- When a clear and concise design philosophy is properly applied to all or most of the specs played.
There’s always something “broken” but often in previous expansions, toolkits, defensives, and offensive nature of specs often played by similar rules, and if not was fixed by next season. The broken aspect often came from numbers being too high, or a PvE item.
Right now if you compare say a Marksman hunter to say a Demon Hunter in the top tier, these specs seem to be playing by wildly different rules. One has a give and take for every ability on the bar, extreme partner reliance, clear cut weaknesses, harsh mobility restrictions with little damage reward, and constant win conditions for their enemies at the end of every single mistake, while the other has barely any weakness, no give and take, no partner reliance, and has to make a dozen mistakes before a win condition is presented to the enemy.
You can’t have a good meta if you have specs that are playing by super saiyan rules, and others forced to play by a hundred other rules not taken into account by others. This is because it becomes impossible to fix a power dynamic which indirectly influences anything the spec(s) playing by rules nobody else has to culling the specs they originally did well against.
- Power Disparity/Potency between Tier S and Tier2/3 constantly minimized as much as possible.
It’s impossible to have true balance in a game like this. During seasons with good metas, they made constant effort to try and make it so even in “bad matchups” good play was still rewarded. You compare a WOTLK/Cata “counter” to todays “counter” and it’s absolutely nuts how far that divide actually is now. Not until legion did the idea of “this literally isn’t even a possible kill target for you even if they play horrible” even become a reality, and now it’s common if you’re not a Tier S/1 spec.
On top of that when you attack both these aspects as hard as possible you minimize “rerolling” for people jumping ship as even when your spec isn’t Tier S/1, the power disparity is close enough that many people stick around to master their current spec due to the rewarding nature of beating people as it, as well as it being palatable enough to continue playing until you end up getting deserved fixes/buffs, or your overpowered counter is brought in line giving you an indirect buff.
When you minimize rerolling, you saturate the queues with a wider variety of comps allowing a more dynamic and thriving “meta” in which even “average specs” can climb and be rewarded.