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Wotlk - released too early
Antipathy
Member UncommonPosts: 1,362
The expansion is fundamentally changing the combat system of WoW. Most buffs are becoming raid wide, and far more classes are being given access to buffs.
This means that in a 25 man raid, it's likely that less than half the people in the raid will be able to justify their place on account of being tanks, healers or essential buffs. The rest will all have to justify their place according to the DPS they do.
The claim: Blizzard claim they will make the DPS of each class approximately equal, with perhaps a slight edge to the classes with weaker buffs (e.g. rogues). Players would be expected to compete for spots according to their playing skill.
The reality: The new system will be introduced next week, in preparation for the launch of the expansion next month. At the moment, their is a huge disparity between the different amounts of DPS different classes can offer. A few classes that used to claim spots based on utility (e.g. shadow priests, shaman) are currently doing very poor DPS. Whilst others have been boosted out of sight and will likely be heavily nerfed (ret palas) whilst some of the traditional DPS classes (e.g. rogues, hunters) still seem solid.
In summay - Blizzard aren't remotely close to the DPS parity that their new system requires. Past experience with PvP reveals that they are very poor at tweaking to achieve balance, so it will likely be many patches before they ever sort this out.
I can't believe how incredibly stupid this is. A lot of people on each class forum are worried about this, and crossing their fingers hoping they will benefit from the next round of buffs/nerfs, but no one seems to be stepping back and looking at the big picture. Because it seems to me that no matter what the patches and nerfs, there is fundamentally too little time left to achieve proper balance. And if large imbalances exist, Blizzard would effectively be turning round to a large proportion (a third?) of it's raiding community and saying:
YOUR CHARACTER IS NOT WANTED ANY MORE. RE-ROLL OR QUIT THE GAME.
Comments
Interesting..........although I tend to agree with Blizzy.
If they can manage to really make all the classes equal on DPS, then skilled players will have advantage on the random retard with an overpowered class.
I am not in Wotlk beta so I don't know if Blizzard achieved this supposed parity between classes, but ideally it should work at the advantage of players whom can play their chsracter best,
It would also get rid of undesired classes (or talent tree) like Warrior Fury and Paladin Retri for example.
From your post it looks like they didn't achieve DpS parity, but we will be able to double check only when all those changes will go live.
First off, there are two classes that currently have a bugged skill that is accounting for their extreme DPS ( Ret pally is one of them), both of these have already been fixed on the internal builds and will be on the beta servers soon. Saying a class is OP based on a bug that has already been commented on by a dev is just a waste of breath. That is the purpose of it being on a beta server
Secondly, EVERY class right now thinks their DPS is lower than everyone else. I can go to any class forum and find a post in the first 2 pages of someone saying " our dps is too low, I'll never be invited to a raid". Warlocks and mages in particular both think the other is OP.
I think we are just seeing another huge example of the 'bad players' worrying. When BC was announed and raids were cut to 25.. there were 15 bad players suddenly worried because their raid spots were in jeopardy. You couldn't just /follow and push one button anymore.
Now we are seeing the same thing... bad players congregated to classes that had a unique utility that meant they were brought along regardless of their lack of skill. I'm looking at you shadow priests. Now that the devs have given other classes the mana battery feature and have given shadow priests the ability to do equal DPS (if played smart), those shadow priests are no longer going to be brought along simply because they had an OP ability.
I think at the current time (on beta) there are two classes that are OP because of bugs, but everyone else is pretty equal. I play some off-specs (moonkin, shadow priest, enhance shaman) and I'm completely happy
When have Blizzard said DPS differences are due to bugs?
What they have actually said is (according to world of raids):
I can't imagine too many people think that DKs (Unholy I presume) and Ret Pallys are balanced. We won't leave things like that.
The numbers aren't done. We changed an awful lot of combat mechanics and we're still adjusting things to get them right. Unholy death knights (I assume that's the spec you are talking about) have some nerfs coming (and I've already posted about them).
Sounds to me like they still haven't got the balance remotely right. Which is worrying so close to release - I write computer programs for a living, and I know enough about the development process to know that at this stage they should be fine-tuning. Not making major adjustments. The expansion simply isn't ready.
At the moment we have some DPS specs doing twice as much damage as others. If they want this to work then they need everyone within 10% of eachother. Or classes/spec won't get raid spots.
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The content of WotLK is pretty much done. Still some itemization to finish up in Chamber of Aspects and Eye of Eternity raids but thats about it.
Class balance is almost done. The problem Blizzard is having here is that the new talents and abilities are balanced for level 80 not level 70. Last I saw Ret Pallies were still at the bottom at level 80, the only change they have gotten since is a buff to Judgements of the Wise. Anyone that says they are over powered based on the PTR is an idiot.
Death Knight balancing is still a huge head ache though. DKs are over powered below 70, average at 70+ and under powered at level 80. Blizzard is changing DK abilities on a weekly basis so who knows how they will be at release.
Threat and DPS numbers have not been finalised(meaning level 80) and wont be even after release. For tanking Druids and DKs still are not close to Warriors or Paladins and DPS is still ruled by Warlocks, Rogues, Hunters and Mages.
Blizzard has 6 weeks yet which is a lot of time for just balancing work.
This is another issue that I would disagree because most of the issues about imbalance on their classes were said about the PTR, and PTR does not level you to 80 to see the full effect of your class. In the beta, everyone's dps has increased by considerate amount to the point where it is competitive and synergy is so widespread to other classes that you can mix up your raid composition by many combinations, unlike TBC. The only problem right now in beta is the lack of balanced geared people for 25/10 mans.
For example, we raided 25 man Naxxramas with classes that were geared with T4-T5-T6 or sunwell(T6.5). The disparity is huge because the stats make a big difference in how much dps you can produce. At the end of the raid, the numbers are so inconsistant that people with the shitty geared with their respective class will assume they feel so gimped when they dont see the logic that they were undergeared over others in the raid. Some may disagree with this point because there could be a better source out there with major guilds explaining how truely each class does in performance and effectiveness with raid synergy.
Secondly, I don't think people will be left out to raid as a casual standpoint more or less as a hardcore standpoint. This helps so much with casual guilds because they don't have to rely on stacking classes anymore, and now they can fill in raids with all sorts of combos and classes without needing to sub people out for certain buffs or vital assistance. This will likely hurt the hardcore guilds because they relied on heavy stacking classes for boss fights to guide through instances so easily without needing to break a sweat so much. Now that they can't do that they will have to layoff those extra class people.
Lastly, if people really feel that their class are not wanted anymore by Blizzard then WoW would've died a long time ago with Burning Crusade. They are keeping up to date with the issues and know a lot of the issues about certain classes (I.e. enhancement shaman/Shadow priest). I do think people will die down on the dumb posts about their class is gimp when the gear in expac will exceed their expectations and see that they can punch out some good numbers. Right now, I really love to see more competent beta testers that know how to play their class and provide more feedback than comment on how they do in dueling.
Further note, Pvp tweaking has always been controversial with the benefit of one or more class than others and effecting Pve as a result in some cases. It's definately hard to balance both pve/pvp as an arena standpoint but Wintergrasp will eliminate that by a margin because it will revolve around large teams to work with and hopefully you dont end up with a bad team than have to worry about speccing to raid there. Blizzard devs will keep watching these issues beyond 3.0 and expac for sure until it gets settled a bit easier and we won't have to see 5 million DKs because they can't balance shit. hehe
MMO Reporter
wait you mean people will have to have skill over buffs to get into raids? holy gee blizz way to make the playtime i spend.... worth the playtime i spend? seriously, what's the complaint here? people will be judged based on skill now, omg qq
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IVE PLAYED WOW AND LIKED IT SO IM A FANBOI PLZ FLAME MY THREADS CUZ I MIGHT MENTION WOW
This is just the same rehashed argument that is thrown at Blizzard everytime they have decided to drop/change/add things to any particular class at any given time, in any given patch. Can we also bear in mind that there is a little more to the game than just raiding.
Every patch where something changes there are a bunch of people that drop in and complain about how it is going to fundamentally change the way they play the game and Blizzard are so stupid for doing it, well guess what, they have made sweeping changes in the past and most of those panic statement makers are still there playing their 'impossible to play' game. While i am on that point, is it just me or do some people take this stuff far too seriously, it is after all just a game and if you are not enjoying it you can always go play something else?
Finally, the expansion is still in Beta, the final changes have not been made and unless you are on the development team that are doing the balancing and have an actual view of the 'big picture' it is difficult to say exactly where they are going yet now isn't it. That is not to say that they will get it right first time out the gate, that is the tricky thing about 'balance' as it takes time to adjust things until you get it completely right.
If more and more poeple that are in the Beta would spend their time letting the developers know where they think things are going wrong rather than ringing the panic bell every time something doesn't meet their particulat taste, then maybe the balance would be sorted a bit quicker.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
My point is that the change in philosophy means PvE balance matters a lot more now. In the past it hasn't made a vast difference to most of us if one class was slightly more OP. Rogues top DPS - np - because you still needed locks for debuffs, shadow priests for mana regen, hunters for MD etc.
Before arena, most people didn't care much about PvP class balance. Then it suddenly became far more important. This thing forces the same problem onto PvE.
And some of those people in the past have made good points - e.g. top end guilds often only take one mage to a raid, whilst they will stack large numbers of resto shaman. So if you're currently a skilled mage trying to get into a top end guild, then you are so out of luck. My point is that with these new changes, this sort of thing is likely to spread to more guilds - even those raiding at the low end.
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I have no problem with the philosophy of skill being rewarded. My problem is that such a system is much harder to properly set up than the current system, and I don't trust Blizzard to get it right.
You think Blizzard can balance classes in PvE perfectly?
LoL - just look at what a great job they did at balancing things in TBC PvP.
I am also worried that the release date of Wotlk seems far more driven by the arrival of Christmas than whether it is actually ready.
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So your argument is just basically - "Trust Blizzard they know best". Somehow I don't feel reassured.
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ER, what do you think happened in the first expansion when they lowered the raids down to 10/24 mans? Same thing really, lots of classes lost their spots, why expect this expansion to be much different.
Like you said, solution is simple, re-roll or go home. Take you what, like a week to get a level 70 these days?
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The advantage is that class balances can be analysed trrough the Arena system.
Ever since Arena exists we see decent follow ups (started in patch 2.3 and up) in the PvP specs of classes. Every gaming site of Wow has some kind of analysis and contribute to further fine tune eveything up to 0.01% of balancing issues.
Problem is that the tweaking for PVE has to be done in relation to the dungeons/raids and like someone said before: the end balance has to be seen at level 80.
So it's not only Blizzard we trust, we can also rely on those hundreds of different websites to analyse the stats to death.
No other game is so much analysed as Wow. The advantage is that the game is becoming rather a rocket science in stats. The disadvantage is that this analysis resembles more and more a scientific number crunching with less freedom for player choices in spec trees and "fun" specs.
This is like saying Windows 7 is released to early isn't it? WotLK isn't out yet. =/
This change is greatly welcome, paladins can now use different auras without needing to be in the same group, mana is now instant instead of every 5 seconds, and now you can do every instance in either 25 or 10 man versions.
If every class is worried about being useless, then what class would be useful? Adding another tank/dps class will balance the game out along with the class additions and changes.
I agree only on the basis that every release is to early but with the advent of monthly or even weekly updates will bring the game closer to balanced.
No offense but only newbs feel this way about the up-coming changes.
They are making it you no longer require certain classes for groups no more ah man we need a mage or cc / aoe etc. Now you just need 10 or 25 good players of whatever class. Its a good change as long as you dont suck and get raid slots becasue you are a mana battery even though you suck and your dmg is low a good shadow priest has good dmg. Its time to turn down the qq and turn up the skill.
Well that's looking at it from the completely negative side. What about examining the positives? This also means that you no longer will be left out because you're a mage and we already have enough mages and we HAVE to have a Shadow Priest. It doesn't matter that you are 10 times the player that the shadow priest is and we'd REALLY like to take you over him but we can't.
So yeah, there's going to be some screaming and hollering from some folks who got in just because they had too go and now they might be left out, but personally I'd rather look at what I as an individual bring to the raid rather than just what buffs I can provide to the raid.
It may take a little while to get it all sorted, but I have confidence that Blizzard will work thru the issues and people will adjust to the new system and eventually it will be better than what we had before. I don't KNOW that's the case, but why not give it a chance before we start saying it won't work.
So your argument is just basically - "Trust Blizzard they know best". Somehow I don't feel reassured.
My argument is that maybe, just maybe, the owners, operators, developers and producers of the software and the people that have more access to statistics on the game than you can shake a stick at may know just a little bit more about how the balance is working than a few people with a skewed and singular point of aspect. Would that not be a fair argument?
As much as people scream and shout about how the changes that Blizzard are making will effect "everyone", they are still only looking at it from inside their own little bubble of collective knowledge and not from the server/continent/world wide "big picture" that Blizzard can see it from.
Just take an hour out and go back to look at the 'doom and gloom' threads that litter this forum before/during/after every patch and then look at the state of play as it stands, then you may excuse me for not running for the nearest bomb shelter because the sky is falling in due to a few balance changes that aren't even finalised yet.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Well me and my sisters play ( sisters play a lot more then me) i just hope that its not HUGE changes like SoE did to EQ2 after about 8 months of being out... lots of ppl left because of it. Changing the combat system and not doing it correctly can have bad impact on the game.
Lets just hope they get is right.. or close enough.
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You are making my case for me. There are vast statistics concerning arena. And yet still certain classes/spec enjoy vast advantages over others. Even with these vast statistics Blizzard has been completely unable to balance PvP at 70 - I can't see any reason why they'd make a better job wiith PvE at 80.
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Actually - trying to win arguments by calling people noobs is both childish and offensive.
I know enough to be certain I'm not a noob. During TBC I have topped raid damage meters with my hunter, and topped raid healing meters with my shaman. I have no doubt that whatever class I will play I will be able to compete effectively with other members of the same class.
But I'm still left crossing my fingers and hoping that whichever class I pick isn't inherently gimped by the very design of the game (cf. ferals in vanilla or Retridins in TBC or hunters in arena) - because if it is, then I may well find myself having to try twice as hard to merely stay level with other classes/specs.
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I just don't understand why you are argueing this point. There is no longer any clear consensus on what classes are doing too much DPS. You tell me 2-3 classes that you think are doing too much raid damage, and I'll link you to threads in that classes forums saying " nobody is going to bring us to raids". Everyone thinks 'their' class is doing less dps then every other class.
The information you are talking about is back when there were obvious bugs with certain abilities for certain classes. You are taking a long term crybaby outlook based on bugs that lasted less than a week on the BETA servers.
Lol.... mabe one day every one will be shamans
, (i use to play shammy prob 3-4 months ago got sick of getting debuffed by blizz and quit! i can almost go to college with all this money im saving!)
Currently it's actually quite hard to compare classes, even when we can see combat logs from the test realms. Since damage output can vary considerably according to factors such as:
i) How much gear characters have
ii) How skilled the player is
iii) Spec
iv) How difficult a class/spec is to play
So the situation is that even with lots of information available, no-one actually knows how balanced the classes are apart from possibly the devs (and possibly they don't either - see below). All we can be certain of is the vast disparities that stick out like a sort thumb (e.g. retri palas, death knights).
However, when vast disparities still exist, it seems to mean that small disparaties don't also exist - we can see spec A does twice as much dps as spec B, but it's very hard for any of us to know with current information whether spec A does 20% more than spec B. And 20% is more than enough to lose you your raid spot.
That's why a lot of people are worried. And some of the worries on class forums seem to me to be quite legitimate and to be expressed by mature people who know their class well and they make well thought out points about issues such as ability scaling (ofc there are also the usual kiddies and noobs).
To dismiss all complaints with the idea that "lots of people are complaining and lots of people aren't and therefore no one has a cause to complain" seems to me to be hopelessly naiive. Perhaps some of the complaints are right and some are wrong? Is that too hard a hypothesis to consider?
And do the developers have a clear handle on things? Looking at the lists of recent changes, how much dps is being moved up or down suggests to me that they aren't yet at a balanced point. And this close to release they really should be.
Consider for example, some of the following:
i) Some classes may currently be improperly understood. For example, pre-TBC, the main raiding build for hunters was MM. It wasn't until several months into TBC that the hunter community began to work out that BM was superior for PvE at 70. I'm not even sure whether was an intentional development decision or whether it was just an unintentional side effect of other choices they'd made (did Blizzard ever say?). So if such disparaties don't become apparent until after release, how can we be confident of equality before release?
ii) Some specs may have relatively hard rotations, whilst others may be much more complex. For example, for druids the new cat rotation looks quite hard to learn, involving half a dozen different skills, whilst moonkins still only press a small number of buttons. So it's likely that in beta the moonkins will do more damage, but as the cats practice, they may catch up or overtake the moonkins. Or maybe they won't. Who knows?
iii) From what I've heard almost all the testing has concentrated on the first couple of raids. So it hasn't really addressed issues such as scaling. So a guild that races through Naxx and quickly heads to bigger and better things is likely to see some of their members rapidly outstripping others. Sure - Blizz may eventually sort it out. But until then, if you're a decent skilled person from the wrong class, then tough luck.
The only real way to work through issues like the above is with a decent period of testing. But with classes changing so rapidly, yesterday's test results are already out of date. So they can't really get proper test results. IMO, they should really get classes balanced first, and then announce the release date. Not the other way round!
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The OP is completely clueless
First you say that the expansion is coming too fast because classes are not yet balanced.
Then you say 'classes are balanced' on the beta servers, but nobody knows for sure if they will be balanced on the live servers.
If that is your logic, then they should never release an expansion, period.
Things look great on the beta servers, things will be fine when thy launch it to the real servers and they will continue to tweek things like always. There is absolutely no reason to say WotLK isn't ready yet unless you are prepared to say the same thing about every expansion for every game.
The patches they have done over the past week have been minor MINOR tweeking. There hasn't been any drastic changes in like a month. I also doubt you even are on the beta if you talk about Feral-cat dps and moonkin DPS. If anything, you have it backwards. Feral DPS rotation is pretty standard and hasn't changed much in a month. Moonkin (my main spec) is the one that has uncertaintity around it's rotation since Eclipse is still debatable (they are buffing it again which might change our rotations). Again, you clearly took a snapshot of the beta from a month ago and are basing your assumptions on that.
But the point is.. there is still over a month and they are only tweeking minor abilities for a handful of classes. A dev just posted this week that the talent trees are done, that they will only be finessing a few numbers here and there to get things right.. and again.. they still have an entire month to do that.
You can cry and worry all you want, but that's because there will always be a chicken-little when something changes.
I am not going to lose a second of sleep over any changes they make. IMO, good players will always find positons in raid groups if they so desire whereas people who might otherwise be ok players but bring some extra baggage into the raid will often be pushed aside. Worrying about these changes seems premature.
In any case, if this is causing you so much stress, you might want to revisit why you play these games. Is it possible you are too emotionally involved in them for your own good? Is it possible you have a game addiction problem?