Class balance & homogenization has gone too far

[Rilas13]

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[Zaqwert]

WoW's not meant to be interesting or immersive these days, it's meant to be a conveyor belt of palatable dog food you consume on a steady schedule without any interference, effort, or worry.

[fengosa]

Thinking back to H immersius each of our healers brought something unique to the fight. Holy pally had righteous fury to help the tank pick up adds, our priest had mass dispel and a dried brings hotw to help dps during lust. Just one example of the top of my head but spec diversity is there if you look for it.

[Rucati]

If you are playing a Protection paladin, you should be a prot pally. And switching specs would be as daunting as dropping all your current gear and paying a hefty sum to change the way you are playing. WoD we see gear that changes stats now based on your spec.

Did anyone like this...?

I raided on my Holy Priest but would PvP as Disc through all of BC, and there was nothing fun about having to go respec and redo keybinds/action bars and whatever else every time I wanted to PvP. I raided Fri/Sat/Sun, so from Friday to Sunday I basically couldn't PvP unless I wanted to go respec and do everything twice, once to go Disc and again to go back to Holy. Then on Monday I'd go Disc and PvP during the week, then back to Holy on Friday. What was fun about that? Absolutely nothing.

Classes are still vastly different, maybe you don't see it in raids, but in PvP it's very noticeable. Every healer is significantly different, and all the DPS are significantly different. Things are homogenized to an extent, but they sort of had to be, otherwise it would be literally impossible to balance raids/PvP. If a boss needs 3 people on interrupt duty, but only 4 classes have interrupts, you better hope you have at least 3 of those 4 classes and if not you need to have an alt or replace a main raid member with a pug just to interrupt for you.

It's not really as homogenized as you seem to think. Every class offers something unique and has a role to fill, and if you think requiring certain classes in raids is a good idea you're wrong. Forcing people to play classes they don't like, or forcing raid groups to replace core members with pugs from trade chat, just to progress in a raid is completely idiotic and doesn't belong in any game.

[Wafffles]

Before I get a lot of people disagreeing, hear me out. ... Anyway iv given my rant, let the hate begin.

Lord I hate it when people say that on here. "Agree with me cuz I'm right, or disagree with me cuz you're a jerk, the choice is yours!" Perhaps disagreeing with you isn't 'hate', perhaps what you said is, you know, disagreeable.

There needs to be more reason to pick a class then spell names and animations at max raid levels.

Like player skill? You're arguing against the design that a skilled player should be able to pick whatever class and spec he wants and still be taken to a raid because he's good enough, so that we can go back to the days where any idiot could pick up, say, a shaman because everyone wanted Heroism at any cost.

No one denies button bloat is a problem, though even when abilities are condensed it's unlikely it will be in order to make more unique abilities. What makes classes unique now are things like rotations. Yes, classes are too homogenized, but doing things like making monk healing channel-based is so much better in terms of diversification than, say, giving monk healers a "super-cool must have AoE super heal of love and miracles". Of course, monk channel-healing and tea mana-regen proved difficult to balance, which players complained about, which required balancing so things were "fair", which required homogenization...it's a vicious cycle.

[Deleted]

The best way to balances classes is to give them all the same tools and the same ammount of it.
Homogenization might sound sad but i'm all for it.

[Zharradan]

and yet I'm always missing crit/spell haste buff on pugs and lfr. hunters are useless they never have the pet you need for that buff that's missing, always with that pet they think it's prettier /rarer

remove stamina and give warlocks spell haste on dark intent, that would be good. also, give another class the crit buff, maybe make it baseline for rogues, all specs can have it.

[Dakara]

Did you play a non DPS class in Vanilla? Namely a Healer? Even in TBC/Wrath prior to dual spec? It was painful.... healing is a group only role.

The only way I would ever agree to being "locked" into a spec, is if Tanking/Healing were able to do 75% of the damage of a DPS (not raid buffed, just out in the world) and were viable for PvP. The way the game works now, and has always worked, is you simply couldn't do everything in "one spec", apart from DPS, but even then, you were either PvP, PvE or a less optimized hybrid.

I agree with the bloat and the duplicated abilities, and it's partly due to Arena/Small scale PvP and partly due to 10 man raids. Both were mistakes (imo), because it destroyed the unique flavor classes could bring to large groups.

[Mirishka]

Niche roles are dead and good riddance to them.

It was so stupid to be 'the AOE tank' or 'the magic tank' or 'the boss' tank. If I roll a protection warrior, I shouldn't be SOL the moment a 'magic boss' pops up, or when a boss with tons of adds/waves of adds happens. I'm a tank, let me !@#$ing tank.

OH HEY WARRIOR, DIS IS THE MAGIC BOSS, U NEED 2 STEP OUT 4 TEH DK TANK SINCE HE IS TEH MAGIC TANK.

Seriously, that #%#$@ can die in a fire.

All classes need to be able to perform their roles to the same degree. That takes homogenization, but whether anyone likes it or not, all classes being able to perform on all kinds of encounters is what's best for the game. Individuality for the sake of individuality is pointless.

[Deleted]

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I agree with this.