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

[Kaver]

The quality is not very very low outside of Mythic+ or Raids. And that is where the bias shows and why thing comments like this are silly. Objectively non-raid and M+ stuff is of a decent quality compared to what was offered prior. The majority of Blizzard's dev time has gone into content other then M+ or Raids. As seen by all the crap there is to do. They haven't even added that much to M+ over the course of the expansion to require "time". But they have done a ton of story lines and other stuff comparatively.

The story line is not a part of the gameplay of WoW. The reason why balancing is so important for both Blizzard and the players, is because the main gameplay of WoW requires balancing. WoW is turning into an Action RPG. Nothing wrong with that but some people don't like it. I do.

[Nuba]

I'll counter OP saying that they barely did any balancing patch in the past 12 months, actually they only did ONE balance patch in the last 5 (6?)

so yeah, they couldnt care less about balance.


let's all be honest here: World of Warcraft hasn't been this unbalanced since PvP Season 6 (second season of wotlk)

they ARE obsessed with creating SYSTEMs, and those SYSTEMS are taking valuable $$resources$$ out of world building and an actual story development

[rhorle]

The story line is not a part of the gameplay of WoW. The reason why balancing is so important for both Blizzard and the players, is because the main gameplay of WoW requires balancing.

Quests and the story they tell is not part of game play? See this is my point about bias. You are creating arbitrary rules that only you know in order to prop your argument up. World content still requires balancing and much of balancing is not about raids or Mythic+ but about players feeling "good" about picking a role, class, or spec compared to the others.

You don't need class balance for raiding as is evident by Vanilla which didn't have broad class balance across the board.

[Hyeonh]

All i know is it's not the same dev team working on WoW anymore, all of them have moved on to another project or left the company, the current team is trying hard to make this game too much like Diablo. It just doesn't mix that well when the rng heavy aspects from diablo worked because you had unlimited chances to keep farming while WoW is time gated and limited attempts for loot. As for class they've sucked out everything that made them unique in the name of simplicity. A Warrior today isn't thee warrior back then, instead they're cut up into three pieces known as Arms, fury and prot warrior, gone are the days of hybridizing such as 60% arms and 40% fury talent warrior known as Mortal Strike Fury.

[stomination]

I don't even know how a thread like this can be made. None of the specs play like each other. Fire Mage plays nothing like a SPriest. Moonkin plays nothing like an Elemental Shaman. Each spec has its own individual feel and you can only come to the conclusion that classes are "homogenized" if you subscribe to the oh-so-fucking-original school of thought that everything Blizzard does is because fuck you and you individually.

Some classes are more dull than others, yes, but this idea that they "all play the same" is total fucking bullshit.

Cast spell wait for proc follow proc with other spell. aoe when aoe is optimal. repeat fishing procs while casting the basic spell.

[Kaver]

Quests and the story they tell is not part of game play? See this is my point about bias. You are creating arbitrary rules that only you know in order to prop your argument up. World content still requires balancing and much of balancing is not about raids or Mythic+ but about players feeling "good" about picking a role, class, or spec compared to the others.

You don't need class balance for raiding as is evident by Vanilla which didn't have broad class balance across the board.

Questing and levelling is not a major part of the game anymore. People do world quests to get AP, but world quests are not enjoyable content. It's very low quality content.

Raiding in vanilla didn't require precise balancing.

Raiding and M+ in current WoW (BFA) do require precise balancing.

Blizzard are taking WoW in a direction where instanced content equate to a much larger part of the gameplay than it did back in the days. Current WoW is far from what Classic WoW is/was and the current player base of retail want balancing.

[KaPe]

Cast spell wait for proc follow proc with other spell. aoe when aoe is optimal. repeat fishing procs while casting the basic spell.

Wow, you just described every class in every mmo. "Use your main ability, then use another ability if its ready, aoe when you need to." Just like every boss fight/PvP duel is "reduce their hitpoints to zero before they do it to you". If you take out any nuance and details, then it's obvious you'll end up with "same" description for drastically different activities.

[lollerlaban]

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.

Excuse me? Shadowbringers has probaly shown how little they actually know about their dps. Stuff like NIN release and SMN fix springs to mind at how grotesque they were

[Tomana]

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

I'm not a FFXIV expert, but doesn't this game has the possibility of playing all the "classes" (or jobs, or w/e they are called) on a single character?
If so, then class balance is kinda secondary, IMHO.

[Quaade]

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.

Boring and sucking out the fun of the classes has nothing to do with the word balancing. They only mean that and balancing can happen without making the classes boring as long as the changes made stick to the narrative, or class fantasy, of the class.

It's the same as the "good is dumb" phrase.

Good is good and dumb is dumb. Someone can be good and frighteningly competent, see also Captain Carrot Ironfunderson af the Ankh-Morpok City Watch.

[MoanaLisa]

Classes don't play anything alike and the game at this point with all of the corruption stuff is more unbalanced than ever.

Good times, right?

[rhorle]

It just doesn't mix that well when the rng heavy aspects from diablo worked because you had unlimited chances to keep farming while WoW is time gated and limited attempts for loot

I see people claim WoW is to much like Diablo but in the end really isn't. Also Mythic+, the repeatable content for loot, is one of the biggest success of modern WoW according to a lot of players. Also there are a lot of developers working on WoW that have been with Blizzard or WoW for a long time. I think this is part of the problem. People aren't happy. Don't really know why they are not happy so they look for easy excuses like "not original devs" or "Diablo" or any number of the thin reasons people give.

I mean how many times has X employee been villified as the cause all the problems only for them to leave the company and a new scape goat found.

[munkeyinorbit]

rofl. now thats a bit of a stretch. come back to earth

Is it really? Some random quit our raid because the tank wasn't parsing high enough? How can you parse for getting punched in the face?

[rhorle]

Questing and levelling is not a major part of the game anymore. People do world quests to get AP, but world quests are not enjoyable content. It's very low quality content.

See. You are confusing "enjoy" with "major part". Questing, including world quests, are very much a major part of the game. They take up more content over all then Mythic+ and raiding. It isn't low quality content. Instanced content has always been a major part yet Blizzard keeps adding in non-instanced content for players to do. Which is directly against your point of instanced content the focus now more then ever before.

[Kaver]

See. You are confusing "enjoy" with "major part". Questing, including world quests, are very much a major part of the game. They take up more content over all then Mythic+ and raiding. It isn't low quality content. Instanced content has always been a major part yet Blizzard keeps adding in non-instanced content for players to do. Which is directly against your point of instanced content the focus now more then ever before.

The quality of the content matters. World Quests etc. are not fun content. It's just time gating. World Quests have the potential to be fun, but they are not.

Getting back to the topic of the thread. The way retail WoW is designed would not work if Classes weren't fairly well balanced. The game and the audience of the game need balanced classes. Modern raiding and M+ wouldn't work well without balanced classes. Raiding in Classic was something completely different.

- - - Updated - - -

Also Mythic+, the repeatable content for loot, is one of the biggest success of modern WoW according to a lot of players.

M+ wouldn't work if Classes were balanced like they were in Vanilla.

[Mysterymask]

Cast spell wait for proc follow proc with other spell. aoe when aoe is optimal. repeat fishing procs while casting the basic spell.

Do you want rogues to have Devil May Cry combinations, Monks to need me to do 6236 FP in order to do a Dragon Punch, and Mages requireing me to actually type the spell in say in order to cast it.....

Cause you just said how hotkey style MMOs work

[exochaft]

The overarching issue I've run into across all my chars is a fundamental lack of control I have over my output/performance, which dovetails into class balancing. As of right now in raids, my damage output pull to pull is about +/-15% DPS, which is nuts in itself but exacerbated when most of it is based upon RNG in the background over which the player has no control. My major frustration with the layer of corruption, essences, and class mechanics/balancing is that depending upon your class/spec, you can tend to have more consistent damage output or have very inconsistent output. The reality is that this expansions systems just amplify the balancing mess.

All that being said, balance must always be viewed from a frame of reference, such as raiding, M+, or PvP. One change can have a cascading effect which could throw off the balance in one or all of these frames of reference. The inherent problem Blizz faces is that they choose to attempt balance in all these frames of reference, which is pretty much impossible with how they choose to tune content. You run into issues where you have metas/comps for each content that are so strong that it feels like you're playing the game wrong if you don't follow the fold. If you're tackling challenging content (such as mythic raiding) and your group's DPS output pull to pull has wild swings just because of class design and balance, that's a problem if the content isn't balanced around the minimum potential.

Simply stated, the current class balance (imho) is extremely frustrating because I get the increasing feeling that I have to get lucky to perform well versus feeling like I have control.

[Kathranis]

I really can't even get on board with the OP's notion. The classes are less homogenized now than they've ever been, with each spec playing differently and most overlapping utility having been removed in Legion and BFA.

Balance has virtually nothing to do with how the game feels, anyway. Especially in BFA, where there approach has been to tune numbers rather than tweak playstyles, even for specs that are universally panned for having unfun playstyles.

With the unpruning and focus shifting back to class identity over spec identity in Shadowlands, which is what OP seems to want, we can actually look forward to the classes inching closer to homogenization once again, as specs start to overlap with each other within classes, and classes start to overlap with each other in functionality.

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.

FFXIV doesn't have specs, talents, glyphes, affixes, essences, or anything else that modifies baseline gameplay apart from the haste stat affecting cooldown time and thus minorly adjusting rotations.

In FFXIV, every Dragoon plays the same. Every Black Mage plays the same. Every Paladin plays the same.

No shit it's easier to balance. It has 18 jobs with nearly zero individual variation. WoW on the other hand effectively has 36 classes, each with multiple permutations depending on talent choice and gear.

[rhorle]

The quality of the content matters. World Quests etc. are not fun content. It's just time gating. World Quests have the potential to be fun, but they are not.

That is the thing though you are saying the quality is something subjective. What is fun to one person is not necessarily fun to another person. And quality content is not always fun. Blizzard has been putting a greater emphasis on non-traidtional end game things with Legion and BfA. Those things are a major part and the focus is not just on Raiding and Mythic+. That is why there is actually a bunch of stuff to do even if you personally do not want to do it. Which seems to be what you keep confusing. Because you don't like it means it isn't major or "quality".

Getting back to the topic of the thread. The way retail WoW is designed would not work if Classes weren't fairly well balanced. The game and the audience of the game need balanced classes. Modern raiding and M+ wouldn't work well without balanced classes. Raiding in Classic was something completely different.

M+ wouldn't work if Classes were balanced like they were in Vanilla.

Sure it would. Just like raiding worked in Vanilla with out class balance. You just would only have certain classes always represented in Mythic+ with others not able to do it at all. Because content is always tuned to those completing it. Classes are only balanced for raiding and Mythic because Blizzard is trying to allow everyone, regardless of spec, to enjoy the content.

It isn't required for that content but Blizzard choose to attempt to allow everyone to do it with out having to change specs or classes. Which is good design. But far from being required as you claim.

[Cosmic Janitor]

First of all, the current situation has nothing to do with balancing. This is purely a cost-cutting measure by streamlining classes to reduce dev time. This is also why actual class design has been stagnant (after slowing down post-MoP) and Blizzard shifted everything towards rental power and generic procc based effects sinnce BfA. And even then blance is worse than ever and entirely dependend on you getting that one good corruption piece. The whole development process has been turned into a statistics game of estimating with what the devs can get away while maximizing profits. And this is across the whole game, every level is pretty much min-maxed to hell and back by now; sadly with complete disregard to the variance in the actual output.

Then for the FFXIV side topic, all I can say is that I adore the game but balance is absolutely not something people should be attributing to the game as a strong point. The game is entirely centered around niche roles for classes and alot of classes tend to sometimes not be viable at all in difficult content, since their niche is no longer wanted. It would lead to far to go into too much detail, but there are alot of assumptions in FFXIV and group dynamics like non-support classes being the flat out best DPS, etc. If a buff is actually strong enough to bring a class then it is usually just one of that class. Bringing multiple of one class is something not really intended in the games design and alot of time the offset between potential DPS in theory (which in turn warrants some mechanics) is overturned by the reality that you are in fact not just standing still and turret casting.