Damage Types, how would you balance them?

Community General Discussion
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  • Frost damage ignores armor.
  • Fire damage has a 30% increased chance to crit with 50% increased crit damage.
  • Arcane damage increases by 10% for each buff carried and 10% for each debuff on the enemy.
  • Nature damage echoes itself in a second attack against enemies for 50% damage.
  • Holy damage increases by 50% from in front of the unit and 50% when the enemy is at or below 25% health.
  • Shadow damage increases by 25% for each stat the unit has lower than their enemy.

EDIT 1: What I’m thinking is that if you’re under-geared for example, then shadow damage is for you. If you’re up against a lot of tanky melee, frost. Fire for low-armored enemies. Arcane if you’re an affliction warlock :stuck_out_tongue: Holy if you like maneuvering. Nature cus its fun. Just so you have different tools to react to different situations - agree that perfect balance is impossible (thanks to Dottie below for detailing).

EDIT 2: Thanks to Thyri for a good perspective on how balance works in a second by second game like Wow. Might I adapt me post some more? :smiley: Blizzard has added too many systems to make their balancing job easy to do. The changes I’d propose wouldn’t be in isolation (I’d remove all the needless conduit complexity among other things). Players who got used to the complexity will complain. But there are times where balance is needed (like Holy Priests outnumbering their healer brethren). I like the idea of elemental energies having some unique effect to them, to make them feel as powerful and interactive as you’d expect from the elements. It doesn’t have to be like my post, I’d basically just like to do something simpler, newer and more imaginative with the combat in Wow (see Dunkiee’s idea below as an example).

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I wouldn’t balance them as it’s an impossible thing to do. There would be only one class and spec.

It’s like herding cats, trying to balance DPS.

Change one thing and it becomes unbalanced against another or getting a new bit of gear makes it OP.

Even if you achieved the miracle of balance (if anything it’s beyond a miracle), it would be boring to all do exactly the same amount of damage.

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Actually, elemental damage has always ignored armor :frowning_with_open_mouth:

Talking about them… I wish elemental damage was modified by weather effects. Things like…

  • More shadow damage during the night.
  • More nature damage in rainy weather.
  • More fire damage in heated/high temperature areas like around volcanoes.

But it would be difficult to cover all of them meaningfully and equally.

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And what effect does that have… my guess you have no clue.

It;s easy top throw arbitary numbers at a wall.

Indeed. Balance is subjective.

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The thing about Damage Type Balancing is, that this is only really possible when using a 3-4 Trinity/Quadro System, so that 1 side/corner (if you imagine it visually) can (be) affect(ed by) the other 2 sides/corners.

Taking your example with the 6 damage types:

https://imgur.com/a/d8sng98

That’s how I would do it in base design.

Edit: A small addition on the Identities of the damage types. As far as I know, Holy and Shadow are both damage types majorly influenced by the thoughts and emotions/believes of the wielders. Hence why I ordered them into the “Arcane”-Family.

Fire and Frost are obviously Damage Types that origin from the Elementals and Nature, hence part of the “Nature”-Family.

Regarding how the details in the balance would be (for example, how much damage difference on resistance, etc.) I can’t give an answer, since I have no clue how it is atm weighted. Also, I have no idea if there are any damage resistance types in WoW atm.

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If bosses have resist it’ll be general magic. Blizzard didn’t like some specs being completely useless in some fights. Could you imagine the uproar if certain specs were practically useless like they were in some older expansions.

There would be a surge in the popcorn futures market. Who needs crypto.

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Since I didn’t specify the details in my chart, it would have room for it. Actually I did base my sorting on PvP perspective (so player class vs player class). Not Player vs AI. In PvE it could be handled differently, like say some regular Adds and Elites have resistances that which makes it easier for certain classes than others (like a Paladin or Priest dealing more damage with Holy against Undead/Demons), but against Bosses all players have the same level with their damage types (so, no type resistance on bosses).

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I don’t think having enemies with specific damage type weaknesses would be good for the game, since it would go against the “bring the player, not the class” principle.

The easiest and most sustainable way of improving balance is to reduce the number of variables. Covenants, soul-binds, conduits, legendaries, and tier sets all add a lot of complexity to the balancing problem.

Because Blizz is getting rid of most of that stuff in Dragonflight, they should be able to do a better job at balancing. I guess tier sets with powerful effects will continue to exist, but balancing just 1 extra layer of borrowed power, rather than 4, should be doable.

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This is a terrible idea.

Blizzard will surely implement it.

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To be fair, thats not a dev problem. Its one created by the community seeing the top 1% of players using a particular group composition and blindly thinking that is the only way and nothing else matters

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Absolutely true.

Let’s hope for that. I am playing ESO since 2 weeks again and we have there not “damage type resistances” on AI enemies really, but for players in PvE/PvP. It works there because the game was fundamentally designed for it.

World of Warcraft on the other hand isn’t designed for that.

To be fair, that’s a problem in every online game. Even my beloved Destiny franchise.

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If you are a priest irl and can prove it to Blizzard you deal 100% more holy damage.
If you are a convicted arsonist irl and can prove it you deal 100% more fire damage.
If you want to deal 100% more shadow damage all you have to be is…actually let’s not go there.

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I agree.
The best you can do is to reach a Rock-Paper-Scissors type of equillibrium. Mage kills Warrior, Rogue kills Mage, Warrior kill Rogue. And so on.

If there are too many Rogues running around then people will start playing Warriors for all that Rogue-stomping fun.

That’s for PVP.

For PVE, I don’t think it matters quite so much. As long as classes are fun and not wildly unbalanced then it’s fine. Some classes will be a bit better at AoE and some at ST. Some will have some mobility and some will have other utility. Just as long are the fights are varied enough that one style isn’t advantages all (or most) of the time.

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You all raise very good points about balance :+1: I agree that perfect balance means basically the same class. Which is kind of what they’ve done with giving all classes the same counters at least (a slow, a stun, an interrupt). It’s like equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity (can’t really have the former without everyone being the same). What I was thinking was that you might have a couple different tools through the elements to react to different situations.

As Gram says above it doesn’t really matter for PVE, but for PVP if you’re under-geared for example, then shadow damage is for you. If you’re up against a lot of tanky melee, frost. Fire for low-armored enemies. Arcane if you’re an affliction warlock :stuck_out_tongue: Holy if you like maneuvering. Nature cus its fun.

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This sounds like balancing would be even worse tbh.

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What makes you think so?

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Basically, youve added even more extras into the mix. They cant balance the game as it is.

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Tbh, frost damage ignoring armor, fire damage having increased crit or whatever… That doesn’t matter that much.

What is more important is how much damage it deals in how much time. In other words not simply overall DPS, but DPS at every time during the fight.
Because, you might have two classes that deal 20k dps overall and think it’s fine, but if one class deals most of its damage during the first few seconds and the other deals all of that damage during a longer period, then these two classes work very differently.

One will be overpowered in short fights while the other will be overpowered in long fights.

And sadly, if you want to balance it, so that no class is overpowered, you cannot do it by simply looking at classes, you absolutely have to look at what kind of fights they’ll have to face.

To be convinced with this, for those who like math, think of the total damage of a fight and how that damage has been dealt.
Take two classes (or any number of classes, but 2 is enough for the argument), and say that you want them to be perfectly balanced. In other words, you want them to end up with the same amount of damage regardless of the duration of the fight.
That total damage is the integral of their DPS. And if two classes deal the same damage regardless of the fight duration, that means this integral is the same for both classes. And if two functions (the dps here) have the same integral, that means these two functions are in fact the same.
So, in other words, that means the speed at which damage is done has to be exactly the same.

So, if one of these two classes has high damage at first then slow, then the other also has to be exactly like that.

So how do you balance classes while keeping things different, varied ?
You do it by introducing encounters with different fights that favors a particular type of damage, then another etc… All while forbidding players to switch characters.
And you try to balance these fights so they are all equally important.

Right now, of course, it’s not what is happening. Right now, it’s survival hunter and destrolock who take everything.
Few months ago, it was WW monk who was completely OP.
Meanwhile, we have classes/specs that have been notoriously bad for so long that even when blizzard buffs them, their bad reputation remains.

And it’s not particularly that these classes are really OP or bad. It’s also that the environment they are in make them OP or bad.

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Also… Contrary to what some have said here. Balance does matter in PvE. Maybe not for the same reasons as they do in PvP, but how is that surprising ? PvP and PvE are so different that they could implement two different games.

So, balance is important in PvP, because you want a fair fight. And that’s a fair point.

But balance is also important in PvE, because you don’t want to “be left behind”, to look at the group finder for hours until some dude accept you in a key which is way too low level for you ilvl, when you should be doing much higher keys.
Whereas some dude who plays a FOTM class is accepted in keys that is too high for his ilvl, but that will be fine because that FOTM factor count as a +50 ilvl.

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:ok_hand: Nice answer, thank you!

That makes a lot of sense, and a lot of what you read on the forums does sound like just complaining because another spec is getting attention for a change, like Holy Priests in PvP (and PVE per Power Infusion) - though maybe in their case it is a little over the top. I mean I see holy priests everywhere now with good gear. My only real problem with that is I’m finding PvP matches a little less fun. There’s always a fight between DPS and healing anyway, and I’m all for the job of healers being easier, but the matches are a bit long, less interesting and in particular: unvaried. I see Holy Priests outnumbering all other healers combined basically. So that’s an example where balance makes sense.

I should probably adapt my post above some more, I wouldn’t propose making changes in isolation, I’d be in favor of removing some of the many complex systems which actively hamper the game’s balance. I agree that you can’t have perfect balance, but making things so complicated you can’t do anything about it is bad game design, in my opinion.

I personally like associating elemental energies with different effects, it makes them seem more interactive. It doesn’t have to be like my post, but something simpler and more imaginative might be fun. These are big changes to the game though, and in fairness to Blizzard (the money-grubbing beesterds), it’s not easy to do their job. But they might make life easier for themselves if they thought through some systems more carefully and were more cautious of what abilities they give players, only to remove them later, and for those players who got used to the new play style to then clamor for bringing them back.