So as we all know frost mages, ele shamans (post naxx), destro locks and sub rogues are a meme specs in PvE, but a lot of people including myself would like to play some of these specs for their play style and there are no reasons for not to buff them. For example giving ele shamans % SP buff on totem instead of fixed number like demo locks have or giving frost mages buff on bosses etc…
Please don’t bring the argument of well frost mages are good in PvP that’s their balance because that makes no sense if you just look at Paladin specs for example. I believe that more variety will bring more people to the game and afaik there’s no reason to not buff some of these specs that are fun.
Thats because these named classes, best example sub rogue, are ment to be able to burst/setup. If a sub rogue can deal the same dps as a mutilate rogue, the sub rogue will always be better, because he can choose when to burst, while the mutilate rogue cant. This is important for pve boss burst phases, but even more for pvp.
By using google I could confirm that early icc a destruction warlock was under 10% overall damage behind the other 2 specs, which is still reasonable in terms of dps balancing. Ele and enhancer were still very close damage wise.
Frostmage was indeed bad in pve and Blizzard could buff maybe deepfreeze boss damage, but other than that, every class scales differently with gear throughout the expansion and has its ups and downs. While it might not be the best choice to progress with a frostmage or a sub rogue, it wont harm raids to have one of each specs with them and these specs are arguably the best specs of their classes in pvp as you said, because of their superior way to burst/better utility.
Blizzard didnt want to have different damage modifiers for pve and pvp back in the day and changing it now doesnt sound reasonable, since it would have to be adjusted with every patch/every gear progression state to actually balance out all the classes perfectly.
Regarding shaman: Yes, having the totem scaling would be good idea, same with stoneclaw totem (glyph), but balance-chaning all abilites now or even normalizing them might affect the class design in the end. I personally want to take as few risks as possible for Blizzard to ruin the game, so the fewer changes the better.
Google source I mentioned: @engadget.com/2010-05-06-icc-dps-analysis-by-spec.html@ (without the “@”)
Every class specc has their role to fill in wotlk. Ele shammy will be OP in pvp. So will sub rogue and frost mage. There is 0 point in buffing them cuz then they would be good for both pvp and pve. And all of these classes you name have at least 1 other spec to be perfectly viable. Some cases 2.
I do not think that little buffs to make these specs more viable in PvE is going to ruin anything in my opinion and it will just bring more variety to the game and overall fun. I do not think that its that big of a risk even with gear progression. We do not need seperate PvE PvP balancing just some talent changes that work only in PvE wouldn’t really be that big of a deal…
That would work, but creates other problems. If every class has the exact same dps, then specs for raids will only be chosen based on their raid support. Why would you pick a destruction warlock over a demolock, if the demo just has so much better raid support. Why pick a dps class/spec that has same dps as any other spec, but cant burst when its needed or has a high ramp up time? The encounters also favor different specs and its not clear where you take your average from. Is it a no movement/dps only boss like patchwerk, or a boss that requires more mechanics and movement?
Its impossible to really balance the classes out and the current Blizzard team couldnt do a better job at balancing as it would be without changes.
I understand that some specs are under-performing, but there are reasons for that. Even if they are under-performing, they are still viable in terms of being able to clear the content. I think adding more retail stuff into classic will remove even more of Blizzards remaining inhibitions to just put every retail feature/design into classic expansions and to remove the original ones. We want to play old expansions, not entirely new ones. If we would want that, we would talk about dragon flight.
I did not say that everyone need to be equalized but no one is gonna bring frost mages or destro locks or even ele shamans in Ulduar will struggle to get into raids they are not viable that’s the problem not that they do not do same damage as other higher performing classes. We just want that we can actually play these specs in PvE and not be laughed at.
But why? You just said that without giving any reasons or arguments as to why to not mix up things a little bit and do something just little bit different for sake of fun and variety. It’s just stupid
It will mess up for example PvP if you suddenly buff these already really strong PvP specs. Unless you want the game to be like retail where skills are totally different in PvP versus PvE.
We didn’t balance classes in Vanilla, we didn’t do that in TBC, so why should we do it in wotlk? You already know which classes will be good and which won’t, so just don’t play a class which you think will suck if you are interested in “pumping”. Ele shamans will surely get a raid spot even through ICC, the rest are quite bad, but maybe you can find a bad guild which accepts them? Not everyone is minmaxing even though the majority is.
All in all, each of the classes you mentioned have one or more viable PvE specs, so I don’t see why you just don’t play those? Some specs are more pvp focused while some are pve focused, that is how it has always been and I don’t know why we should suddenly change the game just because someone wants to raid with a suboptimal spec. The expansion is wotlk, and let’s preferably keep it as wotlk as well. If you want continuous class balance changes where the devs try to make every spec as strong as the other one you should try retail. Even though they fail with that there as well, and wotlk would not be any different.
But again we have classes like paladins that have all 3 specs both viable if not op in both PvE and PvP so your argument automatically makes no sense as why not give some specific PvE buffs to these unviable classes. And why have 2 specs viable if we can have all 3 specs viable it’ll just bring more fun and variety = more players. And so what if we didn’t have balancing in vanilla and TBC? Does that mean that we never can have some? I don’t think so
Isn’t keeping wotlk as close as possible to the original wotlk enough of an argument for you? As said, if you want constant changes go to retail. I prefer the game as it was the last time I played it. That’s the whole point of “Classic”.
You should take advantage of the information we already have this time around rather than intentionally picking a PvP build and then going to do PvE on that said build and complain about it being bad.
I’m all for them updating class balance for a wotlk SoM, but not for Classic wotlk, as then it wouldn’t be Classic any longer. 3.3.5 is as balanced as it gets in wotlk, and you are pretty much the only one who I have seen around here complaining about it.
Even if we disregard fact that the whole point of classic is to have those old designs in. Blizzard is not trustworthy enough to not mess it up.
On top of that, most of the “bad specs” are still perfectly viable for 90% of casual playerbase. The only big outliers in that regard are frost mage, sub rogue and bm hunter (and even then bm will be probably good enough for many groups). You can easily raid all content in wrath with ele or destro.
The specs you mentioned are PvP specs, lol. It’s absolutely fine for certain specs to be geared towards specific areas of the game, provided that the class as a whole can work in ANY part of the game.
I think we should just give every class and spec the exact same set of abilities, just colored differently. Then there’d be balance. Then there’d be peace. Then there’d be freedom (from such weird requests).
Why not to buff Blood DK dmg? I think it’s unfair that only 2 of 3 DK specs have place as DPS in raids.
While we are at it, I think that Smite and Holy Fire damage should be buffed, maybe give those 100% crit chance and 50% bonus crit damage? It’s unfair that Discipline Priest doesn’t have a place as DPS and is forced to spam PWS 24/7.
Oh almost forgot. Fury Warriors need some new powerful tanking talents. I think that it’s unfair that DK with 1 two-hander tanks better than a Warrior with 2 two-handers.
They have done tweaks. Arcane Mages, for instance, got a slight nerf in Phase 2 if I am not misremembering.
I view this as an argument for balancing tweaks.
You say this as a joke but Wrath was the expansion that began the homogenisation process. Shadow Priests’ Vampiric Touch was given to Retribution Paladins and Survival Hunters and rebranded as “replenishment”. Rogues that had had zero AoE previously were given an AoE that ended up becoming really powerful, which brought them up on par with the other classes in terms of AoE. WLK began the process that deteriorated the sense of uniquity that the classes had had.
On the topic at hand: Classic vanilla and TBCC had a rather static class balance throughout their entire lifespans. Is this good? I would argue no. They do not have to perform such overwhelming changes as they’ve done historically, but tweaks should be encouraged. Take the Assassination Rogue in TBCC. It did not really have a spot where it shone in TBC. According to Icy Veins it is one of the worst specs in PvE and in PvP it lacked the insane utility of Preparation and Shadowstep. It was also hit really hard by resilience. Additionally, for world solo content the spec was harder to play than Combat seeing as it relied on positioning…