The most difficult classes/specs to play should do the most DPS

Community General Discussion
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Once thing I never understood about Blizzards decision process on class balance is why they make classes with very easy, simple rotations do insane amounts of damage? rather than the classes that take so much work and thinking to complete your rotation just to do less damage.

The first classes that come to mind are DH and BM hunter. Most players could play these two classes to some degree of success. Simple rotations, not much has to be thought out, there’s no setup, you just press and go for the most part. Yet often times Blizzard makes DH nuke things down and BM do high damage, despite have a super simple rotation. Why is that? You should be rewarded for having to deal with the nuances, setup and thinking it takes to do your damage.

For example, Shamans and Feral druid. You ever played Ele Shaman? weird, clunky feel and rotation to spells, low survivability and you have to setup your dot damage which is annoying, then hit your procs, stand still while casting for the most part and then if the stars align you can dish out a hurricane of damage, which is fun but damn what a chore. All while having to deal with your totems, elementals and everything else, which is not fun when having to wait for the GCD to cast your next ability. Feral druid requires you to setup bleeds, manage combo points, zip around, shapeshift at times, so that you can do your damage, not to mention you’re a druid so you have 50 million buttons/abilities on your toolbar. Why aren’t these S tier every time?

I just think you should be rewarded for having to take more actions and think about setup, otherwise, why would you expect the community overall to play a class that takes much more work?

It’s like driving an automatic car versus someone who is driving a manual/stick shift. Sure, it’s fun to feel cool switching gears and “driving” a car with a shifter, you might feel like you’re really going fast but then you look over at the guy sitting in his automatic car relaxing, drinking his Starbucks Caramel Latte and eating a chocolate chip cookie, driving with one knee under the steering wheel while you’re pretending you’re driving in Nascar, why do more work for the same result or worse?

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No, most difficult classes/specs to play should NOT do the most dps.

  • Difficulty is not entirely objective, and depends on the player of the spec. Some players have better affinity with timers, others have better reaction time with procs, others are better equipped to deal with massive amounts of keybinds. There is no clear way to define a scale of difficulty to “reward” the best dps.

  • Even in the case that you could clearly define the “hardest” specs, this would not be better for the game. It would actually force players into certain specs (since they would be mathematically and designed to be highest dps), and would ruin spec/class representation and balance.

  • One more negative impact it would bring, is widen the gap between high end equipment/hardware. Playing on better pcs/keyboards/mice/connections always brought a slight advantage. The problem is that by making the highest dps classes ALSO the hardest, it would widen the gap between the players using high end hardware and those that do not.

So no, I believe this is a terrible idea. Specs SHOULD be balanced between them, so that apart from their respective niches (areas that certain specs shine), they should be almost equal.

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In pve there is not one class that is so complex that u cant learn to play it.

Dps wise atleast, i think u can play optimal any class; be it simple rotation or more complex
One.

Also, a player thats doing high m+ or mythic raids on a hunter or dh, i”m more than sure could play elemental shammy from ur example to its full capabilities.

Classes should just be balanced, and people should have the oportunity to do good on all specs; either simpler or more complex.

Thats my 2 cents

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basically… in pve there are no hard classes.
Often what is “hard” about it (keeping track of a buff/debuff/timers) will be solved by addons.
The rotations of probably most classes consists of 3-4 buttons and 1-2 occasional buttons on short cd and 1-2 offensive cds that might not even modify your rotation.

the only class that indeed got a little trickier is shadow priest with a lot of procs but again, addons will make it very simple (weakauras…)

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:point_up_2:

This pretty much.

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Yes. Not sure what you mean. Is it that hard to (chain) lightning (or lava bursts when you got charges) till maelstrom is full (or above 70) and then earth shock/earthquake?

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It’s not subjective at all because you see the facts play out in game. Classes like the DH and BM are popular because of their ease of use, they’re no brainers. If you’ve played all classes some are very intuitive and require very little thought or learning to get adjusted to, while others require an understanding and looking into how the talents play together in order to maximize their effectiveness. One of those is Warlock, although an attractive class theme wise for many players, try to get a veteran player to try DH and then Demo Warlock, they’re not going to have a clue how Demo works if they’ve never played it before but will right away understand how DH works.

So this is obvious to anyone who has played multiple classes and looks at the demographic of the player base, there’s a reason there isn’t a lot of shamans yet say lots of Paladins, that’s not a coincidence and it’s more than just about player attraction to that class. Pressing bubble as a Paladin is a lot easier to determine without a thought than it is to lay a grounding totem, lasso or determine the best plan of defense in a sticky situation.

You could also determine which classes are harder to play by the amount of buttons that must be pressed to execute rotations and deal effective damage. I think it’s fairly common sense that the less you have to do and press is easier than having to press more buttons, nobody ever says something would be easier if I had more buttons to press.

Hardware also plays a mute point. The game is 18 years old, the GCD prevents twitch like reactions unless a spell is off the GCD so there’s no advantage in higher frames, ping/packet loss has a much greater affect on performance than hardware. The GCD can adjusted as well through in game tweaks to make the rotation feel smoother, that would also play a bigger role than hardware.

At any rate, those saying all classes should be balanced isn’t a reality. The game also encourages a meta as well, so there wouldn’t be any difference in what players play other than them actually having to get good with a more difficult class that requires more skill/knowledge than a simpler one, therefore, at least they would be earning it but mastering a class that has more intricacies to it than just press the button when it glows or don’t even worry about moving because on this class you can move and hit anyway.

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Having harder specs and easier specs is a good thing.
It means people can better chose the play style that suits them.

Some people want simple classes with few buttons to press. Some people want more complicated specs as they find them more engaging.

They shouldnt be better or worse than others.

Players should just chose the one thats right for them.

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Ideally yes.
But, the problem with this is that it would force everyone into the most difficult classes. Just like the Covenants and their abilities. Players didn’t choose the covenant they wanted to play, they were forced into the MinMax best ability per class.

So just like gnomes and tauren run at the same speed for the sake of the game all specs do roughly similar damage for the sake of the game.

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Which is the kind of thinking that creates the circumstances we are now. If Blizzard ignores the fact that some classes are far easier to play like BM hunter and DH yet makes these classes high damage in Dragonflight then a huge portion of the playerbase is going to move over to them and play the meta, so you’re going to see 50 million DH’s and Hunters running around, because they’re easy to adapt to and do tons of damage.

I for one don’t want to see that situation happen every single expansion, and then when they nerf the damage you see everyone going back to something else.

However, if you have a more complicated specs doing the most damage and they become meta then players are either going to have to learn and step up their game to play them or stick with a less complicated class that still does good damage but is not S tier. It just makes sense, rather than having the flavor of the month class rotate every expansion or big patch and then see massive drop offs after nerfs is those classes happen to be easy to pick up and do damage with. The classes are never going to be balanced, never have in the history of the game.

If Monk and Demo Lock are meta though, yea, you’ll see some people move over to try them out and give it a shot but the majority of people won’t stick with it and put in the time to learn those specs to be good, once they realize it’s not as easy as hitting 1,2,3, especially in a PVP environment.

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Stimmt jede klasse kann gut dps machen, nur mache Klassen bekommen denn dmg in denn :peach: Gesteckt andere Klassen müssen Hart da für Arbeiten . Also ist der Unterschied sehr groß

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But it would be different than an in-game, borrowed power sort of dynamic taking place. There would be consistency within the game, the harder the class or spec, the bigger the reward, it makes sense. You can choose to play something simpler but you’re not going to get the same reward for doing something easier or less than another player, at least in terms of damage and effectiveness. That’s the balancing factor.

The meta is always going to exist outside of that. Outside elements making your class better than it would be because of some borrowed power dynamic, that will never change and is already happening now and every expansion. The difference between this and that is you’re telling the player beforehand that they need to earn their performance, not just be given it by some spinning wheel that happens to land on your class if you’re lucky and if that class happens to also have a lower skill ceiling then 70 percent of the community is playing it.

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No class is particularly difficult to play in this game, Once you learn most classes are builder spender it becomes simple to use and extremely easy to play.

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I dit not find DH easy to play. I played all classes to max lvl and I hated the DH the most. And BM does not do insane damage. I found feral kitty easy to play- atleast before the new talents.
Love arms warrior, hate dps monks
It all depend on personal view imo

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100% agree.

Yes, it’s subjective. I find BM hunter (one of your ‘easiest’ specs) more difficult to play well than feral druid (one of your ‘hardest’ specs).

It’s entirely subjective.

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Language reported.

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you want to be on that DPS mountain alone right?
i had acces to DF beta, there is that one highest mountain above raid entrance. You can find there last Glyph for dragon riding. The fun fact is, everyone can get there and usually you can find there couple of players hanging out, chillin.

…you know maybe you dont have to be that alone on that DPS mountain.

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Ill assume you have top parses to show for the no brainer classes since its so easy.

I think class fantasy and playstyle plays a fair bit here. Paladin as by lore has a more epic feel to it than earth sniffing magicians. (No disrespect to shamans)

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Classes arent hard to rly play, go to a dummy snd do any class i assure you within a hour you will fo all their rotations easily.

What introduces complexity is how essy it is to apply to a fight, i.e BM hunters are easy because their rotation can be done on the move, which removes the punishment for poor positioning.

Snapshotting adds skill level to the feral druid as it demands you to pay attention to additional things, aswell as pooling energy for those moments.

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Is it fun to play a spec where you only spam 3 buttons or a spec where you have to think and be organised? Both play styles attract different players.