Is there any way we can shift balancing to be zone specific?
We see plenty of balancing around targets. “75% effective when used against players” etc. Can we not just balance things around which zone were in? Each dungeon, raid and bg/arena has its own zone id. If we’re able to swap this, we wouldn’t need raid nerfs to hurt specs in m+.
A large portion of balance comes down to encounter design. We’ve seen this bring multidotting and funnel damage types up and down in various raid fights and aoe soft and hard caps have the limits tested in others.
Why shouldn’t each branch of content be subject to its own balancing. If outlaw is over performing in m+, why should it get nerfed for raiding. If Spriest and Disc are so ultra strong for a raid tier, why should they lose effectiveness in dungeons. If Resto shaman are pvp gods, can or should that be used to justify being weak (2 key levels below max) in dungeon content?
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Yes the technology has existed in game for a long time to flag ability behavior on the specific content you are doing. It is used all the time in PvE vs. PvP separation in the treatments of stun, CC, burst damage, defensives, etc.
However blizzard seems extremely wary of even applying a fraction of that treatment to separate different modes of instanced PvE. For example imagine a large (necessary) nerf to resto druid performance (no I don’t mean the joke 8.3 changes) that only impacted them in M+, but was not applied in raiding ? Even better imagine if that nerf to M+ performance was reversed into a large buff when you stepped into raiding ?
Anyways I 100% agree with your post. As it stands now doing small changes against massive imbalances is literally pointless and might as well not have been done at all. Doing large necessary changes to one mode of PvE content automatically hurts everyone else in the other modes of PvE content.
You made a great example with resto shaman which is powerful in PvP but a joke in most M+ content, especially M+ content that requires a combination of high mobility and spreading of players.
As an ex-holy priest I would certainly love to have the following things to make me not worthless in higher M+ keys:
- baseline mobility
- baseline defensives (DP doesn’t count)
- good damage
- good mobile healing
- baseline brez
But I can’t have any of these because my spec is an OK healer in most raiding content ? Nope I don’t buy it.
This is just one of many “step outside the box” big important changes that need to be made to keep endgame retail WoW alive in the future. The other one (among many others) is to finally give up the “raiding must be king” mentality.
I can think of a ton of changes that would make huge differences if implemented. Blood has been fairly weak against physical damage bosses all expansion: Bone Shield is x% more effective when in a raid zone.
Resto druids have been a bit weak in raids: Rejuve gets x% more benefit from mastery or haste in raid zones.
Healing stream/cloud burst totems now have 3 charges in m+ and healing surge can be cast while moving. (you’d burn a ton of mana is you simply used this all the time).
I just remembered how benthic gear worked.
Yes all great changes among many others.
No, no, no. Do not tie important fixes to gear or borrowed power systems or talents or whatever. Imagine if resto druids had barkskin, rebirth and dash removed baseline, and now they had to pick ONE of these spells from a talent row. The forums would go into meltdown.
My point was more the tool tip saying “In Nazjatar and Eternal Palace”. Zone specific.
They should really be making small weekly balances passes. 1-3% difference. They have so much data that they should be able to automate suggested changes.
If anything your abilities should be the same everywhere. It feels awful when you flash of light yourself in pvp and it does nothing.
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Totally disagree. The main issue as I see it is that we can’t get balances that make sense across all end game content. It doesn’t seem possible to nerf or buff something without some other branch of content being thrown out of whack.
Blanket buffs and nerfs are not balancing when end game is so diverse.
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No. We’re arguing that using that approach has made us arrive at the current horrible situation.
Blanket changes do not work as one for so many modes of content, including raiding vs. dungeons.
Class/spec balance will remain a complete disaster as long as blizzard maintains this antiquated approach to tuning.
Healers are just one example, dps have it just as bad.
Shadow for example is perfectly fine in raids, baseline mobility would be nice but that’s a priest issue. With bosses being up long enough for shadow to ramp properly the weakness of the class is overcome by their strong damage one ramped. In M+ the total lack of burst damage outside taking meme beam means that we rely very heavily on a tank/healer/affix combo that allows continual pulls with minimal or no down time. I would love some changes to M+ scaling to allow burst of stone sort.
This is the main reason for the nurf DH meme, they are strong in all content with little to no drawbacks
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A bit off topic, but Rsham is not particularly powerful in pvp right now either. 5th represented healer in 2200+. Seems that they need a bit of love on both ends of the spectrum 
Blizzard is so bad at conveying what their abilities let alone the fact that they behave differently in different content. It’s really bad game design for an ability to feel one way in pve and differently in pvp. They just need to balance the game better.
I mean… You just balance what’s best for different content. Controlled burst for pvp, 4-5 target cleave for m+ and sustain damage for raids. There are exceptions to those guidelines but if you had those aspect of dps balanced the game would be mostly balanced and then fine tune after that.
There’s also no reason that blizzard can’t USE sims and better sims than the community makes to balance their game either.
Last tier, my destro warlock was able to hit a raid boss for 230k for the cost of a 2s cast (80k in pvp). Average high geared health was around 400k, no one should be able to 2 shot someone and that’s the way they’ve been balancing pvp for a while. Corruption aside, they’ve typically balanced pvp with wanting people to stand a fighting chance.
Either way, pvp is a completely separate end game mode and should never feel like PVE of any kind. It should be balanced around what it is, chess. Lining up the utility of the team to snag a kill and trying to survive that window.
It’s better if different content is balanced around itself without regard to other branches.
Pve shouldn’t feel like pvp but flash of light should always feel like flash of light.
Healing has a feel to it. Changing that feeling in different content feels awful. Doing so is just blizzard being lazy and cheap.
Your “feeling” isn’t as valuable as not having a spell that is fast enough and heals hard enough that you and your teammates become functionally invincible in pvp.
Your hand waving that they should “just balance the game” doesn’t account for how many variables there are to high performance, and how those variables change dramatically under different circumstances.
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You can’t do that in a blanket way. That’s the point we’re arguing. Separation between PvP and PvE in terms of ability power and mechanics has existed for years now. It’s long past due for the same treatment to be applied to different modes of PvE, particularly dungeons vs. raiding.
Think of the point of view of a new player who can’t understand why there spells are not working correctly. It feels bad and is bad game design.
Here are some ways to balance pvp vs pve raiding vs pve m+.
Pvp stats, balance cleave, aoe, and single target damage, set with bonuses for pvp, dungeons, raiding, talents (current system or talent tree) designed for the different types of content ie these are the good pvp talents etc. Then the reasons why you character is functioning differently in different content is conveyed to the player.
I’m not saying you can’t have a player function differently but it can not be done without the player knowing it’s happening and feel okay.
Consistency is so important.
You can’t do that with blanket changes.
Gear-based solutions to design problems is a horrible idea. That is how blizzard does it. They design system “B” to fix system “A” instead of just addressing the issues with system “A” directly. For example why does the echoes currency system exist for BOA essences instead of just making all essences BOA in the first place ?
Talents should never be designed around fixing a core design that was meant to be inherently flawed or poor. This issue is epidemic around the current talent trees. If you want a lazy example go look at the warlock talent that reduces shadowfury (AOE stun) cooldown by 15 seconds. Why is this a talent instead of just reducing the baseline cooldown by 15 seconds ?
What people like sack and me are proposing does not require gear-based solutions or currency-based solutions or any of those horrible systems that have bloated the game for years now. If players have (mostly) adjusted to seeing significantly different behavior in their characters in PvP vs. PvE, then they will do the same for different modes of PvE. No solution is perfect but this will be far better than anything blizzard has tried (and failed) to do up until now. There will certainly be tons of players who enjoy both raiding and dungeons who will now appreciate feeling powerful in both modes of content with the same spec.
There is years of data clearly demonstrating that blanket changes, both buffs and nerfs, at best satisfy one group of players and anger the rest. The minor resto druid changes in 8.3 that further hurt RAID resto druid performance is a great recent data point in that regard.
And I completely disagree that having your character not feel the same without anyway of conveying that or giving an in-game reason for it is bad design.
I agree. Nerf DH.
In all serious though, your post makes alot of sense, In season 3 there is a priest i ran some keys with, and his overall dps was thousands higher in keys when the pulling essentially never stopped.
Ive noticed the same “issue” on my demo lock, hes low geared and not doing bigger keys yet, but in dungeons where tanks wait 10-15 seconds between every pull i want to scream because my procs are going to waste and im losing everything i built up on the prior pull, but when i get tanks that dont stop pulling my dps can be double in certain dungeons.
Classes that have to ramp are innately worse than classes that have front loaded damage. I can tell as i get into higher keys and encounters take longer my demo lock will feel better.