What happened to balance? :)

PVP Arenas
127

Oh right! God damn it! :joy:
Not sure why I wrote the other one… They both start with an I. :crazy_face:

It’s really not about Warriors. I don’t have a beef against Warriors. You don’t have to come to the rescue of your class. :yum:
I’m just making a simple point: Blizzard have added to the class design over the years by introducing more to it.

I’ll use my own Shadow Priest as an example.
Didn’t have any AoE abilities to begin with. Didn’t have any defensive cooldowns either.
Then players requested both, because it was bothersome to be without them. And Blizzard of course delivered, because the modus operandi was to add new talents and abilities with each expansion. So Shadow Priests got Mind Sear and Dispersion - abilities they still have today. More strengths, fewer weaknesses.

That’s kind of the story for just about every class in the game.
They had a toolkit to begin with. Then players had some wishes and desires for new abilities and talents. And then Blizzard added something along those lines to the game. Then they’ve gone back and forth on some of it over the years, removing and adding and removing again. But the net result is still that classes in retail have a broader toolkit design than classes in Classic WoW.
So in response to the OP’s thread topic, that’s why classes now have some things they didn’t used to have. They simply got it. :yum:

128

I just miss the class design of older expansions. Little to no playmakers for PvP, for all classes. Our beloved Shadow priests too, even if we got “more” spells. :l

129

I think the underlying problem with WoW’s class design is that it doesn’t have any defined restrictions, so it has a tendency to always evolve into something else, rather than stay true to what it was.

Almost all games today have learned an important design lesson: You have to cap the number of abilities a player can use.

League of Legends.
Heroes of the Storm.
Guild Wars 2.
God of War.
Fortnite.
Diablo III.
And so on.

They all limit the amount of abilities you can use at a given time.
You have 5 abilities in Guild Wars 2. You can switch which ones you want to use, but you can never use more than 5.
League of Legends has 4 pre-chosen abilities for each Champion.
Diablo III has 6 slots that you can fill with various abilities of your choosing.
Fortnite has a slew of weapons and tools you can carry in your inventory, but you can only have one equipped at a time.
And so on.

Blizzard made, in my opinion, a design error when they didn’t define the number of abilities players can use in WoW.
When Blizzard adds more abilities to the game, then players can just add them to their action bars. And over time those action bars just keep growing. That’s why Blizzard feels a need to prune. Other games don’t prune, beacuse they define the amount of abilities you can have on your action bar from the start, leaving them with the design freedom to create as many abilities as they want. WoW always has to balance the amount of abilities they create with the knowledge that players will be able to use them alongside every single other ability they have.

Because Blizzard didn’t put any design restrictions in place to define the size of the ability toolkit, then they are now forever doomed to struggle with the demand for new abilities versus the growing volume of total abilities.

Almost all other game developers learned that lesson. Blizzard did not.

130

I disagree heavily.

Classes may have gotten abilities they didn’t have before, but it’s been at the cost of something else, namely classes themselves and class fantasy.
Kits feel more like scrambled eggs than anything else. We’ve gone into a stage where you’re not playing a class anymore, but rather you’re playing a spec.

Shadow priest was previously a priest that could cast holy spells as well, but was more attuned with their shadow magic.
A frost death knight might have been most powerful with frost magics, but they still used undeath magic and blood magic in their arsenal, since that’s the whole gimmick with being a death knight.

You were a class that had specialized on a certain aspect of your class, not essentially becoming a different one.

Arms warrior today… is not actually an arms warrior, but rather a 2h specialist. There are no shiny tools today that wasn’t there before, besides Warbanner, and even that is not entirely new.

You’re saying that Blizzard has been adding over the years, but what exactly have they added besides one or two things that stick around today?

1 Like
131

Yeah let’s kill the game totally

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132

That. :thinking:

I mean, that’s all I’m saying.

I realize that there’s a broader discussion to be had about class fantasy, specializations, customization, and so on.

But I’m not going there, because that’s not the talking point the OP has posed.

I’m merely saying that classes/specs used to have a few tools to their disposal. Today they have some extra tools.

That’s all.

I’m not suggesting it. Blizzard aren’t going to do it either, because WoW is what WoW is. That ship has sailed, so to speak.
I’m just saying that in retrospect – before WoW was released – it was a mistake not to define the number of abilities a player could use. Because that’s clearly the cause of Blizzard’s headache today, that they never defined their own design space. All other games do. It avoids a heap of issues as far as continued development is concerned.

133

This might be your opinion, but the vast majority of players came to this game because of its complexity.
You could min-max literally everything, something which was removed for no reason.

134

And I’m asking you what are these tools that you speak of?

Where is:

  • Intercept
  • Intervene
  • Banners
  • Shattering Throw
  • Enraged Regeneration
  • Shield Wall
  • Stances
  • A huge amount of stuff that are talents now and not baseline
  • Dodge punishing Overpower

What are these extra tools that you claim I have today?
What extra tools do monk, DK, rogue etc. have?

135

He has no clue what his talking about. Just literally puking his shat without any reasonable knowledge.
He doesn’t even know what his class lost during the years, he just states that he gained some new.
Idk how the fck did he earn an MVP with the ammount of shat he spreads

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136

Hmm, it’s actually not true. It’s true for Warriors maybe (not sure what they all had in the past) but alone the missing intercept let your charge being pointless in a few situations (sprinting target when you are slowed on max range for example - until your charge lands, the target is already 10+ yards away → in former expansion their target would have been stunned at least).

And deffo for DKs/Rets, but that’s basically it. What other classes have more mobility now? Shaman? They had ghostwolf before, they just couldn’t sit in it as they can today (no heal azerite stuff). Mage shimmer? Well, it only allows them to cast while blinking, but it doesn’t mean they have more mobility. ^^

It all comes with a high price - most can’t pay it (dropping def stance for reduced leap cd?! deffo not!).

So totally agree with you: over the years it has become a lot less, not more - the “more” is just an illusion as @Vanhalisha already pointed out.

137

Yeah, that’s what I said:

:yum:

Sure.
I’m not against that either. I’m just saying that Blizzard should have defined what that means.

Let’s take Hearthstone.
Hearthstone defines certain parts of its design.
A hero starts with 30 health.
You start with 1 mana crystal and can have a maximum of 10.
A deck is 30 cards.
Your deck can have a maximum of 2 copies of a specific card.
If it’s a legendary card, your deck can only have 1 copy.
And so on.

Whatever Hearthstone expansions come out in the future, this will always hold true. That’s the design space Blizzard have defined for themselves, and its within that space that they can develop new things – rush, inspire, quests, etc…

WoW is in desperate need of something like that. It’s probably too late to get it, but it should have had it.

You and I have no idea what the next WoW expansion will bring.
The talent system could be scrapped. Or expanded. Or pruned. Who knows?!
You could get more abilities…or fewer. Who knows?!
Blizzard could remove class specializations entirely…or add new ones. Who knows?!

We have no idea, and Blizzard has no idea either, because no one has ever defined what class design in WoW is meant to be. It’s a ship that’s sailing without a course.

As far as complexity goes, then Blizzard should just have defined it.
Whether it would have been 12 or 24 or 36 or 48 abilities or whatever is less important. It just had to be something instead of nothing. All games define something, because that establishes the design space for further development. If you don’t define anything you end up with a mess, like WoW. Players don’t know what to expect.

So Monk is a recent class, so it hasn’t gone through much design development.
But Rogues have self-healing with Crimson Vial. They didn’t have that at their inception.
Warriors have more self-healing with Victory Rush. And they have more mobility with Heroic Leap. Stuff they didn’t have at their inception.
The classes have grown. They can do more.

138

Wow, compared to what? Classic? Beside that’s not even true (you had basically more stuff (at once) in classic I think), most of PvPer would more compare with expansions before pruning. Compare those classes with their classdesign back in MoP for example (even there the pruning had already taken place a bit I think). And always remember: You can’t have all talents at once!

So you are wrong: You actually dropped at least 1/3 of your possibilities (probably more) - it doesn’t matter how much talents you maybe can have on paper, it only matters how many of them you can use/have at once.

140

Yes. Or TBC if you want to go with the start of Arenas. I said this earlier too:

But I’m not saying that the volume of abilities is greater. Your spell book was obviously more full when you played a class rather than a specialization.

But you have more tools in your toolkit now.
You used to have a hammer and a screwdriver.
Now you have a saw and a wrench as well.

Maybe that doesn’t apply equally to all classes or specs, because they’re all different from each other. But overall Blizzard have added more abilities to the game, of the types that there were few of to begin with.
Like the OP says, originally it was only hybrid classes that had strong self-healing. Now that’s a more shared design area.

Reported. This is crossing the line. Please be more mature in the future if you wish to talk to me. This is not the first time you’ve thrown this kind of derogatory comment at me.

141

Well, sure, compared to the beginning they did, but then they started to remove abilities again because they were afraid new players couldn’t handle them all - so we are basically back at the beginning.

They tried to implement an overwatch/lol design into wow → didn’t work out. It basically destroyed a huge amount of skillcap in this game.

143

Sure sure. Agree entirely. And now maybe they’ll start adding abilities again. Or they won’t. Who knows. :yum:

144

In 3 days monks turn 7 years old. I think that’s long enough to include them.

Victory Rush is hardly ever useable in PvP. Heroic Leap is just a trade off, they used to have Charge, Intercept and Intervene, which is way more mobility.

But again, with your rogue example

145

Tbh quitting mid TBC S4 and coming back in mid MoP was a bit of a shock seeing how much most classes had. I think it was a mistake giving so many classes everything

146

Sure. But like Demon Hunters they’ve seen relatively little change from expansion to expansion because they were initially made to fit the current class design environment. All the other classes went through the process of being classes to being specs. Monks and Demon Hunters were built around their respective specs to begin with.

Again, I’m not saying anything about what’s good in PvP and what isn’t. I have merely made a simple point in regards to what the OP said:

It changed. That’s all I’m saying. Blizzard added stuff, removed stuff, added other stuff, removed more stuff, re-added old stuff, and so on. And the amalgamation we have today is what happened.

You won’t get me to discuss individual class balance as it pertains to Warrior or any other class. I don’t do that, sorry. It is dangerous ground to tread. :neutral_face:

I would say that Rogues have gotten more survivability and mobility.

They used to rely on Evasion and Vanish. No more Evasion? Then Vanish!
Then they got Cloak of Shadows, Cheat Death, and Recuperate / Crimson Vial. You can actually grind mobs now as a Rogue without having to Bandage all the time!

In terms of mobility, then the original design for Stealth was that you moved at a slower speed (sneaky sneaky…). You went unseen, but you were slower. Strength and weakness. Then Blizzard removed the weakness, so now Stealth just means being unseen. You move at full speed – and sometimes faster.

Let’s take a really broad example: Caster resource management.
Mana used to be an important thing. It was a limited resource that required some management.
Now most casters have the same unlimited resource design as melee classes. A net-positive as far as throughput is concerned.

147

Might definately be something behind this. GW2 also sticks a bit more to their core design, even with elite specializations, than WoW does. WoW changes class design radically every 2 expansion, or has so far, instead they could build upon the design they had from the start. Talking about the removal of spells like Warrior stances, Paladin seals and auras, etc. To me these types of spells felt like the core of the class, what defined them.

152

That’s actually not true. Beside of the “mage” and engi class, they all have 2 different weapon slots (each with different abilities) and 5 additional slots. So in total you have at least 15 different spells. Combined to that, some (maybe most?!) classes also have the so called “F Skills” (since they are binded by default to F1-F4), so they get up to 19 spells.

The “mage” class and the engi (not comparable to anything in wow) have up to 29 different skills. So even if you can’t switch them when the “arena” has started, you have between 15-30 spells and you basically need at least most of them!

You also have talents&sigils which also have effect into the combat system (kinda like passive talents ->2 sigils for each weapon, 9 passive traits and 9 traits you can actively pick).

And since you can swap the weapons around like you want (you don’t need to level anything or need gear, you can start directly with pvp, buy cheap level 1 gear and be totally competitive), you are so flexible of what you can play…

So don’t compare GW2 with LoL, HotS, Overwatch or WoW (these days). ^^

P.S.: The only issue GW2 has is that “arena” there is like arathi basin in wow. Every map is like that and capturing points is way more important than any fights, so it gets boring pretty quick.