Class Meta in an MMO

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

This came up in conversation with a friend today, and I wanted to ask you all about your thoughts on it.

In an MMO, you pick a class / role / spec that resonates with you, then you play it. You play it because you enjoy it, and then you progressively get better at it.

In WoW, you pick a class / spec that gets you into keys based on what is and is not meta, you play it because it’s meta, and you don’t really care about getting “better” at it because you’ll probably end up benching it after the seasons over.

Some of us are sweaty alt-oholics and play everything, others are more siloed into playing 1-2 classes.

I get class fantasy is a thing, but in the competitive meta of the game, wouldn’t it be easier to just have everything good at everything that is required in the meta every season?

Example

Prot Warrior is hyper struggling right now, make the DR shout (w/e it’s called, green orc, don’t remember names) silence enemies for like 2 seconds or something as a talent.

Thematically, you could even have it so they can throw out (multiple?) spears and drag enemies in - similar to something like DK mass grip.

Just something that allows you, as a player, to be more effective in your role without having to literally reroll to another class entirely in order to progress further.

I’d love to hear community feedback on it. It’s not like we’re outside the scope of what is possible, we’re just wandering into viability concerns.

As of current, there are plenty of classes that are literally incapable of going beyond a certain key level. That just doesn’t feel right to me, if you’re good at your class and you’re capable of doing the content, your class shouldn’t matter.

That’s the entire point of an MMO.

Thoughts?

2

I don’t run high keys, so I can’t really answer your general question, but this sort of thing has always been a problem in WoW for the highest end content. There have been lots of times you just couldn’t take certain classes to the raid, or to the mythic raid, or to the highest level of PVP, or etc. This is something that has been discussed so many times that I’m confused it isn’t a sticky somewhere.

You’re talking about Demo Shout, but talenting into Challenging Shout (aoe taunt, two talents below Demo Shout, one of which is a Revenge boost) and then Disrupting Shout gives a 6 second AOE school silence on top of the aoe taunt. The default Mythic+ Prot Warrior build on WoWhead doesn’t include Disrupting Shout, but I tend to think someone raiding keys at the level you’re talking about isn’t going to be using cookie cutter builds anyway.

My low level playing of Warrior makes me wonder if the bigger issue isn’t self-healing, which the warrior seems (again, low skill, my warrior is only level 50) to have less of than Bear or Tankadin or (obviously) DK.

ALL OF THAT ASIDE:

If you want to clear the very hardest content in any game with different levels of difficulty, you aren’t going to be successful doing so in a casual way. You’re going to have to know when to use each ability, and it’s going to matter when you drink a potion, and etc etc. There’s not much sense in trying to dumb down the content, because without the difficulty, the folks who crave that challenge will go find it elsewhere.

I think it would be great if every class could clear every sort of content, relying only upon the skill of the player, but Blizz has not yet mastered having different abilities that all work out the same for e.g. survivability or maximizing DPS.

3

The meta is super irrelevant if you’re not in the top miniscule fraction. I realize that getting into content based on meta is a thing, just like no religion needs to be true to effect one’s life.

That said, I play what I like and set goals based on it. Idc what’s meta, I saw Veng was getting double sigils and I think that’s the only interesting part of the spec, so I played it, it happened to be meta.

I was playing mw last season because it was fun, it got buffed defensively coming into the patch and got a bunch of other buffs later. Happens to be meta atm, but I swapped to rsham because it really is quite fun to play a Swiss army knife and have lust in every party.

I play surv, I struggle to get invites relative to my mage, but I do about twice the dps and am way more tanky. The last key I did was 296k dps and the next person down was 220k. That doesn’t really help me get into keys later, unless I befriend those in that group.

Kk, so establishing credibility done, I do not think that the game is overly meta. I play mtg arena and that game has a 12 deck meta, I play brews and get 55-58% win rates against those metas. I think this game would do better with rock paper scissor balancing, as other games do, but how do you incorporate that into coop?

You could make certain classes synergize in different ways so that, say, Veng + triple ranged + rsham is goated and Ppal + rogue/monk/warrior + pres is also goated. This would require some spells to work better with x in the group, but maybe we’ve moved past ffa group compositions.

I’ll add that the pug meta specs and the world first meta specs are almost never the same specs. In pugs, you need to play like you’re the only person who knows anything about the dungeon and there are very clear tank and healer specs for that and about half the dps specs can slot in.

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4

not me. I tanked on this toon before there was such a thing as a prot paladin as far as community was concerned. and i kept playing it through the bottom of the dps meters as ret just fine.

I will not change toons, and will not play alts regardless of anything.

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5

I enjoy every season when raiderio does its break the meta event and teams are made using 0 meta specs and still end up timing keys in title range.

Really puts into perspective how important the “meta” is for the masses.

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6

There’s something to be said about learning from watching and there is an information gap.

7

This is oft repeated but simply not true. The meta might be different at low keys than at high keys, but there are absolutely some specs that give you a better chance at success at all levels of play.

I think what you really mean is that playing at a higher than average level (in lower keys) means you can make up for what your spec may lack, but most people are not above average, and better spec = better chance at success.

And this is why meta matters, even at low keys. People can’t just guess that you are better than average, unless your score indicates that. If an 1800 player of a good M+ spec applies alongside an 1800 player of a bad spec, then I don’t need to tell you which player is more likely to get the invite.

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8

No.

There is an element of higher keys that is entirely irrelevant and shapes the upper end meta. Survival.

Early season, you see the top damage dealers and hps dominate. Then you can’t just brute force it any more and specific specs are used to bypass nearly impossible hurdles. There are no impossible hurdles up to 25 (at least).

Fire mages are most often represented in the meta because they have a strong single target profile and a suite of defensives they can cycle to survive as well as a cheat death. Low keys don’t require a laser in the party to be successful at all.

No group under 23 had any benefit to having an augmentation Evoker, ever. In a group of 60-80 parsers, including the Evoker, you simply just lost time on someone who’s Schtick was survival.

The lower keys don’t require heavy stops, defensive usage or anywhere near perfect play to time and never have. Bringing classes that have a large portion of their balance be defensive in nature (stops, stuns, defensives, aoe soothe, group defense, cheat death, silence, mind soothe, gate skips, druid stealth skips, etc etc) aren’t necessary when you can just kill that mob in 25-30s.

Nvm that fotm rerollers are often horrible and carried to their scores by constantly getting invited because of a perceived meta advantage. Because they’re performance wasn’t necessary.

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9

I strongly disagree with this. Playing a strong class is impactful at a much lower key level then the highest keys happening.

Do you need the meta classes to be successful?

No.

Is it irrelevant?

Also no. You can feel the difference. You can pull things off with meta classes that you can’t with weaker specs.

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10

Balance can always be better BUT given a set of dungeons there will often be a set of classes that have the best tool kit for them.

Blizzard should be slow to do reworks or modify or adding spells like you suggest to demo shout. So they can put a lot of thought into it.

Weekly tuning should happen. 1-5% buffs and nerfs every week would ensure there is tight balance and if your favorite spec is behind it will not be behind for long.

11

You can feel the difference between a top 5% arcane mage and a 30% ret paladin. In high keys, everyone is amazing. In low keys, almost no one is. Bring the player.

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12

You can’t bring the player when you’re pugging. Because you don’t know the player.

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13

Handy little trick is to just have higher score/accomplishment standards for anyone playing meta. Chances are they deserve the 100-175pt deduction.

I can’t over state how inflated a score becomes when you get more invites. Tanks have similarly inflated scores, you just can’t carry bad tanks very far.

14

Make nothing account bound (make it character bound) and let FotM rerollers have empty husks of an account. Voila! Done.

15

I subtracted 400 io from Rogues during BFA.

16

Ewwwww no. Instead of screwing altoholics just mentally subtract rating from FotM specs like @Sackless said.

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17

If they made title rewards based off spec and not entirety of classes people would chase meta less, aannnndddd people that are really good at off meta choices would be picked, played, and rewarded.

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18

FotM rerollers.

19

I play every class all the time; how could I be a FoTM reroller if I’m already playing said class?

20

I don’t think anyone really considers it FotM rerolling if you don’t do any content.