How good/bad is class balance really?

[Saltysquidoon]

It's true that by class DH isn't super-high, but by melee classes it's also right in the middle.

There are more factors to take in here then "havoc is bad literally right this second".

If you look at pre-nerf and post nerf 1 Havoc was parsing proportionally higher, which would suggest it simply doesn't scale well with corruptions as opposed to the spec being weak in of itself

Of the 10 tiers it has existed for it's only been in the bottom 50% twice, that's got to be a better strike rate than any other spec.

Even when it's performing poorly it has among the highest representation of any spec.

[Gaidax]

Right now it's showing as right about where it should be - 12/24 DPS, 6/13 melee. This puts it well ahead of Paladins and Monks (who also have only one DPS spec), and all Rogues, and both Shaman DPS specs. It's true that by class DH isn't super-high, but by melee classes it's also right in the middle. However, DH also brings tons of raid utility, and in particular if you don't have a DH tank, the Havoc DPSer brings that +5% magic taken debuff and that means that 5% all the spell damage the raid does come from having a DH in the raid, meaning that the DH counts for at least another half of a DPSer just from that.

I did say mediocre didn't I?

The only real utility for raid it brings is 5% debuff. The rest is just fluff.

[OFiveNine]

Havoc would be in a better position if we weren't playing casino for good ranks #wishiwaspartoftheamponlysquad

And like most patches where gear and stuff like corruptions it is skewed in the favour of people who can make the biggest uses out of the power imbalances. Rogue would probably be top 5 dps on pure stats alone outside corruptions.

But every tier I wish the gap between classes were between 10k~ dps of the bottom to the best and then classes themselves exceeding massively on fights such as fire mage/dh on hivemind etc but that is merely a pipe dream and FOTM will forever be a huge thing

[Athulua]

The balance is fine. You can play almost any spec in the game and clear all the content you want.
Unless you want ridiculous high keys, 20+ or 25+.
The game doesn't even support any achievements for key levels that high, the highest M+ content recognized in achievement system is +15.
And any spec in the game can clear +15.

The last time i remember truly unplayable specs was WOD patch 6.2
Survival Hunter was doing like 50% less damage than BM/MM. Nobody was playing this spec in 6.2, it was vanilla WoW level bad.

[Kalisandra]

The last time i remember truly unplayable specs was WOD patch 6.2

Elemental early this expansion. Arcane also. Fixed, by adding silly powerful azerite traits, thus increasing the difficulty in getting decent gear and upgrading it. Great game design.

[Doffen]

I did say mediocre didn't I?

The only real utility for raid it brings is 5% debuff. The rest is just fluff.

I always looked at us Demon Hunters more like Fluffy Hunters anyway.

[Ezyah]

With corruptions, you can rolfstomp the raid with quite a large range of setups since the dps check is laughable now.

Regarding balance, it's hard to tell as it's not really the class balance that is broken per se but how class do scale with the current borrowed power.

[Kehego]

The balance is fine. You can play almost any spec in the game and clear all the content you want.
Unless you want ridiculous high keys, 20+ or 25+.
The game doesn't even support any achievements for key levels that high, the highest M+ content recognized in achievement system is +15.
And any spec in the game can clear +15.

The last time i remember truly unplayable specs was WOD patch 6.2
Survival Hunter was doing like 50% less damage than BM/MM. Nobody was playing this spec in 6.2, it was vanilla WoW level bad.

facts, lmao

Imagine how tilting it was to HAVE to drop sv when hfc hit. Ugh.

[Lilly32]

I don’t understand why there have to be meme specs like Ret, WW, and Enhance.

[MrLachyG]

Class balance will never happen. Blizz should give specs more utility, give people a reason to play them. Having some utility within a spec will counterbalance slightly lower dps

[cparle87]

I concur with this. It's so fundamentally strange to me blizzard has stuck to their style of a patch every quarter and adamant refusal to do spec iteration outside of expos in 2020 when games like lol and fortnite are patching at least once a month.

I find the excuse of "people don't want specs to change" to be a complete nonsense outside the world first window.

Because those games are centered around this "here's the brand new OP character, buy it now!" "here's the brand new OP character, that last one you bought is now shit, buy the new one!"

They also patch every month so the theorycrafters can go "these are the strongest classes this month" and everyone rerolls to them so they keep playing so MAUs stay high.

[Gaaz]

I find it very hard to estimate current class balance currently. Simply because corruption system and essences contribute such a large portion to character's performance, their actual built in numbers are being dwarfed. To oversimplify, one spec may be doing 1 dps, another one 10 dps, thus being 10 times stronger. But if they both slap on an item that deals 1000 dps by itself, the difference between these specs will hardly even register.
Personally, I do not like the idea of balancing classes through external toolkit (e.g. corruption). It is effective and does even things out overall, since all classes will be using similar items. But this is just lazy and makes the game more bland. But Blizz was never good at balancing things (up until recently some specs having twice the output of others), so I guess it is better than seeing your favorite spec in the gutter. I guess this is what they are doing in Shadowlands - balance through external sources identical for all classes. Only instead of corruption, you will have faction abilities. Good news - unlikely specs will have very large differences between them in terms of damage output. Toolkit will be more important overall. Bad news - get ready to grind and have half of your buttons be identical on all characters.

[Saltysquidoon]

Because those games are centered around this "here's the brand new OP character, buy it now!" "here's the brand new OP character, that last one you bought is now shit, buy the new one!"

They also patch every month so the theorycrafters can go "these are the strongest classes this month" and everyone rerolls to them so they keep playing so MAUs stay high.

I mean Fortnite doesn't have characters. I also can't see why blizzard wouldn't want to drive MAUs (except maybe because they get their sub bucks no matter what).

Further, I'm not sure how this excuses talents like ossuary or first blood that have been mandatory since they were introduced in legion without having been changed or removed.

But keep shilling blizzard my loyal friend.

[music49]

The big issue here is everyone compares them selves to the top 1%. These top 1% squeeze the absolute maximum out of the top spec. So what a minor dps deference is for most the top 1% will make it look like a huge imbalance. That is why shamans looked so bad at launch of BfA the top guilds in the world didn't see a use for any of the specs except maybe spirit link totem. So they never actually had high parses. And the general player base that choose there main based on what the top 1% are playing see that as "oh they are bad this teir" when usually at that level it doesn't make a difference. The skill/dps gap between the top raiders in the game and the majority of raiders is probably just as big of a difference as the difference between people who at most do LFR and those who actually raid.

On the other hand people enjoy that sort of play style. Looking for the strongest spec in a teir and trying to do the best they can. Which is a totally viable play style.

TO stay on topic, balance in wow is great for a majority of the player base, however the higher you go in difficulty the greater the imbalances become.

[cparle87]

I mean Fortnite doesn't have characters. I also can't see why blizzard wouldn't want to drive MAUs (except maybe because they get their sub bucks no matter what).

Further, I'm not sure how this excuses talents like ossuary or first blood that have been mandatory since they were introduced in legion without having been changed or removed.

But keep shilling blizzard my loyal friend.

If your only arguments are ad hominem I don't see the point of trying to discuss with you.

"Somebody has disagreed with me! I know! I'll present no refutation to their argument and passively-aggressively call them a friend and a shill in the same sentence! I win!"

[Saltysquidoon]

If your only arguments are ad hominem I don't see the point of trying to discuss with you.

I presented three arguments and a joke.
You decided to disingenuously ignore my arguments and REEEEEE about the joke, not to mention the post I was replying too was a factually incorrect strawman.

But I mean keep on shillin' I guess?

[Kralljin]

And...looking very closely at it from hindsight and how it all started in Vanilla...yeah...man was it bad.

Point is however that back then, you didn't have devs on the team that had ~15 years of experience on Class design in that very specific MMO under their belt.

Fucking something up on your first time is natural, but after 15 years, you should get it right much quicker.
And looking here at the corruption, they absolutely dropped the ball.

or how can one explain the crazy influx to the game when it was at the most imbalanced and the worst of pidgeon-holing classes and speccs.

People were less educated about the subject?

Like, i'd bet there were some Guilds in Vanilla where a Rogue or Hunter was topdog Dps, which could just mean that:
1.Hunter / Rogue was overgeared
2.Loaded on consumables on virtually everything
3.Guild was filled with bad Dps Warrs

Information about imbalances simply didn't spread as fast back then and people didn't have the same tools they have now to figure how broken something is.
People may have known that Dps Warrs are pretty strong, but i don't think most people knew they were THAT strong.

Not to mention that not too insignificant amount of people were stuck leveling their characters for a long time in Vanilla, where endgame balance obviously no concern when you're not max level.

It simply was a different time and a different game, drawing conclusions such as "balance didn't matter back then and thus doesn't matter now" is just false.

[Relapses]

What I find interesting about this is that for 15+ years people have accused Blizzard being shit at pretty much everything...and in this case especially balance. And...looking very closely at it from hindsight and how it all started in Vanilla...yeah...man was it bad.

Yet...at the end of the day it seems people were / are okay with it...don't / didn't care that much...or how can one explain the crazy influx to the game when it was at the most imbalanced and the worst of pidgeon-holing classes and speccs.

Balance has gone through stages with Blizzard. In Vanilla, it was #yolo. Consumables and world buffs were so disproportionately relevant and the game was so new that it really mattered very little. TBC saw Blizzard fleshing out more specs but still very much adhering to the "hybrid tax," for specs like SPriest and Moonkin. WotLK saw Blizzard changing to the "bring the player, not the spec" mentality. Balance was much more cohesive in this expansion but there were still extreme outliers and things like ArP certainly didn't help matters. Moving from Cata into MoP we saw Blizzard adding utility to everything and giving ranged DPS specs nearly as much mobility as melee. (Kil'jaeden's Cunning for Warlocks and castable LB on the move for Ele Shamans come to mind.) MoP I believe was the height of button bloat but also represented one of the more truly balanced periods for all specs in the game. (Except Warlocks -- but that was an issue with Snapshotting more than the class itself imo.) WoD is when pruning began and this continued into Legion with the emergence of rental powers. I think Corrupted gear represents the "final form" of rental powers because it's so incredibly powerful (especially when compared to pretty much any other end-of-expansion feature). Now, moving into SL, we seem to have an amalgamation of many different aspects of WoW's past and it's going to be interesting to see how it'll be remembered in hindsight.

Somewhere in all of that, you're going to find people who prefer one version of the game and these people will hold steadfast that anybody who disagrees is wrong or "simply didn't play." It's this subjective nature of balance and personal preference which keeps this topic from dying off. It's really easy to create a blanket statement like, "balance has never been good," but it's much harder to look at the broad strokes philosophies behind Blizzard's approach to balancing the game and the positive and negative elements each approach has had.

Personally, I think Blizzard has done a much better job at keeping the game cohesively balanced than a lot of other triple A developers and while I doubt there will ever exist a time when even a large percentage of players are totally satisfied with the state of the game, it could be a lot worse.

[apelsinjuice]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st.../24#dataset=99

[Khallid]

I havent played much WoW this expansion and have been focusing mostly on PoE and FFXIV. When it comes to balance I feel like FFXIV does a pretty good job with it. While it seems like Summoners have been top DPS for a while now you can pretty much bring any DPS job to a raid and they will do just fine. Same for each Healer and Tank. So why does it seem like in WoW theres one class to rule them all during each patch...I think in 8.2 it was S. Priests and now its Fire Mages. Again Im just looking through DPS logs since I dont have any high end experience this expansion. I assume for Mythic+ theres also some specs that will never in a million years get you a group. So is it really that bad for some classes/specs (Shaman, non BrM Monks, Ret, Non BM Hunters) or are a few vocal posters blowing everything out of proportion? For example I feel like the Warlock Forums, here and official, seem to have the most Doom and Gloom for as long as I can remember. Yet according to https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/24 all 3 Lock specs are near the top.

TLDR: Class Balance really bad or not that bad?

DPS Balance tends to be pretty decent for single target, and pretty bad for AoE.

That's been a trend for a while. Blizzard doesn't seem to be too concerned about large inbalance in AoE spells. Which is odd considering how Mythic+ is a big part of the game now, and how often raid bosses have adds.

If you look at a single target boss like Shad'har, Fire Mages are still near the top but they're not outliers by any means. However, look a fight that has AoE like Hivemind, Vexiona, or even Ra-den, the Fire Mages are ridiculously far ahead. And it's always like that. The outliers are always on AoE, or multi-dotting multiple adds that can't be brought together. So Blizzard deliberately doesn't seem to care if AoE is unbalanced. But they do nerf/buff if single target is too unbalanced.