Honestly yeah, I’m on the same point where I opened up warcraft logs and was like “oh wow this is a like over 33% disparity between best and worst”.
Mindyou the devs have seemingly gleefully put themselves in the position where covenants, soulbinds and the rest makes the problem worse.
I say scrap those systems. Make the base classes good, fun and balanced.
We don’t build the roof of a house when the foundation still isn’t there. And that’s exactly how I view the stacked on systems of soulbinds, covenants, yadda yadda. It’s insane to me.
Removing variables always makes things simpler yes… but they’d need to remove a lot more to actually balance things.
But fights are not infinite. Mathematical performance in infinity will not yield you the same results over a shorter duration.
Alright then you implement statistics and include the mean and stardard deviation and specify the balance by specifying those parameters instead…
Gotta love asymptotes, it doesn’t matter if you’re asymptotically better if you’re below the curve of someone else.
Okay.
I want a 5 year minimum contract and you’ll pay me at least $200,000USD a year to work from home to do it.
I also want full medical benefits.
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Don’t forget 40 hours at least of PTO and guaranteed time off for the holidays.
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Imho I think perfect balance is an impossible goal. Computing things myself it’s always that last 10% closing the gap that takes the longest time to suss out.
But I think we don’t need a computer to tell us we might need to tack a bit more damage when we open up warcraft logs and WW monk is on meme-tier for the latest raid doing like 30% less damage than fire mage.
That’s a clear “oh better slap on a bit more potency on their basic rotation” to me. No AI needed.
Honestly I think the entire problem with balance is that the devs simply don’t care and are allocated elsewhere or just don’t have enough manpower to do it.
I genuinely do not believe it’s that hard to cite warcraft logs or any automated tool and pinpoint and at least reduce the level of imbalance we see. Perfect balance is impossible-- but we don’t need 30% less damage. That is obscene.
There is a lot of variability between specs regarding ST vs AOE, dependency of DPS and HPS on movement, and that’s before procs.
Unless you want horrible levels of homogenisation there are going to be imbalances.
(But Blizzard, not so much imbalance!)
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I mean it would be a worthfile freaking job for Blizzard to hire for. Think about how much money they lose in bad PR over class balance and how much people complain about it? How many subs would they gain by having better class balance?
Blizz largely agrees with you as best I can tell. It’s easier to look at what players are actually getting out of the class rather than theory anyway.
Okay, so… I read the whole thread.
Why hasn’t anybody mentioned this:
What makes anybody think Blizzard WANTS the classes to be balanced?
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So that’s the thing, it’s easier to just go off of real data and balance off of that than worry about theoretical perfection. It’s faster, it’s cheaper, and it uses a lot less expensive server compute time.
Honestly this is a good take.
It’s hard to look at feral druid, guardian druid, monk, enhancement and elemental shaman and not feel like blizzard intentionally wants these to be bad picks.
Like sorry, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to drag up warcraft logs and figure “Gee, feral druid might need about 30% more potency on their spammed ability. Gee. Hmmmm.”
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Developers who used to work there have said quite plainly that blizz devs play favorites.
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Personally, I agree with you that it is easier to go off the data that the community produces because there is so much of it and so much variance. I am not advocating theoretical perfection, but what I am saying is that there are numerical approaches to complex problems that (being approximations) are not perfect but are accurate to within a reasonable margin of error.
While we are at it lets download the dev teams consciousness into the internet. Think of how well the game would be without the horrible limitations of flesh bodies!
Honestly that makes too much sense.
Priest main in balance lead right now with how priest dominates in m+, raids and solo content on disc and shadow. It’s pretty evident. Unless shadow AND disc get nerfed heavily they’re going to be S+ tier picks.
Then look at monk and it’s absolutely unwanted in comparison.
It isn’t easy
some classes are ranged, some are melee some have attacks u can use while moving, some can’t.
Then having to build items/sets around those abilities.
Also every encounter is different.
And if everyone did the same damage etc, it would be extremely boring gameplay… kinda like classic
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