Hypothetical: A TBC+ server. What would you change while keeping it balanced?

I understand that Blizzard said they consider classic to be a museum piece, but I honestly don’t buy it because it actually makes them money and see it more like they are testing the waters.

So, if they did come out with a Burning Crusades server and they did actually start improving on it without changing the feel of the classes or any of that, what BALANCED changes would you make? Also, for point of reference, please include what your main class(es) you played during that time was. For my, I was a druid and was primarily feral but also did do balance on occasion and rarely healer.

For basic changes.

  1. Change mana and energy so it regenerated gracefully like in future games instead of energy ticking in 20 energy chunks. It made energy management much more smooth and was an improvement they got right in the game.

  2. Change Mage Armors, Warlock Armors, Priest Armors undispellable and remove the charges from the priest armors. Again, something they got right in future games.

  3. Make warriors rend scale better with attack power to make it useful in PvE instead of ignored.

  4. When a priest bubbles someone and the bubble absorbs the damage, have it treated as a hit so that the tanks can actually not have to worry about being starved because of it. Would make disc more viable without actually changing much. The warrior hitting the bubble would still be rage starved, but the warrior actually being hit would get rage.

  5. Paladins, change it so they no longer get mana back from healing, instead of protection have talents that allow them mana back from having attacks dodge, blocked, parried or otherwise avoided and some back from incoming damage. That will allow them to scale with their gear. Being geared should not starve the tank for resources. They should be able to get mana enough between their judgements and avoidance to hold their own.

  6. Warriors have no way of shedding threat other than dying or stopping DPS. Give them a way to do so. But since there is nothing graceful about warriors and their moves, neither should this. It should be expensive but also reduce their rage by a large amount to compensate for it. Maybe name it “Fall Back”, costs 35 rage but reduces rage by a significant amount.

Now for the ones that hit close to home for me, druid specific ones.

  1. Turn Omen of Clarity into an undispellable passive. Not a buff. That is too important to a druid to have it removed so trivially.

  2. Moonkin form, the Melee for mana is poorly thought out and does not work for what it needs. Instead I would change it to be similar to Feral in that critical spell hits actually regenerate mana and apply to others in the group. Would help solve their mana issues.

  3. Give druid treanants a pet bar to control them. I personally would also include this for Mage elementals and any other pet that gets summoned, even through engineering.

  4. Mangle, remove it from the talent tree entirely and have it baked into the higher ranks of claw and have the bear form version actually hit the trainer to.

  5. Where Mangle was, I would move Feral Charge to as our cap stone. But I would remove its rage cost and make it usable in both cat and bear form as a cool down with no dead zone. This would allow it to be used as an interrupt for feral cat while DPSing or feral bear while tanking or a gap closer, so they have to pick which to use it as. This would also put it out of Restoration druids range which caused many to complain about.

  6. As an extension of #5, the Feral PvP glove bonus would be changed as well. Quite literally it was near useless, an interrupt on an incapacitate. I NEVER got PvP use out of it and only got use out of it in PvE for the interrupt when the Warrior, Rogue, Mage, or Shaman was slacking and I had combo points to spare. I would instead have it remove the positional requirement of shred as that is a HUGE portion of feral DPS. And while it was meant to be Feral backstab, that isn’t what it actually ended up being used as when it came to our damage and how much we needed it in PvP.

  7. Where feral charge was in the talent tree, delete Tigers Fury and instead have “Feral Fury” which would be usable in both Cat and Bear form and allows all your attacks to hit additional targets similar to a rogues “Blade Flurry” and a warriors “sweeping strikes”

  8. Swipe, have it increased from 3 targets to a minimum of 5 (8 preferred).

  9. Include an immunity to Hibernate for the druid with the “Leader of the Pack” aura as that combined with Cyclone and Roots is too much in allowing a single person to completely lock down another. And please notice I didn’t say anything about Hunters scare beast in that regards or anything, they are fine. It is just a single class having all 3 of them against another to completely lock them down is too much. If properly done, the feral druid will only get about 3 seconds of free time out of every 30 if they are lucky.

  10. Allow feral druids to retain their run speed and their ability to cast roots indoors. Having 2 talent points and our PvP 4-set bonus turn off along with roots because we are in doors as a bit much. Especially when that includes most instances and half of the PvP environments. That doesn’t add flavor to anything, it adds frustration at best.

  11. Allow feral druids to actually use potions and items in forms and benefit from “Chance on Hit” procs. We already have an insanely short list of weapons we can use and not even asking to change them because would be too much (Unless they would be willing to do it) but not even allowing them to use potions, warlock hearth stones, Nightmare Seeds, or even change on hit enchants is a bit restrictive and pointless.

  12. Allow Barkskin to be used in Cat and Bear form and change it where you are uncrushable while active. That would give druids a way with dealing with crushing blows and actually have a functioning “Oh Sh1t” button like every other spec that doesn’t wipe all their resources to use it. Would actually make them capable of tanking illidan without having to cheese it since they will have their own “Shield Wall” type mechanic to help with shear.

  13. Give standard out of combat resurrection similar to every other healing capable class.

  14. Have Rake scale so it is actually worth using instead of taking off your bar.

  15. Nurturing Instinct: Change it from just 100% to healing to also include 50% to spell damage to actually allow druid ranged attacks to scale with their gear like every other class. I don’t think a feral druid in T6 with +300 Spell damage and no talents boosting it is going to hurt anything.

  16. Natural Shapeshifter rolled into Survival of the Fittest and have it boosted to 20/40/60%. Feral is the spec that needs to shift and they are also the spec without any major regeneration. While Balance and Restoration, it is the opposite.

  17. This one is stretching it a bit but: Roll in the WotLK Furor with the current one. Where you actually are able to retain what you have when you change forms instead of completely wiping it. But not allow you to keep all of it, cap it at 50 energy and 25 rage similar to stance mastery.

  18. Change “Wrath of Cenarious” to also remove the cool down on Hurricane and give balance druid (And only balance druids) the ability to spam it like other casters can with theirs.

  19. Ferocious Bite, flat out remove the bonus energy conversion on it entirely and just have it be a set cost. Otherwise, severely boost that scaling so it isn’t a waste of energy.

  20. Cower is crap, you actually reduce your threat using the energy on cower instead of an actual attack move more than the threat cower actually lowers. Increase the amount it lowers threat by.

Others:

  1. SL/SL Warlocks are entirely too strong. At endgame levels they become unbeatable 1v1 against any other class unless they allow it, they don’t even need fear anymore which is too strong and the main thing that put Undead on the map. Do something about their mitigation because we don’t want to cut their DPS because that would adversely impact them in PvE.

  2. Potentially start releasing Heroic versions of the old instances with scaled up gear as well to match them. Would give players at end game much more to do, much more content to run and much more gearing options. Would also see 70s in the old places more often to run them. But please do something about the Manual Crowd Pummeler, not trying to have that thing farmed to infinity and required for druids.

  3. The feral druid T4 2-set bonus is INSANELY good. So it that not only is feral required to carry it all through TBC but they actually broke it in WotLK because it was so good it would end up required for T7+ instances because it was better than any stats they could put on it. Swap the T6 Mangle cost reduction with the T4 so that the endgame gear will still be the higher end. It hurts feral burst but the scaling rake, undispellable Omen and the removing of shreds position requirement would help counter that with better sustained and would have the T6 being the one you wanted most.

What changes would you make? And remember keep it balanced, nothing overpowered and no gutting of another class just because you dislike it.

Edit:

Added stuff:

  1. Allow Hunters ammo too stack in sets of up to 100,000 so it didn’t kill their bags. As an extension of this, the fire rate buff they provide would be a passive from the trainer and the current Quivers and Ammo bags would instead be Leather and Mining bags that increased the skinning/mining speeds effectively.

  2. Allow Warlock Soul Gems to stack up to at least 20. Same deal with the Soul Bags except turn them into Enchanting bags. (Herb bags would get the speed increase as well).

1 Like

nerf cyclone from 6/3/1.5 to 5/2.5/1.25
make pet take increased soul link split damage
push forward dual spec
disable OOC drinking and racial abilities in arena
permaban enforcement for account sharing, piloting, win trading
disable herbalism in crow forms

I would point out that your basic changes in particular 4 5 6 are not balanced overall.

4 allows rage gen to be pooled for a burn instead of starving the war. That is a tactic and changes the nature of interaction for wars swaps in arena allowing them to be that much more powerful in arena.

5 This change is directly targeted at BE pallies if you want them to change the Seal call the seal out dont change the ability entirely.

6 This was never in any version of the game so im against it on principal.

Hunter ammo can stack to 200. Warlock SS to 5. You get bigger bags as options as well.

To Arete,

Don’t really see the point logically for the Cyclone nerf. Maybe put it on diminishing returns with other forms of crowd control but while you can’t be healed in it, you also can’t be damaged.

For the other stuff, I can see dual spec and drinking and racials in Arena. Fear being so strong is the entire reason Undead is even on the map outside of that and the Orc stun resist, the Alliance racials are far superior and I say this as a Horde druid.

With them disabling Flight form for herbing, I could only agree with that if all nearby mobs immediately agro the person pulling it and can’t be taunted off so pets can’t be abused to get around it as well. Same with Vanish and other agro wiping abilities to get around it.

To Melphina.

  1. They already have a way to pool rage without the bubble, just outright healing them and letting the warrior DPS naturally. But could always just bake in a talent at the end of the protection tree to enable it to prevent those interactions.

  2. I don’t know enough about Paladins personally so I couldn’t get into much specifics on it, Just think that them being geared should not hurt their tanking ability because they go out of mana and the entire concept of healing to give them mana just sounds poorly thought out.

  3. I wasn’t talking specifically about including stuff from other games, some of it wasn’t in any of them. I just noticed that if the warrior is getting high on threat, all he can do is either die or stop. They have zero agro shedding abilities to allow them to continue, this would address that without changing how the class functioned at any real level.

Edit:

Another thing to change if it currently isn’t this way.

When frost spec mages apply their chill debuff, have it apply the chill and the root as separate things so that they can still benefit from the crit buff from it when it comes to bosses and other things that are immune to the root.

As someone who’s played TBC recently and focuses mostly on arenas…

  • Removal of arena teams in favor of Personal Rating & MMR : High rated players enjoy playing with a variety of players. To do so, they end up disbanding and reforming teams constantly to do so. Without this change, expect to meet Gladiators in the 1600-2000 bracket every second game.
  • Water drinking dampening : 90% of match-ups are over in less than 3 minutes. 10% of match-ups can last well over 30 minutes. I propose the introduction of dampening solely on drinking water such that after 15 minutes, drinking water regens 5% less mana per additional minute (drinking nullified at 35 minutes).
  • Faction-specific titles : A big problem with TBC is how strong the horde racials are in PvP. Every single comp is stronger as Horde, with the sole exception of warrior comps (mostly WD and WLD) being slightly better as Alliance. Faction-specific titles means that you’re not forced into playing Horde if you want end-of-season titles.
  • Delay T5 to S2 : You don’t want Stormheralds running around in S1.
2 Likes

I wanna move my horde war to alliance and give ally seal of blood or maytr

I don’t really like this one because it nullifies the unique effect of the legendary sunwell bow. But, just for the sake of fun, allow me to redesign the bow so it will still be unique.

Thori’dal, The Stars’ Fury
Equip: thori’dal generates magical arrows when the bow string is drawn. Does not consume ammo.
Chance on hit: Magical arrows generated by thori’dal can burst into a stellar explosion, dealing arcane damage to all enemies within 8 yards of the target.

Blizzard won’t even fix teleport hacking.

They don’t care.

TBC+ makes less sense than classic+

I don’t know that it needs a + as that seems to mean permanent but it wont be its just a temporary hold until WOTLK. I do think this is a good chance to make changes as they have made no TBC promises. I would like to see the cosmetics of retail as well as the raid mechnics of retail. The pvp balence needs alot of work as well such as sweeping nerfs to all forms of CC. I would also like to see WOTLK and beyond arenas in TBC for more variety.

What on earth makes you think disc priests aren’t viable? PI says hello.

When in groups, the bubble can prevent them from getting rage while being hit and for Paladins would be prevented from having the heals give them back mana.

This would prevent the rage starvation that can happen (Especially if the priest is decently geared) .

Philosophical changes:

  1. You have to address the fact that the game is fundamentally based on an ever increasing player power and level cap. It’s not sustainable forever, and having abandoned content (previous expansions and tiers) just feels terrible. I’m not sure what would replace it, though. At least be willing to release tiers of content where not everything is a massive upgrade from the previous tier.

  2. While keeping things balanced in terms of power level, devs should focus on making sure each class feels unique, and that it’s unique abilities feel important. That means (for example), if you want to have access to summons, you should need to have a warlock. If you want access to portals, you should need to talk to a mage. Yes yes, “bring the player not the class” in terms of overall balance, but you should still want at least one of each class ideally.

  3. Don’t try to recreate technical limitations of the past. Remove debuff caps and artificial spell batching.

Not a change, but

  1. Create a link between modern and classic WoW. Maybe have them cover the same areas of the lore in each timeframe. In modern WoW, hint that something happened regarding a particular character, then have that actual event happen in Classic a tier or two later. Have some event happen in Classic, and then have Modern players deal with some of the fallout from that event.

How does this make disc priest not viable though? Disc priests aren’t hurting to find groups, at all. What makes bringing a holy priest better than bringing a disc priest?

  1. Add the “sated” debuff into the game to prevent LWer- Drums stacking from being a thing.

  2. Give the tank and dps paladin seals to both factions of paladin (ie alliance ret get seal of blood)

  3. All class/spec pvp gear has resilience on it. (Ret gear in OG vanilla didn’t until season 3)

  4. Some kind of incentive for people to actually play as Alliance so queu times aren’t even worse than vanilla/classic.

  5. Undead Paladins and Hunters (because I don’t want to be a disgusting elf and orc)

Make Shammy tanking a thing similar to Paladin tanking. I don’t care of both classes can be played on both factions, but I feel that Shammy tanking would have been interesting passed Vanilla. Idk if it was a thing in TBC or not.

1 Like

i’d just remove stupid nerfs they did to all the classes. One that really pissed me off when Demonology Warlock was nerfed and soul link went down to 15%.

Here is an upgrade that they could do to Classic and I don’t think they would have a single complaint…

Allow Taurens on mounts to fit through the Undercity elevator entrance doors. It is seriously not cool how Tauren’s have to dismount from their Kodo’s to get into the elevator when everyone else just rides on in.

Oh look, a completely buff me bro, nerf everyone else post that would ruin TBC for a heap of people.

TBC is fine, people just need to change their mindset about what balance actually is.

where did I give a single nerf?

At what point is asking for the ability to actually use my abilities indoors or the ability to actually use potions or not have Resto/Balance druids be an effective RPM Team one man army against ferals too much?

Edit: Except for mentioning SL/SL Warlocks which are massively overpowered at endgame.