wonder what the team has learned from sod from beginning to end.
i think 1 lesson that they probably learned is to keep the numbers in check so they only have to tweak a little or move damage over slightly on this or that.
also pvp balance matters , just not as a perfect symetrical balance but more of a get the outliers down quick (before they rule an entire phase) and be flexible for changes.
you dont have to be a precog to see some of the changes when they added them were bad ideas , and even the playerbase was telling you they would be bad ideas before they were added.
what are some other ideas you hope they learned?
I hate to say it I thought they learn anything. But, Classic+ will tell.
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Incursions bad.
But in all honesty, now they can modify a presumptive Classic+ while running it on the same client as Era, we would hopefully see more considerate changes to base spells/talents without relying on a separate rune system.
i like the description to be something more to the point.
so taking people out of the world or funneling everyone to a certain area with that area being the best gold/xp/honor (yes even honor) farm in the game and absolutely screwing the economy with the influx of raw gold ireverseably was bad.
also i think having a client that is different wholly than the classic client (or a fork or offshoot that doesnt change anything for the other classic clients) would be better for creative freedom .
they need to be flexible yes, but they also need to be even allowed to do the thing in the first place.
I think there is something to take away from the level cap. Phase 1 was great because the barrier to entry was super low, super accessible for all. But I would only do one level cap next time maybe 25-30, then 60.
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Too many systems is horrible for balancing. Runes+Tier+Shoulder are too much and the power should be baked in to the talent trees themselves. Powerful abilities should be at the end of a tree so you don’t have high dps specs running around with tank survivability or dps specs with high self healing.
The departure from casted abilities to a bunch of high damage instants and increased mobility was atrocious for class balance.
Raids are great, but there needs to be content outside of them for people to stay entertained. If PvP is wildly unbalanced with no rewards and the dungeons have lost meaning, people are just going to raid log.
Leveling raids in the first few phases shouldn’t be difficult. The goal should be to bring people up to the skill level of experienced players over time. Dropping a raid designed for experienced players in the beginning is just going to push new players away when they can’t meet the skill requirements.
Hybrids need to retain hybrid roles. Having hybrids doing top tier dps is trash for the game. Shamans having infinite mana and tank survivability, rets globaling people while having a ton of utility, moonkins having nuke damage and frenzied regeneration in moonkin form is dumb. Defined roles and benefits for classes is a good thing. Class homogeneity is a negative imo.
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ya . honestly the capability of any class , hybrid or not, to be tanky as crap and also be big damage or even be 100% in 1 role and be any more than 50% in another is bad balance.
your damage reduction should also reduce your damage done by close to the same amount.
it should be balanced like the old balance systems of fzero like you sacrifice handling for speed or in wow terms ( tankyness for damage done) or other things like healing done for damage done.
this isnt to say that any class, including a hybrid , when fully specced and geared for damage shouldnt be able to fully compete in doing damage or when fully specced for healing or tanking that they shouldnt do any 1 role very well.
damage profiles are needed to be shifted too. if something has a cast time it should hit harder than something that doesnt unless that something can be cast 40 yards away and so on .
there should be trade offs for the stuff you have to do to do damage.
it doesnt have to be full parity or anything like that but something closer would help alot in a guide to balance better.
in terms of the raid difficulty , it was fine when they gave optional hardmodes and on the raids they diddnt do that , gave a week for the hard core to clear and then nerfed it for the rest of the people.
just let it be known beforehand what youre doing and dont make it look like you just slapped two pieces of bread together and called it a sandwich.
all in all the rune system was great TO TEST things. it gave flexiblity to speccing and im sure they have data on what was being ran with what gear and so on.
i just hope for pve that they can stick with classes being at most from very top to the bottom a 10%ish difference at most.
I learned that the Classic community is unpleasant and unpleasable. The devs should figure out their vision for the game and stick with it & ignore the constant complainers.
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that happens with many many communities and the vocal minority dont speak for the silent majority .
there are lessons to be learned from people complaining though cause sometimes something is just annoying to deal with and someone caring enough to speak about it can help you see what you normally cant.
A lot of the design choices were exactly that and led to significant imbalances. For example the shift to kill shot for hunters during the AQ phase was told directly to Zirene that it was going to be a problem yet Zirene advised that the dev making the set wasn’t going to change it and that they wanted underutilized skills to be part of that phase. It ended up being so broken for pvp that the set had to be disabled against players.
I don’t see where they learned anything really. They certainly didn’t show us what they learned through in game adjustments, so unless you believe they have all this knowledge gained stashed away somewhere awaiting classic+ implementataion… I just don’t see it.
My classic+ expectations are pretty low
Pick the same class as the lead developer lmao
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I learned that SoD is the best version of WoW ever.
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A couple things I thought worked well:
Creating new content that is not in Questie and the community has to figure out together. Day 1 was the closest Classic has ever gotten to that Vanilla launch feeling as people worked together to figure the runes out
Time gated content. I enjoyed playing the different level progressions and seeing the full world. They just need to error on the side of shorter than longer
Faction lock on servers. I always felt fairly in balance in terms of how many horde vs alliance I ran into. I think the concept worked
BFD and Gnomer revamps were exellent. New mechanics that had a good mix of some challenge and moreso fun. They should carry that design philosophy into C+ raids
Ashbringer actually feels legendary. The weapon design is amazing. You feel the power uptick when you equip it and the animations are on point. I would make it “Thunderfury Rare” but having rare, hyper powerful legendaries is great
I doubt they learned much from SoD.
P1 - Best Phase, class nerfs were applied once it became obvious that certain outliers were too good in PvP and PvE.
P2 - Gnomeregan was alright, could’ve been better by making non crit immune tanks viable. Bloodmoon favored ranged toomuch and was just melee getting stomped everytime.
P3 - Was this ST? Because if it was this might’ve been one of the worst phases along another. Too long, PvP balancing was whack, ranged bias once more etcetc.
P4 - Ah MC, making mandatory FR for H3… idk but this shouldn’t be a thing, PvP again ranged favored + shamans became more and more unkillable by the phases.
P5 - BWL, good affix attempt but most of it came down to RNG on bosses, not what you would call particularly fun. Melee finally good in PvP? Potentially if in right hands but ranged just took another round of dump ontop of melee mostly unless you could sneak past like rogues and druids.
P6 - AQ, dogwater phase, nothing fun and introduced Burrow trinket. Also first lockout on phase release didn’t give any loot, so if you were one of those, one less week of loot for you. Very cool blizz.
P7 - Naxx, Seals and Shoulder Runes, what a good time to be alive for raiding, for PvP you had to pray not to face Tank or RestoEle Shamans, Druids or Hunters. Rogues would still be a menance at least their power was heavily restricted to 1v1s.
KC was interesting, not really well bugged fixed but hey they tried.
P8 - SE, legendary grind etc, no actual PvP changes to the top 3-4 specs and classes but pally gets nerfed just because off sims? Ontop of that Blizzard also demonstrating good decision making by overtuning the raid at the start. Also there are still bugs on the bosses which is kind of lazy.
Basically don’t get why you would stop making PvP changes but still fix rake vs players week one into naxx but never nerf hunters, balance druids, tank and restoele shamans. Also tanks getting defenders resolve vs players is a failure.
It’s tough. Without community polling, its very much up to interpretation.
I hope they realize that the player power and encounter design is an arms race. If you buff/improve one, you need to do the same to the other. This sorta never ends and leads to either overly trivial or overly difficult content. Everything outside of SE and maybe Naxx HM4 is completely faceroll in sod, simulating a more wotlk-like experience. This is definitely a departure from the slower nature of vanilla/tbc.
I also hope they learn that challenging content simply doesn’t fit in classic+. Good players have always had the option to speed run/parse/speed kill. When you make content harder, bad players quit and good players simply transition to focusing on progression. This might be fun for 3-6 weeks, but ends up being a more hollow experience by the end of each phase.
I think the modularity of runes is a cool concept, but way too difficult to meaningfully balance. Allowing every spec to have access to every rune, means you’re left with a bunch of runes that require a ton of added text.
*Edit: Designing something that is cool isn’t enough. You also need to design something that is still fun/cool to do in a month, or two months. Certain added content never felt easier, and so people completely stopped running it.
There’s a lot more, these are my main few pillars.
Yes I was disapponted that the talent trees were not touched. There was too much reliance on tier sets. I would rather piece my equipment together than be shoehorned into 4 or 6 pieces of equipment, many classes had to use previous phase gear.
your viewing through the lense of and obsession with shaman and their balance or lack thereof is sad to see and only proves you lost the thread a long time ago and havent gotten a clear thought in a while.
its sad to see dude.
You and others literally only view from horde side, I’ve been on both alliance and horde ends and guess what, as a warrior I would rather fight paladins than shamans. Heck the shaman discord is laughing at fellow shamans and horde players who struggle with paladins. On LC/Paladin discords you find the same agreement that shamans are OP.
Go figure who has lost touch and clear thoughts whenever you and the other clowns here gaslight how OP pally is when there are literally 3 classes that just clown on it.