

Just check the graphs, people running heroic raids (which was the top tier content) didn't obligatorily have to take only the exact same comp every damned run because if you didn't take the EXACT SAME CLASSES AS EVERYONE ELSE you couldn't progress at all.

Atm, not a single class is truly subpar (you set the range to class instead of specs) in every bit of the content are they ? I reckon some specs are behind in some parts but not an entire class.