Agree. I was speaking to the nerfs that occured throughout the season. The spec did not warrant the hammering it took at the end of 10.1.7, however the initial changes in the first few weeks of 10.1.5 were justified.
Thatâs fine, but if the 5%âs performance trickles down to the masses, then it is no longer an issue with the top 5% anymore.
What am I missing? The objection would still hold to not balance 95% of the playerbase for what the 5% do because the trickle down would make the percentage much larger than 5%.
The issue will never be fixable as long as we are only concerned about what happens at M+25 and above. Like, to put this into perspective those percentages I quoted are just the percentages and not population sizes.
Here is the population sizes for the brackets too:
254000 healers at 2-6
331000 healers at 7-13
226000 healers at 14+
55000 healers at 20+
175 healers at 25+
We go from THOUSANDS to triple digits between 20+ and 25+. It is absolutely ridiculous to balance millions of players around what a handful are doing. Itâs NONSENSE.
Players have optimized the fun out of the game so much that now thatâs all we balance around. I donât even get to PLAY the game I once enjoyed because of the perception of what happens at the top tiers. Some of this is on the players, but Blizzard absolutely is not helping with their terrible balance decisions.
nerfing shadow into the dirt didnât help affliction warlocks, feral druids, windwalker monks. They saw zero increase in their percentages in Season 3 after Shadow got dunked on. All it did was push the already performing classes up and remove shadow from the pool of playable options. And that is the impact of EVERY change that happens to Shadow whenever we get out of line. And the impact of every nerf they make to classes in M+. And Iâm just tired of it. If it wasnât for Classic I would have cancelled my subscription again.
1 Like
I think the point is thereâs a reason for that enormous decline and that should be addressed. I will never agree with tuning specs around players who cannot play them.
1 Like
WoW at its core is really just #s.
People will flock to specs that do +20% more dps than others and people will invite specs that do high dps because they want to time their keys. As you move up in the key brackets the less players there are and more people care about class stacking.
+15s and +20s are so brain dead easy that you can clear dungeons in 14-18 minutes with a completely mish mash comp, but you canât do that on a +28. You might time keys with 10-15s left.
So what happens is people get frustrated if theyâre playing a non-fotm class and want to move up in the brackets. If you have two players, but one is a Havoc and another is a Shadow Priest with the same IO applying: 9 out of 10 times people are going to pick the Havoc. You can sit in queue for hours and never get invited to keys.
I mean the reason for that decline is pretty standard, itâs a typical response to infinitely increasing tiered difficulties. If you have a system that is designed to have a âsoft capâ on how high you can go, and a hard cap to what is supposed to be achievable, you will always have that drop off. Itâs pretty clear that Mythic+ raiding was designed in such a way where the soft cap of what was clearable was below M+25. Whether or not thatâs the right place to make the cap is debatable, but itâs clear that is where the brick wall was placed.
Thereâs no real addressing that. There will always be an insanely tiny fraction of players able to push past those limits and perform at the tippy top highest levels. That should be the exception and not the rule. But we make those players matter as if they are the representation of the Mythic+ game mode because weâve turned it into a competition rather than just having it BE a game.
1 Like
Well given everything can do 20s, nothing needs any buffs. The only reason to do tuning at all is to achieve relative balance and the only way to do that in any meaningful way is to tune based on the capabilities of the spec. In the same way you donât pull up blue logs to see how well a spec is doing in raids.
People are incredibly bad at making decisions based on numbers and percentages. The vast majority of people are consistently wrong about decision making when faced with data points and information because preconceived notions and perceptions often take hold more than logical analysis and numbers. A perfect example was your argument earlier that because shadow performed well other priest healers were not getting groups, when in fact priest was the single highest represented healer for 99% of the Mythic+ healers.
Not on +25s and higher last season, but then again every healer other than Holy Paladins was hardly represented.
It was somewhere around 85% of the healers were Holy Paladins, 10% of the healers were Disc/Holy, and 5% were every other healer spec COMBINED.
Compared to last season I get invited to 5x more high keys and my IOs almost as high as it was last season. I stopped pushing keys last season because I got tired of sitting in queue for hours. I could have just gone shadow and pushed instead.
I disagree with this point IMMENSELY. I think that data needs to be taken from more aspects than just the highest potential performance. Because if this is all that matters, should you balance an entire class around what 0.1% of players can achieve on it, if the other 99.9% of players are all performing not only consistently but also almost 35% LOWER than that tiny fraction at the top? What if the bottom 50% of players are performing exceedingly low on a spec, but the top 50% are all performing at an even level. Is there a different approach there?
I ABSOLUTELY look at the blue logs when talking about a specs performance. I just had this argument a few weeks ago with hunters on Season of Discovery in response to saying they were overnerfed and unplayable. My argument was that hunters were the best performing dps class in SoD at the time after the nerfs, because while they did not have the highest possible dps at the top end, their lowest performing players were higher than others, and the gap between the lowest performing players and the highest ones was the smallest, WHILE also being within 8-12 dps (roughly 1%) of the top dps values of the other classes.
So yes, the blue parses DO matter when youâre talking about making balance changes that affect those players.
1 Like
I think itâs a case by case basis but, for the most part, wow specs are not complex enough for the mined intricacies of high end play to have a meaningful impact on performance to the point where tuning them around said players would detrimentally impact the lower end. The two exceptions to this are arcane mage and augmentation Evoker and Iâve been vocal about the latterâs problems with optimisation gaps in the past.
The issues we see in high end disparities are not typically about throughput, theyâre about specs having answers to the questions being posed as well as varied and relevant toolkits.
Again, Youâre talking about 175 people. Not 17500, 175. We could fit the number of people you are talking about in a room at a convention center.
It is something we can look up. We have the information on this. At 25+ it was for healers:
Shaman 28.4%
Paladins 25.7%
Druids 18.8%
Evokers 13.3%
Priests 11.1%
Monks 2.8%
You act like priests were monks at this point. They were not. Not even close. In fact, you act like paladins were the highest represented healing class, but it was actually shaman. This is what I mean by people being bad at making decisions based on the data. Here you were presented with an opportunity to actually CHECK the numbers and instead you used a preconceived notion of what was reality instead of verifying.
That is a 100% anecdotal piece of evidence and will differ greatly for different people. And is also entirely dependent on what M+ levels you are pushing and where you see the most impact to your grouping, what time of the day, etc.
What point did you stop pushing? At a certain point you WILL stop pushing. Because the number of people at that point will be Infinitesimal. If there are hundreds of thousands of players doing M+ below 25, and only hundreds doing it at 25+ then youâre going to go from getting groups regularly to getting zero groups for a LONG time. Because the population of people DOING that level of content gets smaller and smaller, and you will eventually hit a ceiling where you are done pushing at a regular level, and the only way to go higher is with a lot of hard work, dedication, and a highly specialized group of people you personally know.
How much sense does it make to apply 25+ environment to the rest of the Mythic+ community? None at all.
2 Likes
This is good. The game should be balanced around 20âs more than 28âs. I care about whatâs probable/likely for the masses more then whatâs possible for the minority running those super high keys. Mythic plus is impossible to balance as long as it is infinitely scaling.
Iâm glad I can invite anybody to 15-20 keys and have a good time.
Yes, the point is that we should ignore them, itâs that we should ask why the number was so ridiculously small.
If you want to run the highest keys, then you must prioritize class selection to get that done. It doesnât bother me much if your class caps you at 25 keys honestly. It sucks, but it impacts very few players and Iâd rather blizzard fix other issues first.
The usage of Mind Soothe as a way to optimize pulls and speed through content goes from nonexistent at most levels to borderline required at the soft cap ceiling. That is ABSOLUTELY something that can be targeted and dealt with that would affect only the tippy top tier of players and not the bottom tier.
Rotations, talent decisions, and ability usage varies DRASTICALLY between the top and the bottom of players. As does class synergies, consumable usages, and the like. They absolutely can target changes that have major impacts on what the top tier is doing that doesnât impact the bottom. But they donât.
At again, I know I keep bringing it up, but power infusion is a perfect example. Stacking power infusion on other classes allowed for incredible performance at a high tier and was an example of class synergy that worked really powerfully at the top levels that had a very minimal impact on the bottom tiers because the way players used it was vastly different.
And they COULD have easily addressed that by nerfing PI baseline and buffing Twins talent so that the priests themselves would see little to no change and ONLY the other classes would, effectively hard targeting the high level synergy. And they didnât. They just nerfed it baseline and left priests with a worse cooldown. And itâs not a big change. Itâs not gamebreakingly bad. But it just is a prime example of large scale across the board changes rather than precision changes.
1 Like
I will always bring up S1 dragonflight as an example of how little things have to actually improve for variety to return to high end mythic+. It doesnât require a utopia, there were still things about that season that were awful but somehow the amount of variety I was seeing (Outside of tanks) even in keys 100+ points above title was something you could only dream of now.
People want to play their mains / what they enjoy most, and that desire to do so will overrule a certain degree of imbalance even in the highest levels of gameplay. Things donât need to be that much better.
This is a good point. I wonder how it can be solved without class homogenization.
You are clearly a very skilled player. You could have fixed this last season by playing another class. I know thatâs not optimal, but what do you expect when pushing the tipity top keys?
The data youâre referencing is incorrect. Raider ios page was bugged and not showing data properly for a good portion of the season. If you look itâll say thereâs 18 Disc Priests and 1 Holy Priest. Please make sure to double check your sources.
I totally get this, but when you are dealing with a game type that is infinity scaling you will at some point have to make a choice:
- Do I want to run +28 keys and change class? Or
- Do I want to run sub 28 keys as my main.
At some point the scaling gets so nuts that unless classes are identical, any difference is important at the top.