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

[Echocho]

I feel like we're partly to blame since we cried pretty much since day one whenever some other class beat us at something.

Rock, paper, scissors shouldn't be balanced

[neik]

Given the fact that many specs are underperforming to normal standards, this includes: added unnecessary cooldowns, and cast-time on many spells/newly found resources/loads of ramp-up needed. I'd suspect Brian Holinka is the main villain here. Slowing down the games makes newcomers feel more welcomed. Both in PVE and PVP. Just my personal opinion.

[MasterOfNone]

How did you find this information? I thought they all benefited greatly. Which classes are screwed?

he said players as in general, not classes

[Thelyron]

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.

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.

[Raven]

And who is it that demand perfect balancing, its not Blizzard, its the players, if a new patch comes out and their class is 5% after another on damage done its like 200 OMG Nerf class x post within a hour.

If a class is weaker then other classes, those are not brought to dungeons, and who make that decision to not bring them, again its not Blizzard, its the players.

See the problem now ? Blizzard dont want perfect balancing, but is forced to try and balance it perfect becouse of the players, or else players wont bring class X to raids, dungeons or what ever even.

And this problem will always exist aslong as the only thing players care about is Damage / Healing Meters.

[huth]

Blizzard's obsession with balance? You mean the communities obsession. Blizzard's just getting punched for it no matter what they do.

[MasterOfNone]

Blizzard's obsession with balance? You mean the communities obsession. Blizzard's just getting punched for it no matter what they do.

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

[Trumpcat]

If every class had niches and utilities in addition to performing their core role equally well I feel it would be appealing to both the balancing and unique crowds.

For example: Feral Druid vs Topkek Rogue spec.
- The Rogue brings far more utility and niche (shroud uniquely suited for M+), much higher damage, better stealth, better survivability.

Prot Warrior vs Vengeance DH:
The Warrior can do better everything the DH can. Stronger survivability, insane damage, mobility

Whatever little utility the Feral(lol) and Veng bring, it is not enough to make up for their mediocre core performance of damage and survivability.

So I think numerically classes should perform nearly identically and the differences should come from their unique utilities and niches and the playstyle in which they achieve their numbers. This is not happening at the moment and it sucks the fun out, besides the RNG fest other systems.

[Thrif]

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.

Yep, it's what happens when you listen more to the people who care about not being 3% behind in dps over the people who care about the game being entertaining, and because you want to push an MMORPG into being an e-sports, despite being the game type that least lends itself to that format out of literally every single game type out there.

[Shaetha]

FF14 class design is light years ahead of WoW's. Like it isn't even a contest. Say what you will about the balancing of the game (although I can't say I really agree looking at logs) and the slow-paced combat, but at least their designs are fun and unique, something that cannot be said for WoW nor could have been for the past 7(ish?) years.

Hell even some of the crafting jobs in FF14 have more flavor than WoW's classes I play many alts in WoW and literally all of them can easily follow my strict template of keybindings because they all have the same abilities basically, they are just named differently and have different animations.

Caster: Exactly the same as WoW, except strictly worse because the ogcd abilities have animation lock and make the classes flow like shit because of it.
Melee: 3 buttons to do what one button could do, causing bloat for no reason. Don't have to worry about the animation lock as much(except sometimes you do), but you also need to worry about having 4 hands for all the redundant abilities.
Ranged: See Melee
Tank: See Melee, except half your buttons you push when the boss casts something or when the previous one ran out instead of just pushing in rotation.
Healer: The least bad. All the abilities feel like they have a reason to exist beyond just giving the player more buttons. Or it would be if the community didn't expect you to put in twice as much effort as anyone else in trivial content.

(PS: Obviously, I think combos having 3 separate buttons is stupid. It makes the game play strictly worse to do it that way. It does nothing but add more buttons that you are always going to push in a certain order. There is no difference between pressing 123 then 124 or 111 then 222 if it's always the same sequence.)

The sound design for combat is just bad. No attack feels satisfying to use except maybe the caster limit break 3. Everything else feels like it has no impact at all. The fact that everything happens 2 seconds after you do it also doesn't help with this.

It's moronic to say every class has the same ability. They all do if you want to be obnoxious because it's push button to do thing. That's the nature of the reductionist argument. It's basically masturbation because it feels good, but it does nothing. The only thing that matters is how it looks and feels, and FFXIV doesn't do it for me on that front.

The actual combat loop is by far the worst part of the game. 100% strictly worse than WoW. If that was all the game had, I would have played it once and never touched it again. I wouldn't do it at all if the game didn't absolutely require you to do combat quest progression for crafting and gathering.

[Naiattavain]

This is what happens when you push esports into a mmorpg

yes i agree

[Kralljin]

Yep, it's what happens when you listen more to the people who care about not being 3% behind in dps over the people who care about the game being entertaining, and because you want to push an MMORPG into being an e-sports, despite being the game type that least lends itself to that format out of literally every single game type out there.

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.

[Lurker1]

All your thread titles are missing "for me personally" at the end.

I agree! lol!

[Exeris]

How did you find this information? I thought they all benefited greatly. Which classes are screwed?

I'm guessing he's talking about the RNG about getting gear with corruption, then what corruption and then what level it is.

[cface]

I'm guessing he's talking about the RNG about getting gear with corruption, then what corruption and then what level it is.

Yes I saw, and he's right sadly. Why would blizzard think a system that screws over half the playerbase with bad corruption, doing way less dps then the rest, is a good idea that will boosts their metrics? I don't have TD or IS at all and been playing since patch release. And I don't wanna farm m+ 7hours a day either, cause the odds are just so overwhelmingly low. This patch has made me play less, not more.

[Mardux]

What's balanced about 50% of the player base getting a 15-20% dps increase from corruptions while the other half gets screwed over? Blizzard's obsession lies with RNG, not balance.

Aside from very specific fights, it's only that high for the people that are bad as their spec.

- - - Updated - - -

he said players as in general, not classes

Dont be pedantic. We all know exactly what they meant. Hopefully we dont die of old age before they're willing to back up their claim.

- - - Updated - - -

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

No, it's really not. If you came back to reality you would see it.

[Bladesyphon]

Hell even some of the crafting jobs in FF14 have more flavor than WoW's classes I play many alts in WoW and literally all of them can easily follow my strict template of keybindings because they all have the same abilities basically, they are just named differently and have different animations.

This is just flat out misinformation.

I have three crafting classes at max level in FFXIV (Blacksmith, Woodworker, and Alchemist), and all three have LITERALLY the same skills, so much so that as I was leveling Alchemist, I was simply swapping back to one of my other two classes to see my hot bar set up, and putting the exact same ability in the exact same spot so I could just muscle memory every craft.

You also said you don't look at logs, so how exactly can you tell us that XIV's class design and balance is "Light years" ahead of WoW? Especially when the Tank and Healer Jobs all play functionally identical to one another.

Yes, XIV's jobs have more buttons to press, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Ninja, my favorite DPS job, has gone from being a fluid combat rotation to a god damn clusterfuck of trying to maintain track of four different resources at any given time (with a UI that is absolutely god awful), to the point where there's no fluidity, just button mashing.

That's not fun, that's fucking terrible, and it's sucking the fun out of trying to play the job.

[Soon-TM]

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 doesn't give a flying !@£& about balance, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing rogues/DHs in their current state (especially in high M+), while on the other hand you have eternal underdogs like arcane or holy priest, which are either nerfed as soon as they are good at something, or remaining largely ignored. And no, a couple of pitiful buffs here and there are irrelevant.

Not that it matters a lot, since a good third part of your DPS these days comes from lolcorruptions, which are also laughably "balanced" (infinite stars by 8.3 launch, my sides). Did you win the lottery with a high rank of IS/TD? Good. You didn't? Enjoy the last place in the DPS charts, scrub.

[enigma77]

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.

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

but maybe balance is not fun?

[Seranthor]

I feel like we're partly to blame since we cried pretty much since day one whenever some other class beat us at something.

Rock, paper, scissors shouldn't be balanced

I can't disagree with this assessment.