Jeff Kaplan's new philosophy for class balance

[styil]

In the latest developer interview, Overwatch's game director (and former WoW game director) Jeff Kaplan has shed light into the new class balance philosophy that the team has adapted:

"We're also going to change our balance philosophy, which is going to be: balance more frequently, more aggressively and be less concerned with trying something and maybe pulling it back later... we are going to try some pretty aggressive balance changes. We are going to deliberately target the meta. Before we used to balance with stability in mind, stability of the entire game, all players in mind. Now we are going to balance more aggressively targeting the meta and moving you off the meta as frequently as possible"

Do you think that Ion Hazzikostas and the WoW team should follow suit? Classes in WoW are often left untouched for an entire raid tier, and it is always the usual suspects who are at the bottom of the barrel in DPS (Enhance/Elemental/Windwalker, Arms, Arcane, Unholy), Healing (Mistweaver, Holy, Resto Shaman) and Tanking (DH, Warrior). It is absolutely not fair to all these specs in the game and the players who would like to play. The meta at the top undeniably trickles down to the rest of the playerbase.

[Absintheminded]

Yes and no. There actually is something to be said about not having huge reworks from patch to patch. But when many people are unhappy with the state of your class, something has to change.

[Kallisto]

In the latest developer interview, Overwatch's game director (and former WoW game director) Jeff Kaplan has shed light into the new class balance philosophy that the team has adapted:

"We're also going to change our balance philosophy, which is going to be: balance more frequently, more aggressively and be less concerned with trying something and maybe pulling it back later... we are going to try some pretty aggressive balance changes. We are going to deliberately target the meta. Before we used to balance with stability in mind, stability of the entire game, all players in mind. Now we are going to balance more aggressively targeting the meta and moving you off the meta as frequently as possible"

Do you think that Ion Hazzikostas and the WoW team should follow suit? Classes in WoW are often left untouched for an entire raid tier, and it is always the usual suspects who are at the bottom of the barrel in DPS (Enhance/Elemental/Windwalker, Arms, Arcane, Unholy), Healing (Mistweaver, Holy, Resto Shaman) and Tanking (DH, Warrior). It is absolutely not fair to all these specs in the game and the players who would like to play. The meta at the top undeniably trickles down to the rest of the playerbase.

I'd say no, simply because the differences between the games. In overwatch gear doesn't matter, something changes in balance you can just hop on to another character if you're super into flavour of the month.

In wow, it's swapping, maybe levelling (let's face it if Ion tried this the forums would be full of "Blizzard trying to snake money by making you pay for boost!!!!111"), gearing and then hoping the nerf bat wasn't smashed on your class during this time.

While it would be nice in PTR to try to get a true balance, I feel even then it's pretty much impossible. Too many specs need to be close to each other and game mechanics let alone rotation and numbers will always lead to an inbalance. Even if there were a game with just two classes it would still be unbalanced.

[MoanaLisa]

Ha ha. No, that won't work in an MMO where things take a long time to do. Kaplan wants to screw with Overwatch's meta essentially all the time and thinks it wise to destablize the game entirely. Good luck with that. It would be a disaster in WoW. If casual guilds take a few weeks to get through raids the last damn thing they want is to have the game's meta and balance screwed with a couple of times a month. Never mind gearing and the rest.

PVP? Ha ha ha ha. No.

The idea that this should be applied to WoW is really dumb. I can't even.

Over the long run I'm guessing this won't work for Overwatch either but at least there you aren't spending weeks leveling characters from scratch only to have your time wasted because they want to shake up the meta on a frequent basis.

[Fabled]

I never really enjoyed the thought of a meta, in fps games or in mmos in general. Sure people find classes, heroes, set ups to abuse for high end content, but I've never been there and I've never tried to cheese shit that hard. Would it be nice if some classes got some love now and then? Sure, but not to the point Papa Jeff is wanting to basically make a new meta every five minutes.

[ro9ue]

It's no big deal in Overwatch because you hop on, pick a character to play and can even swap to a different one mid match.

In WoW, you build a character over time. Some people have literally years of investment their class.

Can't just change that shit willy nilly. Not comparable at all.

[Kralljin]

A core problem of class balance is the fact that Blizzards design philosophy is that they want to have each class to have strengths and weaknesses.
Yet the devs themselves haven't figured out where the strengths and weaknesses of certain classes or specs lie.

It is one of my biggest criticism of class design, their current philosophy is just an empty shell that the devs simply fail to fill.

A good approach would be:
-Communicate where a class / spec is supposed to be strong / weak
-Implement abilities that clearly reflect this
-Discuss with the community whether these strengths / weaknesses are properly reflected or further tuning is necessary

Balancing numbers is fine and all, but before you start numbers tuning you should figure out whether numbers are the sole issue of a spec.


Not to mention that class wide strength and weaknesses do not work in a game that has stripped most classes of unique tools.
Take Shaman, what's the "core strenth" of the Shaman class?
Good question, Ele, Enhance and Resto have basically no overlap in terms of abilities outside of rather generalized spells such as Bloodlust, Earthbind and Wind shear.

That design approach still worked in Classic / TBC, when Shaman still had their support niche.
Regardless of which Shaman spec you played, those powerful buff totems came with you.

Whether that design was better or worse is a different story, but it was where the class identity came from.

I'm all for more class balance, but the issues of balance don't start at the execution of their "balance strategy" but at the foundation of class design itself.

[styil]

It's no big deal in Overwatch because you hop on, pick a character to play and can even swap to a different one mid match.

In WoW, you build a character over time. Some people have literally years of investment their class.

Can't just change that shit willy nilly. Not comparable at all.

So it's better to do nothing and leave that Enhancement Shaman at the bottom of the barrel for an entire year of Ny'alotha, and force all those players who have years in investment in their characters to reroll, rather than Blizzard actually doing their jobs and at least trying to get some sort of class balance in game?

[klaps_05]

Thats basically what you say when you cant be bothered to have a balance meta - you just keep messing with it constantly. Having a meta is not a bad thing.

[Redroniksre]

So it's better to do nothing and leave that Enhancement Shaman at the bottom of the barrel for an entire year of Ny'alotha, and force all those players who have years in investment in their characters to reroll, rather than Blizzard actually doing their jobs and at least trying to get some sort of class balance in game?

Outside of minor tweaks? Yes. Going in and doing massive changes to classes mid-progression would be jarring to any guild that is trying to actually do the hardest content. Realize that most class changes (outside of gameplay loop ones) will be most felt by those at the high end, while those who are more casual might only notice slightly longer/faster kill times.

[Bramickias]

This would be great.
As long as they dont put another couple of grinds that are character based in the next expac. Last 2 expacs have been very harsh for people who wanted to switch main and if you move from average dps to top of the chart to bottom, to incredible aoe in a couple of months it would suck pretty hard. But annoying that top 1% of the population that are intense min/maxxer is fine with me. WoW is already super easy until you get to Mythic raiding and high mythic keys, let them have fun with the meta, 95% of the population will barely notice.

[ro9ue]

So it's better to do nothing and leave that Enhancement Shaman at the bottom of the barrel for an entire year of Ny'alotha, and force all those players who have years in investment in their characters to reroll, rather than Blizzard actually doing their jobs and at least trying to get some sort of class balance in game?

Uhhhhhhhh what?

You're advocating for "aggressive, sweeping changes" in the OP.

That's a horrible idea in WoW. That doesn't mean you can't do tweaks and numbers tuning...

[Zyky]

Do you think that Ion Hazzikostas and the WoW team should follow suit? Classes in WoW are often left untouched for an entire raid tier, and it is always the usual suspects who are at the bottom of the barrel in DPS (Enhance/Elemental/Windwalker, Arms, Arcane, Unholy), Healing (Mistweaver, Holy, Resto Shaman) and Tanking (DH, Warrior). It is absolutely not fair to all these specs in the game and the players who would like to play. The meta at the top undeniably trickles down to the rest of the playerbase.

No, the game functions are very different. In a PvP game, which Overwatch is, it's very important to be playing what is considered 'meta' or strong. In a game like WoW, they do frequently address issues in PvP aspects of the game, not nearly quick enough in many situations, but they do frequently nerf PvP. For aspects of PvE it significantly more tricky to rebalance classes entirely in the middle of a raid tier or M+ season, it would ruin encounter balance which would mean they'd have to put in significantly more time dealing with balance. Once a tier is more than enough for rebalancing specs honestly, they just entirely skipped it with 8.3 because Blizzard gave up on this patch long ago, like they did with 6.2 in Warlords.

[Kallisto]

So it's better to do nothing and leave that Enhancement Shaman at the bottom of the barrel for an entire year of Ny'alotha, and force all those players who have years in investment in their characters to reroll, rather than Blizzard actually doing their jobs and at least trying to get some sort of class balance in game?

As someone playing Marksman (which at the moment is logging near the bottom on nearly all fights) and has no desire to swap to a FOTM class or spec (including BM), yes it is. Unless you're pushing for world first (AKA you're not posting here, you're either with the method or the limit raids) you don't need to be in FOTM class. Minor tweaks are fine but outright nuking or buffing classes during progression will cause mass unstable groups where one week class a is strong so you gear it, week later class b is strong so you gear that. Nothing gets done, people get pissed.

If you're into FotM class you'd know which to roll out before everything goes live anyway.

[MoanaLisa]

So it's better to do nothing and leave that Enhancement Shaman at the bottom of the barrel for an entire year of Ny'alotha, and force all those players who have years in investment in their characters to reroll, rather than Blizzard actually doing their jobs and at least trying to get some sort of class balance in game?

"...balance more frequently, more aggressively and be less concerned with trying something and maybe pulling it back later...we are going to try some pretty aggressive balance changes. We are going to deliberately target the meta. Before we used to balance with stability in mind, stability of the entire game, all players in mind. Now we are going to balance more aggressively targeting the meta and moving you off the meta as frequently as possible"

Yes, but that isn't what we are criticizing from the OP which---you---specifically based it around Kaplan's thing about aggressively going after the meta. What you are talking about with class balance is not at all what Kaplan is thinking about. Do I want what's in the Blizzquote for WoW. Fuck. No.

[SirCowdog]

Given that Ion has already said they aren't going to be making and large class changes going into SL, I think it should be their focus to balance the various specs and builds as much as possible. They really need to nail the enjoy-ability and quality of life going into this expansion. Class balance should not be screwed with in any major fashion if they aren't going to change how they play. And the types of balancing that is going to happen will be through things like reverting the GCD change, and fiddling with the various abilities granted through Covenants.

I do think they need to keep a close eye on trying to keep each spec as close as possible to each other, especially for classes that have traditionally underperformed. Heavy use of the PTR, and close attention to informed player feedback will be key. Just ignoring the players and doing whatever isn't going to fly two expansions in a row.

In short: Fine tuning rather than sweeping changes.

[arr0gance]

Yes please, I'll take shittiest ideas ever suggested for $1,000, Alex.

[Marrilaife]

I'd love to not be harassed every raid tier "why don't you swap to monk / dk tank instead" but what would be even worse is seeing my class going from patch to patch from overpowered fotm to broken useless.

Some of the balance changes in wow look exactly like that, take shadow priest:
Uldir (shit) -> BOD / EP (op) -> Nyalotha (shit again)

It's a very bad experience for players, because it feels like your skill and dedication don't matter, just whether Blizzard smiles or frowns upon your spec.

This isn't a MOBA / Overwatch where you swap characters per match basis or Diablo where you reroll every season new char.

[Kathranis]

This philosophy doesn't really translate from Overwatch to WoW in that WoW doesn't really have a meta, per se. At least not in the same sense as Overwatch.

In Overwatch, any player can switch to virtually any other hero at any given time, instantly changing their playstyle and team strategy, and the game is balanced with hero switching and countering in-mind. Their goal with these changes is to ensure that the meta isn't dominated by only a small number of heroes and strategies. It's okay if characters come in and out of the meta, so long as they all get some time to shine.

You can't really adjust the meta in WoW so that classes fade in and out of use over the course of a patch, because players can't readily change their class. Blizzard needs to seek something close to complete balance across all roles so that no player feels left out because their class is subpar. Every class needs representation at all times and they all need to be performing within a fairly narrow range.


That being said, with both the Hearthstone and Overwatch teams clearly shifting to more aggressive balance and design philosophies, it certainly could mark a sea change for Blizzard. I wouldn't be surprised to see the WoW team follow suit in Shadowlands.

However, their precise goal and how they try to achieve it would clearly be different.

They are honestly already pretty aggressive about tuning numbers and class balance so that class performance, at least, is broadly consistent. They aren't shy about rolling out hotfixes weekly, or even multiple times a week, to address issues like that.

And of course, a lot of that is also tied into encounter design as much as class design. Some specs and talent choices will perform better than others purely based on the encounter, and we already know that they ideally try to have a wide variety of encounters so that each class and spec gets its moments to shine in every season.

More likely, any changes of this nature would be more directed specifically at class design, and choices within a class. So, for example, they could be more open to redesigning a disliked rotation, or rebalancing or redesigning major choices, like talents or, in Shadowlands, Covenant abilities.

And while I don't think these core class design should be adjusted too frequently on the fly -- you wouldn't want your rotation to change every few weeks -- it's something they should certainly be willing to do more often than once per expansion.

[Dreadgear]

This kind of aggresive balancing can work for games where you swap your tools and kits frequently, Weapons in shooters, heroes in mobas, characters in overwatch etc.
It can work in those games because you can choose and change your hero whenever you like and depending on a situation and what is requiered by you from the team.

WoW is not like that, you have 1 character which you spend a lot of time, from weeks to months and at times expansions and years. Logging in every every week or month to see that your class pays drasticly differently will put of a lot of players, especially those who put time, effort and resources into optimizing their characters. This kind of system can't work. Don't quote me on this but i think this was something they tried in early mist of pandaria where a lot of classes had their classes overloaded with kits and it created a lot of balance issues so there were big changes to classes on weekly basis and that eventually tuned off a lot of people with the same reason that they didn't want to log into wow just to find that their classes are vastly different from what they played last time and now they either had to wait for the next wave of drastic changes or start all over with a new character.