With the clusterfuck going on now that is the covenants and soulbinds it would suck the biggest donkey dick in existence having your class nerfed during your most vulnerable moment which is just before raiding.
With the clusterfuck going on now that is the covenants and soulbinds it would suck the biggest donkey dick in existence having your class nerfed during your most vulnerable moment which is just before raiding.
There's no functional way to do that though. You can't do a tuning pass untill you settle on the mechanics for how the class (and covenants) work. Imagine hunters - we've wanted hunters mark gone since start of beta, and now it is, and this is a mechanical function of how we play - but if tuning had already been done, it means 5% damage would have been just gone.
While neat for the player if they could settle on shit early, it just doesn't work in reality.
They will do tuning for prepatch and shadowlands somewhat independently... at least they did in the past to some outliers that may only exist at level 50 with bfa systems still active.
They will have to adress the class itself and their power increases... Ideally the additional stuff would be similar in power increase but history shows there will always be some specs that gain a much bigger (maybe unexpected) advantage by receiving a specific new borrowed power
lvl50 + bfa azerite + essences
51-60 with the barebone covenant
lvl 60 + covenants + soulbinds
Yes they are nowadays
tuning is done in three steps:
1. rough tuning at release to not have crazy outliers
2. balancing when the first season starts (raid, M+, pvp)
3. detailed balancing when mythic raid opens
It cannot be done earlier because Blizzard uses data from the previous step to balance the next one.
They usually tune at the end of heroic week, right before or when Mythic launches, and then they don't touch balance unless something is literally bugged for 6 months straight. It doesn't matter how broken a class is or how far ahead they might be, they simply won't touch them for nearly half a year, which is honestly a joke. The worst part about this is that classes that are clearly awful rarely get anything thrown at them during this time too, and when they do, it's a marginal amount of table scraps thrown their way before they're forgotten upon the next major patch.
My issue with tuning is that they're too afraid or unwilling to make changes after the first 2-3 weeks of a patch (balance wise), and let classes be hilariously broken for 6 months intervals (hilariously broken can be taken as both good/bad). If there are a host of classes that are upwards of 10-15% above everybody else, and it shows within the first month of a patch, why can't some of these classes get pushed upwards instead of having to wait for the next major patch? Surely PvP can't play into it, because PvP has been balanced differently for the last few expansions (and poorly).
I'd like to see the reasons behind their balancing decisions put to public scrutiny, along with frequent Q&A. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be a very fun job at Blizzard, but at the same time, I believe it would help the community in a lot of ways. Also, potentially, it could help the game itself.
Last edited by Zenfoldor; 2020-10-13 at 08:55 PM.
Yes, it will be balanced enough at release. Just like it was balanced enough at BfA release. Because here's the thing: You don't need perfect balance without endgame content.
It doesn't matter how balanced it is at release. There is no content in the game where you're going to need that good balance. It should just be in a roughly decent shape. What matters is how good balance is when the season starts. Did they do a good job previously in that regard? Not really, no. Will they do a good job in Shadowlands? I doubt it. But that doesn't change the fact that finetuning should happen once the game is released and not when all systems are tweaked left and right.