Please finish all class balance before 11.1 releases

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
81

Yeah I mean that just means they need to tune more often and more reliably. Not a huge ask, should be possible. Balance will never be perfect with how many specs are in the game, but leaving something as powerful as that for most of a season is unacceptable.

PvP has the same thing, BM hunters/Fury wars/Aff locks and more importantly Holy Paladins have been dominating, especially Hpal its not even close to the other healers its like a full expac ahead and its just been left like that for the last 2 months of this season. I understand the season is coming to a close, but that does not mean they just drop everything and move on, there should still be tuning happening to ensure nothing is too crazy. Hpal is completely broken in pvp right now its wild, just 1 week of tuning could have resolved this and made the last 2 months of the season feel better to play.

So yeah they drop the ball on tuning a lot. They go extremely slow, which is not necessarily bad but they leave some obvious outliers for way too long. And they did the same thing this season that they did with DF where they stopped tuning 2 months prior to the next patch, which I understand they are fully focusing there efforts on but still.

This is why I keep talking about PTR cycles and beta cycles being too short. 1 1/2 months for a .1/.2 patch is crazy, there should be more testing time so they can actually get to things and don’t have to rush. Its clear they are listening to feedback and reading forum posts, they just don’t have the time to get to everything regarding classes. Release PTR and Betas sooner, maybe even merge the two small patches we get into one and release PTRs earlier that way. I don’t know, but something needs to be done here.

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82

prot wasnt turbo buffed, it just had its skill floor reduced to the point even people without hands can perform good on it

tank balancing was still good this entire season which each tank comfortablly doing 1-2 keys behind prot on keys level. op isnt right, never right and meta is a community perception thing that cant be fixed without blizzard actively making specs unplayable and making other specs turbo stupid op

also the sim screenshot going around in classcords is very much unfinished and alot of them are using talents and armors that make no sense. for example vdh is using last resort in that sim despite it a heavy loss in damage

i know your upset about brew but i dont think reactive doom posting misinfo and bad takes is good for anyone

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83

I would prefer if classes are balanced more consistently over the course of the season, but failing that (i.e. what happens in reality) then I’d prefer to know what the outlier is gonna be well in advance. It’s pretty demotivating when you see enhance shaman being so much further ahead in keys when you don’t have one in your group, even if you’re not gonna be doing +20 keys yourself. At least if you knew that was gonna be the case ahead of time you can make a more informed decision.

84

What OP is asking for is so unreasonable and borderline malicious toward everyone else that it seems like a pretty big stretch to assume it’s being done in good faith. You might as well just ask for Blizzard to delete every spec except for 5 and require a group comp with one of each for every dungeon just so you don’t have to make any kind of choices.

The fact that that’s essentially what he’s asking for, combined with the fact that he admittedly doesn’t care how it would affect anyone else who enjoys playing any one of the 34 off-meta specs or plays any content below world-first key level, is proof positive that he’s either trolling or is just one of those people who thrives on negative attention.

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85

This is only partly true. Prot Pallies were considered the resoundingly worst tank prior to their rework, and the best after it. None of their changes by themselves were “turbo buffed”, this is true, however the cumulative effect of all the changes they got, combined with the group support power of Lightsmith, rocketted Pallies up the charts.

Things like 10% more armor, more holy power from reworked talent placement, extra damage on AS, etc
 all of these are good, reasonable changes that prot got that were not OP at all, but adding them all up
 it was a fair amount.

As pally is one of my favorite tanks, I remember what they felt like prior to their rework and what they felt like after, and while it was not “turbo buffing”, it was quite significant.

VDH are getting a pretty decent set of buffs this coming patch, and they do not add up to the amount Prot Pallies got from their rework. The famed “god comp” bear talent adjustments were actually smaller and less impactful than what pallies got.

Maybe its just impressive how little tweaks can make a pretty big difference how tanks perform.

86

why does this ptr forum have so many random class whines
I come in here and the world is ending for warrior apparently when I have been playing fine on my own

87

Refining Fire was doing well over 30% of a prot paladins damage after the changes in M+ alone. If adding one talent that gave that much damage isn’t a “turbo buff” then I don’t know what is.

I can’t take you seriously now.

88

Try 15%. They’re nerfing Refining Fire by 30% which will result in around a 5% damage loss overall.

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they really didnt change to much tbh :dracthyr_shrug: again community perception is one hell of a drug. the class tree changes didnt really do anything either if you consider offhealing to be “super good”

i do agree the changes to lightsmith again lowered the skill floor low enough for people to perform at a high value at minimum effort. kinda like how ret offers a strong frontloaded damage and ease of access which gives the illusion that the spec is good. when its really the skil lfloor being low enough that anyone with nads can do good with the spec.

keep in mind that more hopo prot wasnt really much of a buff since prot had a fair amount of hopo overcap with proper play, AS damage is nice but again doesnt really fix the core issues with it. alot of these changes again brought the skill floor and ceiling lower. you could see simliar performance % pre buff but with more rotational mastery.

im not saying these changes are good, they are, but they only served to allow more players to get into prot paladin while not effecting veterans of the spec to much. the issue is that they brought the skill floor low enough for push tanks to utilize it and thus trickling down the community.

basically ya, its also impressive how lilttle tweaks positive and negative can convince large amount of players when a tank is meta or not. vdh is getting a fair amount of great changes, but the most important change vdh is getting is again a lower skill floor. with ftd and last resort being alot more easier to get (at still a somewhat high damage cost) it will allow for more wiggle room. now if push tanks consider this floor low enough for maximum output to reduce cognative load in high keys is yet to be seen. but i honestly think its a vdh season JUST because the skill floor is even lower than before, like how each season meta tank was defined by this lower skill floor with a sprinkle of utility

they also reduced the damage of some things at high ceiling to allow for this buff for more front loaded damage. it wasnt a turbo buff, it was just a simplification of damage type to allow for more people to perform at lower tier without rotational mastery

it very much so, vdh was “meta” in df season 2. then bear was “buffed” (overal less then 10% buff to offensive and defensive kits, more of a extreme lowering of skill floor) and then suddenly bear was “meta”

meta is ultimately defined by what push tanks are using to get to cutting edge content, a tank with less cognitive load so they can focus on shotcalling, route,s mechanics, and stuff like that while performing decently with minimum effort

its a hard pill to swallow. but the sooner you swallow it, the faster you start to realize and enjoy the game.

ultimately play what you want, network, and make friends. or you’ll never enoy this game trying to fotm chase

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90

I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about 11.0.5 when it came out, since the discussion at hand is about how its not really great to buff one class so much that it displaces every other class’s representation at higher keys.

Which, in 11.0.5, thats exactly what happened.

I truly dont give a flying **** about meta chasing. What I care about is gimping my team by playing the classes I want to play.

91

if your not pushing content where meta starts mattering. then i dont really think your gimping anyone playing the spec you want to play.

each spec can get title. some harder than others. but ya. also whose to say your team isnt gimping themselves either by not playing meta dps and healer specs either :dracthyr_shrug:

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92

Every dps is capable of doing title keys? Its literally just a matter of doing enough damage to time a key, and up to +15 the limiting factor is generally survivability and doing mechanics properly. DPS have it pretty easy.

Healers, its basically can you meet the heal check and do you provide enough utility to the group.

But for tanks, theres literally some classes that cannot do above certain keys right now because they can’t take the damage. Or they can take the damage but its so much strain on the healer that they let other people die.

93

I have a feeling more tuning is coming, and frankly you don’t ever want to be fotm at the start of a season patch. That .5 patch always looms over the remainder of the season.

Also, you love the phrase “lower the skill floor” which always comes off as sandbagging the power of whatever you’re talking about. Most of the changes do not ONLY do what you’re saying, but also allow classes to excel even more on the high end, so its really adjusting the range of their performance UP
 which most people just call “a buff”.

Lowering the skill floor would be like taking away abilities to condense a specs power into less variable button presses without changing the power of the spec.

That is not what blizzard is doing. The specs in question are still just as complex, but they simply function higher.

The way you attempt to spin it comes off as disingenous, whether that is your intention or not.

Personally, I’d love them to RAISE the skill floor of bear. Allow us to throw out more balance spells or feral abilities if we spec for them from bear form. Give us more things to track and more ability to customize how we play.

If wishes were wings though


94

That may be what you’re talking about, but that’s not what the discussion at hand is about. The OP just wants a fixed meta with no changes at all so that no one has to work out what the meta actually is and it doesn’t change mid-season. Earlier you said you agreed with the OP but now you’re contradicting yourself by saying that even though they buffed one class above par they subsequently tuned them down and you agree with those changes, which is the opposite of the idea being advocated for here.

I think they should just buff all tanks to be on the same level of being survivable and having a good toolset and decent DPS so they CAN be played with a low skill ceiling and low level of cognitive load, because that would make tanking fun and more people would do it which would be good for the game overall.

The thing is that it’s impossible to perfectly balance 39 specs that are all mechanically different along with steady releases of new content. There are always going to be certain specs that are just numerically better at current content than others. That’s equally as true of DPS and healers as it is of tanks, and the people who are at the top level of keys are looking at those roles just as much.

That’s where the community mindset thing comes in, and where YOUR mindset comes in. What’s actually important to you? Pushing title or getting the absolute highest IO just for its own sake? Then sorry, but everyone at that level is always going to be chasing the meta and optimizing to their utmost, because that’s their priority over playing a specific class. If what you want is for your spec to be on a perfectly level playing field with every other spec at that level, it’s never going to happen, ever. Sometimes you’re going to win, and sometimes you’re going to lose.

If what you care about more than that is being the best player you can be at YOUR spec, you’re just going to have to accept that that other type of player isn’t going to group with you since they only care about IO above all else. That’s their mindset, but it doesn’t have to be yours. You could be happy with pushing one lower key level on a given dungeon than the current meta spec, especially since you don’t get anything out of it anyways other than score.

If you care more about playing your spec than getting the absolute highest IO you can, then you ARE gimping your team to that end, if the latter is what they care about. Again, that comes back to mindset and priorities. No one worth anything said you objectively have to care about one more than the other, but it’s just a FACT that you will have to choose one over the other and that you’ll have to find other players with the same mindset as yours in order to enjoy the game.

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95

I will never understand why some people always chase @ meta specs.

Most people (me before all else) cannot play the game as good as some young-meta-streamers.
Even if i would play a meta class i would not be as good as the streamer.

But mostly this +meta+ specs are no fun for me anyway.

Even if you cannot push keys over 3200000 but you have fun with your guild/friends, isn t that enough?
WOW is not job or should not be.

Relax more people and do not listen too much at those meta-streamers. They want to earn money with that, they are not there to let you have more fun :wink: always remember that.

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96

It’s not a Warrior, therefore you can now benefit from the special rule: And They Shall Know No Fear


97

again, brew and bear and every other tank are legit 1-2 keys behind prot paladin right now. these are accessable logs everyone can see.

title keys arent the limit of keys you can reach. its legit just 1% of key level for the class. if your doing 15’s then congrats your in title range accoridng to the cut off prediction website that wasnt wrong since its set up on shadowlands

ofcourse brew isnt going to do a 20 ara-kara like prot paladin. but it sure as hell can time a 19 arakara as we see in logs

yes i know, ive stated this multiple times in multiple threads

most players at the cutting edge of keys dont play these tanks at the max skill ceiling due to the nature of these difficult keys. but luckily we have multiple examples in logs of people doing title keys aka 15s and what not, with each tank performing at its skill ceiling, which show case alot of them doing somewhat simliar damage and still surviving things. :dracthyr_shrug: tank balancing is okay at peak performance, again meta tanks are picked on which tank can do the most with the least amount of effort at these stressful keys.

we have to define buff further cause the blanket term of buff doesnt really describe the complexity of tank balance and tnak meta.

i agree, they should.

specs are still complex yes, but some also have a lower skill floor. both of these are true and a good example of this is df s3-4 vdh. it was still a complex class rotationally, but you still had like 70+% of parry by pressing spikes and sof, which lowered the skill floor defensively considerably.

again the nuances of tank balancing cant be described with simple stuff like buff or nerf. you legit have to look into why its a buff and what is actually nerfed, then measure community perception. because alot of people think a perfectly fine tank nerf is actually the end of the world. like how people thought the multiple prot paladins nerf this ptr effectively killed it. when its still decently strong and a competitor for “meta”

but we went on a huge tangent from op’s smooth brained point so. ill just leave it there

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98

Fair

However the thing that 1-2 M+ levels can mean is pretty wide. Often, you are comparing people 1-2 levels down from whatever the “meta” tank is who are pushing the skill CEILING on their class to come close to the players on the favored tank in any given patch who are sitting around your “skill floor” in performance.

It is why you get like 200 prot pallies near the level of a druid like squishvegan. Those 200 (just picked a reasonable number) are not all performing anywhere close to his level, but are performing on a spec that is simply tuned higher.

Saying “well Brewmaster is 2 levels below prot pally, that isn’t that much” is really "the absolutely best of brewmaster as eeked out a key 2 levels below prot pallies banging their heads into the keyboard.

Now, not ALL of them. But enough in the sea of pink that comparing them to the few amazing players of other classes (and oftentimes those players have meta tank at a higher level than their preferred tank) doesn’t feel quite so good. It isn’t like you go down 2 levels and see a ton of other tanks all capped at an 18 compared to a prot pally 20. You find 1-2 tanks scrapping the top of their ability to get there.

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99

You have a link?

100

+20 is effectively unachievable for everyone who isn’t playing with a full meta comp of players who have been putting in hours and hours of practice on a daily basis. It’s not even something the highest competition teams can reliably pull off during tournaments and events. With a system like m+, there is simply going to be a key level where the most minute differences in spec tuning make something barely possible for one exact comp including healer and DPS, and more or less impossible for anything else. There aren’t even 200 prot pallies timing 20s because there probably aren’t 200 individual players timing 20s in any role.

Since each spec has different types of mitigation, damage dealing, and utility tools, there is always going to be a given key level at the precipice of what’s possible to achieve that is going to be doable for one spec more than the others. A huge amount of that also comes from content design and tuning; if you make a dungeon with huge white swing physical damage and lots of spell reflect mechanics, prot warriors are objectively going to perform the best in that dungeon.

That’s also completely irrelevant to the extreme majority of players, because we’re talking about the absolute top 1% of performance. If we’re talking about 15s and 16s, it’s objectively true that the same level of optimization isn’t necessary and pretty much any off-meta comp should be able to achieve it reliably with players that are skilled enough.

That’s where the community perception thing comes in. There’s literally nothing you get from timing a 20 that you don’t get from timing a 15 other than prestige among players who think that’s important, and the players who are actually timing those 20s are there for the sake of playing at the highest level regardless of which spec they’re playing. Again, that’s competition team level, bleeding edge stuff. If that’s the level you’re at, you’re already running with a full team of like-minded players who are all playing meta specs and treating m+ seriously like some kind of team sport.

Anyone who is NOT at that level who is forming group comps for 15s and lower and not taking this tank spec or that healer spec because it isn’t meta is pretty much deluding themselves. They could instead be prioritizing player skill above all else, or simple fun, or the challenge of playing an off-meta comp just to do it, but they’re not. The further away you get from that 20, the more absurd it is to play in lock step around the meta.

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