How important is class balance, really?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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When I played Vanilla the “hybrid tax” was gospel and it was widely known that Warrior, Priest, and Rogue were what you played if you were Serious™. So we kind of started with the idea (whether actually true or not) that your favorite class might not be end game viable.

Takes a lot of work to get to 60.

Kind of a bummer to go through all that and get “only if I heal?” from your guild. A lot of people furiously rerolled. A lot soldiered on, suboptimally. A few took the challenged and deconstructed the classes and played them incredibly well, breaking expectations; but not many listened.

From TBC on Blizz has focused a ton on balancing classes and those changes have reverberated through every aspect of the game, but still it is probably the #1 complaint on the forums since the dawn of the game.

But here we are on the cusp of Classic, (supposedly) the most unbalanced version of WoW ever and people are totally excited for it!

So bearing all that in mind, how important is it to “balance” classes and how much should that affect game design? Can we even imagine a game where everything is completely balanced? Would anyone want to play that game? And finally, is our excitement about Vanilla in spite of its unbalanced classes or because of it? Or is Vanilla balanced and we’ve been wrong all these years?

Cheers,

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I don’t remember it being a big deal. I remember one of my friends let me go on an onyxia raid with his guild because all their hunters had the head piece and they didn’t want it to go to waste. Different guilds different cultures.

Hard to tell, maybe at the start people will be more concerned with finding enough competent players and classes won’t really matter. Later on if the raids are actually a big challenge people will start to prune for only the most optimal classes.

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People are confusing “class balance” with “no matter how you spec your talents, you’ll still be great.” If people overcame that, there would be fewer issues, I think.

Overall, the classes were “balanced” in Vanilla. Raids may not like every spec you can make your character, but no one spec owns every situation in the game either. PvP was also very rock-paper-scissors in Vanilla as well, and your spec sometimes meant you got killed softly instead of hard-countered into the dirt.

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Most classes are balanced, not ever spec is balanced i feel, we can debate that for hours upon hour’s though. So where would you like to start?

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Classes were balanced back then, not so much specs. I’m not even sure if they even really thought about specs, it was just trees that modified what you were doing so you could do it better.

Frankly I always liked TBC for this because while it was tinkered with more than Vanilla and everything was much more viable you still had some unique things and not everything was optimal.

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I believe the classes in Vanilla are relatively well balanced, actually. That isn’t to say that they all compete similarly in raids however, but there’s more to the game than raiding. A rogue will pretty much always deal more damage than a druid, but rogues have far more competition for gear than druids, can’t tank/heal dungeons for quick groups, be a ranged spec or healer in Battlegrounds, are far more mobile, and druids have a much better time leveling. If you play a rogue or a mage, you’re locking yourself to being able to do damage and only do damage. It only makes sense these are roles you would excel at it, if you didn’t why roll anything but a hybrid?

There’s more to the game than purely raiding, with each expansion more and more focus was put on raiding however and classes had to be perfectly balanced to fit that.

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I don’t remember ever seeing 40 man raids filled with nothing but mages, rogues, warriors, and priests. There are clearly optimal classes to play if you only care about HPS and DPS but all the classes bring something unique to the table. Warlocks bring summons, soul stones, and healthstones that mages can’t, druids bring battle rezzes and innervates that priests don’t, ect.

If you decide to take a 7th mage or 7th priest over a druid or a warlock then not only are you limiting the pool of players to choose from but you are gimping your raid. A good druid or good warlock will be better than a mediocre priest or mage.

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And you will end up sharding a ton of gear and probably guaranteeing that all you will see is drops for whatever you didn’t bring :stuck_out_tongue:

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Balance is important while designing content. If you do not have balance you cannot have challenging content.

If you have classes who pull less than half the dps of the main dps classes, you have two choices for tuning the raid.

If you tune the raid for a non optimal setup then anyone who does use an optimal setup will breeze through the content because they do so much more damage and healing.

If you tune the raid for an optimal setup then the non optimal classes literally cannot compete and its now actually harmful to bring them, excluding classes is terrible design.

So you without balance you either have easy content or non viable classes.

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In the history of WoW there have never been non-viable classes. There have been a few specs, but they always made sure every class had at least something they could raid or PvP with.

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Way to completely miss the point and if you think all the classes in vanilla are viable in pve you are kidding yourself, bringing a token class for a buff is not viability. If you are optimizing a raid in vanilla you want 1 druid, 3 warlocks and 2-3 hunters and all of them are brought for reasons other than the job they are supposed to be doing.

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I’ll be honest, I don’t think I have ever seen so many sincere replies about how WoW classes are balanced. Usually to even suggest such a thing would get you branded a heretical trolls, especially on those Vanilla forums. Are the Classic players going to be that different from the Vanilla players (regarding class balance)?

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Class balance is horrific in classic. At least in BC they started trying.

I won’t be playing after the Naxx patch, because that’s when a few classes in PVP will dominate everyone, once that place is on farm, so I’m hoping it’s not for a couple years.

Druids, for example, there is no good spec for them in end game PVP. Feral dies off fast, balance never gets off the ground. Resto can’t keep up with heals.

You invite one druid to run flags or maybe one to guard an AB or AV flag, but…that’s it. They run away better than anyone, but once gear gets into the tier 2 and above range, they fall of super fast.

Holy Paladins are good for healing. No point to prot or ret in PVP. You get some spelladin/shockadin meme guy that can blow someone up using all their cooldowns and a mace they have to farm, along with T2 gear, but who cares? It’s easy as hell to counter them with mages and locks.

Ele shaman stay competitive the longest, but resto and enhance in PVP are memes. Ele/resto can at least throw some heals on others and not go OOM. So they have that.

Shadow priest stays competitive longer than most memes, and what I plan on playing, but disc is hot garbage and holy priests dies to warriors and rogues like bugs getting stepped on by children after a rainstorm. Cloth just sucks after T2 and warriors can destroy any hope of healing they have.

Warriors, somehow, got to be hybrids that actually got top DPS and Top (only) main tank spots near the end of the vanilla game, so that’s proof the hybrid tax was only applied to some, not all.

Honestly, PVP is just disgusting in classic and unfair. And that’s what some people love. They’re going to play their warriors and rogues and mages, and even locks later on, and their going to tell literally every other class to cry more, git good, meanwhile knowing that they’re saying so while playing the only viable classes the further into endgame we go.

I’m playing for Wpvp and ganking, but when we get to Naxx I’m out. I’m not raiding, and I’m not going to get crapped on by three classes for the rest of time while the rest to wish they’d rolled one.

This is obviously purely PVP related. Memes will find homes, and when someone links DPS meters and they’re all the way at the bottom, with no hope of ever getting better, despite their best efforts or skill, they’ll either quit or reroll. The same way people did before after AQ was on farm.

The drop in Paladins, Druids and Shaman was crazy high, as people started rerolling.

And it will happen again. Because the game sucks at balancing things.

BC is where it’s at for a more fair, fun endgame.

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Not a single class will be sitting at home on raid night, this is a fact you can not dispute which makes them viable.

Outside of 1 or 2 guilds on a server everyone else will be taking what they can get and even those may be as well. If your so tight that the difference in you clearing content is an extra Druid, Warlock, Hunter or anything else, you have bigger problems than whether a Class is viable or not.

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You will bring token players for a few spots. No one denies that.

But trying to keep them playing when they’re last in healing and last on damage…yeah good luck with that.

Playing a druid so you can rez a better class and give innervate to a better class…wow. How fun.

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Learn what viability means.

Viability means you are capable of doing the content, you cannot do the content with a raid full of druid and shaman healers especially not when you are using hunters and other hybrid specs for dps.

Being brought along solely for your raid buff is not viability, raid buffs are incredibly poor design and while its not as bad of a problem in a 40m raid, they contribute nothing to actual gameplay.

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For Hybrids, that would be ‘heal please’ for most of them, in Vanilla.

As long as people are cool with that, its all good.

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You really only want the 1 druid for mark of the wild, brez is nice but innervate is actually less mana regen than bringing another pally/priest and just splitting the burden on the healers.

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They will be quite different regarding class populations. All those players who soldiered on, just making do with the non-optimal classes and resigned themselves to healbot even if they didn’t want to now have rank 9 hind sight starting at level 1. They’ll be able to correct their past mistakes.

Let’s see if ~35% warriors is a #change the #nochangers can live with.

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It’s called utility, and classes were balanced around it. Whether you like the game play or not they were viable because they were brought to raids for a reason, whether you personally like the reason has no bearing on that result.

Every single class in Vanilla will be raiding, therefore they are viable. Viable and optimal are two totally different things.

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