Getting players in on designing buffs to under-performing specs

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
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We’re cheap labor (I.E. free labor) and we care way too much, so why doesn’t Blizzard let the community council and big figures in the class discords/Wowhead guide writers help design buffs to worse specs? We have very robust calculators to simulate the specs with all the gear from the entire expansion, and plenty of people would be willing to spend the time, time you wouldn’t need to compensate like you would for Blizzard developers.

We can agree on specs to be addressed and buffed, the players can do and show their work, and Blizzard can edit or implement it. You can even scale what players suggest back a little to err on the side of caution, but with how nerdy and smart some people get, I’d trust them to make good buffs. We can PTR it before finalizing as well.

To think Shadow Priest is just 1 very simple change away from being close to the top performers is so frustrating. That simple change being to put a Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain back into the game to make SW:P benefit from haste, and to then, if you’d like, disable the glyph in arenas. Possibly improve its snap-shotting capabilities to make it work how Corruption does too. It’s totally fair I think.

Blizzard’s response to buffing Retribution essentially being “because pallies are doing so well in the other 2 specs, we’ll leave Ret alone” seems more like a response to defend their decision not to spend the resources on doing buffs. Let players do it for free then imo.

That argument isn’t totally unreasonable though, Hunters have 2 great dps specs, I don’t expect BM to be overtaking unholy DK’s. Mages have 3 dps specs, 2 of which are good (fire will soon be insane), so leaving frost for pvp seems fine. But Priests have 1 dps spec and 2 healer specs with Discipline (that you’d only ever take 1 tops in a raid) and Holy that is totally looked past. Making the experience better for Shadow players seems to just be a positive for everyone. The same argument applies for Retribution.

I’d like to see the community get really detailed and big brained about this, which of course they would, they already do all the time as a hobby, and propose smart cautious buffs for Shadow Priests, Elemental Shamans, and Retribution Paladins at least. I’m no expert so maybe others could be argued for as well, does feral cat scale well later on? Specs that are guaranteed to be insane later like Fury or Fire mages would likely just have to wait for their gear as they’d be too OP later on if buffed now.

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Fairly certain feral scales with armor pen and will get better in later tiers

I don’t think any class or spec will get any changes for wrath I think that’s more something for classic+ if that ever happens or even a SoM type server

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I would have to agree that making balance “open source” to a degree would probably be best and cheapest way for balance to be improved. Though I’m guessing this won’t happen in any “live” version of Classic.

Right now the future of Classic is totally up in the air, but I think one thing we can all plainly see is that it will continue to be a thing because it’s been such a success. The question is really what will happen once we reach the more Retail-esque eras of WoW. Do we just keep going, do we stop, do we just redo the first 3 again but with changes, or maybe we just run all of the eras of WoW that have a large audience like they’re private realms?

I could see them taking up on your suggestion if and when we have a redo of Classic eras with changes and/or new content. But for now, I highly doubt they’re going to mess with the overall balance or add stuff much more than we’re already seeing in the raid balance changes and Heroic+.

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And then when they decide on buffs, who puts them into the game? And to even get to that point they would have to have paid employees to liaison with the community members they are essentially deputizing as class balance devs. It’s still going to cost Blizzard money and they’re way happier with the way things are now.

People complain, complain, complain but they never quit. As long as they don’t quit, Blizz is perfectly happy to collect your sub money while you yell into the void that is the forums.

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All the current specs are within a delta of 20% of each other. There is nothing comparable to the 50% delta of vanilla between warriors and everyone else. The nore you ask for buffs the closer we get to retail with everyone getting everything and then what. Just accept that not every class can or should top the meters, play a pure dps spec if you want to do that

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I do not think class balance should be done

But if it is done, the likely best way to buff BM hunter would be to make ranged critical attacks from arcane shot and steady shot from the hunter reduce the CD of kill command by 1/2/3 seconds. Add it to one of the 3 point talents fsrthet down the bm tree. Then give the pet 100% armor pen stat inherited from the hunter.

That would make it scale better giving more stat value to crit and armor pen. Both of which are not as effective in pvp so it minimizes the effect it would have on pvp.

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Just let bestial wrath be reset by readiness.

Ez

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That wont fix the scaling issue. That also gives it a huge pvp buff.

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everyone will just agree to buff whatever streamer is currently in need of a power trip so they can make soyface thumbnails and spam emotes on twitch

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Exactly

Make beast cleave great again

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I’m not too fond of the sim people are using, it’s been proven over and over that the sims aren’t reliable and ignores many nuances.

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They mostly likely do and have.

The first time we went through this, Tankspot and ElitistJerks were a couple of the biggest places for guides and theorycrafting. How many people from those places have been working at WoW?

EJ is the guild that Ion started in beta…

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Honest question. If you were a chef at a fancy restaurant would you collect recipe cards from the dinner guests?

No. No you wouldn’t.

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no go play retail which is currently being developed…THIS IS CLASSIC ERA NO BALANCE CHANGES HOW HARD IS THAT TO UNDERSTAND.

I wish Warcraft logs would shut down so cringe mentality on classic era games, got 20 year old kids crying about balance on a game from 2009 which has completed its development cycle.

no one cares about your parses.

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exactly these people need to go to retail unironically, the type of game play they desire is legit mythic + content with min/max every class for dps, they need to leave classic. So annoying dealing with them.

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Especially for tanks. Based on sim i should deal around 1-1,5k more dps with my tank. That would give me a 100 log on most fights, and its clear to see where the mistakes are made in the sim, but well nobody cares bout tank sims anyway^^

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Yeah Wotlk actually had that. It was called TBW and was absolutely broken in arena.

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It’s been more than 3 years of letting dumpster tier specs stay dumpster tier. It’s Classic. Why should they buff classes now?

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I don’t think there’s really any buffs or class tweaking necessary because for the most part, all specs are balanced the three outliers are UH dks doing absurd dps, which isnt that big of a deal and then arms and ret trailing far behind. Arms scale into the expansion, in TOC they start to shine and in ICC they will be much healthier. But ret will be bad in Ulduar, it will be bad in TOC and only in ICC will it be mediocre. An easy way to fix ret is that while Ulduar is active content buff their dps by 15% flat in just the raid. Repeat for TOC. That way it doesn’t affect the balance of anything else.

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I’ve generally been against class/spec buffing or nerfing, but if they’re buffing raids and making them harder doesn’t that punish the poor classes even more? I don’t know what the Ulduar changes are like, but if damage requirements are tight it seems the lower dps classes will be even more sol.