The reason god comp is soo dominant is not only because augment and fire mage are broken (til Tuesday) it’s also because a holy paladin has a disorient and a kick to carry two long CD caster kicks. Shadow priest is also paired because of vampiric embraces strength and power infusion.
How do we solve these issues in the future?
-
Utility needs to be balanced among healers, either by removing or adding kick to some healing specs. Fear should also work on all targets that disorients work on. /points at worm in nels lair.
-
Power infusion should become a self buff only. Haste is not a balanced stat for all DPS specs. If keys don’t have a clear PI target, PI can lead to toxicity in keys over who should get a PI. Is it the boomy? The DK? The Mage? I’ve seen some shadow priests refuse to PI anyone when this discussion starts.
-
We need to stop nerfing the added damage benefits an augment provides. Healing keys with an augment in the party is significantly easier. Healers will always push for an augment. How do we solve this? Remove the +stam benefits from augment and nerf augment’s damage reduction. This is what needs to be looked at.
-
Versatility has always been a toxic stat for m+. Anytime classes that benefit from verse over mastery have been too strong they will always be preferred. Fire mage now stacks haste + verse, they are a mage tank this tier. When this happened to havoc DH in BFA they were god tier and everyone wanted one for their m+ run. The static damage reduction verse provides is strong but not balanced in PVP or PVE, not because it’s not a balanced stat but because some classes can stack it over mastery without a disadvantage.
Defense balance was a far cleaner issue to solve in expansions like WoTLK (not saying it was solved but easier to solve). Because dps had spell power or attack power. Yes, primary stat now becomes attack power or spell power. But (side note) is it as fun as looting an item with spell power or attack power on it?
Or, more importantly, did we somehow break the game when we added verse + mastery, in terms of class balancing? We might need to rethink our stat system now that content has changed to the point where defensives are a significant area of focus. Perhaps the solution is to remove verse and only have mastery. Then change how avoidance works. Increase its proc chance on items and have it reduce all damage taken. People will then ask for gamers avoidance percent vs. their verse percent, as they have done in the past.
Making some of these changes might tackle meta issues significantly more than over nerfing a spec and upsetting players. Yes, fire aoe was over tuned but for example, if we look at Warcraftlogs, frost mages are trending multitudes lower in overal damage in mythic+, compared to a few dps specs, not just spriest and fire mage. But their damage will be nerfed again on Tuesday to avoid mage’s spec swopping and taking up that spot over other potential classes. But the issue is power infusion synergy with a comp that feeds survivability and damage. If a WW is in que, would you pick them over a mage? Of course not, if we had a spriest because WW benefits in such a small amount from power infusion. We need to stop penalizing some classes regularly with dps nerfs and fix the core issues that constantly cause these issues from tier to tier.
Gamers should not feel forced to reroll a new class to be competitive, it should be a choice.
(Written from my phone, and I apologize for any typos)