Blizzard's obsession with balancing sucked the fun out of the classes.

[Thrif]

Not like Blizzard gave a lot of fuel to people by adding rather competitive modes such as Arena, Mythic raiding and M+.

I'm not arguing for the removal of these modes, but you also have to say, if you introduce these modes and put the best rewards behind it, people expect a modicum of balance.

Yes, this one is more on Blizzard than the fans, really. Them trying to push an MMO into being competitive/e-sportsy when the genre itself has been successful due to the completely opposite reasons is just such a braindead move. But hey, if you want to have to hide your sub numbers, that's one way to do it.

[Craaazyyy]

true, but i don't think it's just their obsession with balancing, also it's funny how they fucked the classes but balance is still shit.. says a lot about blizzard

[FelPlague]

Balancing is what led to the homogenization of all classes. It made the gameplay sterile and stale.

Instead of focusing on making the classes feel fun, on giving them flavor, they focused on balancing. And as as inevitable result of that, we've seen pruning and standardization of abilities and all classes ending up playing the same like all others. Each class now has a button for X, a button for Y, a rotation that builds a resource and spends it etc...

I'd take an unbalanced but fun game over a standardized and homogenized but polished turd any day.

Blizzard's obsession? do you mean the players obsession? blizz has many times in the past stated and made stuff to be purposfully overpowered or underpowered.
Death knights were made to be stronger then other classes. but issue is players want balance, in these days if their class and spec is not the best spec, then its the worst spec.

- - - Updated - - -

Yes, this one is more on Blizzard than the fans, really. Them trying to push an MMO into being competitive/e-sportsy when the genre itself has been successful due to the completely opposite reasons is just such a braindead move. But hey, if you want to have to hide your sub numbers, that's one way to do it.

A game does not need to be balanced to be competitive, look to blizzards other games, hearthstone, starcraft, overwatch, their charecterrs, playstyles, etc, are not balanced, but they are countered by eachother. and blizz understands this, but wow players NEED their class to be the best, or they get mad.

[derpkitteh]

they should really never nerf.

if, for example, warlock is too strong, buff every other class to be as strong.

[Drusin]

yet you are more than happy to throw your money at them. Why is that?

You know you don't need to use actual money for anything wow related anymore.

[Advent]

FFXIV is almost perfectly balanced and almost always is: only slipping up typically for the first few months of an expansion.

Their inability to balance things has nothing to do with the classes getting stale, its just bad devs.

Oh, clearly. It can't be because that game has no class specializations. You want to be a warrior? Then you must be a tank. You want to dial wield weapons? Your only choice is a rogue/ninja. Let's not pretend the devs of that game are geniuses of some kind, they just put themselves in a box and severely limited class play styles, nothing more.

[Super Kami Dende]

FFXIV is almost perfectly balanced and almost always is: only slipping up typically for the first few months of an expansion.

Their inability to balance things has nothing to do with the classes getting stale, its just bad devs.

That's a joke right? FFXIV still has balance issues even with 1/3rd the Specs in the game.

With only 11 DPS "specs" there is still a slanted trend when it comes to DPS. Just like in WOW.

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/33#dpstype=pdps

[Thrif]

A game does not need to be balanced to be competitive, look to blizzards other games, hearthstone, starcraft, overwatch, their charecterrs, playstyles, etc, are not balanced, but they are countered by eachother. and blizz understands this, but wow players NEED their class to be the best, or they get mad.

I guess that boils down to it being the only way to distinguish yourself in raids nowadays. In the games you mentioned you play to win and that's it, but in WoW everyone can kill the bosses so it's all about topping the damage meters instead, which in turn hugely increases their demand on a well balanced or overperforming class.

[KoolKidKaos]

That's funny. I keep hearing how everything is unbalanced. Also, fuck the ppl who say Blizzard never listened, because IMHO it is a direct result of listening.

It is unfair that dwarf priests have fear ward, it is unfair that Alliance has Paladins, it is unfair that only warriors tank, it is unfair that I can't level in a heal / tank specc, it is unfair only Horde has shamans, it is unfair that we must bring a shaman for Bloodlust, it is unfair...it is unfair...bla..bla..bla..I bet I missed a ton.

But yeah...ppl here still come to the end result that nothing is fun anymore. So you fit right in with your thread(as) and enjoy the attention.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH

Everything you just listed has nothing to do with play style and the way classes feel, congrats you just wasted everyone's time with a pointless reply.

And the current game isn't what players asked for, most of the worst ideas implemented in retail no one asked for. No one sat there and said hey we should randomly get loot that triggers a 2-16 item level boost completely random.

No one asked for LFR, they asked for easier raids for the more casual player, which could have easily just been an easier raid, not an entirely random toxic LFD style raid, where the worst players migrate to, and the worst trolls to make sure it's harder than normal content to finish.

No one asked for Cross Realm Zones, they just wanted a way to group with friends from another server, not merge servers together so it really doesn't matter what server you're on.

Stop acting like the community brought retail upon themselves, Devs change class playstyle every singe expansion for no reason, other than to make it feel more shiny and new. Even though it's just a polished turd.

[Gimlix]

Balancing is what led to the homogenization of all classes. It made the gameplay sterile and stale.

Instead of focusing on making the classes feel fun, on giving them flavor, they focused on balancing. And as as inevitable result of that, we've seen pruning and standardization of abilities and all classes ending up playing the same like all others. Each class now has a button for X, a button for Y, a rotation that builds a resource and spends it etc...

I'd take an unbalanced but fun game over a standardized and homogenized but polished turd any day.

I have always thought like you did.
Removal of anything fun (like hunters being able to control their pet etc) it might be unnecessary and maybe unbalanced at some ways. but that made WoW fun.
The way to be able to fuck around due the ways bugging/balancing worked.

Now everyone must be on the same line or else it aint fair and if it aint fair it aint fun which is not true at all.

[dacoolist]

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH

Everything you just listed has nothing to do with play style and the way classes feel, congrats you just wasted everyone's time with a pointless reply.

And the current game isn't what players asked for, most of the worst ideas implemented in retail no one asked for. No one sat there and said hey we should randomly get loot that triggers a 2-16 item level boost completely random.

No one asked for LFR, they asked for easier raids for the more casual player, which could have easily just been an easier raid, not an entirely random toxic LFD style raid, where the worst players migrate to, and the worst trolls to make sure it's harder than normal content to finish.

No one asked for Cross Realm Zones, they just wanted a way to group with friends from another server, not merge servers together so it really doesn't matter what server you're on.

Stop acting like the community brought retail upon themselves, Devs change class playstyle every singe expansion for no reason, other than to make it feel more shiny and new. Even though it's just a polished turd.

The community is the entire reason BFA is BFA, it's what the community wanted unfortunately brother - All of these quick changes to fix new systems were changes the community wanted as well. NOW, I will say the corrupted system was blizzards anti titanforge thing that tbh.. I mean it pretty much backfired as far as I can tell - Corruption is super unbalanced even after the balance passes because from people like Preacher: You literally play roulette every time you fight a boss - even people with the SAME corruptions get HUGE differences per pull etc..


ANYWAY, I love you all

[Flurryfang]

I think they should do things a bit closer to how League and Dota are doing things. They found out, that balance is boring and that it limits design space. Make things unbalanced, make them wierd and maybe even OP, and then just "balance" things often enough to make sure, that somebody is not always on top. Make fire mage really good for a tier and then nerf it to be average the next. Give people their moment to shine and then move it on to the next class.

[mhdoe]

It is mostly the players who complain about balance who ruined things.

[Kyphael]

Not just that, it has now robbed us of a new class.

[Puri]

While I agree that the homogenization of specs has removed many fun parts and the identity of a spec, I also realize that your class/spec not being viable or feasable for content X also sucks out quite an amount of fun out of the game.

So somewhere you have to find the sweet spot, and since this probably is impossible to do in the first place there will be no other chance than experimenting with the specs and constantly shift the balance.

[Kralljin]

very true, people have been complaining about balance forever and the result is blizzard listening

but maybe balance is not fun?

Yes and no.

The problem is simply that if you create game modes that appeal towards competitive people, they are going to expect some sort of balance.
If you then also put pretty prestigous rewards behind that content and host tournaments on top of that, you can't turn around and say "fun comes first, balance later!".

On top of that, the overall class design also plays a role.
As Shaman, it never bothered me by a huge marigin during Vanilla / TBC that i was a weaker dps than other classes, i still had value for the party based on buffs.

But since Wotlk and the removal of these unique buffs, my value is mainly measured by dps, so if i no longer bring unique buffs, i expect to be on par with other dps.
People sometimes attempt to paint these people in a negative light, but at the end of the day, i think a lot of people simply want to bring maximum benefit to their party while also playing their favorite spec, which is by no means unreasonable, but if you turn its own dps into the sole metric of a useful nonhealer / nontank, that's the way it goes.

Also, the focus on small group sizes is one huge nightmare in terms of balance.
In raids, you can get away with having a few more niche / unique things, the higher you climb in PvP or M+, that gets extremely difficult because a single party member carries so much weight.

I mean, while they said they moved away from "bring the player, not the class", "mandatory" abilities such as MC or Spellsteal are still Mythic only.

At the end of day, it goes back to a fundamental criticism of WoW's design over the past expansion: What sort of game should WoW be?
And the devs are still on this two way track, attempting to unite a game inheritely prone to imbalance with competitive aspects.

Yes, this one is more on Blizzard than the fans, really. Them trying to push an MMO into being competitive/e-sportsy when the genre itself has been successful due to the completely opposite reasons is just such a braindead move. But hey, if you want to have to hide your sub numbers, that's one way to do it.

I disagree on the count that it is the players fault, game design is not a democracy.
The devs have the power in this regard, not the players, they need to have a vision on what their game should be.

If you implement modes that are by nature competitive, you will have people that are going to ask for balance, especially if you put prestigous rewards behind it.

Rob Pardo flat out said in 2009 that Arena was huge one mistake that should've never happened.
Has Blizzard explored different ideas for PvP? There's RBG, which they treated as the bastard sibling of Arena and Ashran which crashed and burned.

In my opinion this drive towards competitiveness (or rather, greater challenges on a skill level) seems to stem from an attempt to make the game more accessible while trying to keep the audience that is usually more isolated by these changes.

Like: "Well, you don't need to farm XYZ because some players hated it, now you can instead wipe 300 times on this super challenging boss!"

And quite frankly, i don't think the top end players don't have a lot to say when it comes to the overall game design, did you hear complaints of "bars being too full" during MoP from high end players?
Yet Blizzard still went and pruned, because their internal metric have (seemingly) shown that only a handful of mages actually use abilities like Alter time.
Why in the world not being used = needs to be removed is beyond me but that's a different story.

Same goes for corruption or titanforging, most competitive / hardcore players did / do not like these systems, yet Blizzard went ahead.
The removal of ML was also universally disliked among the Mythic scene, yet Blizzard did it.

The question who or what the target audience is of WoW is something i ask myself, but as a hardcore raider, i can say that it's not the top end of players.

[McNeil]

I do agree it sucks but I wouldn't put all the blame on Blizzard, its also the playerbase who keep yelling for better balance and the end result will be homogenization of all specs. WoW should be a MMORPG at first so in my mind classes should have more RPG elements and unique class fantasy to stand out. I would say that WotLK hit the sweet spot were most classes were properly balanced without sacrificing class identity to do so.

Their push towards e-sport certainly isn't helping. It turns the game more and more into an arcady action style RPG which also pulls you out of the world all the time because of an overabundance of instanced content. I've accepted that Blizzard will never be able to actually do a proper balance job, so if anything I'd like to see them do more classes and specs while also at least trying to keep them on par with another power wise. I don't like that when demon hunters were released they only got 2 specs rather than 3, and now with Shadowlands we aren't even getting a new class at all despite the fact that every expansion consistently has gotten a new one after an expansion that didn't. And now classes have always been a lot of fun content which can really carry an expansions quality.

[Alcsaar]

On one hand, i agree with you. On the other, i don't want to play a game where the spec i want to play gets declined for the content i want to play because it's shit in it. They can either balance specs to all perform well enough in all levels of content, which leads to homogenization, or they can make the content so easy that it can be done regardless. Both options are bad, and i'm really not sure what the solution would be here.

This is one of the primary reasons I quit. Alongside terrible gearing options and not getting the "good" traits, it felt like the classes/specs I was interested in playing were considered absolute garbage in M+ and trying to get a group invite was like pulling teeth. Not to mention having to rely on a stupid addon telling people if I was "good enough" or not.

[Voidism]

I agree. Their focus on balancing the classes for the top 5 % makes the game quite unfun in the long run in my opinion.

Sometimes they nerf classes that are already weak at low or mid item level, which to many is just baffling (or buff specs that are already great at lower ilvl - like my frost mage outperforming the other specs got a buff recently. Thanks I guess :P). Also, the top 5 % will always always pick the thing that's 1 % better even so why even bother with that level of balancing precision?

[Dellis0991]

Balancing is what led to the homogenization of all classes. It made the gameplay sterile and stale.

Instead of focusing on making the classes feel fun, on giving them flavor, they focused on balancing. And as as inevitable result of that, we've seen pruning and standardization of abilities and all classes ending up playing the same like all others. Each class now has a button for X, a button for Y, a rotation that builds a resource and spends it etc...

I'd take an unbalanced but fun game over a standardized and homogenized but polished turd any day.

It was never fun when it was unbalanced.... because when it was unbalanced you had a bunch of premades rolling with the same "fun" class clogging up battlegrounds steamrolling the other side. Any time you hit a spell and that spell is going off like a god damn nuke you got to know in your heart and brain that the devs goofed the numbers somewhere and a /nerf/hotfix/balance is coming at some point.