Ideas for why the game is so unbalanced. Don't be rude.

[Gedias]

As stated before, it's all about PVE vs PVP

Even if WOW was a PVP-only game, it would still be hard to balance. But since it's a PVE and PVP game (with obviously more focus on the PVE side since that is Blizzard's customer base), it's practically impossible. Take for example enhancement shamans: they do less damage to other melee because shamans wear chain while other classes wear plate (with exception of rogues, but in compensation they can vanish and stunlock). Boost enhance damage in PVP, and then they're OP in PVE. Increase their armor or damage mitigation in PVP, and now they may be able to tank or offtank in PVE (which would be awesome for shamans btw, but not what the designers have in mind).

You could try giving each class a PVP-only spec with PVP-only abilities but that could also be a nightmare. Hybrids (druids, shamans, priests, pallies, monks) would all demand multiple PVP specs to cover the different PVE specs they already have. A PVP spec would be fine for BG's and Arenas, and PVE for raids and dungeons, but what about out in the world? Would you have a PVP spec to fight other players, but then switch to a PVE spec for world bosses or dailies?

Basically you have to favor one side over the other, or do both poorly. Blizzard has chosen PVE over PVP, since that is their customer base, though they still attract a good amount of PVP players because the competition is so weak.

[DiscoGhost]

the seer number of spells and abilities in the game. its a basic mathematical concept that the more you add to an equation, the harder it is to balance.

[Roose]

Too many damned abilities.

I am gonna try 70s pvp and if that is too bloated too I am likely done.

[ringpriest]

As stated before, it's all about PVE vs PVP
You could try giving each class a PVP-only spec with PVP-only abilities but that could also be a nightmare. Hybrids (druids, shamans, priests, pallies, monks) would all demand multiple PVP specs to cover the different PVE specs they already have. A PVP spec would be fine for BG's and Arenas, and PVE for raids and dungeons, but what about out in the world? Would you have a PVP spec to fight other players, but then switch to a PVE spec for world bosses or dailies?

I agree with most of what you said, but in response to this I just wanted to make one observation. Once upon a time, WoW had a talent system where there was plenty of room for choices between pure pvp and pve talents. Back when dual-spec was first introduced, that's exactly what some (I'd say many, but I don't have any actual numbers) players used it for: having a pve build and a pvp build.

[Gandrake]

Homogenization

What class does not have 3 forms of CC, a good slow, and an interrupt? Very few. Shit, half the classes have Execute in one specialization or another now.

[Yvaelle]

Homogenization

What class does not have 3 forms of CC, a good slow, and an interrupt? Very few. Shit, half the classes have Execute in one specialization or another now.

Shadowpriests don't have a good slow (we have a 50% for 3 second slow we have to channel, that roots us), and we don't have an interrupt (Silence is only an interrupt in pve and has a 45 second cooldown). Disc and Holy have neither of these. Apart from Priests though - ya - everyone's toolkits are pretty similar nowadays. Most of the time, giving everyone a snare and an interrupt and such is necessary to make them interchangeable - ask the rets what it was like to be the melee without an interrupt.

I don't think denying people snares or interrupts, or giving one class wildly more CC than another - is a good way to distinguish them for WoW's design model (not that it doesn't work for some games). Good differentiation is giving tools that accomplish the same effect, but in different ways - charge, death grip and shadowstep all put you in melee with your opponent - but they are all distinct and have situational advantages over one another.

Where I don't like the current homogenization is in how all damage must be roughly the same, our resource mechanics are carbon copies of other specs, we all get cooldowns of roughly equal benefit with roughly equal durations and cooldowns, our burst is all about equal, our pressure is all about equal - that's silly. Now obviously I'm being pretty liberal with the phrase "about equal" there, but compared to Vanilla or TBC or even WotLK - you can see the trend.

Having wildly different damage and survivability and mobility and such is beneficial sometimes because it gives us clear strengths and weaknesses, when we all have the same toolsets - the subtle discrepancies become a bigger issue (as they are now), so the irony of homogenization is that it actually makes the game appear more imbalanced.

[Xl House lX]

I don't think many of you are looking at the "Big Picture."

I'm not here to hate on Blizzard or anything but look at it this way. The game is dumbed down for the casual players, correct? For the players that only play once or twice a week for a few hours. (Not that there is anything wrong with this.) Why? So Blizzard can make more money off with a wider market range. So this creates a problem with the different gear players will get at end game. LFR creates one tier, normal instances the second and heroic versions the third. This means the scaling will naturally be way too high when it comes to later gear (for progression to exist you must need better gear in order to down a boss before the enrage timer.) So since there is a HUGE difference in the item level of gear with PvE there must be the same with PvP.

Three tiers: Honor gear, conquest gear and Elite conquest (I know there isnt elite for 5.2 but hear me out). They need this so there is some sort of barrier between the hardcore players and the casual players. (For their market; nobody who plays this game frequently would play if you could only get regular honor gear. If you are 2.2k and put a lot of time into this game you don't want the same as someone who puts in 2 hours a week).

Due to scaling in MoP everyone's damage is high, their healing is high and their health pools are high. Why? You need a large difference between the last expansion otherwise players wouldn't bother doing anything to attain the new gear (and this leaves a chance that you will get bored, unsubscribe and Blizzard would lose money). If you could do MoP raids/pvp with Cataclysm gear then whats the point to attaining new gear? (besides looks obviously).

Now take into account that Blizzard wants to balance this game around RBGS. This makes sense because Blizzard simply wants players to have to work together in a larger group that is (overall) easier to balance. This also gives a reason for letting their developers get a little lazy with pvp. Simply scale class damage for pve and in RBGS it won't matter as much. So now you're stuck with players who have ridiculous damage, have a high amount of life and insane healing in a game where there is very little actual balancing to any sort of skillful play. Making it more casual (After all, who doesn't like to see large numbers?) and overall "easier" for the players and on the developers since they won't have to worry too much about players complaining.

Basically, Blizzard is just being very lazy and very greedy. Catering to a larger crowd which will bring them more money. There you have it, my theory on why PvP is no where near as good as it could be.


Now, lets talk about ways to improve the PvP.

1. Take away certain abilities in Arena only. Whether that is spec specific or overall for the class, who knows.
2. Make it so PvP gear is very similar to PvE gear and give players buffs/debuffs for when they enter arenas.

Thank you for reading the post and please be kind!

EDIT: Sorry if my thoughts feel scattered, it's 5am here and they certainly are.

The game is unbalanced cause its not just one game. It's two. The world of PvP and PvE are two totally different games. Until they make things similar to like maybe pvp specializations or makes all spells behave differently in PvP than in PvE, the game will ALWAYS be unbalanced.

That is all there is to it. This is why I quit WoW, why try to play competitive multiplayer when the games developers are putting half of their resources into the other half of the game? Or I could play CoD which puts virtually 100% of its resources into multiplayer.

[kindar]

If you want a pvp game that's perfectly balanced, play rock/paper/scissors.

I don't mean that statement to be rude, but it's the truth. If you go outside that archetype, mathematically, things are never going to be truly balanced. The more variables you add, the more potential for imbalance you incur. That's just a fact of life.

There are 34 specs in this game. Three different roles. Multiple playstyles. Tons of niche choices. Making all of those things even somewhat "equal" seems like a bit of a daunting task. The tone of some people really makes it sound like they could do a better job. I'd love to see that. I'm not sure how many people will understand the phrase, but there needs to be a saying like "armchair quarterback" for people that think they know how to run a game better than the company does.

I really wish Blizz would invite some of the biggest whiners to their HQ and let them balance the game for a day. Just sit them in a room with the programmers, and let the whiners call all the shots. After they've put all that time in trying to balance pvp, let the playerbase enjoy their work. Blizz could then post the home addresses of the new "devs," in case anybody wanted to send a thank you card for the much-needed balance they brought.

... People would die.

Blizzard has actual mathematicians hired for this kind of stuff. I really think some people are under the impression that Ghostcrawler himself just sits down at a computer, arbitrarily punches some numbers in, and that's how Blizz does "balance." I sincerely doubt that's the case. It may feel like that at times, even to me, but that's not what's happening. This is a multi-million dollar game, I assure you that they have people that have nice degrees that work on these numbers. That alone should be proof of how hard balancing this game is: even those guys kinda suck at it.

All that said, I want to make it clear that I don't completely have Blizz's back. I believe they could be doing so much more to balance pvp. I also feel though that they've been improving a lot. Bottom line is that the game is never going to be perfectly balanced; If you can't handle that fact, I fear for you when you go out in the real world and see all the imbalance there.

[Exorte]

Homogenization

What class does not have 3 forms of CC, a good slow, and an interrupt? Very few. Shit, half the classes have Execute in one specialization or another now.

What?
The more homogenization the more balance it would be.
If all class are the exactly the same, the game would be perfectly balanced.

[PrairieChicken]

Devs are making poor excuse of not everything can be balanced, blah blah, so they ditch 1v1 2v2, rvr and no wonder why game isn't balanced

Plus it's PvE game, pve gets priority, so pvp will never be balanced without seperation

[Korgoth]

Shortsighted uncaring developers and their pointless desire to dump endless crap into the game with little regard to its outcome.

[Deleted]

If you want a pvp game that's perfectly balanced, play rock/paper/scissors.

I don't mean that statement to be rude, but it's the truth. If you go outside that archetype, mathematically, things are never going to be truly balanced. The more variables you add, the more potential for imbalance you incur. That's just a fact of life.

There are 34 specs in this game. Three different roles. Multiple playstyles. Tons of niche choices. Making all of those things even somewhat "equal" seems like a bit of a daunting task. The tone of some people really makes it sound like they could do a better job. I'd love to see that. I'm not sure how many people will understand the phrase, but there needs to be a saying like "armchair quarterback" for people that think they know how to run a game better than the company does.

I really wish Blizz would invite some of the biggest whiners to their HQ and let them balance the game for a day. Just sit them in a room with the programmers, and let the whiners call all the shots. After they've put all that time in trying to balance pvp, let the playerbase enjoy their work. Blizz could then post the home addresses of the new "devs," in case anybody wanted to send a thank you card for the much-needed balance they brought.

... People would die.

Blizzard has actual mathematicians hired for this kind of stuff. I really think some people are under the impression that Ghostcrawler himself just sits down at a computer, arbitrarily punches some numbers in, and that's how Blizz does "balance." I sincerely doubt that's the case. It may feel like that at times, even to me, but that's not what's happening. This is a multi-million dollar game, I assure you that they have people that have nice degrees that work on these numbers. That alone should be proof of how hard balancing this game is: even those guys kinda suck at it.

All that said, I want to make it clear that I don't completely have Blizz's back. I believe they could be doing so much more to balance pvp. I also feel though that they've been improving a lot. Bottom line is that the game is never going to be perfectly balanced; If you can't handle that fact, I fear for you when you go out in the real world and see all the imbalance there.

You are ridiculous for thinking anybody thinks it could be done in a day. Nobody is saying that.

Yes i do believe i could do better. If i had a team of guys and a Carte blanche to change PvP as i saw fit, without having to account for things such as what the publisher or marketing want or what Blizzard think doesn't belong in their design philosophy.
It would mean massive changes though and separating PvP from PvE in regards to abilities. In essence it would have to be two games for it to be possible.

I have no doubt that the talented guys at Blizzard could also fix balance if they got the green light to redesign it as they saw fit but that will never happen. Could i fix balance given the same constraints that Blizzard employees face? Not a chance.

[kindar]

You are ridiculous for thinking anybody thinks it could be done in a day. Nobody is saying that.

I meant "day" as a more arbitrary unit of time in that comment, but I understand the misconception. Sorry about that. To clarify, I don't think most people could do a better job if they had one day or one decade.

Yes i do believe i could do better. If i had a team of guys and a Carte blanche to change PvP as i saw fit, without having to account for things such as what the publisher or marketing want or what Blizzard think doesn't belong in their design philosophy.
It would mean massive changes though and separating PvP from PvE in regards to abilities. In essence it would have to be two games for it to be possible.

This is the crux of the argument, I believe. Breaking the game into essentially two different games. I'm with you, I think it'd be ultimately the best choice they could make. I think Blizz has also made it fairly apparent that this will never happen though.

I can't say I blame them. Not only would it be a massive undertaking, but it'd also be quite a risk. For every player that would be in favor of such a change, I'm sure there's another player that would feel alienated by it. And that's if they get everything perfect. They'd surely make mistakes to vary degrees in the design and implementation of the "new" pvp, and then they'd not only have to deal with people complaining about imbalance but also people remarking how they completely mangled something that wasn't too terribly broken (relatively speaking, of course).

Personally, I've never been TOO terribly upset with the state of pvp. I'm a naturally easy to please person though. My main has been a rogue since 3.2, so I've seen a lot of ups and downs (admittedly mostly ups) and there have been very few times I was just absolutely disgusted with how things were. Although things are far from perfect, they really do do a great job compared to most of their competition. Wow just happens to cater to a wider audience than most so it gets a bit more flak.

[willtron]

easiest thing to do would have abilites do different damage in PvP and PvE - but blizz think we're too stupid for that apparently.

[Golden]

Personally, I've never been TOO terribly upset with the state of pvp. I'm a naturally easy to please person though. My main has been a rogue since 3.2, so I've seen a lot of ups and downs (admittedly mostly ups) and there have been very few times I was just absolutely disgusted with how things were.

I have a rogue as well - but also an elemental shaman alt. I actually am truly disgusted with how my elemental shaman is right now. Imagine a spec that hard casts nature spells +90% of the time in a world where melee have 2-4 different spell interrupts on low cooldowns. It's a bit off-topic, but I bring it up just to highlight that fact that there are some truly imbalanced and unfair things in the game right now that make you wonder how such a thing could even happen.

[Posokhov]

WoW has 34 different specs, most fighting games have as many heroes all perfectly balanced against each other.
Gear can easily be balanced and level differences doesn't matter.

It's just a huge cop out from the developers saying it can't be done. You honestly think it's not possible?

WOW also balances classes around 5-man PVE content.
10-man PVE content.
25-man PVE content.
3-man PVP content.
10-man PVP content.

None of these are things found in fighting games. None. Balance in WOW is infinitely more complex than balance in fighting games.

[Ramaloce]

Well in my opinion it breaks down into 3 major factors that is the major imbalance that is WoW PvP (aside from the fact it can never be 100% balanced) in no particular order:

1)The new talent system: It's new and after they got the bases of it (old talents that they considered worthy of being there) it left a lot of empty spaces all around the talent tiers. So they had to add new things that supported a theme for each tier. This ended up being a ton of new abilities, some with even new mechanics. All this new stuff at once makes it hard to balance it all out for the overall effect of both game aspects of PvE and PvP. Even with the amount of testing (internal and beta) it could never amount to millions that get to play with the new system when it's launched, so their is no way they could fully get a grasp on how it would end up effecting the classes as a whole in PvP. As such we ended up with some talents that were good and more or less equal to the other talents in it's tier, but ends up being borderline op from a PvP standpoint.

2)They're trying to greatly widen the PvP player base: This has been quite clear since the first announced base resilience, appealing to a broader player base is always a good goal to have in mind for a gaming developer. It's a very noble cause and I support it 100%. However we are currently sitting in the early stages of this PvP player base widening and with that everything is not going to be even remotely close to stable. With PvE, they made a easy(LFR) medium(normal raids) and hard (heroic raid) difficulty so they can have as many people as possible enjoying the raid content, They are now trying to do that with PvP. Not make a multiple difficulty PvP setting but by making it easier for anyone to just jump right in and not get completely "WTF 1-shot" kind of deal, without making it too easy for the vets and still making PvP gear the thing to get for PvP.

3)They keep adding MORE STUFF: I'am mostly talking about abilities here but with this expansion they added a lot of new abilities with the new talent system and a new class on top of it all. Balancing anything works much like a 'balancing scale' shocking I know and blizzard has they're work cut out for them balancing the current scale they have for PvP. As more stuff is added to their scale like a new class for example. It gets really really difficult to actually maintain any sort of balance at all, and all sorts of different things will need to be added, adjusted or removed purely for the sake of balance. As more things gets added more adjusting will need doing, with more things to have to look at for possible adjustment the greater the likelihood of overlooking something(they are people after all). As such we end up with a ton of things either not really needed, too much of the same kind of thing, or some combination so out of whack that without it that part of the scale will be much to weak but with it either way too powerful or just it itself is too powerful.

That's about it from my point of view. Given time I still hold onto the hope that it will get better, and it is. Very slowly, but it is.

[Rabian]

Burst has to be strong to take down healers as they can bring themselves (or a teammate) back to full health in like 2 gcd's. Imo they should implement a blanket fix reducing all healing and damage done in pvp by 50% (or whatever amount it takes to tone down burst and heals).

[Thirtyrock]

WoW has 34 different specs, most fighting games have as many heroes all perfectly balanced against each other.
Gear can easily be balanced and level differences doesn't matter.

It's just a huge cop out from the developers saying it can't be done. You honestly think it's not possible?

Most fighting games don't have healers. Most fighting games don't have crowd control.

[blackblade]

Most fighting games don't have healers. Most fighting games don't have crowd control.

Also don't balance against Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, or other non-you-vs-me game modes.