That was my first thought after I recalled what they said. Simply buffing the lowest performing classes just enough to put them in line with mid tier specs should be fine I’d think. The only guess I have as to why you wouldn’t want to do this is if they were going to do some pretty big changes and the extra work isn’t worth it.
Hmm… Interesting. Team comps, huh? That is lame. I mean, you can rationalize laziness or a myopic viewpoint any way you like. To me, it is laziness. Such an excuse is bogus.
I don’t mean to justify Blizz’s choices, I’m just providing the answers they’ve given
Ya and I for sure get where they are coming from. But there’s no denying it is the same specs over and over in the limelight and others that have never had their turn.
Again with mistweaver, why would you ever bring one to anything. Brewmasters for raid progression are typically always a solid pick which provides you with the only monk benefit of the 5% melee buff. Mistweaver literally has no CD or niche that will ever make them a better choice than a shaman with spirit link, devo aura from pally, etc. It’s not just a skill balancing thing, there’s some specs that literally need a complete rework to ever even attempt to find themselves in the meta. And blizz just refuses to ever acknowledge that. So it’s not a patch to patch tuning issue when there’s certain aspects that have been that way for years on end
Time and again, they try to lock people into characters by making expansion features very alt-unfriendly. It never occurred to them they could devalue alts by regularly addressing problems. If classes were constantly being buffed and nerfed and tweaked and cratered then rerolling to the fotm would die. Everyone would just ride out the wave.
Oh I am in no way agreeing what they said, I just wanted to find the quote. I agree that they should do more frequent balance changes. To play devil’s advocate, mistweaver is apparently really good on sunking since they can pump single target healing but I think people still prefer shaman.
Oh, no. Thank you for the info. Much appreciated.
As for the game devs, I think is it very myopic, and that long term it is a mistake. And I further think they should make a serious effort at balancing as soon as possible–ideally before new content is even introduced.
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I think if they want to lock people into their class choice with grind systems, yet tune the game the way the do where you’re forced to meta slave to actually play content then they need to make stuff like rep, covenant progress, honor level, currencies, etc. become account wide.
Why should I lose all progress on non transferable stuff on a character that I spend months/years farming, because blizzard can’t balance the game properly.
There’s probably not a single person in here not playing a meta spec that can say they don’t get declined constantly to content because those groups are looking for a meta class. You shouldn’t be punished for that.
For me I main blood dk, the #1 blood dk in the worlds highest key is a 24… #1 DH tank is a 27… if you take the key scaling into effect, that is a 141% scaling
increase between a 24 and a 27. If anyone thinks a 141% difficulty difference between tanks isn’t a massive balancing failure than I’d love to hear their argument
I think its mostly cause of how they do their patches.
They tend to do tons of balance changes when a patch comes out.
Therefore yea its slow, but I guess it does allow for more thought into the changes
Easy answer.
Blizz DOES NOT CARE!!
Why would they waste time and resources and money on something that’s not going to make them more money.
So let’s make another mount we can sell
They care about your two month SUB. Other then that.
THEY DON’T CARE
THEY DON’T GIVE TWO $%^&
But if it allows for more thought for the changes then why every single patch is there at least 1 or more classes that are so far ahead of others.
Like I said 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 of BFA, prot warriors ran the show. All of BFA resto druids ran the show. Rogues and mages are almost always meta, when was the last time warlocks were meta in m+ over a mage?
Yes they do a lot of changes for new patches but most of the time what’s meta stays meta, and if it doesn’t then something else completely broken takes it’s place. There’s always specs that are just never going to compete.
Where is their data over the last few years for the same bottom feeding specs that haven’t left the basement?
It would be an easier pill to swallow if you’re slightly behind the fotm specs but know your turn will eventually come and you just stick with your main. The problem is that time never comes and never will for certain specs
And to the post above this. They should care… because when people get declined for hours on end to groups and lose interest in playing cause of it blizz won’t be getting their sub money anymore.
If you are not meta, you spend a lot of time sitting on your hands waiting for invites in m+. If you are not meta your raid spot it at risk.
Assuming you don’t care for M+ or raiding, then, sure. It does not matter because you won’t quit the game because of a problem with access to content. But if you do want to raid and run m+, then when you don’t get invites or have a raid spot, then does that help or hurt your chances of continuing your sub?
It’s pretty simple really. Do the math.
Anyone on the side of balancing isn’t hurting the game please counter this argument.
Dps out number tanks by such a vast margin that as a dps you’re naturally going to get declined from a ton of keys because there’s only going to be like 1 tank for every 30+ dps players.
Now you take into account that blizzards tuning has made tanking the least fun thing by a mile this xpac with the damage tuning of dungeons forcing a kite meta. So you’re playing a tank, will never compete with dps on the meters, and unless you’re a blood dk you shouldn’t beat a healer on the meters unless your farming low content for your ilvl.
So you’re never competing on the meters, you’re a tank that feels like paper fighting for your life every pull. The second you die the dps blame you regardless of whether it’s actually your fault or not. You’re responsible for routes and changing your play style based on affixes week to week. Open world content is nowhere near as fun because as soon as you get into a situation of killing elites you’re spending forever killing it as opposed to a dps player. Then raiding also becomes way harder because there can only be 2 tanks in a raid, so getting a spot is way harder. Also pvping as a tank is not really an option besides niche BG play
So at the end of the day because of that, more and more tanks will inevitably just swap off tanking because it’s not worth the hassle, or just quit playing entirely. Which then makes it even worse for the dps players trying to get into keys because now there’s even less tanks which means more declines from the few keys out there.
The way the game is currently tuned, there is absolutely no way that tank population doesn’t drop consistently over the xpac. When tank population drops, everyone else also suffers and it’s already bad enough with the shortage of tanks, especially good ones. This is DIRECTLY due to blizzards tuning. Everyone including the top players have complained about the kite meta and amount of damage tanks take since beta and very little has been done about it.
Then when it comes to raiding, the community is so over saturated in the same few fotm classes that you either need to play an off meta class to get a raid spot, which kills the rest of the game for you, or you had better be a high skill player of that fotm class to be able to hold your raid spot against a ton of others playing the same thing. So those off meta players who are brought for specific raid buffs or niches will fizzle out over the raid tier because of how hard other content becomes for them.
Wow is not the type of game that will bring in high amounts of brand new players, and with the amount of time dedication and knowledge required for the game retaining new players becomes even harder. And IMO the state the game keeps continuing with is probably driving out more players than it’s bringing in
AoTC season 1, quit raiding after that
20 keys in that last season after they disabled corruption. I took a 10 month break and came back like the day before they disabled corruption
Took a 3.5 month break starting mid December and have swapped mains like 3 times so far
See above 
Weren’t the dungeons heavily nerfed once they removed corruption in prepatch?
Reduced headcount. Remaining headcount takes on more but not enough hours in a day, so things don’t get done as efficiently as you would expect.
Small indie company.
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Personally I wish they did PvP sort of like FF14 (not the same mind you because FF14’s pvp is bad, but…) in that PvP gets its own ability list and balancing completely separate from PvE. That way unbalanced stuff in PvP can get rebalanced without affecting PvE, and vice versa.
Yknow, kinda like how Starcraft 2 has their unit data completely separate from the ladder unit data so that balancing doesn’t break the campaign.
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The shortest answer: the core game is why things remain imbalanced so long.
The core of the game is fun and engaging. It moves quickly and there’s a felt impact from a button press to things happening on screen.
When something badly balanced makes its way live, people rightly complain, some work around it and some just quit.
More players work around and complain than quit. This means there is no true incentive for the imbalance to be fixed. Most of the time, the player base learns to live with it.
The past few years that I have played, the pattern seems to be to shift around the imbalance onto different distinct types of players so that no single group feels like they will NEVER have their issues addressed.
The real trick by Blizzard is spinning enough plates that the longest term balance issues become par for the course. Players stop expecting anything to change even if they DO keep asking for a fix…
Player complacency can really exacerbate developer apathy.
Ooo. I like that line… it sums up EVERYthing wrong with this game: player complacency exacerbates developer apathy… it’s the long title for “Shadowlands”.
Unbalanced. Not Imbalanced. It’s like the old nail-on-blackboard thing whenever I see people torturing the language…
But grammar aside - I’m not sure I understand about DK tanks. You say
Is the purpose of a tank now to outdo the dps of the dps classes in order to keep aggro? I thought tanks had other means of doing that? I ask this in all seriousness since I have very little personal understanding of how tanks work. The only recent experience I do have is doing a normal instance (sort of by mistake) on my paladin as the tank. My dps was lousy yet I managed to keep the bosses interested in me rather than the dps for most of the time using things like Hand of Reckoning. I guess I just assumed all tanks used that sort of thing which was how they kept the bad guys interested in them.