(sorry novel incoming)
Yep, you’re right to some extent. The difference nowadays is that there is significant data to back up the meta while also having multiple players who play the game a lot, understand the fundamental mechanics of each spec, and can give a lot of feedback on it.
Playing what you want to play is fine for the vast majority of people. But you can’t complain that destruction sucks, or the ret paladin/xyz class blows you out of the water in dungeons, and then also have affliction/demo as options that beat your destruction damage and get you closer to par. Similarly, the people who end up being most adversely affected are the players in the sub +10 category who are subject to meta-game toxicity and people only inviting meta classes. The downside, is that the only place to turn to blame when you get declined as an “off-meta” spec, are the people that determine the meta.
This isn’t pointed at you but at the feedback process in general, especially the huge split between the 0.1% and the rest of the player base.
Back on the topic of destruction, I think it’s not particularly helpful to say, “I play what I want, and from my experience, destruction performs fine,” when in reality, when skill level is equal the difference is clearly noticeable. In groups that end up having extreme skill variance (low-level pugs/heroic raiding guilds in general), damage is most likely a factor of skill. I guarantee you, you could play the worst dps spec in the game in a group with high skill variance but are a relatively skilled player, you will end up finding that the “bad spec” is somehow good in a particular group. This is where Blizzard has a tough job of finding a balance between pure numbers and ease of access, etc.
Obviously, this is a game, so nothing is taken too seriously, but as somebody who’s done multiple dozens of hours of testing on beta and has played this game for a while at the bleeding edge, it’s rather frustrating when people give anecdotal experience or blame the 1% for creating the meta when it’s usually evidence-based feedback. Again, this is purely based on numerical tuning from a perspective of “there always needs to be somebody at the bottom”. I will admit, there are more bad actors at the 0.1% that don’t understand game design than there are people able to give decent feedback, but I’m still unsure of whether this truly impacts anything as much as people think.
My issue is that destruction has notoriously been the worst lock spec numerically for the past decade starting an expansion. This isn’t conjecture, there are literally hard facts to back this up, with dozens of hotfix tuning history that highlights the poor tuning for destruction. I understand developer and design turnover, but c’mon, guys, at least learn from past mistakes and shake up the meta a bit. I’m at least happy that I won’t have to play Demonology from a purely numerical standpoint for the fifth tier in a row.
Unrelated, but destruction is also one of a handful of specs that hasn’t been fundamentally changed in the past 10-15 years. I recently played Cataclysm Classic, and it literally plays the same way. If you’re not going to update class or spec mechanics, it better be a fully functioning jack-of-all-trades spec that can perform dead on average with little skill required (see Frost mage + BM Hunter). Destruction is a huge trap for noobs since it’s one of the more difficult lock specs to perform well with, at least outside of pure aoe.
If Destro was built like frost mage/bm
- Rain of fire would be a debuff applied to a target that slowly drained your soul shards, but followed your target around instead of being a placed ability.
- Cataclysm would have a lower cooldown, and serve as purely an aoe immolate.
- Fire and Brimstone would be a lot more of your passive cleave damage. Think hitting multi-shot/splitting ice
- You wouldn’t have to choose between chaos bolting in single target vs rof in multi-target.
- Havoc would be your main multi-target “cd” where you do significant burst to multiple targets when it is up.
- Less button bloat (rift is no longer a used ability, and is passively procced for instance)
- Movement is not as crippling (multiple ways to do this).