I saw an interview with an ex-dev who said that class imbalance is intentional and executives at Blizzard hold meetings to decide which specs should be underpowered next, because then Blizzard makes more money through time-played metrics and level boosts when those players have to reroll to a FOTM class. Is this true? It’s absolutely ridiculous that Blizzard would abuse its own customers like this. It also explains why class imbalance is so bad right now. Also this is the reason why the dev quit, it went against his morals and he couldn’t do it anymore.
This is false. The truth is that (a) they aren’t good at balancing and that (b) balance isn’t their first priority. That’s why it’s frequently bad and only sometimes reaches the status of “mediocre”.
Almost every multiplayer game has a meta. You can’t escape this, only try to balance it close as you can.
There was a great explanation from Riot games at one point when they were criticized for balancing why does it feel bad sometimes, truth is it’s very hard to balance stuff with multiple power levels and variety of players with different skill levels.
For instance, a class may feel bad on low gear level, but can be broken with good gear and correct stats. Also, a class may be bad in the hands of a bad or mediocre player (due to high skill floor), but may be insane in the hands of a pro. WoW also employs additional levels of balance, with PVP/PVE difference where classes use the same kit for both, and also single target / AOE damage, burst/sustained damage (fight length) etc.
Fact is it is incredibly hard to balance it out and you will always have a segment of the playerbase that is unhappy with their class state.
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Fact is, Riot, that you mention, do a much better job at balancing than Blizzard ever did. They consider it a failure when a particular champion goes outside of the 47-53 winrate corridor. If we were to apply a similar metric to WoW, we’d get at least 30-70 even after dismissing tons of things as “let’s not get stupid, this cannot ever work, won’t even consider”. And for Riot, that’s just one metric out of multiple. WoW designers are babies when it comes to balance. Total babies.
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There’s no such thing as a winrate indicator for wow though, as it’s a primarily PVE game. And also it’s hard to balance out stuff in PVE strictly as you have to keep PVP in mind all the time.
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