TL;DR: Content should be difficult because of interesting challenging mechanics not because Blizz nerfed player power.
So… for a while now, I’ve been displeased with how M+/class “balance” has been going. I’m definitely biased because I’ve played and mained WW since MoP, but the situation is getting to the point where it’s just annoying. Between the CC nerfs, the AoE nerfs, nerfs in general, and wonky tuning, it feels like Blizz is designing this crap with malicious intent or at the very least to stretch out playtime.
Gone are the days of giga pull and stun and bung and everything is dead in like 20 seconds. Nowadays AoE CC are just glorified kicks instead of actual lockdown. It feels like we’re running races, but we lapped everyone else so Blizz put a bullet in our leg and told us go to go run the race again. I can still run the race and keep pace with or beat most people, but it’s always in the back of mind of how far from max output I am now. It just doesn’t feel good doing content anymore sometimes.
To put it numerically, I average about 120k-140k for overall dps at the end of 18-20 key. More if there’s an Aug with me. With WW fully un-nerfed, it’d be easily leagues above what I could crank out even with an Aug evoker funneling me the entire dungeon. Probably in the 180-200k range. Maybe higher.
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Torghast was the closest thing Blizzard put in the game to let players go wild but at the end even that was ruined.
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I agree, things feel like they are in a real bad spot right now.
They seem to be doing a really bad job with balance overall, taking quick shortcuts that often make things worse instead of fixing the actual problem.
I’m guessing the number of Blizzard Employees who actually work on things like class balance has dwindled compared to years past. While at the same time, they keep introducing new classes and new specs that make proper balance even harder. On top of that we have borrowed power that comes and goes (Onyx Ring being a recent example), new spells being introduced, etc.
As someone who has played since Vanilla, every class has always had it’s ups and downs. There have always been problems with the game. But balance issues were usually addressed reasonably quickly, and so were problems with the game. It’s feeling more and more like things are being ignored. Whereas in the past it usually made sense to “stick it out” knowing things would get better again, now it seems like the smart players are the ones who have given up and just re-roll FOTM constantly instead. Sad.
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balance can’t be achieved, and S1 dragonflight was one of the better balanced states.
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From warrior to monk:
[insert “first time” meme here].
I gotchu.
Also monk prolly got screwed worse than warrior.
Most of these issues are coming from making game wide changes for specific content branches. No m+ healer was asking for a game wide nerf to healing, but raid healers want to feel relevant and challenged.
I understand the thread may be about class specific balance, but the game wide changes probably have higher impact. Having a meta is inevitable, but classes being locked 2-6 levels below the highest performers isn’t good.
They’ve dipped their toe into the “increased power in dungeons” pool and I think this is a positive direction. Pvp has its own tuning, afterall. The math is very different between 4-5 healers for 20 and 1 for 5.
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There is definitely an issue with content difficulty/balance. Normally when you think of class balance, you think of DPS/HPS. But when you think about the current meta, what makes the exodia comp more ridiculous than their DPS/HPS numbers is their utility. Blizzard’s philosophy for introducing difficulty has favored classes with great utility much more than classes with broken output.
The problem with this paradigm is that, for the most part, your class either has the preferred/mandatory utility or it doesn’t. When a spec is meta for insane damage output, obviously taking one for a key will make things quicker, but you can still invite many other specs that can do like 90% of the damage. You can’t pass on a shadow priest and take a WW monk to get 90% of MD.
Combine this with the current tuning, where these specs with great utility also have the craziest output and it’s not surprising to see such a dominant meta.
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