But the class guides on icy viens/mmo/etc - do they represent fan made interpretations or actually from blizzard?
I think it is fun to come up with new builds, but does blizzard actually say how they interpret the class, its rotation, and it reasons for scaling things a certain way? I would also like to know what they consider the optimal “rotations”
**this crossed my mind while reading all the beta builds. Often times the dev will quote " this was added to smooth out the rotation" I want to know what rotation they used in the testing.
Blizzard is more willy nilly on secondary stats, even though not every spec plays equally with secondary stats like when they make crappy Mastery on purpose and players are supposed to know. It really wouldn’t be too much trouble if they added a Passive at the very back end of the spellbook that gave you footnotes on how each Stat weight benefits your spec.
If they don’t like the way you’re playing, they’ll tell you, and try to encourage you to play according to their way.
Like how they buff Ice Lance’s damage because people are playing the No Ice Lance build (basically focusing on generating Icicles with Frostbolt, get Brain Freeze, and nuke your target with Glacial Spike+Flurry), although people are still playing without using Ice Lance even after that buff.
They actually did have fairly “you should keep this dot up, and do this on cooldown, this when you have no other abilities” baked into the spellbook around Cataclysm?/MoP? I wanna say, it’s been almost 10 years (wow, doesn’t that make you feel old) so I forgot when exactly they got added but I’m surprised they just up and removed them one day. They were quite helpful imo,
I am curious what you’d expect a Blizzard class guide to look like.
I’d wager the class developers wouldn’t be too keen on creating guides a la wowhead or icy-veins as these guides typically focus on what is considered “best” talents, gear, rotations etc…just a haunch.
If the developers created guides in that manner I think it could be construed as a judgement on the validity of much of their own work.
If they made guides that say, expanded on tool tips, explained scenarios where abilities could be beneficial, or showed how different builds might be created around armor pieces those would likely be behemoths and hard to digest. Especially for somone who is just looking to maximize an average of performance.
The origional box set for wow came with a brief description of the available classes, it included insights such as “[Shaman] are masters of the elements, they use spells and totems to heal or enhance their allies in battle…” Which made me think they would be similar to Bards, they weren’t.
I think that sort of thing is the best we could hope for from the devs.
Oh, never done a class trial so didn’t know that. I would still prefer if it just showed you on spec change honestly. While none of the rotations are particularly complicated to figure out what Blizzard wants, there are just some people who like structure in being told what to do at first when they are trying out a new spec, and being able to see that without having to go to some third party site.
Seems kind of silly that they moved that information to something as rare as class trials, I have multiple 120’s of every class and didn’t realize that’s what they did with them. Plus there’s no way that took up a lot of storage/development time to make; 4-5 sentences on when to do what for a general idea. I am aware proper well-done rotations usually went outside the scope of those explanations, but was still an easy thing to point to to explain simple integrations of abilities.
When it comes to difficult content like Mythic raiding and high keys, Blizzard balances the content around players using their class to its utmost potential. So it’s implicit that Blizzard intends their players to use optimal rotations and cooldown usage. At least for the really hard content.
In normal raids and +10 keys? Go to town, do whatever you want.
If blizzard ever released an official class guide with optimal talents and builds, then they’d have to admit which talents are supremely weak and do something about them.
Okay, so I used to develop classes for a game server I ran. Designed, scripted, etc. Here’s kind of the process we went through:
You need to figure out a class concept from scratch. This is usually the hardest part.
You have to think about what the class concept can bring. Will it be fun to play? What is its role?
You write down a rough-draft of what the class + abilities should be.
That rough draft goes through a round table that can take weeks.
Once you have the final draft approved you start designing the class.
You run the class through trials/tests and change things based on feedback.
You analyze the data behind how much damage and stuff it can do.
Pushed into final production.
Changes are made further on.
So, yeah. Every class basically has a spreadsheet of its maximum potential usage and the players that test said class provide feedback. They literally change around values and can figure out how much HPS/DPS you can do under circumstances. A lot of the other stuff is just QOL improvements.
The hardest thing they keep doing is forcing a “lets review every single class” ingame doctrine when the expansions come out. I did this with like 30~ classes once and its complete hell and it was only with a team of small numbers.