Balance in WoW is great, and I miss it in all other MMOs.
Arenas ruined wow.
Vanilla:Had a chance to kill anything no matter what class you were and it was.....F U N
TBC:Resilience
WOTK: OMG BURST
CATA: 1 HOUR KILLS
MOP: PVP What?
PvP felt least futile during BC, and the very end of vanilla wasn't as bad as people are making it out to be. BC did have issues with certain PvE gear and RNG (mace stun, sword spec + windfury totem, etc.), but games were more reasonably paced instead of chaotic clusterfucks.
MoP PvP is just an unmitigated disaster. Blizz gave up on 2v2 and 5v5 is a ghost town. The only bracket that matters now is 3v3, but people get globaled constantly in 3s even at 1500 rating. It takes zero skill to line up enough CDs to kill someone in less than 2 seconds.
It doesn't help that every class in the game now has at least one stun, a silence/interrupt, and some form of CC. What happened to the good old days when a random class would say "I want a CC and a stun and an interrupt too!!!" and Blizz would just reply "STFU"?
Last edited by konway; 2013-01-09 at 03:05 PM.
there isnt.
one class is always going to be king and one class is always going to be the jester. the vary nature of the diffrent mechanics for diffrent classes will always cause this.
the best that can be achieved is an even rotation of whos on top and whos on the bottom.
I'd disagree. Of course some specs will always be a little better or worse than others, but I think an ideal would be such that those different mechanics make certain classes better fits for different comps. For example in the current game, holy paladins synergize best with tunnelvision meleecleaves while resto shaman tend to be superior for most other comps. That kind of separation is acceptable and I daresay interesting, but the basic throughput/survivability/sustainability/etc. differences between those classes and e.g. a priest is not.
maybe. MAYBE if this was a pvp only game. or if they developed it so that pvp spellbook was seperate from the pve spellbook they could pull it off. but not with having to consider pve, but i suspect even then it would just fall back to a more obvious rock paper scissors model
i mean after 8 years they havent managed to even get close.
so untill such time i stand by my blance is an illusion.
Well part of that is Blizzard intentionally moving away from that model (though likely unaware of what they were doing). The game used to have a little more situational balance like I described, but between the addition of more CCs across the board and a reduction to hard counter mechanics (druid shapeshifting polymorphs, banishable tree and meta forms, etc.) we've wound up with a game where specs like arms and feral can just outclass every other melee in every situation.
Blizzard's at least trying to balance PvP this expansion, but in the end you probably are right about the rotation of overpoweredness. Judging by the PTR, it looks like monks and rogues may just take the place warriors and ferals are currently occupying. I still disagree that the game fundamentally has to be this way, but it is what it is. At least balance is close enough now that a good player can actually succeed despite their class' disadvantages, and it looks like it'll those disadvantages will keep shrinking to some degree.
Vanilla had its moments, but it was pretty much TRINKET MAGES/MS WARRIORS/ROGUE STUN and everyone else had the ocassional moment in the spotlight; Like shaman windfury multi-proc videos, Priests MCing people off LM, and paladin bubble pushing the horde front back a few feet in AV.
S1 was good, simply because resilience was sort of half-there at that point, but warlocks and paladins pretty much held the throne once gear started up. Warriors/Rogues with mace-stun-metagem-stun did pretty well, if they had the blacksmithing mace.
Hearing all the alliance players going "WTF Shaman suck!" was pretty fun too.
Oh, and rerolling engineering up to iron grenades.
Man, I remember a mage buddy of mine keeping some poor alliance sheeped for a few mins with that.Yeah you're right I miss 40 sec polymorph and mace stun too.