This game hasn’t been balanced for 20 years, you think they gonna start now? People complaining about ret paladin but the paladin kit in general has always been broken. Protection paladins and guardian druids are so broken in pvp. In 20 years I’ve always felt like the underdog as a warrior in every aspect of the game. It’s because the kit itself just doesn’t compete with hybrids.
Just because they moved around the abilities and stuffed them into talent trees, doesn’t mean anything has really changed…feels more like Dragonlands/Shadowflight in regards to class balance and the more they screw with stuff the more things swirl around the toilet bowl back to where we were. I’d rather they just keep adding new classes and go with the League of Legends philosophy and make everyone OP since they just be pssng people off by pulling a bunch of levers randomly and with no vision.
Wow has moved toward smaller and smaller scale content.
In larger raids class disparity was less telling but as they moved to 10 man raids it started showing itself with certain classes being ‘mandatory’ due to what they bring (often tied to expansion changes to the kit)
When Arena started it really highlighted class imbalance at least on the PvP side.
Now with Mythic + you can see that on the PVE side with all the ‘meta-comp’ chatter.
Add solo shuffle and the new augment specs as a cherry on that heap…
In summary, with all the diversity in class mechanics, the smaller scale the content, the more these differences will become min-max-meta issues.
I think this viewpoint is spot on. The devs seem to choose the 20-player Mythic Raid as the PvE balance scenario and then all other scenarios fall where they do until they hotfix buffs/nerfs in to address severe imbalance issues (e.g., the Exodia comp for M+ or rofl-stomps in Solo Shuffle).
It doesn’t particularly seem that they even achieve a good balance for Mythic Raid, but I don’t think it’s impossible. To me, a good balance is some metric where best and worst are no more than 10% apart (for DPS it’s simply damage per second as observed in combat logs for each scenario of interest).
With all the combinations that can occur for varying talents, stat rankings from gear, and special gear abilities (tier set bonuses, crafted embellishments, and trinket effects), one might simply give up and say there are too many variables to ever achieve a ±5% balance. However, using Design of Experiments and Analysis of Variance with a stats tool like JMP or Minitab and a simulation that is representative of actual gameplay from logs, it is a solvable problem. It seems like they just don’t have a statistician or data scientist on the dev team (or they get ignored by the artistic creatives coming up with “cool new abilities” that they have no clue will be game-breaking).
Blizzard has said that balance is that the top performer should be within 5% of the bottom performer. Provided all characters are in their best gear at the moment and do perfect rotations.
That is probably not happening in the real world.
Players want ALL DPS to be at exactly the same level for balance. No one does better than others.
Balance and balancing are two different things. It’s impossible to achieve balance in a system with so many variables, technical and human, so they must be forever balancing, like a tightrope walker that continually shifts the pole to keep things in a manageable state. The walker cannot ever achieve a lasting balance.
Whenever someone talks about balance I am eternally reminded of comments like these because … “a balanced game” doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere
Let me explain:
If [Ability A] does more damage than [Ability B], does that mean its unbalanced? If these were the only variables then sure, but let’s assume that ALL variables are the exact same except for the amount of damage they deal
Is that [Ability A] better and stronger than [Ability B] in that case? Sure
But that has no bearing on whether the thing is balanced or not, because a balanced gameplay experience isn’t a single variable such as damage - we can remove all other variables and look at one single variable and that could never tell us whether something is balanced or not, just whether it is nummerically better than another ability
A game being “balanced” or not is not possible to determine in a vacuum or even scientifically, as it is largely driven by community perception (linked two pages from Dark Legacy’s webcomic just for comedic effect but largely … they are honestly correct in their, most likely unintentional point) - its impossible to “perfectly” balance a game, one still has to do what one can to make the gameplay satisfying which is ultimately the only thing that can truly dictate whether something is balanced or not
If a game is well balanced one can enjoy it, otherwise it’ll feel skewed and whilst numbers is how we usually treat it… a “perfectly” balanced game would still upset a subset of players who view the game through this lens of community communal perception:
But its also important that in some cases, to create a more amicable playing field to strive towards that “balanced” feeling you might also have to step on some people’s toes and provide unequal compensation … which in turn is also going to make folks feel like the game isn’t balanced despite it being actively balanced:
In short … eh, unless you are a MDI, RWF, or AWC player … the game is largely balanced like +95% of the time that we don’t need to worry about it overall and should just focus on playing the game rather than complaining about issues that aren’t real issues
Doesn’t mean that folks can’t complain but everyone complaining about the “exodia” comp and the like … well, that’s not a realistic problem for anyone but absolute top of the world type players, so making grumbling remarks and jokes about it online whilst just playing whether games one want to play whether that is WoW or another game just do it instead is in most cases a better and more sensible use of one’s time
Or one could read webcomics like Dark Legacy, whilst waiting for nerfs and buffs to arrive whenever they do
In the Raid scenario, I would think it’s reasonable to be measured against what others in my spec and item-level are doing. I would find the gameplay experience very unsatisfying if the raid leader always sits me on the bench because another spec always outperforms me, even if I’m in the tenth percentile among those that play my spec.
I don’t want to reroll to a “good” spec, I want all the specs to be close enough to each other that “bad spec” isn’t a factor in team selection for Raid, M+, BG, etc. The gameplay certainly is satisfying in the leveling process and doing outdoor WQ type content… I can do that (almost) equally well on any of the nine alts I have. But I want to do the group content on my ret paladin as it was my first character and I love the class fantasy and rotation for it. However, in 10.0, I did group content on my Hunter because the ret paladin was so bad it was difficult to get into groups–I still had a path to play but it was not the class/spec I wanted to play. The pally rework fixed most of that.
The Dark Legacy comic did give me a good laugh, but I don’t agree that satisfying gameplay is completely independent of role throughput balance (dps, hps, or dmg mitigation) among specs. There are tools to help achieve that balance and my guess would be the dev team doesn’t use them (I could be wrong but we’d see better balance if they were using them effectively).
It also is not surprising to me that what should only be an issue for MDI, RWF, or AWC creeps into everyday groups even though it’s absolutely not necessary, but its presence absolutely degrades gameplay satisfaction for some portion of players. Do you need an Augvoker to time a +20? Absolutely not, but there’s a ream of players who think otherwise and that hurts the experience for some. It’s mostly a PUG issue because if you have a solid group of friends for M+ or a fair and rational Raid leader, it doesn’t matter what the 1% is doing. But I had a guy I used to raid with who wanted to follow MDI strats for +15 keys and I had to set him straight that our group could not do that. How many other “leads” adopt that wrong mindset at a level where it’s not required and is likely detrimental to success at their lower level of difficulty? Lots of players will look at what the top is doing and try to emulate it… if it’s possible to flatten the curve through better balance, I think the devs should pursue that as it’s inextricably linked to gameplay satisfaction imo.
That’s even better than the 10% spread I’d be willing to accept as “balanced.” Do you have a link by chance where they stated this?
I highlighted this part because you also later on mentioned this:
You already admitted to that the thing driving this is a hypothetical social issue, not whether the game is nummerically balanced or not - this is entirely derivative of what people expect of other people and folks in-game are vastly different from how folks pretend that folks are like on these and other forums
There’s always going to be odd-ball exceptions that some random forum troll can come up with and bring evidence for, but for every other time, every other study, every other piece of evidence that indicates the opposite; anecdotes makes for a bad basis of argumentation
And, I need to stress this … at the core, you have already agreed with me that it is largely if not entirely a community perception issue rather than anything that Blizzard (or any other company in regards to their games for that matter) can have any real say or do anything about
This is just the thing I want to stress, because at the end of the day we don’t actually know in detail what tools or methods Blizzard uses to come to the decisions they come to in terms of basically anything gameplay and game design-wise, so trying to say that Blizzard isn’t balancing their game (as many folks on social media often do) or how they go about it, we just know that they do and by and large …
The issue is a community mentality-issue rather than anything else by and large
And as someone who enjoy games like League and DotA (dunno why, so please don’t bother asking as I have no idea as to how or why I could enjoy those games), game design and balance will never be straightforward and especially not when considering class and specialization fantasies, performance, utility, group compositions, and way more
But by and large any and all attempts in other games to “flatten the curve” has only led to more boring and stale gameplay historically and as far as I am aware this has been the case in all multiplayer games ever (even if this is definitely more of a general statement than anything backed up by hard evidence)
In this hypothetical example, the raid lead is sitting me because the game is not numerically balanced and he/she is trying to maximize the likelihood of downing bosses (spec A always underperforms by a significant margin compared to spec B, so it’s a no-brainer math issue to not bring spec A). It’s not a social issue insisting on an Augvoker for a +20 when it’s not needed, but even that case will improve the likelihood of success (as long as you also bring two pumpers that benefit from Ebon Might) so why not opt for that composition? Why would I do task X at 100% difficulty when a different comp reduces the difficulty to 80%? That’s math imbalance not a social issue question. A variance of ±5% is likely small enough that most players would consider that balanced. A variance of 20% is only ignored by the ignorant or those that simply don’t care (only doing low Keys, casual Raid, etc.).
I think we’re largely in agreement and thanks again for the comics!
Perfectly balanced means everyone can do the same dps, heal for the same amount, and tank the same despite their design differences (And through all types of content in the game). This will never ever happen tho.
As a troll, you got to be trollin me! Warriors haven’t been meta since maybe one season in BFA with gushing wounds. I can’t recall any time before then.
