Describe how you’d balance this stuff. First you’d need to balance around a certain number of mobs per pull. You also need to keep the affixes in mind. Let’s say you manage to accomplish that. Each time more or less mobs are pulled than what you balanced around, all your work is undone. Every time an affix changes, you’re right back to square one. You’re asking for the impossible.
Yeesh, I really hope you’re not a game developer. That is NOT a healthy way to design a game. “Sorry you like this class and want to participate in multiple types of content, that class is already okay in one part of the game so we shouldn’t give you targeted changes to make you viable in any other part of the game because that’s all you need.”
Oof. lol
All specs are viable and as someone shared they are already withing arms reach of each other in raids. There is no way to balance the game around M+ due to the variables. Theres nothing wrong with specs performing better in one area and not in another.
I myself am a Prot Paladin pushing keys with pure pugs. Prot Paladins are publicly viewed as the squishiest tank and definitely not meta. I pugged to 1800io and still climbing. Theres no excuses for other non meta specs, they are all viable.
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If a type of content is LITERALLY impossible to balance… maybe it shouldn’t exist?
Now, to be honest, I don’t think that’s the case. I am pretty sure that Blizzard CAN do it. Classes have a lot of tuning levers, so you CAN make adjustments to those levers to make it work.
But if a type of content is so poorly designed that it is FACTUALLY impossible to balance despite being intended as COMPETITIVE content… then it really should be rethought.
you’re basically making an argument that m+ is fundamentally busted as a concept… not that things shouldn’t be balanced.
This is my new favorite thread.
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Which melee also under perform in? Why not just give them passive AoE damage reduction?
In it’s current form it is balanced enough for all specs to be able to complete KSM and beyond. It is impossible to balance it to the ±10% you are suggesting.
Like I said any spec that relies on dots and ramp up will struggle with M+, its just the way it is. They will however destroy long boss fights.
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They shouldn’t be standing in stuff or in front of mobs to begin with. This is literally a non issue for high keys because they know where to stand.
Except blizzard is making achievements now for doing +20’s? The balance needs to be looked at
Yeah, that’s really the game ender right there. Seeing as it’s impossible to outgear content that infinitely scales, you will eventually reach a point where class and spec make a big difference. That point is not keys in the 15 range.
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Right, but there’s a reason why they aren’t tying gear to that achievement.
I have melee DPS take threat or get hit by AoE cleaves all the time. Why should they be so severely punished for things that ranged don’t even have to deal with
The problem is where do you make the balance reference content? What content difficulty becomes the datum/the reference point for balance?
The difficulty is balancing essentially infinitely scaling and multi-variable content, where each DPS spec synergizes with each DPS spec in different ways. The damage of classes in team play are directly affected by composition and gameplay of the teammates around them. If we have a within 20% dps (which is still a moving target of a metric because we’d have to define dps sustained for how long and against how many targets and how those targets are affected, etc), at what level key or raid or dungeon is this going to see inflation due to increasing ilevel, stat gains, etc.
In other words, if it’s balanced against a level 10, does this extrapolate out “reasonably” to a 15? To a 20? Should it? What does this mean for content under a 10? Are specs that are top dps performers on 5s but drop to the bottom on 15s due to lacking sustain for higher HP mobs? Etcetera and so on.
I maintain a better deep dive would be to analyze the minimum required party dps (or just those dps members in that party) for a specific dungeon and see how each class compares within that party. Because this is objective. We have finite numbers: known HP of required-to-kill mobs and bosses and the time limit on the dungeon. We can do this for any key level because the timer is constant and the HPs are known.
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All specs have been able to get +20? Look at RIO. You understand these achievements are not meant to be achieved by the masses right? It is supposed to be for the best players.
That’s 100% a tank problem. Run with better tanks.
If you ever get hit by a cleave you positioned yourself poorly.
To the cleave point, a tank can contribute to this by improper movement when kiting or positioning by starting to kite just as a targeted cleave comes out and pivots that enemy to the back lines. Or simply dancing to avoid sanguine…lol ask me how I know (prot Paladin too)
Funnily enough, Blizzard faced this exact problem at one point in the past. And they made some adjustments to the way the class worked, giving them a tool that allowed them to succeed relatively well despite that… and the class was suddenly able to participate at a reasonable level again.
Wow. I guess the old WoW dev team was just that much better than the current one.
You don’t pick one. You balance for many points. Yes, it’s complex. Yes it’s difficult. But it’s what you have to do if you want customers to continue paying you.
This is obviously going to give a better objective gauge, but it doesn’t help to keep players from feeling inadequate or help to keep people from excluding players.
And a large part of keeping people playing is keeping people from feeling as if they’re at a fundamentally impossible disadvantage simply because of the class they enjoy playing. Which means you don’t just worry about feasibility, you have to also worry about perception and making sure no class is so far off what other classes are capable of that that player feels it is not worth their time to play.
(also, thank you for engaging beyond just saying ‘it’s impossible because variables!’)
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That’s a big part of what makes this stuff so difficult to balance. Some classes do very well when things are dying fast and some classes don’t. CD’s don’t line up quite right. I find fire to be very unfun in low keys.
I think they’ve done a reasonably good job in balancing around 15’s which, coincidentally, are where the rewards stop. They’ve tried balancing around MDI before and now we have this weird mix of capped aoe vs uncapped and I don’t think we’re better off than we were in BFA when it comes to keys.
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In your opinion, how does balancing capture the difference in skill between players?
It is impossible to meet the psychological needs of each individual player when we don’t even have a reference for what adequacy is. I get your point and I don’t want people feeling bad, but that “soft data” ( but valid, not trying to use that word in a derragatory connotation) doesn’t integrate with the “hard data” of balancing. One is subjective and the other is objective.
And to build on the concept of inadequacy vs adequacy: this is what I was referring to by having objective performance thresholds that are based specifically on an equation loosely transcribed as:
Min party dps=HPs/dungeon timer
Or
Speed=distance/time, Where distance is the amount of hit points that we need to see CRUSHED, and speed is damage per second (like miles per second, it’s just rate)
From here we can determine what needs to happen in a raw, dps per party number, and then compare the ratios of each person’s dps to that.
Many games measure balance at multiple skill levels and use the data from each to help influence decisions on game design. In my eyes this is the most intelligent goal. Sometimes if a character in underperforming at low skill levels, that means that you need to adjust the messaging of abilities to make it easier to learn, or make it more forgiving in less than ideal situations… but it isn’t something you should just ignore.
Obviously they can’t balance a person to feeling good. But they can use the objective tool of balance to remove obstacles in the way of that player feeling good, such as other players saying “I don’t want this class because they don’t offer enough to a dungeon”.
And they should always strive for as close to perfect balance across all content as possible. In some cases, concessions may have to be made and certain classes may need to sit too weak or too strong for a bit because in order to correct the issue it will require more significant changes than make sense for a small patch… but it should never be seen as ‘acceptable’ for this to be the case. If a class is overperforming in raid but underperforming in mythic, then they should get small changes to narrow the gap on both sides.