I’d like to start by saying that I love the fact that since TWW open world is getting more and more love with delves, future prey system as well as experiments like heroic world tier in Legion Remix.
Sadly, the attention to open world doesn’t include balancing classes for open world content. Whenever a question pops up about best class/spec for delves, the answer is always “tanks” closely followed by “pet classes”. Similarly, in Legion Remix tanks became kings of heroic world tier:
Heroic World Tier awards more artifact knowledge due to empowered enemies. However, this comes at the cost of mobs with much higher health and damage. White swings alone will kill the majority of DPS specs, especially between 70 to 80 unless you’re pulling very slowly. However, as a Tank, you can pull whatever you want, in whatever quantities you want and even some of the biggest rares!
I was hoping this will get adressed in future expansions. Since more open world content was announced, I hoped more attention would be paid to balancing. Sadly, it seems it’s the other way around.
My main, frost mage, is losing a lot of his crowd control potential, that let it keep enemies at bay, as well as any kind of self sustain. I wrote about it in the mage section (link below) and I won’t reppeat myself here. I find the changes to be widely applauded by the M+ community, since our control abilities interfered with big pulls, and losing much of our self sustain isn’t that big of a problem in group content which is done with healers. As long as we have some big defensives for mechanics, all’s good for them. This is not the case for open world, where You have to constantly deal with a steady stream of damage, not single big abilities here and there.
With the doubling down on class disbalance in the open world I was already considering changing my main, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was Valeera Sanguinar, or rather her replacemant for Brann’s “Dwarven Medicine”.
See, Brann threw his potions at Your location, which means that if I started a fidht at a range (which I do as a ranged DPS to avoid damage), but Valeera’s replacement orbs appear around the mob she attacks, which mens that if i want healing, I have to get in the range of mobs. This design complelty invalidates my ability to keep mobs at a distance, since I need healing to heal infoming spell/ranged damage. See examples of how Valeera’s healing works here (if the timestamp doesn’t work, You can see it clearly at 7:20):
With this changes my squishy mage became even more squishy, and on top of limiting my control potential Blizzard came up with a design where I can’t even take advantage of what’s left of it, forcing me into melee.
I’ve had enough. I’d still play Midnight, because it’s shaping up to be good expansion - just not with my mage. I’m not looking for artificial challange. I don’t want to intentionally make my game experience worse by choosing a class that’s becoming less and less viable in open world. It’s not about me being unable to do content - I’m confident I would be able to, just as I am now. But if the game design forces me into melee, i’d rather play a proper melee class for it.
