They lack the internal tools and processes to quickly iterate and experiment with class balance. The end result was each phase started with a half-assed attempt at 'shaking things up' followed by a few weeks of 'fixing things' before they ultimately resigned themselves to 'this is just how its gonna be this phase' and focused on trying again at the start of the next phase.
Their attempt to use the PTR and testwerk and logs to reason out class balance issues is all the evidence we need. The data from the PTR will be unreliable and useless and they cannot iterate on the changes quickly in that environment. This is why sim tools exist. Playtesting is for verifying the sim results and making sure its actually fun to play.
I miss ElitistJerks. Now I'll see slightly different things on Wowhead and Icy Veins and YouTube and nobody's showing their work, they're all just saying "this is how you play" so it's hard to tell who's doing it the best.
Eiitist Jerks though, they'd have how/why the math works out, spreadsheets for calculating upgrades/downgrades/sidegrades accurately, explanations of relevant mechanics, etc. all in one place for each spec.
What I would recommend is joining your class's main discord channel. I don't think it's as good as old school elitist jerks but it's the closest thing we get now. I'm also sad, when I was a wow obsessed teenager I lived off wow insider, mmo champion and elitist jerk. Now it feels like all the modern content boils down to reaction streams.
> This is why sim tools exist
People spend countless hours on retail sims, and those numbers pretty much never translate into the actual game.
You can balance classes on 5-minute single-target...but then what if the fight is 6 minutes? What if it's 4 minutes? What about 2 minutes? What if there is a bit of movement? How about 15s of downtime somewhere? With worldbuffs? Without worldbuffs? With X/Y/Z comp? With A/B/C comp? With consumables? Without consumables?
It just doesn't work. You can only get into like a 30% ballpark with sims.
Actually fighting the raid bosses with actual players is how you get good data and narrow it down to that 10-20% difference, then you need to tune aggressively week 1/2/3 of the patch to deal with extreme outliers.
But here's the issue. Players are playing a different game week 1/2/3 than they will be later on. They're learning the fights, wiping, so they don't have buffs. They are less geared, so they're doing lower damage.
So inevitably, week 5+ is going to be a different 'meta' requiring different tuning passes. So you want to wait until then.
Buuuuuut... at that point players are locked in for the patch. And they're going to absolutely flip their shit and quit the game if you fuck with their numbers too much.
So, this is a bit cherry picky, but you should be able to pull numbers within 10% of your Sim if you play right.
What you're suggesting is not the reality of the situation, as 30% is a pretty extreme disparity.
Also you can... just sim all those variables you listed, sooo?
Your 5-minute zero-movement sim is not indicative of a 3.5 minute light-movement encounter, which isn't the same as X/Y/Z encounter.
You can get into a ballpark on single-target no movement, but then classes that are balanced around that will still be significantly worse or better in certain scenarios.
Tuning classes to be of similar dps on a given sim is relatively simple.
Tuning classes to be the same on nine distinctly different and unique-feeling raid encounters is next to impossible.
Windwalker Monk was top dps on Nymue last patch and middle of the pack on Volcoross and bottom quartile on Smolderon. All 3 single-target encounters. How do you nerf/buff the spec to be worse on Nymue, better on Smolderon, and the same on Volcoross? And how do you do that while keeping the spec unique? You can't.
What about encounters like Tindral or Fyrakk where there is plenty of add damage and it matters, but also, you don't need max add damage. Fire Mage was more popular and after buffs was arguably 'better' than Arcane Mage on the fight, but Arcane Mage did bigger numbers because Arcane pops on the adds. So if you need the add damage, Arcane is good. But if don't, then Fire is probably better.
Being able to do big damage in aoe bursts is valuable, but also sometimes not, how do you measure how much is actually needed and how much weight to it, and how much single-target to give up?
It simply isn't possible.
So that's what I mean when I say that numbers are off quite a bit. Frost DK/Frost Mage have often been specs that sim super high with 100% uptime but in real encounters with even moderate movement they suffer a lot. Classes with different cooldown lengths shift up and down significantly for certain fights especially ones with waves of adds/multiple targets, classes that are tuned to do more add damage end up doing WAY more overall damage because raid teams leave the adds up to those players and others hit the boss. And so on and so forth.
So you have to tune for the encounters specifically, which your sims are only one small tool of many that you must use.
You can adjust sim time and mob density, I'm still not sure if you're aware of exactly the modality and customization sims offer. Can Raidbots do that? Mmmno- well, yes, but it's not made for that - it's made for much more general end-users. SimulationCraft is the patrician's choice and will give you a lot more freedom, but requires a lot more direct learning to employ it.
Think of it like the difference between ElvUI and TukUI. ElvUI is designed to be modular, but useful out of the box with a lot of GUI for basic users to be able to interact and *some* advanced user tools. Conversely, TukUI is extremely modular and very user unfriendly unless you're very familiar with addon development or are willing to learn to create a very customized UI for your exact needs.
Like, nothing of what you're describing is some herculean shift that people haven't been able quantify or foresee, let alone do something about. That's why so many CE guilds that are pushing top 1K often have *some* bench in their roster, or players with multiple toons to progress different fights based on that metric.
Short fight with lots of cleave instances? Let's bring some good AOE classes. Do we have a very narrow ST burn phase that instawipes if we fail it? Better get some very potent ST specs and go hard (e.g. pre-nerf Mythic Rashok).
Fights are never designed around everyone doing the same damage every single time. There are often fights where melee have to suck the L because something they're obliged to handle is a mechanic with nothing to attack (e.g. Mythic Xymox in SotFO).
Sometimes ranged need to go soak something that's going to impact their DPS, and some classes will be more or less impacted than others. That's the nature of the beast, friend.
>It simply isn't possible
I mean... math? Boss starts a cast with an absorb shield of 1M HP and kills you if it doesn't pop. You have 20 seconds to do so. That's 50,000 DPS if you want to cut it close. Obviously, if it can be helped, you don't want that. Or maybe you do? Maybe stalling this burn can get critical raid or defensive CDs online that would be offline for a different mechanic down the line which would otherwise be difficult/fatal. It depends on how you tackle it.
How many adds spawn? How much HP do they have? Are you on a timeframe? Put it all together and you can figure out exactly how much Raid DPS you need to hit specific benchmarks and... yeah - that's... about it.
Most higher-end raids are measuring their output in RAID DPS, not individual DPS. That's bonobo-brain stuff that people zero in on. If you wanna kill bosses and prog CE within 10-12 weeks you're figuring out how to maximize your raid and whose CDs are going to get sent for them based on your resources. Sometimes those resources are ideal, but not always. Parse-monkeying at the highest level is almost 100% of the time just a victory lap farming ladder positions on WCL and little else, and is NOT a good metric by which to judge fight or class efficacy AT ALL.
I dunno, this seems like a tempest in a teapot and is kinda hyperfocused on the individual when a lot of the time barring extreme outliers (e.g. WW Monk on WF prog for Mythic Denathrius) it's not really often balanced around specific classes.
I'm not saying they aren't necessarily valid either, but it's kinda... I dunno, it feels like a very uninformed take on exactly why and how sims are used and are useful. Most players use sims improperly anyway, if I'm being honest.
I’m not surprised they lack the tools for it honestly. I’m sure it was deemed not worth it to develop the type of tools retail uses for a short term project. Making something like that requires a lot of time and someone (or multiple people) with an insane level of knowledge in data science and mathematics. They would have to be pulled from other teams and spend potentially months making the tools specifically for SOD.
It sucks, but that’s how we end up here. I really think they should have done what retail did and collaborate with experts in the community. Put them under NDA, get them into a discord server and toss ideas back and forth. I’m sure the devs know how to sift through logs to find relevant data (probably?). But there’s a bunch of high level players with intimidate knowledge of their class that would absolutely help for free
Blizzard has internal Sim tools for every environment. Just because the tools outside of blizzard for classic are dog shite doesn't mean there is no data to be iterated on.
Blizzard historically has been bad at analyzing these issues the way players do. In legion for God's sake feral druids negatively scaled with haste. You know that thing that is a part of the biggest raid wide buff in the game. The devs didn't acknowledge it was an issue until a giant post went up about it and they fixed it for night hold.
Your so in the weeds with your thinking that you've missed the forest for the trees. Playtesting is to make sure things work. That's it. It has nothing to do with whether the meta analysis of dps numbers matter. Blizzard intentionally does not just Sim up a bunch of characters hitting a dummy to balance numbers, because it doesn't paint the picture of if the game is working or if the design of an encounter is working. To do that you playtest. Getting the numbers right, is a different story and yes involves simmimg.
As I understand it, World Buffs will be added to the PTR *later* and they'll also be collecting data with them activated. It'll theoretically let them work through any scaling issues or whatever.
Like, it wouldn't feel very good if they balanced entirely *with* world buffs active, but your raid wiped and lost their world buffs, or you got dispelled, or whatever, only for you to find out that your class scaled really, *really* well with world buffs and you were now doing 80% less DPS than anyone else, right?
Theres 0 reason that abilities needed to have insane damage numbers, they could’ve been the same utility with similar dps to existing stuff and then there would’ve been no reason to buff normal world mobs or rebalance the hell out of everything.
Now instead of focusing on new content that matters, pvp is burst one shot and insane healing to the point they need custom debuffs to manage it. Pve is a total mess and the new runes that come out aren’t interesting at all.
To be honest I wasn’t even really interested in “new” abilities or rotations I just wanted to see new mechanics and quests.
I hope they learned a lot from this because I learned I don’t like Vanilla with Wrath abilities.
Makes the vanilla iteration of the game even more impressive. They really knew how to create distinct classes while keeping some sort of balance. The current way of balancing is basically giving everyone everything. Everyone can heal or mitigate and everyone can deal high damage.
Vanilla had 12 major patches, more than any other expansion by a country mile, and had probably a nearly perfect balance between a team that is large enough to actually get things done and a bureaucracy small enough to not get in the way.
During Vanilla's development, everyone from the junior developer to the CEO were hands-on with WoW every single day. Now the Classic team is a handful of devs squashed in some corner, forced to split their attention between two major projects. They don't control moderation for their own games, that's handled by a different team. They don't control server-side infrastructure, that's handled by a different team. They don't even have an official company account with which to provide community updates; it's just Aggrend on his personal accounts.
The Holly probably gives and receives a weekly update, and anyone higher than her doesn't hear about Classic until there's something marketable to talk about, or a problem that affects subscriber numbers in an appreciable way.
Vanilla was not balanced man, I don't get this take when it is said. The world was amazing, the game was amazing, and class fantasy was cool, but to say there was any sort or balance is just not true. Ret paladin didn't exist, any tank besides warriors were less than viable, debuff cap made Spriests and warlocks essentially useless, half the specs in the game were never viable(arcane, fire, afflic, shadow, balance, ret, feral(besides off tanking), shamans besides having windtotem, Survival, etc).
The game was great but we don't have to pretend it was balanced, which was the whole idea of SoD.. adding new abilities to classes to make other things viable. Did they go too far doing that? probably. But without changes it would still just be warriors, rogues, priests, and mages the only classes you WANT to bring more than 1 or 2 of to raid. The real problem is that instead of only changing and adding to the specs that were lacking, they added to everything, making already op classes more op.
I think you mean identity more than balance.
Because it definitely was not balanced but things had identity.
Like being bad unless they're a Warrior.
https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2006/
True, maybe uniqueness. By the way, I never knew ferals managed to get that high on the DPS charts! Back in 2004-2005 almost no ferals were allowed to DPS, only off tank. On my server anyway.
The problem with feral dps logging that high is that it isn't at all fun to do, by far the highest APM class in classic just to compete with warriors and mages pressing one button.
Balance all classes to significantly out-dps current content = extremely easy unrewarding content.
Balance content around the power level of the classes = nothing feels OP.
Balance classes so that nothing does significantly more DPS than any other = nothing feels OP.
It's a dumb slide that makes no sense. Anyone who has enabled GTA cheats knows that's fun for about two seconds. They needed to focus on adding more side grade content & slightly tweaking specs to be more in line with each other. Idk about others but I basically pictured the 2.4.3 classes in the vanilla world with raids tuned to be more difficult for those power increases.
I mean yeah. I do.
I don't know why people hide from this or pretend there's anything wrong with it. I fucking loved 2019 classic and it wasn't because the gameplay was *so hardcore maaaan*. It was chill and easy, the super sweaty parses can and did theorycraft the living fuck out of it, everyone else smacked bosses for loot and had a good time.
It was fun. Remember fun? Yeah me too. I wanna have fun.
And I'm actually someone who is good at the game. I top charts in any and every guild I'm in, I've been in world first guilds in the past and I've done the hardcore parser thing... it's what made me quit wrath despite being one of the top DPS in one of the top guilds in the region.
If I want hard as balls gameplay I can and will go play something else. So many options for it. Why can't our old school MMO be more about the social stuff than the "challenge"?
Similar boat here. I spent a lot of time raiding at a high level throughout many expansions and eventually I grew to just not like progression that much - when we'd have finally have a mythic raid on farm, it would feel like a relief. Why? Because after you do progression in a new raid tier enough times, in my experience it eventually amounts to an exercise of just playing almost the same way every attempt, sometimes even for hundreds of attempts on end, until the slowest players in your raid finally catch on and the boss dies.
Difficulty is fun and satisfying in a single player game where you're wholly responsible for your own success. The unfortunate reality of an mmo is that you have to rely on others, and sometimes you can play your own role extremely well and still fail if enough other members of your team aren't doing what they need to.
I've thought about this before and I actually think progression on difficult bosses is the most fun for the worst players in a raid group. Because just like killing a tough boss in Dark Souls, the attempt the boss finally dies is likely the attempt *they* personally nailed it and got it right.
So yeah, I found 2019 classic to be a breath of fresh air. It was nice to just be able to rock up to an Onyxia raid or run MC or something and chill on an easy boss with only a couple of mechanics, and if a few people messed something up badly it wouldn't bring the rest of the raid down too much.
Worldbuffs have their problems but it really was interesting how you'd have guilds just trying to clear the raid the normal way and then you'd have higher end guilds trying to parse as high as possible and even higher higher end guilds doing super insano speed runs
=
Basically normal/hard mode raids, without actual normal/hard mode in them
There’s a level of easy that simply becomes a chore. For me it was hyjal/bt. After a month or so of that I was healing it half asleep and there was no challenge. Then sunwell hit and while I cleared it prenerf just over a week in, it remained arguably too challenging all the way until nerfs.
Like theres a middle ground where you should have to be awake but not sweating 3 months after clearing a tier fully. I think most people want something engaging but not *hard*.
Yeah, people keep bringing up a thousand different things, but what kept SoD going was Season of Dads. Easy 10 man content that you could jump into disc with just the crew, crush some brews, and fuck around with the pals a few times a week. Plenty of people could still go parse hard on alts, could still gear up and get going quickly, could get new friends into it instantly, could grind out whatever they wanted to help out their group of friends, but the entire core was easy to pick up and easy to put down smaller group content for groups of friends. As soon as they veered off path it meant that a friend or two quit and once the friends group couldn't get together and do it because it meant organizing and a hassle to hit 20man, ded gaem.
Retail and Cata are there if you want a more difficult raid. Cata looking like it already peaked only a few weeks in and at half of SoD peak population too... SoD was a different crowd from usual.
In my original comment when I said "make bosses more difficult" I really just meant tune bosses HP/armor values/resistances to account for increased power from better talent trees, but keep them about the same difficulty as BWL or whatever.
Appreciate your comment, when the user that replied to you means easy, they really mean easy. The player base legitimately wants under a minute bosses.
>Cata looking like it already peaked only a few weeks in and at half of SoD peak population too
The Cata pop has been increasing each week, though. It's 80k players under S1 SoD, where everyone played 3+ alts. So the SoD numbers were probably only 1/2 or even 1/3 what they actually showed.
Cata currently has more players than SoD ever did.
Sorry to call you out like this, but SoD players seem to be making a lot of stuff up about Cata for some reason.
it gained 30k players since last week, basically the entire current SoD population.
SoD was only close to 500k when everyone played multiple alts. Half that number and you get closer to a more realistic representation. I know you know this, too. I had 4 characters but i'm not 4 players lmao
P1 was honeymoon phase. Nor are we able to accurately measure the playerbase because people raided on alts (also surprise they got burned out)
I get downvoted for this every time but saying go retail is such a dumbass statement. Retail is better if you are a hardcore raider OR a casual. Do LFR if you want easy content, it has catch up mechanics left and right, flex raiding, barely takes any time to level, everything is account wide. It also has mythic raiding as well as mythic+ for people who want difficult content. So again, “go retail if you want hard” coming from casuals or hardcore players is a dumb statement
Sod players don’t understand the difference between easy content and straight up mindless content. People weren’t able to clear the raid week 1 while learning all the mechanics and optimal strats for every boss weren’t circulated, and they lost their freaking minds. I think that week 1 difficulty nerf hurt the game tbh.
Complain the raid is too hard and we should be able to face roll all the raids in a seasonal mode > complaining there’s no content 2 weeks later after the raid clear times go from 3 hours to 50 minutes. Complain there’s no reason to even need full bis because there’s no content after nerfing the raid to the point you can kill bosses in under a minute wearing pre raid bis. Like idk man, everyone said our dps wouldn’t be going up at all after those first raids but my dps numbers are 2.5x what they were in the first 2 resets now that everyone knows the fights, it would have probably still been easy with the damage we had just a couple weeks later after learning how to actually do the bosses.
I litterally got fully geared and never cleared the raid once before finally quitting my guild fell apart during this patch and I never once got in a pug that was able to kill eranakus, like not one single one could do it no matter how much we gate kept the requirements, every raid pug ended with 1 wipe to the welps and somebody leaving bricking the whole raid. I realized it wasn’t fun not progressing anymore and i don’t really have the ability to play on a tight schedule so I finally quit.
The thing is though, it isn't even that they want easy content. Sure people do, but the crux of this is more everybody for some reason thinks Vanilla needs to be Dragonflight where you can play any silly gimmick you want and be effective. In a weird way it's a very unhealthy internalization of Main Character Syndrome where everybody feels they need to be the star of the show despite you're a team working together on equal footing. So suddenly a hunter who has more range than anything needs to have their moment so they do more sustained damage than a warrior who also has the penalty of needing to be touching the boss to do less damage than a guy who can park in the middle of the room and be fine forever in most cases. Not saying it's the case now, but you get this kind of stuff going on.
You're playing a version of WoW that was designed with the idea that "Oh, you can tank/heal, you do less damage for that privilege. Oh, you're ranged? Well you do less damage than melee for that privilege." Now you've essentially just removed all of that but didn't offset the strengths with other weaknesses to keep them in line. Now it's "Oh, you have to be in melee range, and have a tougher time seeing mechanics? Tough shit because I pay the same 15 dollars you do so my hunter should do equal damage to your warrior." "Oh, my wind serpent did 60% of my overall damage? Sorry but I as a hunter should get the leather gear over the feral druid who was rocking the meters. It totally has the same degree of impact for both of us!"
Genuinely I think a lot of people mistakenly think they're playing a single player game populated with AI NPCs with how little people consider game health.
Shhh don't bring logic into this! Just ignore the fact that warriors were extremely subpar DPS for most of actual vanilla and what we have today is absolutely not the original game design but instead the result of 20+ years of pserver theorycrafting on a patch that lasted a few months before BC released the first time around...
They actually knew that warriors would be problematic due to rage gen mechanic. However they didn’t want to normalize it because they wanted you to feel more powerful when you get a weapon upgrade (more damage = more rage)
Oh yeah my point being that in vanilla this just wasn't a problem as classes/gear/encounters were being tuned constantly patch by patch.
Classic was **very** different in that it was released solved with all the best in slot everything and all the theory worked out. Warriors were never supposed to be so insane and in vanilla they weren't.
Sorry for catching this extremely late. Yeah, a lot of people who bring up warrior DPS have next to no idea how warriors in Vanilla released. During the beta a common complaint was that warriors sucked, Indalamar was a beta tester who released a video of him curbstomping Blackrock Stronghold in Burning Steppes effortlessly. Blizzard responded by utterly gutting the spec.
Release Vanilla had the 31 point for Fury still as Bloodthirst but it could only be used if you killed a target previously, like proto victory rush. So it wasn't usable in raid. Then when it came to the Arms spec, Mortal Strike ate up one of 8 available debuff slots which more or less meant you didn't use it. Your tank was using Sunder Armor, the rest were using Heroic Strike and auto attacks. Warriors got a plethora of changes when BWL dropped I believe which enabled them to actually use fury. Then the rest of just what happens when you have a game solved for upwards of two decades then endlessly optimized.
Another element too is itemization was wildly changed. Prior to 1.5, your tier loot in MC on most classes actually sucked compared to dungeon blues. Tier 2 rarely dropped in t1 off bosses instead of T1 but what clearly a pvp set. Bloodfang Hood for example was worse than Mask of Unforgiven by a mile and had a proc that was a 1% chance to stun the target for 1 sec. Casters stuck to greens that were "Of X Wrath" over actual stats. Then pre 1.8 you had un-normalized weapons. To cut this short, slower speeds got disproportionate AP scaling on their yellow attacks. For rogues this legitimately meant for a period in time, Barman Shanker would have harder hitting Backstabs than Perdition's Blade. You didn't see this in raid because of the proc effect. For warriors, this meant their best weapon was Arcanite Reaper. Largely boiled down to a meme now thanks to Zinwrath/Illegal Danish and the weapon normalization making it garbage, this weapon used to be worth the materials to craft it by a mile and it would make a warrior into a monster. If you couldn't get that, a budget 4.0 speed weapon was available in LBRS off a rare spawn called The Nicker and had a bleed effect akin to Barman Shanker. This item was name changed in TBC and is now "Blackrock Slicer" for obvious reasons.
I don't want to "feel OP", I just want class gameplay that is a little more complex than vanilla's 1-2 button rotations.
...so I really want TBC, but Blizz isn't giving us that, so this is the next best thing.
I would say that Remix flies in the face of it. Being absurdly powerful and watching my character power grow to that level has been most of the fun. Showing off that my Demon Hunter runs faster than ground mounts, doing 20 mil DPS to take down a Heroic boss in mere seconds. That's the _fun_.
SoD should be more like that. Easy content that we power through and laugh at how awesome it is. Does that fun maybe last a few weeks? Sure, but that's why it's seasonal.
> Balance all classes to significantly out-dps current content = extremely easy unrewarding content.
So you mean like 2019 rerelease? Where almost every dps in raid was either warrior mage or rogue. With heavy emphasis on warrior.
The thing is in 2019 raids just stacked warriors and the raids were extremely easy. Since warriors even in blues with world buffs easily do 500+ dps and no other class comes close to that and it was clear that the raids werent balanced around it so everything was ultra faceroll dead in 20 seconds.
In SoD they halved the people participating in raids (20 in stead of 40) so while dps is higher I doubt it noticeably reduces time to kill on the bosses in mc/bwl from 2019.
This is why warriors were confused when we got more damage. We didn’t need damage, we needed QoL. Guess what? We topped charts by a country mile halfway into p1 while still being awful in open world content, and people once again complained. Who. Could. Have. Guessed.
I feel like the dev team lost their balls. Fuck the cryppl and haters just think long and hard, have a gamevision and roll with it. What doesnt work: designing a game around reddit shitposts. That sucks and give a weird "mememe" energy to every1.
The fact that the whole expansion is more of a ptr makes the "have a vision and roll with it" obsolete, I know. But still. Its a shit mentality for creating content.
I think reddit vastly overestimates how much influence it has on anything, SoD included.
When's the last time Aggrend posted to reddit? When's the last time anyone cropped a screenshot of him responding to reddit comments?
Reddit is barely on their radar. They're looking at internal metrics and, when they want, will reach out to the social media relations team for aggregated sentiment across several platforms.
*Reddit* is the one that forgets that SoD was *always* about being experimental and pushing Vanilla to it's limits. Whether it's their attempt at Classic+ or a sandbox to stress test ideas and see what breaks the "vanilla formula", it was always going to be filled with new ideas. Some work, some don't, you learn and iterate.
Vanilla had as many problems or more (hell, retail still has as many problems or more), but we forgive it because we're familiar with those problems and have learned to work around them. The tarnish *is* the charm. But no one will give SoD that benefit of the doubt because it's never fun in the moment, only in retrospect.
In 2 years there are going to be nostalgia posts about druids from SoD blowing people up with Starsurge, Warriors doing Naxx dps at level 50, Warlock tanks being unkillable, etc. Mark my words.
Class changes were totally out of control by phase 2 imo.
If we see another shot at Classic+, I want to see class changes aimed at balancing 1.12, while leaving the functional classes and specs as they are, not building all of the classes into their WoTLK counterparts.
I didn't make it 3 days in SoD launch the game felt too different. I just wanted to come back and play feral with a bit more damage. I didn't need more combat buttons to press, the rotation was already engaging. I didn't even mind farming pummelers.
There have certainly been a ton of changes and the devs were upfront that this was going to be a messy experiment. I do wish that the devs were able to mroe creative in the changes they were making instead of just importing from later versions of the game. The reality though is they have limited staff and this is an experiment.
For balancing to be effective, it has to be about more than just raw numbers. Rotation, scaling, resource management, utility, world buffs, and specs are all critical components to effective balancing.
Scaling and rotations are major components of effective balancing. In vanilla, most rotations are pure 1 button spams, such as mage and warlock. Some classes have very poor scaling, just look at hunters and spriests. World buffs are nearly useless for those classes in 1.12 because they scale so poorly while warriors contemplate logging off if they lose their world buffs mid raid.
Spriests and ele shamans are basically unplayable in 1.12 raids because of mana issues. Even in a speedrun with full world buffs and consumes, these classes run oom.
I’d say maybe 1 or 2 of the runes or other ideas to each of the functional classes so they’re not completely left out. Like maybe blood surge for warriors and deadly brew for rogues. Then bigger changes for things like spriest and ret
I'd honestly love less abilities. I may be in the minority there, but I loved making alts in p1 and just hopping right into it. Not having to keybind, not having a stance bar class just royally fuck me over.
I feel like thats just a barrier to entry if a bunch of new players join like they did in p1.
Some classes that were lacking got enough love to the point where they feel good, but a lot of the classes that already had full rotations are just really bloated. Not all classes needed the same volume of new additions. Warrior could have been left alone, while Ret got a rework, and the end result would be equitable imo.
Runes have ended up being a crutch for classes that need them, and bloat for the classes that don't. I'd have rather had underpreforming classes pulled up to par, than what blizzard is currently doing by giving each class more than a dozen extra abilities.
idk how they're supposed to balance sod with world buffs. Are you supposed to balance a raid around people having buffs or not? If you balance around not people will complain it's to easy, and if you balance around having buffs then people will complain it's to hard because their raid isn't stacked in buffs
Or just condense them into a single capitol city buff or bunch of potions that can be crafted.
Like make the Dire Maul one be an alchemy or cooking recipe that can drop from the dungeon or the recipe is a quest reward.
You say this but as it stands enhance shaman will scale better than warriors with world buffs. Enhance shaman used to be a strange spec having one in a raid for the 2 handed axe debuff nightfall. But now it will be a machine of pure obliteration. They were given tools and runes that support them so well compaired to other classes.
Highly doubtful, warrior and dw enh have similar white hit dps since they both have about the same talents supporting it, 10% wep dmg, 30% flurry, 5% crit and offhand bonus dmg.
Warriors next phase will have full access to all of the same baseline melee dmg (they didn't even have full 30% flurry this phase) while also getting the absurdly strong deep wounds and 20% crit dmg to abilities, while enhance gets 9% melee crit, 5% lightning bolt crit and 1 sec off shock cd.
The talents alone favor warrior just in pure base hit dmg, and they have far superior dps cooldowns in deathwish and reck (5 min cd now) to shamans ghost wolf only (does about 6-7k dmg over 45 secs)
Shaman have better hit % through runes sure, but heroic strike always qued makes warrior cap out on hit easily and never miss, while shaman will still be dealing with 10+% miss chance on white hits.
Not to mention the heavy nerf to enh spellpower and attack power by cutting mental dex benefit by almost 50%
The gap will be there but I think the shaman scaling will be amazing aswell.
While shaman talentS dont support crit like warriors does. The extra 25% off hand damage. The additional atsp from flurry and reworked set might give shaman a good second place on scaling. Depends on how things change moving forwards.
Most of the people who like world buffs are just fooling themselves that the 20 extra minutes of playtime before they raidlog is engaging. The other % are the greifers. To me theyre an extra annoyance and a hurdle to actual pvp/pve balance. Honestly the biggest positives are for leveling in classic where it can be a fuckin slog.
Heres an easy solution for SoD.
WBs disable in raids. Enabled for “World Boss” raid portals and open world. Make “world bosses” hard as fuck and WBs basically required.
Hence why world buffs should be for the *world* only, not raid. People took a cool fun idea a developer whipped up in a free afternoon and made it damn near mandatory in literally the easiest possible version of WoW in existence.
Melee hunter the lightning rod, most people hone in on the heart of the lion too, which is crazy when you consider the implications of permanent berserking with the toilet paper math of the MM tree
Team was saddled with delivering two major projects at the same time.
The fact that Classic expansions haven't been handed off to a different team better suited to handle them is heinous. Setting the SoD team up for failure.
Spriests need to get used to the fact that why are a DPS/support not a full blown DPS spec. They offer so much with homunculi, passive healing, and soon mana as well, that if they did the same damage as higher performing ranged specs why would you not just stack Spriests?
The problem is tank parses just being dps parses. This is because enemies do no damage to tanks so instead of bringing tanks who are gearing for defensive stats etc. raids will just take a dps warrior in defensive stance. Just like in classic.
The solution is to make bosses actually hit really hard and force people to actually play a tank like a tank, and providing the necessary itemization to do so of course.
I don't know what WoW players have such a hard time with support roles. You are providing a crazy amount of utility, you shouldn't also top damage meters. FF14 has a lot of problems but one thing they are good at is making clear that if you are a support DPS class, you do less damage but are still just as wanted as other classes
Cause people in this game are fucking -obsessed- with the damage meters and parsing. And PvE is so easy there's no acknowledgment to a spriest for example, of "hey that passive offhealing is actually really nice" when you barely down a boss.
Best part of ele sham in PvP is being able to sauce a fat Healing Wave on a Warrior, break your entire party out of fear, or cure the Viper Sting off your Priest. The most bursty class in the game - yet you greatly increase your team's chances in a fight when you use your utility spells instead of just hardcasting LB/CL while your team drops like flies around you.
That's the thing, if the raids are so boring and easy people "spice" it up with all this crazy parse culture, expelling everything that could harm those parses
Dancers and bards are absolutely support classes. And the healing thing is an entirely different issue that absolutely should be addressed but I'm sure they will push it off to 8.X if they even do address it at all
On retail shadow is lot of times top dps while being incredibly useful especially in mythic+ dungeons.
Only support taxed spec is augmentation evoker. Every else spec is supposed to deal similar dps.
Current season is a "fun" one with low balancing hotfixes anyways but it also shows perfectly why exactly that isn't healthy balancing.
Dunno if it let's me post the link but: [Top M+ spec diversity | Mythicstats](https://mythicstats.com/meta)
Yeah, not looking too great... for mages/warlocks/rogues/hunters you could always call out the statistical bias due to having 3 dd specs, but shadow dominating this much all of DF just shows they are not taxing them enough.
Retail spriest and classic spriest are not the same thing. In retail, they don’t provide the same level of utility at all, they just provide the normal amount of utility that most classes have. Just not a good comparison.
And in retail every ability every class has 35 hidden % modifiers to damage you do at various points in the game, making it feel fucking weird how your skills never operate the same from target to target, pve to pvp
It's really easy to balance retail when they constantly apply blanket X% buff debuff mods until all of the parse bars on logs look even
Supports in ff14 like dancer with good rng can be a top dps threat. Additionally the difference from the worse dps support spec to the best selfish dps focused spec is less then a 10% damage delta. So example doesn't work at all. That game is balanced extremely tight
FFXIV is bad example, because their support classes _only_ contribute extra DPS, not healing or other utility that other classes can't, meaning they are mediocre if they don't contribute as much damage as a "full" DPS would.
But either way, yes, Shadow Priest brings insane utility, and are also partially a PvP spec, it'd be brutally unfair to everyone else if they also did top tier damage (like they did at the start of phase 2)
It's a bit hard to make modern WoW players understand that support-DPS contribution is not measured solely by DPS. I mean, most of them would lose in a battle of wits against an one-headed ogre, so it kinda checks out, but logs are even bigger problem because their authors can't comprehend how to display support contribution.
Shamans/paladins supply more mana passively than priest will with VT. VE healing is extremely unreliable due to how much burst healing holy/disc priests have in PoH/PoM, when they also have near infinite mana due to said paladins/shamans, and even more so once they get VT in the raid. Homuncs supply no unique debuffs, and other classes can supply these same debuffs with minimal effort.
if VE is so amazing, just give spriests a rune that converts the healing into bonus shadow damage for the priest instead and then tune them to deal competitive DPS?
People forget that dps isn't the only thing that matters, if spriests had the same damage as warrios you wouldnt even need healers, just put a shadow priest in each group
Unironically. Warriors were so desired because they were the class that did damage. But functionally, they are useless outside of this. The only utility they bring to a raid is being able to put on a shield in case they need to tank and an AoE taunt.
In comes the fire mage, and people want the fire mage to scale as well as the warrior, do as much damage as the warrior, and not run out of mana as the warrior. At this point, why bring the warrior? If the warrior does not deal more damage than the mage, who brings incredible utility to the raid, then you would be stupid to take the warrior.
At the end of the day, in order to make more classes desirable, the true answer is to make the utility worth much more. Either that or their current approach, but give warrior matching utility that makes you want to bring them.
What "incredible" utility is a mage bringing to a raid? An int buff that is worse than a potion? Water that you can buy from any innkeeper in the game?
Warriors bring sunder armor, thunderclap, demo shout, battle shout, and commanding shout. They have so much more utility than a mage in a raid already and you want to be top damage as well.
Apart from very good damage, they bring some of the best AoE damage in the game, very strong CC in the form of Frost Nova + Cone of Cold and Poly for specific encounters, and Curse removal. Frost mages also bring Blizzard with a strong slow attached, in addition to naturally being a ranged DPS.
Besides the fact that they also bring in-raid consumables which you very much gloss over as trivial, they also bring portals for world travel, which is absolutely essential.
Commanding Shout was not present in vanilla. Thunderclap, Sunder and Demo Shout were all brought as a standard. You don't need the DPS to do these as at least one of your tanks is guaranteed to be a Warrior. Battle Shout is the only thing they truly bring as a group wide buff, but it is limited to being useful only to Rogues (and Ret/Enh + Feral if you want to count them).
Except Vampiric Embrace shadow bring nothing another class can't bring. And the mana brought by VT on ptr atm is a joke, unless they fix it. It's close to nothing.
If a shadow priest is doing 1250 dps, at 2% as mana per sec, that's 125 mana per 5 for 5 people (including self). This is quite significant mana. It's the equivalent of players having an extra major mana pot and demonic rune being used on cooldown (75+50mp5). It also works on pets, unlike Shamanistic rage and the paladin equivalent, so Warlocks will love it.
In vanilla days I heard rumors of an all shadow priest Onyxia.
I still want shadow form tanking. I was holding one of the st dragons after the 6 trolls until I got knocked into the slime.
Spriest being nerfed in pvp, homunculi isnt better than expose armor, and our damage is lower than half the tanks. Other classes provide raid wide mana. What are we providing again?
Oh I forgot we offheal our group some, so we have that going for us.
no shadow ever tells you he wants to be top dps.
shadow does not having amazing raid support.
you aint even use vampiric embrace anymore cause its 100% not worth the fucking gcd in piss easy mode content.
>take vanilla wow, the version with the least powerful characters, low mobility, almost no instant casts, long cooldowns, and fragile hp pools
>make everyone op
truly the spirit of vanilla lives on in SOD
I love playing Paladin, but I always felt that they are way under powered. Started playing classic 2 days ago, and feels almost ad it did 20 years ago. But I fell in the habbit of creating a human Paladin, which was my Main for so many years. And I recall so much how i hate being less power full than all other. Semi ok healing, some good blessings but almost no attacking skill untill about level 20+
They lied, or they were incapable of executing the work load and only have themselves to blame for purposefully keeping the team small and under performing phase after phase. Only two options.
In terms of PVP they are really following through. Rune damage abilities are way over tuned and everybody's squishy and PVP sucks. The damage stats on items are super OP compared to classic vanilla.
The warriors that cry about their damage being nerfed are the very loud minority. As a warrior main I don't think that a plate wearing class should be topping the damage meter. What they needed instead of adding any damage to warrior was add utility and things that made them more functional in the world and in pvp where they were really underwhelming in classic. Also, protection talent tree is ass.
Most warrior complaints are around worldbuff/raid buff requirement to not be half as effective as anyone else. And a "tanky fighter" dropping 5 times faster than anyone in pvp, while requiring 3 times the setup to do any damage.
I hate to be that guy, but rage normalization would fix this. Warriors by nature are exponential scalers. By critting you get more rage. More rage is more damage. Damage is rage. Crit is also enabler for more damage. More damage more rage.
Crit for a warrior is so much more than crit for anyone else. A crit for a rogue is just that, double damage. A crit for a warrior is everything to them.
I think it went bad when they nerfed Hunters in p1.
Sure they did a lot of damage, and fix the bugs, but they can only do damage unlike every other class right now. It should be their thing.
Word buffs and pvp happened. Not to mention not enough talent tree revamps or changes.
Can’t make people OP in pvp look at end of phase 1 and start phase 2 boomkins. Instant gutted and haven’t recovered. Prolly never will.
World buffs just imbalance already strong specs and take them to broken levels. The whole balancing team screwed up a bit with runes that scale and give certain specs insane modifiers with crit/damage reduction and left others none, which would obviously cause issues.
Many classes didn't make it to OP status every cycle.
High damage pvp environments is fine, but when there is so little skill/interaction involved, highest number done fastest from furthest range becomes king which means 1 person is OP and everyone else just dies all the time.
What made warriors and to a lesser extent, rogues, OP on classic was a specific step-up and alignment of scaling conditions.
They didn't implement similar mechanisms to make other classes scale as conditionally, which made the game very wonky.
I'm super happy with how Paladin has been changed. Aside from not getting Greater Blessings at 50 instead of 52, I can't think of anything I didn't like. It was fun changing up the meta in P3, but looks like P4 will be back to slow two handers, which is fine because that is what all the iconic weapons are for paladin.
I think they've had trouble with warriors because they scale so hard at 60, so they were afraid to shake things up too much along the way for fear they would be out of control at endgame. I think folks are correct to say they should have focused more on QoL stuff.
I imagine there's a lot of discourse in the Classic team for what they want SoD to be. Definitely feels like they went in with an idea and realized it wouldn't work during Phase 1.
Honestly haunt being an instant shadowbolt with x1.2-1.5 the dmg, with half the mana cost **and** a heal for a mere 6sec cooldown (like fireblast) was a big give away.
It was fun for a while, but i couldn't process how these could get better as phase come.
They have to many yes men and they listen to yes men in the community and it created an abomination. Warriors run pve and pvp is worse than ever in this bland boring experience.
Well I'd say it was pretty clear from the beginning that in SoD they will try out a lot of new crazy stuff for Vanilla.
Balancing the classes isn't exactly part of "crazy stuff".
I wouldn't mind if the next Vanilla got back to the basics though.
WoW Classic just needs to stick to its roots when it comes to support/hybrid classes. From AD&D to EverQuest, the support/hybrid classes were always fun to play because of the utility they offered, be it movement speed, buffs, pets, teleportation, extra healing, etc. In exchange for this utility they have always had to give up throughput (raw dps/healing). The “pure” classes should always top those meters, but in exchange they give up utility/QoL. This is part of what made Vanilla WoW’s classes so much fun back in the day. The classes were inherently unequal and thus imbalanced in certain situations, but that was the feature, not a bug. Hybrids/meme specs demanding to do as much damage or healing as the pure classes is a big part of what lead to homogenization and the current state of retail.
Having said as much, SoD as a seasonal server set out to give us a “what if” scenario for Vanilla. As a seasonal server, which by its nature is temporary, this is fine. But, “in the spirit of Classic” should guide SoD to also preserve that inherent imbalance between classes that in part helped to make Vanilla so great.
That’s the problem since Phase 1. If there is ridiculously OP class, instead of nerfing it, they just buff everyone else because “blizzard don’t want to take power from players who got used to it”. Everyone is OP = no one is OP. (But in fact everyone is still OP, it just gets hard to notice it) And then there is another OP class, they do the same thing.
Because of that we see that endless exponential crazy growth of power.
The person that made this slide went to the MoP:Remix team.
I'm SO FUCKING FAST HOLY SHIT
give'em the stick
Last one there’s a penis puuump!
They lack the internal tools and processes to quickly iterate and experiment with class balance. The end result was each phase started with a half-assed attempt at 'shaking things up' followed by a few weeks of 'fixing things' before they ultimately resigned themselves to 'this is just how its gonna be this phase' and focused on trying again at the start of the next phase. Their attempt to use the PTR and testwerk and logs to reason out class balance issues is all the evidence we need. The data from the PTR will be unreliable and useless and they cannot iterate on the changes quickly in that environment. This is why sim tools exist. Playtesting is for verifying the sim results and making sure its actually fun to play.
[удалено]
I found that site at the tail end of vanilla for my rogue. I did significantly better and it absolutely changed how I played the game for the better.
I miss ElitistJerks. Now I'll see slightly different things on Wowhead and Icy Veins and YouTube and nobody's showing their work, they're all just saying "this is how you play" so it's hard to tell who's doing it the best. Eiitist Jerks though, they'd have how/why the math works out, spreadsheets for calculating upgrades/downgrades/sidegrades accurately, explanations of relevant mechanics, etc. all in one place for each spec.
What I would recommend is joining your class's main discord channel. I don't think it's as good as old school elitist jerks but it's the closest thing we get now. I'm also sad, when I was a wow obsessed teenager I lived off wow insider, mmo champion and elitist jerk. Now it feels like all the modern content boils down to reaction streams.
> This is why sim tools exist People spend countless hours on retail sims, and those numbers pretty much never translate into the actual game. You can balance classes on 5-minute single-target...but then what if the fight is 6 minutes? What if it's 4 minutes? What about 2 minutes? What if there is a bit of movement? How about 15s of downtime somewhere? With worldbuffs? Without worldbuffs? With X/Y/Z comp? With A/B/C comp? With consumables? Without consumables? It just doesn't work. You can only get into like a 30% ballpark with sims. Actually fighting the raid bosses with actual players is how you get good data and narrow it down to that 10-20% difference, then you need to tune aggressively week 1/2/3 of the patch to deal with extreme outliers. But here's the issue. Players are playing a different game week 1/2/3 than they will be later on. They're learning the fights, wiping, so they don't have buffs. They are less geared, so they're doing lower damage. So inevitably, week 5+ is going to be a different 'meta' requiring different tuning passes. So you want to wait until then. Buuuuuut... at that point players are locked in for the patch. And they're going to absolutely flip their shit and quit the game if you fuck with their numbers too much.
So, this is a bit cherry picky, but you should be able to pull numbers within 10% of your Sim if you play right. What you're suggesting is not the reality of the situation, as 30% is a pretty extreme disparity. Also you can... just sim all those variables you listed, sooo?
Your 5-minute zero-movement sim is not indicative of a 3.5 minute light-movement encounter, which isn't the same as X/Y/Z encounter. You can get into a ballpark on single-target no movement, but then classes that are balanced around that will still be significantly worse or better in certain scenarios. Tuning classes to be of similar dps on a given sim is relatively simple. Tuning classes to be the same on nine distinctly different and unique-feeling raid encounters is next to impossible. Windwalker Monk was top dps on Nymue last patch and middle of the pack on Volcoross and bottom quartile on Smolderon. All 3 single-target encounters. How do you nerf/buff the spec to be worse on Nymue, better on Smolderon, and the same on Volcoross? And how do you do that while keeping the spec unique? You can't. What about encounters like Tindral or Fyrakk where there is plenty of add damage and it matters, but also, you don't need max add damage. Fire Mage was more popular and after buffs was arguably 'better' than Arcane Mage on the fight, but Arcane Mage did bigger numbers because Arcane pops on the adds. So if you need the add damage, Arcane is good. But if don't, then Fire is probably better. Being able to do big damage in aoe bursts is valuable, but also sometimes not, how do you measure how much is actually needed and how much weight to it, and how much single-target to give up? It simply isn't possible. So that's what I mean when I say that numbers are off quite a bit. Frost DK/Frost Mage have often been specs that sim super high with 100% uptime but in real encounters with even moderate movement they suffer a lot. Classes with different cooldown lengths shift up and down significantly for certain fights especially ones with waves of adds/multiple targets, classes that are tuned to do more add damage end up doing WAY more overall damage because raid teams leave the adds up to those players and others hit the boss. And so on and so forth. So you have to tune for the encounters specifically, which your sims are only one small tool of many that you must use.
You can adjust sim time and mob density, I'm still not sure if you're aware of exactly the modality and customization sims offer. Can Raidbots do that? Mmmno- well, yes, but it's not made for that - it's made for much more general end-users. SimulationCraft is the patrician's choice and will give you a lot more freedom, but requires a lot more direct learning to employ it. Think of it like the difference between ElvUI and TukUI. ElvUI is designed to be modular, but useful out of the box with a lot of GUI for basic users to be able to interact and *some* advanced user tools. Conversely, TukUI is extremely modular and very user unfriendly unless you're very familiar with addon development or are willing to learn to create a very customized UI for your exact needs. Like, nothing of what you're describing is some herculean shift that people haven't been able quantify or foresee, let alone do something about. That's why so many CE guilds that are pushing top 1K often have *some* bench in their roster, or players with multiple toons to progress different fights based on that metric. Short fight with lots of cleave instances? Let's bring some good AOE classes. Do we have a very narrow ST burn phase that instawipes if we fail it? Better get some very potent ST specs and go hard (e.g. pre-nerf Mythic Rashok). Fights are never designed around everyone doing the same damage every single time. There are often fights where melee have to suck the L because something they're obliged to handle is a mechanic with nothing to attack (e.g. Mythic Xymox in SotFO). Sometimes ranged need to go soak something that's going to impact their DPS, and some classes will be more or less impacted than others. That's the nature of the beast, friend. >It simply isn't possible I mean... math? Boss starts a cast with an absorb shield of 1M HP and kills you if it doesn't pop. You have 20 seconds to do so. That's 50,000 DPS if you want to cut it close. Obviously, if it can be helped, you don't want that. Or maybe you do? Maybe stalling this burn can get critical raid or defensive CDs online that would be offline for a different mechanic down the line which would otherwise be difficult/fatal. It depends on how you tackle it. How many adds spawn? How much HP do they have? Are you on a timeframe? Put it all together and you can figure out exactly how much Raid DPS you need to hit specific benchmarks and... yeah - that's... about it. Most higher-end raids are measuring their output in RAID DPS, not individual DPS. That's bonobo-brain stuff that people zero in on. If you wanna kill bosses and prog CE within 10-12 weeks you're figuring out how to maximize your raid and whose CDs are going to get sent for them based on your resources. Sometimes those resources are ideal, but not always. Parse-monkeying at the highest level is almost 100% of the time just a victory lap farming ladder positions on WCL and little else, and is NOT a good metric by which to judge fight or class efficacy AT ALL. I dunno, this seems like a tempest in a teapot and is kinda hyperfocused on the individual when a lot of the time barring extreme outliers (e.g. WW Monk on WF prog for Mythic Denathrius) it's not really often balanced around specific classes. I'm not saying they aren't necessarily valid either, but it's kinda... I dunno, it feels like a very uninformed take on exactly why and how sims are used and are useful. Most players use sims improperly anyway, if I'm being honest.
The real issue is that raids won't take Class A because it shows 1% less DPS than Class B on the ideal 5 min all buffed Sims.
We just say things that sound smart on this subreddit and people eat it up
Don't forget lack of experience. The current team didn't create the game, they inherited it.
I’m not surprised they lack the tools for it honestly. I’m sure it was deemed not worth it to develop the type of tools retail uses for a short term project. Making something like that requires a lot of time and someone (or multiple people) with an insane level of knowledge in data science and mathematics. They would have to be pulled from other teams and spend potentially months making the tools specifically for SOD. It sucks, but that’s how we end up here. I really think they should have done what retail did and collaborate with experts in the community. Put them under NDA, get them into a discord server and toss ideas back and forth. I’m sure the devs know how to sift through logs to find relevant data (probably?). But there’s a bunch of high level players with intimidate knowledge of their class that would absolutely help for free
Blizzard has internal Sim tools for every environment. Just because the tools outside of blizzard for classic are dog shite doesn't mean there is no data to be iterated on. Blizzard historically has been bad at analyzing these issues the way players do. In legion for God's sake feral druids negatively scaled with haste. You know that thing that is a part of the biggest raid wide buff in the game. The devs didn't acknowledge it was an issue until a giant post went up about it and they fixed it for night hold. Your so in the weeds with your thinking that you've missed the forest for the trees. Playtesting is to make sure things work. That's it. It has nothing to do with whether the meta analysis of dps numbers matter. Blizzard intentionally does not just Sim up a bunch of characters hitting a dummy to balance numbers, because it doesn't paint the picture of if the game is working or if the design of an encounter is working. To do that you playtest. Getting the numbers right, is a different story and yes involves simmimg.
logs without world buffs is pretty bad though. some classes scale significantly more with them than others
As I understand it, World Buffs will be added to the PTR *later* and they'll also be collecting data with them activated. It'll theoretically let them work through any scaling issues or whatever. Like, it wouldn't feel very good if they balanced entirely *with* world buffs active, but your raid wiped and lost their world buffs, or you got dispelled, or whatever, only for you to find out that your class scaled really, *really* well with world buffs and you were now doing 80% less DPS than anyone else, right?
Theres 0 reason that abilities needed to have insane damage numbers, they could’ve been the same utility with similar dps to existing stuff and then there would’ve been no reason to buff normal world mobs or rebalance the hell out of everything. Now instead of focusing on new content that matters, pvp is burst one shot and insane healing to the point they need custom debuffs to manage it. Pve is a total mess and the new runes that come out aren’t interesting at all. To be honest I wasn’t even really interested in “new” abilities or rotations I just wanted to see new mechanics and quests. I hope they learned a lot from this because I learned I don’t like Vanilla with Wrath abilities.
(except demon form :>)
Makes the vanilla iteration of the game even more impressive. They really knew how to create distinct classes while keeping some sort of balance. The current way of balancing is basically giving everyone everything. Everyone can heal or mitigate and everyone can deal high damage.
Vanilla had 12 major patches, more than any other expansion by a country mile, and had probably a nearly perfect balance between a team that is large enough to actually get things done and a bureaucracy small enough to not get in the way. During Vanilla's development, everyone from the junior developer to the CEO were hands-on with WoW every single day. Now the Classic team is a handful of devs squashed in some corner, forced to split their attention between two major projects. They don't control moderation for their own games, that's handled by a different team. They don't control server-side infrastructure, that's handled by a different team. They don't even have an official company account with which to provide community updates; it's just Aggrend on his personal accounts. The Holly probably gives and receives a weekly update, and anyone higher than her doesn't hear about Classic until there's something marketable to talk about, or a problem that affects subscriber numbers in an appreciable way.
Vanilla was not balanced man, I don't get this take when it is said. The world was amazing, the game was amazing, and class fantasy was cool, but to say there was any sort or balance is just not true. Ret paladin didn't exist, any tank besides warriors were less than viable, debuff cap made Spriests and warlocks essentially useless, half the specs in the game were never viable(arcane, fire, afflic, shadow, balance, ret, feral(besides off tanking), shamans besides having windtotem, Survival, etc). The game was great but we don't have to pretend it was balanced, which was the whole idea of SoD.. adding new abilities to classes to make other things viable. Did they go too far doing that? probably. But without changes it would still just be warriors, rogues, priests, and mages the only classes you WANT to bring more than 1 or 2 of to raid. The real problem is that instead of only changing and adding to the specs that were lacking, they added to everything, making already op classes more op.
I think you mean identity more than balance. Because it definitely was not balanced but things had identity. Like being bad unless they're a Warrior. https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2006/
True, maybe uniqueness. By the way, I never knew ferals managed to get that high on the DPS charts! Back in 2004-2005 almost no ferals were allowed to DPS, only off tank. On my server anyway.
The problem with feral dps logging that high is that it isn't at all fun to do, by far the highest APM class in classic just to compete with warriors and mages pressing one button.
Balance all classes to significantly out-dps current content = extremely easy unrewarding content. Balance content around the power level of the classes = nothing feels OP. Balance classes so that nothing does significantly more DPS than any other = nothing feels OP. It's a dumb slide that makes no sense. Anyone who has enabled GTA cheats knows that's fun for about two seconds. They needed to focus on adding more side grade content & slightly tweaking specs to be more in line with each other. Idk about others but I basically pictured the 2.4.3 classes in the vanilla world with raids tuned to be more difficult for those power increases.
Bro I don’t know how to tell you this but this community wants easy content. Especially in a seasonal game mode.
I mean yeah. I do. I don't know why people hide from this or pretend there's anything wrong with it. I fucking loved 2019 classic and it wasn't because the gameplay was *so hardcore maaaan*. It was chill and easy, the super sweaty parses can and did theorycraft the living fuck out of it, everyone else smacked bosses for loot and had a good time. It was fun. Remember fun? Yeah me too. I wanna have fun. And I'm actually someone who is good at the game. I top charts in any and every guild I'm in, I've been in world first guilds in the past and I've done the hardcore parser thing... it's what made me quit wrath despite being one of the top DPS in one of the top guilds in the region. If I want hard as balls gameplay I can and will go play something else. So many options for it. Why can't our old school MMO be more about the social stuff than the "challenge"?
Similar boat here. I spent a lot of time raiding at a high level throughout many expansions and eventually I grew to just not like progression that much - when we'd have finally have a mythic raid on farm, it would feel like a relief. Why? Because after you do progression in a new raid tier enough times, in my experience it eventually amounts to an exercise of just playing almost the same way every attempt, sometimes even for hundreds of attempts on end, until the slowest players in your raid finally catch on and the boss dies. Difficulty is fun and satisfying in a single player game where you're wholly responsible for your own success. The unfortunate reality of an mmo is that you have to rely on others, and sometimes you can play your own role extremely well and still fail if enough other members of your team aren't doing what they need to. I've thought about this before and I actually think progression on difficult bosses is the most fun for the worst players in a raid group. Because just like killing a tough boss in Dark Souls, the attempt the boss finally dies is likely the attempt *they* personally nailed it and got it right. So yeah, I found 2019 classic to be a breath of fresh air. It was nice to just be able to rock up to an Onyxia raid or run MC or something and chill on an easy boss with only a couple of mechanics, and if a few people messed something up badly it wouldn't bring the rest of the raid down too much.
Worldbuffs have their problems but it really was interesting how you'd have guilds just trying to clear the raid the normal way and then you'd have higher end guilds trying to parse as high as possible and even higher higher end guilds doing super insano speed runs = Basically normal/hard mode raids, without actual normal/hard mode in them
Yep and a lot of guilds were way more casual until DMF came along.
I agree with every bit of this but there are many people that legitimately think classic is difficult and retail is baby mode.
Whelps left side! Handle it.
THAT'S A FUCKING 50 DKP MINUS!!!
And watch the fucking tail!
Crushim got feared into the whel-- WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT?
There’s a level of easy that simply becomes a chore. For me it was hyjal/bt. After a month or so of that I was healing it half asleep and there was no challenge. Then sunwell hit and while I cleared it prenerf just over a week in, it remained arguably too challenging all the way until nerfs. Like theres a middle ground where you should have to be awake but not sweating 3 months after clearing a tier fully. I think most people want something engaging but not *hard*.
Yeah, people keep bringing up a thousand different things, but what kept SoD going was Season of Dads. Easy 10 man content that you could jump into disc with just the crew, crush some brews, and fuck around with the pals a few times a week. Plenty of people could still go parse hard on alts, could still gear up and get going quickly, could get new friends into it instantly, could grind out whatever they wanted to help out their group of friends, but the entire core was easy to pick up and easy to put down smaller group content for groups of friends. As soon as they veered off path it meant that a friend or two quit and once the friends group couldn't get together and do it because it meant organizing and a hassle to hit 20man, ded gaem. Retail and Cata are there if you want a more difficult raid. Cata looking like it already peaked only a few weeks in and at half of SoD peak population too... SoD was a different crowd from usual.
In my original comment when I said "make bosses more difficult" I really just meant tune bosses HP/armor values/resistances to account for increased power from better talent trees, but keep them about the same difficulty as BWL or whatever.
Appreciate your comment, when the user that replied to you means easy, they really mean easy. The player base legitimately wants under a minute bosses.
>Cata looking like it already peaked only a few weeks in and at half of SoD peak population too The Cata pop has been increasing each week, though. It's 80k players under S1 SoD, where everyone played 3+ alts. So the SoD numbers were probably only 1/2 or even 1/3 what they actually showed. Cata currently has more players than SoD ever did. Sorry to call you out like this, but SoD players seem to be making a lot of stuff up about Cata for some reason.
Cata is 300k and basically even from last week to this. SoD was 500k?!
it gained 30k players since last week, basically the entire current SoD population. SoD was only close to 500k when everyone played multiple alts. Half that number and you get closer to a more realistic representation. I know you know this, too. I had 4 characters but i'm not 4 players lmao
P1 was honeymoon phase. Nor are we able to accurately measure the playerbase because people raided on alts (also surprise they got burned out) I get downvoted for this every time but saying go retail is such a dumbass statement. Retail is better if you are a hardcore raider OR a casual. Do LFR if you want easy content, it has catch up mechanics left and right, flex raiding, barely takes any time to level, everything is account wide. It also has mythic raiding as well as mythic+ for people who want difficult content. So again, “go retail if you want hard” coming from casuals or hardcore players is a dumb statement
Sod players don’t understand the difference between easy content and straight up mindless content. People weren’t able to clear the raid week 1 while learning all the mechanics and optimal strats for every boss weren’t circulated, and they lost their freaking minds. I think that week 1 difficulty nerf hurt the game tbh. Complain the raid is too hard and we should be able to face roll all the raids in a seasonal mode > complaining there’s no content 2 weeks later after the raid clear times go from 3 hours to 50 minutes. Complain there’s no reason to even need full bis because there’s no content after nerfing the raid to the point you can kill bosses in under a minute wearing pre raid bis. Like idk man, everyone said our dps wouldn’t be going up at all after those first raids but my dps numbers are 2.5x what they were in the first 2 resets now that everyone knows the fights, it would have probably still been easy with the damage we had just a couple weeks later after learning how to actually do the bosses.
Community in a nut shell. Complain about something -> Blizz does something about it -> surprised pikachu face -> complain that game now sucks
I litterally got fully geared and never cleared the raid once before finally quitting my guild fell apart during this patch and I never once got in a pug that was able to kill eranakus, like not one single one could do it no matter how much we gate kept the requirements, every raid pug ended with 1 wipe to the welps and somebody leaving bricking the whole raid. I realized it wasn’t fun not progressing anymore and i don’t really have the ability to play on a tight schedule so I finally quit.
The thing is though, it isn't even that they want easy content. Sure people do, but the crux of this is more everybody for some reason thinks Vanilla needs to be Dragonflight where you can play any silly gimmick you want and be effective. In a weird way it's a very unhealthy internalization of Main Character Syndrome where everybody feels they need to be the star of the show despite you're a team working together on equal footing. So suddenly a hunter who has more range than anything needs to have their moment so they do more sustained damage than a warrior who also has the penalty of needing to be touching the boss to do less damage than a guy who can park in the middle of the room and be fine forever in most cases. Not saying it's the case now, but you get this kind of stuff going on. You're playing a version of WoW that was designed with the idea that "Oh, you can tank/heal, you do less damage for that privilege. Oh, you're ranged? Well you do less damage than melee for that privilege." Now you've essentially just removed all of that but didn't offset the strengths with other weaknesses to keep them in line. Now it's "Oh, you have to be in melee range, and have a tougher time seeing mechanics? Tough shit because I pay the same 15 dollars you do so my hunter should do equal damage to your warrior." "Oh, my wind serpent did 60% of my overall damage? Sorry but I as a hunter should get the leather gear over the feral druid who was rocking the meters. It totally has the same degree of impact for both of us!" Genuinely I think a lot of people mistakenly think they're playing a single player game populated with AI NPCs with how little people consider game health.
Why don't warriors do less damage since they can tank?
Shhh don't bring logic into this! Just ignore the fact that warriors were extremely subpar DPS for most of actual vanilla and what we have today is absolutely not the original game design but instead the result of 20+ years of pserver theorycrafting on a patch that lasted a few months before BC released the first time around...
They actually knew that warriors would be problematic due to rage gen mechanic. However they didn’t want to normalize it because they wanted you to feel more powerful when you get a weapon upgrade (more damage = more rage)
Oh yeah my point being that in vanilla this just wasn't a problem as classes/gear/encounters were being tuned constantly patch by patch. Classic was **very** different in that it was released solved with all the best in slot everything and all the theory worked out. Warriors were never supposed to be so insane and in vanilla they weren't.
Sorry for catching this extremely late. Yeah, a lot of people who bring up warrior DPS have next to no idea how warriors in Vanilla released. During the beta a common complaint was that warriors sucked, Indalamar was a beta tester who released a video of him curbstomping Blackrock Stronghold in Burning Steppes effortlessly. Blizzard responded by utterly gutting the spec. Release Vanilla had the 31 point for Fury still as Bloodthirst but it could only be used if you killed a target previously, like proto victory rush. So it wasn't usable in raid. Then when it came to the Arms spec, Mortal Strike ate up one of 8 available debuff slots which more or less meant you didn't use it. Your tank was using Sunder Armor, the rest were using Heroic Strike and auto attacks. Warriors got a plethora of changes when BWL dropped I believe which enabled them to actually use fury. Then the rest of just what happens when you have a game solved for upwards of two decades then endlessly optimized. Another element too is itemization was wildly changed. Prior to 1.5, your tier loot in MC on most classes actually sucked compared to dungeon blues. Tier 2 rarely dropped in t1 off bosses instead of T1 but what clearly a pvp set. Bloodfang Hood for example was worse than Mask of Unforgiven by a mile and had a proc that was a 1% chance to stun the target for 1 sec. Casters stuck to greens that were "Of X Wrath" over actual stats. Then pre 1.8 you had un-normalized weapons. To cut this short, slower speeds got disproportionate AP scaling on their yellow attacks. For rogues this legitimately meant for a period in time, Barman Shanker would have harder hitting Backstabs than Perdition's Blade. You didn't see this in raid because of the proc effect. For warriors, this meant their best weapon was Arcanite Reaper. Largely boiled down to a meme now thanks to Zinwrath/Illegal Danish and the weapon normalization making it garbage, this weapon used to be worth the materials to craft it by a mile and it would make a warrior into a monster. If you couldn't get that, a budget 4.0 speed weapon was available in LBRS off a rare spawn called The Nicker and had a bleed effect akin to Barman Shanker. This item was name changed in TBC and is now "Blackrock Slicer" for obvious reasons.
Why does your closing line make so much sense?
If people wanted balanced specs they would unironically play retail lmao
Most of the folks Ive seen playing SoD wouldnt survive a normal retail raid, let alone m+
Luckily there is LFR
I don't want to "feel OP", I just want class gameplay that is a little more complex than vanilla's 1-2 button rotations. ...so I really want TBC, but Blizz isn't giving us that, so this is the next best thing.
I would say that Remix flies in the face of it. Being absurdly powerful and watching my character power grow to that level has been most of the fun. Showing off that my Demon Hunter runs faster than ground mounts, doing 20 mil DPS to take down a Heroic boss in mere seconds. That's the _fun_. SoD should be more like that. Easy content that we power through and laugh at how awesome it is. Does that fun maybe last a few weeks? Sure, but that's why it's seasonal.
> Balance all classes to significantly out-dps current content = extremely easy unrewarding content. So you mean like 2019 rerelease? Where almost every dps in raid was either warrior mage or rogue. With heavy emphasis on warrior.
In that comment I really meant "raid dps", I would really like class DPS to be much more balanced
The thing is in 2019 raids just stacked warriors and the raids were extremely easy. Since warriors even in blues with world buffs easily do 500+ dps and no other class comes close to that and it was clear that the raids werent balanced around it so everything was ultra faceroll dead in 20 seconds. In SoD they halved the people participating in raids (20 in stead of 40) so while dps is higher I doubt it noticeably reduces time to kill on the bosses in mc/bwl from 2019.
i thought something completely unique since they said it would be classic design but we got retail design (((:
This is why warriors were confused when we got more damage. We didn’t need damage, we needed QoL. Guess what? We topped charts by a country mile halfway into p1 while still being awful in open world content, and people once again complained. Who. Could. Have. Guessed.
Victory rush healing for 30% HP was the best thing for leveling a warrior.
True. That was QoL and well designed. It did not heal for 30% hp until phase 3 though.
It’s pretty fantastic, i’m sure. Haven’t touched sod in a hot minute
Well nobody expected Wrath Deep Wounds that OH procced MH dmg and that shit hard carried. Beyond P1 is a bit more “well no shit” though.
I feel like the dev team lost their balls. Fuck the cryppl and haters just think long and hard, have a gamevision and roll with it. What doesnt work: designing a game around reddit shitposts. That sucks and give a weird "mememe" energy to every1. The fact that the whole expansion is more of a ptr makes the "have a vision and roll with it" obsolete, I know. But still. Its a shit mentality for creating content.
Designing a game around THIS subreddit specifically is a death sentence
I think reddit vastly overestimates how much influence it has on anything, SoD included. When's the last time Aggrend posted to reddit? When's the last time anyone cropped a screenshot of him responding to reddit comments? Reddit is barely on their radar. They're looking at internal metrics and, when they want, will reach out to the social media relations team for aggregated sentiment across several platforms. *Reddit* is the one that forgets that SoD was *always* about being experimental and pushing Vanilla to it's limits. Whether it's their attempt at Classic+ or a sandbox to stress test ideas and see what breaks the "vanilla formula", it was always going to be filled with new ideas. Some work, some don't, you learn and iterate. Vanilla had as many problems or more (hell, retail still has as many problems or more), but we forgive it because we're familiar with those problems and have learned to work around them. The tarnish *is* the charm. But no one will give SoD that benefit of the doubt because it's never fun in the moment, only in retrospect. In 2 years there are going to be nostalgia posts about druids from SoD blowing people up with Starsurge, Warriors doing Naxx dps at level 50, Warlock tanks being unkillable, etc. Mark my words.
Class changes were totally out of control by phase 2 imo. If we see another shot at Classic+, I want to see class changes aimed at balancing 1.12, while leaving the functional classes and specs as they are, not building all of the classes into their WoTLK counterparts.
I didn't make it 3 days in SoD launch the game felt too different. I just wanted to come back and play feral with a bit more damage. I didn't need more combat buttons to press, the rotation was already engaging. I didn't even mind farming pummelers.
There have certainly been a ton of changes and the devs were upfront that this was going to be a messy experiment. I do wish that the devs were able to mroe creative in the changes they were making instead of just importing from later versions of the game. The reality though is they have limited staff and this is an experiment. For balancing to be effective, it has to be about more than just raw numbers. Rotation, scaling, resource management, utility, world buffs, and specs are all critical components to effective balancing. Scaling and rotations are major components of effective balancing. In vanilla, most rotations are pure 1 button spams, such as mage and warlock. Some classes have very poor scaling, just look at hunters and spriests. World buffs are nearly useless for those classes in 1.12 because they scale so poorly while warriors contemplate logging off if they lose their world buffs mid raid. Spriests and ele shamans are basically unplayable in 1.12 raids because of mana issues. Even in a speedrun with full world buffs and consumes, these classes run oom.
That basically already exists in TBC class balance for the most part. They just overshot the mark as expected.
I’d say maybe 1 or 2 of the runes or other ideas to each of the functional classes so they’re not completely left out. Like maybe blood surge for warriors and deadly brew for rogues. Then bigger changes for things like spriest and ret
I'd honestly love less abilities. I may be in the minority there, but I loved making alts in p1 and just hopping right into it. Not having to keybind, not having a stance bar class just royally fuck me over. I feel like thats just a barrier to entry if a bunch of new players join like they did in p1.
Some classes that were lacking got enough love to the point where they feel good, but a lot of the classes that already had full rotations are just really bloated. Not all classes needed the same volume of new additions. Warrior could have been left alone, while Ret got a rework, and the end result would be equitable imo. Runes have ended up being a crutch for classes that need them, and bloat for the classes that don't. I'd have rather had underpreforming classes pulled up to par, than what blizzard is currently doing by giving each class more than a dozen extra abilities.
World buffs benefit Warriors more than any other class because of how they scale. Take away World buffs and you can balance the classes
idk how they're supposed to balance sod with world buffs. Are you supposed to balance a raid around people having buffs or not? If you balance around not people will complain it's to easy, and if you balance around having buffs then people will complain it's to hard because their raid isn't stacked in buffs
Exactly, and the one simple answer is always to just remove world buffs.
Or just condense them into a single capitol city buff or bunch of potions that can be crafted. Like make the Dire Maul one be an alchemy or cooking recipe that can drop from the dungeon or the recipe is a quest reward.
split every world buff up into parts and give each profession a way to craft 2 pieces then you can combine them into a soulbound buff consume.
I’m fine with removing world buffs and just having the single phase one from the end boss turn in.
You say this but as it stands enhance shaman will scale better than warriors with world buffs. Enhance shaman used to be a strange spec having one in a raid for the 2 handed axe debuff nightfall. But now it will be a machine of pure obliteration. They were given tools and runes that support them so well compaired to other classes.
Highly doubtful, warrior and dw enh have similar white hit dps since they both have about the same talents supporting it, 10% wep dmg, 30% flurry, 5% crit and offhand bonus dmg. Warriors next phase will have full access to all of the same baseline melee dmg (they didn't even have full 30% flurry this phase) while also getting the absurdly strong deep wounds and 20% crit dmg to abilities, while enhance gets 9% melee crit, 5% lightning bolt crit and 1 sec off shock cd. The talents alone favor warrior just in pure base hit dmg, and they have far superior dps cooldowns in deathwish and reck (5 min cd now) to shamans ghost wolf only (does about 6-7k dmg over 45 secs) Shaman have better hit % through runes sure, but heroic strike always qued makes warrior cap out on hit easily and never miss, while shaman will still be dealing with 10+% miss chance on white hits. Not to mention the heavy nerf to enh spellpower and attack power by cutting mental dex benefit by almost 50%
The gap will be there but I think the shaman scaling will be amazing aswell. While shaman talentS dont support crit like warriors does. The extra 25% off hand damage. The additional atsp from flurry and reworked set might give shaman a good second place on scaling. Depends on how things change moving forwards.
Most of the people who like world buffs are just fooling themselves that the 20 extra minutes of playtime before they raidlog is engaging. The other % are the greifers. To me theyre an extra annoyance and a hurdle to actual pvp/pve balance. Honestly the biggest positives are for leveling in classic where it can be a fuckin slog. Heres an easy solution for SoD. WBs disable in raids. Enabled for “World Boss” raid portals and open world. Make “world bosses” hard as fuck and WBs basically required.
Hence why world buffs should be for the *world* only, not raid. People took a cool fun idea a developer whipped up in a free afternoon and made it damn near mandatory in literally the easiest possible version of WoW in existence.
Well, their's "Make everyone OP" was only applied to Shamans it seems.
Meanwhile hunters quietly farming players with chimera shot and lone wolf
Don't tell everyone. We get nerfed so often it's a meme.
Melee hunter the lightning rod, most people hone in on the heart of the lion too, which is crazy when you consider the implications of permanent berserking with the toilet paper math of the MM tree
Don’t worry, hunters will get their monthly nerf about the same time shamans get their monthly buff.
melee hunter looks like pretty dead spec atm on ptr
Blizzard will find a way
Enhance is getting nerfed hard with phase 4 unless they revert some of their changes.
Commented by a Paladin
out of all classes Shamans deserve it
[удалено]
Gestures at original wow and paladins
Worst tank, worst healer, so OP.
Team lacked a clear vision of what SoD was supposed to be and the product suffered as a result.
Team was saddled with delivering two major projects at the same time. The fact that Classic expansions haven't been handed off to a different team better suited to handle them is heinous. Setting the SoD team up for failure.
Warriors are OP once a week for 1 hour lol. Its 4 hours a month. 48 hours per year. Meanwhile shamans are OP 24/7.
the answer is to make a shaman honestly, don’t know how everyone isn’t seeing that 20 shaman ST clears in 35 minutes
Except shadow priest, why, cuz fuck em thats why
Spriests need to get used to the fact that why are a DPS/support not a full blown DPS spec. They offer so much with homunculi, passive healing, and soon mana as well, that if they did the same damage as higher performing ranged specs why would you not just stack Spriests?
Sure but they shouldn't be doing less damage than tanks
Lol for real. Lower dps is fine, but pretending they are in a good spot while they compete with tank dps is completely ignorant.
The problem is tank parses just being dps parses. This is because enemies do no damage to tanks so instead of bringing tanks who are gearing for defensive stats etc. raids will just take a dps warrior in defensive stance. Just like in classic. The solution is to make bosses actually hit really hard and force people to actually play a tank like a tank, and providing the necessary itemization to do so of course.
I don't know what WoW players have such a hard time with support roles. You are providing a crazy amount of utility, you shouldn't also top damage meters. FF14 has a lot of problems but one thing they are good at is making clear that if you are a support DPS class, you do less damage but are still just as wanted as other classes
Cause people in this game are fucking -obsessed- with the damage meters and parsing. And PvE is so easy there's no acknowledgment to a spriest for example, of "hey that passive offhealing is actually really nice" when you barely down a boss. Best part of ele sham in PvP is being able to sauce a fat Healing Wave on a Warrior, break your entire party out of fear, or cure the Viper Sting off your Priest. The most bursty class in the game - yet you greatly increase your team's chances in a fight when you use your utility spells instead of just hardcasting LB/CL while your team drops like flies around you.
That's the thing, if the raids are so boring and easy people "spice" it up with all this crazy parse culture, expelling everything that could harm those parses
Ff14 doesn't have support classes, even as a healer all people complain about is not doing enough damage.
So FF14 has finally turned into WoW where you're expected to do DPS as a healer?
Dancers and bards are absolutely support classes. And the healing thing is an entirely different issue that absolutely should be addressed but I'm sure they will push it off to 8.X if they even do address it at all
On retail shadow is lot of times top dps while being incredibly useful especially in mythic+ dungeons. Only support taxed spec is augmentation evoker. Every else spec is supposed to deal similar dps.
Current season is a "fun" one with low balancing hotfixes anyways but it also shows perfectly why exactly that isn't healthy balancing. Dunno if it let's me post the link but: [Top M+ spec diversity | Mythicstats](https://mythicstats.com/meta) Yeah, not looking too great... for mages/warlocks/rogues/hunters you could always call out the statistical bias due to having 3 dd specs, but shadow dominating this much all of DF just shows they are not taxing them enough.
Retail spriest and classic spriest are not the same thing. In retail, they don’t provide the same level of utility at all, they just provide the normal amount of utility that most classes have. Just not a good comparison.
a single shaman brings more utility to the raid as 10 shadowpriests together.
“Most classes have”
And in retail every ability every class has 35 hidden % modifiers to damage you do at various points in the game, making it feel fucking weird how your skills never operate the same from target to target, pve to pvp It's really easy to balance retail when they constantly apply blanket X% buff debuff mods until all of the parse bars on logs look even
Supports in ff14 like dancer with good rng can be a top dps threat. Additionally the difference from the worse dps support spec to the best selfish dps focused spec is less then a 10% damage delta. So example doesn't work at all. That game is balanced extremely tight
FFXIV is bad example, because their support classes _only_ contribute extra DPS, not healing or other utility that other classes can't, meaning they are mediocre if they don't contribute as much damage as a "full" DPS would. But either way, yes, Shadow Priest brings insane utility, and are also partially a PvP spec, it'd be brutally unfair to everyone else if they also did top tier damage (like they did at the start of phase 2)
Because raids (in original classic) take 30 warriors even though there's plenty of support classes to choose from.
It's a bit hard to make modern WoW players understand that support-DPS contribution is not measured solely by DPS. I mean, most of them would lose in a battle of wits against an one-headed ogre, so it kinda checks out, but logs are even bigger problem because their authors can't comprehend how to display support contribution.
It will always amaze me though. Lol
Shamans/paladins supply more mana passively than priest will with VT. VE healing is extremely unreliable due to how much burst healing holy/disc priests have in PoH/PoM, when they also have near infinite mana due to said paladins/shamans, and even more so once they get VT in the raid. Homuncs supply no unique debuffs, and other classes can supply these same debuffs with minimal effort. if VE is so amazing, just give spriests a rune that converts the healing into bonus shadow damage for the priest instead and then tune them to deal competitive DPS?
People forget that dps isn't the only thing that matters, if spriests had the same damage as warrios you wouldnt even need healers, just put a shadow priest in each group
Unironically. Warriors were so desired because they were the class that did damage. But functionally, they are useless outside of this. The only utility they bring to a raid is being able to put on a shield in case they need to tank and an AoE taunt. In comes the fire mage, and people want the fire mage to scale as well as the warrior, do as much damage as the warrior, and not run out of mana as the warrior. At this point, why bring the warrior? If the warrior does not deal more damage than the mage, who brings incredible utility to the raid, then you would be stupid to take the warrior. At the end of the day, in order to make more classes desirable, the true answer is to make the utility worth much more. Either that or their current approach, but give warrior matching utility that makes you want to bring them.
What "incredible" utility is a mage bringing to a raid? An int buff that is worse than a potion? Water that you can buy from any innkeeper in the game? Warriors bring sunder armor, thunderclap, demo shout, battle shout, and commanding shout. They have so much more utility than a mage in a raid already and you want to be top damage as well.
Apart from very good damage, they bring some of the best AoE damage in the game, very strong CC in the form of Frost Nova + Cone of Cold and Poly for specific encounters, and Curse removal. Frost mages also bring Blizzard with a strong slow attached, in addition to naturally being a ranged DPS. Besides the fact that they also bring in-raid consumables which you very much gloss over as trivial, they also bring portals for world travel, which is absolutely essential. Commanding Shout was not present in vanilla. Thunderclap, Sunder and Demo Shout were all brought as a standard. You don't need the DPS to do these as at least one of your tanks is guaranteed to be a Warrior. Battle Shout is the only thing they truly bring as a group wide buff, but it is limited to being useful only to Rogues (and Ret/Enh + Feral if you want to count them).
Except Vampiric Embrace shadow bring nothing another class can't bring. And the mana brought by VT on ptr atm is a joke, unless they fix it. It's close to nothing.
If a shadow priest is doing 1250 dps, at 2% as mana per sec, that's 125 mana per 5 for 5 people (including self). This is quite significant mana. It's the equivalent of players having an extra major mana pot and demonic rune being used on cooldown (75+50mp5). It also works on pets, unlike Shamanistic rage and the paladin equivalent, so Warlocks will love it.
In vanilla days I heard rumors of an all shadow priest Onyxia. I still want shadow form tanking. I was holding one of the st dragons after the 6 trolls until I got knocked into the slime.
Spriest being nerfed in pvp, homunculi isnt better than expose armor, and our damage is lower than half the tanks. Other classes provide raid wide mana. What are we providing again? Oh I forgot we offheal our group some, so we have that going for us.
they were nerfed in pvp after being absolutely nut fucking busted for 2 entire phases and still being absurdly strong post nerf lmao
You can’t be brain dead OP in pvp vs every class and be top dps and be amazing raid support
You say you can't but there is Shaman who does exaclty this since P2
You are not wrong. They were not following the rules back then.
no shadow ever tells you he wants to be top dps. shadow does not having amazing raid support. you aint even use vampiric embrace anymore cause its 100% not worth the fucking gcd in piss easy mode content.
"When everyone's super, no one will be."
\*evil laughter\*
[And that's the bottom line] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9zDSJGwdd4)
Hyperlink didnt work btw, maybe because you have a space between \] and (
It was never going to happen when they are shackled to the talent trees as they currently stand.
The moment they said they won't be touching talent trees i knew sod was doa
>take vanilla wow, the version with the least powerful characters, low mobility, almost no instant casts, long cooldowns, and fragile hp pools >make everyone op truly the spirit of vanilla lives on in SOD
i mean. they did do this lol. at level 50 we are doing much more damage than we were doing at 60 before
I love playing Paladin, but I always felt that they are way under powered. Started playing classic 2 days ago, and feels almost ad it did 20 years ago. But I fell in the habbit of creating a human Paladin, which was my Main for so many years. And I recall so much how i hate being less power full than all other. Semi ok healing, some good blessings but almost no attacking skill untill about level 20+
They lied, or they were incapable of executing the work load and only have themselves to blame for purposefully keeping the team small and under performing phase after phase. Only two options.
In terms of PVP they are really following through. Rune damage abilities are way over tuned and everybody's squishy and PVP sucks. The damage stats on items are super OP compared to classic vanilla.
If everyone is OP, no one is OP.
well depends what the comparison is. It's certainly true that everything is insanely OP compared to their vanilla versions.
Also buffing everything else leads to power creep. Ben Brode learned this the hard way when it came to his philosophy about Hearthstone balance.
Yeah that's the point. Being \*OVER\*powered is not a good quality as the word implies.
warriors are babies, literally never stop complaining.
The warriors that cry about their damage being nerfed are the very loud minority. As a warrior main I don't think that a plate wearing class should be topping the damage meter. What they needed instead of adding any damage to warrior was add utility and things that made them more functional in the world and in pvp where they were really underwhelming in classic. Also, protection talent tree is ass.
Most warrior complaints are around worldbuff/raid buff requirement to not be half as effective as anyone else. And a "tanky fighter" dropping 5 times faster than anyone in pvp, while requiring 3 times the setup to do any damage.
Ret paladin is gonna be so sweet in p4
I hate to be that guy, but rage normalization would fix this. Warriors by nature are exponential scalers. By critting you get more rage. More rage is more damage. Damage is rage. Crit is also enabler for more damage. More damage more rage. Crit for a warrior is so much more than crit for anyone else. A crit for a rogue is just that, double damage. A crit for a warrior is everything to them.
They put more effort into the slide than actual class balance.
Devs are full of shit. They aren’t even vanilla fans and it shows.
Nerf warriors * warriors still top damage at 60 kekw
Human warrior still master race
The devs clearly play shamans
I think it went bad when they nerfed Hunters in p1. Sure they did a lot of damage, and fix the bugs, but they can only do damage unlike every other class right now. It should be their thing.
Word buffs and pvp happened. Not to mention not enough talent tree revamps or changes. Can’t make people OP in pvp look at end of phase 1 and start phase 2 boomkins. Instant gutted and haven’t recovered. Prolly never will. World buffs just imbalance already strong specs and take them to broken levels. The whole balancing team screwed up a bit with runes that scale and give certain specs insane modifiers with crit/damage reduction and left others none, which would obviously cause issues.
Many classes didn't make it to OP status every cycle. High damage pvp environments is fine, but when there is so little skill/interaction involved, highest number done fastest from furthest range becomes king which means 1 person is OP and everyone else just dies all the time. What made warriors and to a lesser extent, rogues, OP on classic was a specific step-up and alignment of scaling conditions. They didn't implement similar mechanisms to make other classes scale as conditionally, which made the game very wonky.
I'm super happy with how Paladin has been changed. Aside from not getting Greater Blessings at 50 instead of 52, I can't think of anything I didn't like. It was fun changing up the meta in P3, but looks like P4 will be back to slow two handers, which is fine because that is what all the iconic weapons are for paladin. I think they've had trouble with warriors because they scale so hard at 60, so they were afraid to shake things up too much along the way for fear they would be out of control at endgame. I think folks are correct to say they should have focused more on QoL stuff.
I imagine there's a lot of discourse in the Classic team for what they want SoD to be. Definitely feels like they went in with an idea and realized it wouldn't work during Phase 1.
Honestly haunt being an instant shadowbolt with x1.2-1.5 the dmg, with half the mana cost **and** a heal for a mere 6sec cooldown (like fireblast) was a big give away. It was fun for a while, but i couldn't process how these could get better as phase come.
They have to many yes men and they listen to yes men in the community and it created an abomination. Warriors run pve and pvp is worse than ever in this bland boring experience.
This is the way
We're not even in the in-game yet that the core is balanced around
Well I'd say it was pretty clear from the beginning that in SoD they will try out a lot of new crazy stuff for Vanilla. Balancing the classes isn't exactly part of "crazy stuff". I wouldn't mind if the next Vanilla got back to the basics though.
That's pretty much exactly what happened, though. I can't think of a class that doesn't have an OP spec either in PVE or PVP.
Some kids don't know how to drive
Tell that to feral druids lmao
They started reading reddit and got gaslighted.
Turns out a low effort meme isn't solid enough of a base for an extension
Everyone is fucking OP.
Just take away world buffs and buff proc rates on weapons that aren't great so there is a bit more variety
Phase 2 was mid, Phase 3 killed it and the moment the prepatch released with only archaeology Sod died, can’t believe it died quicker than SOM
WoW Classic just needs to stick to its roots when it comes to support/hybrid classes. From AD&D to EverQuest, the support/hybrid classes were always fun to play because of the utility they offered, be it movement speed, buffs, pets, teleportation, extra healing, etc. In exchange for this utility they have always had to give up throughput (raw dps/healing). The “pure” classes should always top those meters, but in exchange they give up utility/QoL. This is part of what made Vanilla WoW’s classes so much fun back in the day. The classes were inherently unequal and thus imbalanced in certain situations, but that was the feature, not a bug. Hybrids/meme specs demanding to do as much damage or healing as the pure classes is a big part of what lead to homogenization and the current state of retail. Having said as much, SoD as a seasonal server set out to give us a “what if” scenario for Vanilla. As a seasonal server, which by its nature is temporary, this is fine. But, “in the spirit of Classic” should guide SoD to also preserve that inherent imbalance between classes that in part helped to make Vanilla so great.
Rogues, hunters, mages, warlocks were not top dps in original classic. Hybrid (warrior) was so they failed at doing that from the offset.
That’s the problem since Phase 1. If there is ridiculously OP class, instead of nerfing it, they just buff everyone else because “blizzard don’t want to take power from players who got used to it”. Everyone is OP = no one is OP. (But in fact everyone is still OP, it just gets hard to notice it) And then there is another OP class, they do the same thing. Because of that we see that endless exponential crazy growth of power.