No. Not “improves”. No. “Improves”, like the cake, is a lie.
Is there ANYBODY who has played in three expansions who still believes they make class changes to improve the game?
This one gets up my nose, because when I was new I assumed that the devs made changes to improve the game. I was a naïve idiot. They don’t. They make changes just to change the game. They make changes to roll the classes around the wheel, from bottom to top and back again (“No class rules forever, my son” “To the ground, baby”). Personally, I wouldn’t discount the idea that they make changes just because they themselves want to try out their own new ideas for their own egos; there’s a lot of that in software development.
Even more significant, they have explained since WoD how they have systematically simplified the basis of classes to make their own jobs easier. (“Base” and disposable “toppings”.) No, I don’t accept that as a mischaracterisation. As a dev in a very different field myself, I even sympathise and approve of the underlying intent. As a system gets older, and grows and accretes, the maintenance surface increases, every change potentially affects more and more things, and the number of ways to screw up multiplies. Preventing that from becoming overwhelming is necessary. Ion has explained how they spread the changes over two to three expansions to limit the perception.
They make changes for these reasons, in the alpha, and then try to clean up the screwed-up mess that results before it goes live. THAT’s what happens. And sometimes they don’t clean up the screwed-up mess, and sometimes the screw-up is too fundamental, too structural, to be fixed. And so a class or two is told “We’ll try to do something about it (band-aid, or buff) in the next patch” or “Sorry, we’ll fix it next expansion”. BfA had a wider problem. They thought they could fix all specs with Azerite Traits. They couldn’t. Cluster-fail.
From reading and watching, I think they may genuinely have changed classes just to improve them up to early Wrath, but I wasn’t there. Definitely not after Wrath. As the great John Gall said: Intrasystem goals come first, and so now we see them dominate the layout of a game increasingly engineered for game designers rather than players.
End of rant.
Important question. I have wished for an expansion where we discover that since we went through the Red Portal, we actually discover that we stayed in the Alternate Timeline, and we wake up back in Shrine, ready to go forward from there, with a knowledge of the mistakes made since Mists. But that ain’t gonna happen.
Here’s what I do know: Even if they were trying to improve the game, I don’t trust this team to make enjoyable classes on their own. Maybe some of them once knew, but have forgotten how to let go of their own learned prejudices and fears. Honestly, I would prefer to see them recapitulate the evolution of classes from Wrath through Mists, but with the improved tools they have now, than start on yet another desperate and unproven odyssey through Yet Another Universe of Bad Ideas That They Can’t Make Work.
I’m no kind of theorycrafter or expert. I maxed all classes in Legion, but I play maybe 5 specs well enough to avoid comedy. But here’s what I do know: I have seen myself enjoy all my classes less and less on a second-to second basis after Mists. Yes, the Legion buffs somewhat made up for it for a while, but basically, in Mists I could be happy pulling a field full of wolves, because my class was fun enough on its own to engage me, and that basic fun has just continually drained out of every single GCD. And without that key ingredient of a fun class, it doesn’t matter how many swirlies or sparklies they add. As the Vogon guard said about his job: the hours aren’t bad, but the seconds are pretty awful.
