I’ve always wondered why dps classes and specs are always so unbalanced, at least for PvE, as I don’t play PvP at all.
Just a side note, this is all about PvE, I think PvP should be balanced too but it’s way more complicated than PvE.
There has always been a pretty massive difference in terms of DPS between the best spec and the worst spec in the game, be it in simulation or actual player results.
Does anyone have an explanation as to why it is designed that way?
I think class balancing is way easier than some people say it is, and if a class is overall underperforming by 20% compared to the top class, you can litteraly just increase all their base skill dmg number by 20% and make it the same, or just be conservative and increase those numbers by 15-17%
On some PTR patches there are litteral changes that are this “All damage increased by 30%” so it is something that they can do, but do not do on purpose
So, what is the reason behind this? This is not a rant or anything, I usually don’t care if my favorite spec is the top or bottom of meta and I play whatever i like, but i’m wondering on a game design perspective, what is the moviation behind this choice, and what are the benetifs for them or for anyone actually?
I think having all classes way more balanced would be so much better for variety and making everyone feel good. It would also make being in the top damage that much more rewarding as it would show you actually master your class, if everyone has the same theoretical power level.
Why they are unbalanced? Quite simple. Artificial metas.
By nerfing what is good and buffing what is weak, they (developers) create a cycle of “rebalancing” that makes you more inclined to try out new things instead of just playing always the same things.
For example, we have Paladins in DF S2 being very strong. Many people make Paladins because of that because “easier experience”. Then in S3/4 they nerf Paladins, people stop playing the Paladins they made in S2 and play what is “strong in the new season”.
That’s an artificial meta. Bungie did the very same thing with weapons classes in Destiny 2 since the beginning of the IP. I have experienced that practice for 10 years now in that game. It is a pretty common practice, in fact, to balance overused things around to make less used things more used.
Helldivers 2 does it too. And people complain about it ironically.
I think part of the reason would be the fact that now you have a lot more modifiers for a spell. Now a spell can have 4 talents that interact with it, and another 4 passive from the 4-set tier.
Also there are plenty of classes (I don’t want to say majority cause I might be wrong) that are RNG based. so there is not an easy job to balance RNG.
Also most of the difference is not in class balance, as is in the best players switching for best specs, so the specs that are not considered meta, are not equally represented in terms of quality and quantity.
Classes are designed to have strengths and weaknesses, niches. The issue is that balancing around all these variables and also balancing around increasing gear becomes almost an impossibility. Add on to that, boss/dungeon/encounter design will favour or penalize certain classes/specs more than others and sometimes the niche of one spec may simply not fit into the mould of the current content.
Now they could design the game with balance being a more important factor, but the result of that would almost always be less interesting class and encounter design, more homogenised, less niche or situational powers and strengths… The reality is to balance the game you have to make it more boring, you have to design out a lot of the fun.
Sometimes they could be more reactive with balancing though, but they seem to not want to risk jumping the gun.
Technically they could just start from scratch, balance every class in a way that makes them unique and strong in their own ways and then just scale everything upwards with increasing gear.
But that would also mean to never touch the classes ever again in case of balancing.
Because the “I play the strongest class” mentality exists. And after balance changes, you always have to dress up the new character, which takes time. And time is money.
The shorter answer: they’re just terrible at numbers and cannot actually balance it.
Because it’s not easy to balance game revolving around multiple modes simultaneously. Every balance tweak that happens because the class was too strong/weak in, say, raids will affect its presence in M+ and PvP (except «apply % in PvP» cases). You can’t realistically freeze it since it’s curve of people gearing, getting stats and making new builds constantly, so given that internal stats are unchanged, DPS of classes at first week of patch can drastically differ from DPS at last week of patch cause gear changed, stats changed, comps changed, builds changed yada yada. And if you don’t change it - you get the meta domination affecting all difficulty levels (Havocs and Rdru domination all around the DF both in M+ and SS, or Aug-Mage-Priest M+ disaster for example).
Plus, as was already said above, balance needs to move anyway because the game needs it. Otherwise it will lead to Classic-styled «take all the necessary classes by one to buff the entire raid of X cause they perform ahead everything in this frozen meta» which you really don’t want, trust me.
Because there are now thousands of different modifiers with this talent system (all classes/specs combined). And in DF beta they refused to balance them. Instead they opted for blanket % buffs and nerfs to balance the classes, sometimes twice a month.
Previously the balancing work was done much more adamantly and even the patch notes reflected changes in modifiers.
In TWW it will continue like it is now.
There is no real smooth scaling in the game anymore, like for example in some expansions you know shadow priests would be better late expansion because of their mastery modifiers or something similar.
1st difference of skill levels, some classes need more skill to get full potential so they need to decide what skill level they want to balance for
2nd content, difference between raids, dungeons, mythic raids and normal raids, harder or easier mythic
3rd utility, classes bring different things to party
4th scaling, some classes scale better than others
Because damage dealers are not simply damage dealers. If every dps was dealing exactly identical numbers, guess what would happen…
Correct. You’d only see the ones with the best utility or survivability being brought to high-end content and everyone else would be “non-meta”.
And then you also have to consider factors like:
Spec synergy. SpecA and SpecB on their own against a target dummy deal identical numbers. But bring them together and you see SpecA perform 10% better than SpecB because the buffs of SpecB on SpecA are more potent than the buffs of SpecA on SpecB
Single-target fights vs AoE fights vs Cleave fights
Specs with frontloaded damage vs Specs with backloaded damage
Playing on a mathematically perfect Patchwork encounter with computer fast perfect rotation is not the same than playing it for real. And the performance depends on the player awareness and risk taking. Like dodging swirlies.
The level of skill of the player in question is not the same. Some specs perform very well when its complex rotation is executed perfectly. But if you play it on a “normal” level, or make 1 mistake, its performance drops. Others are the inverse, where playing it perfect or badly makes no difference.
Raid buffs. If you have a ton of +XYZ magical damage buffs, the warrior will perform significantly worse than everyone else. Same for things like PI.
CDs. When to hold them, when to pop them. This is dependant on your party. In M+ it depends on what pulls the tank does (and when) and in a raid it depends on the performance of your raid buddies. So depending on the party, classes with 40s CDs or 2 min CDs will perform differently. Even if on paper they should perform the same.
Tipes of encounters. Some specs have better AoE than others. Or Cleave damage. Or ramp-up/burst damage. But no spec has it all. Depends on the encounter. So for example, the simulations you talk about are Patchwerk simulations (Single Target). So strong ST specs will have better results in those simulations.
Long story short : WoW is a cooperative game. You depend on other people to do things. And WHO those people are impact your own personal performance. Hope this helps.
because devs realise that you can evnetually clear like 95 % of this game by doing literaly 30 % parses and unless you are a whiny tryhard it really doesnt matter in grander picture .
and meta is vastly overrated because it bring in very natural way a lot of horrible players to swap to meta specs just to get easy invites and then severly underperform .
augumentation is perfect example - i can count literaly on fingers of my 1 hand groups i have been in in like 10-20 bracket with aug evoker which really benefited from having it since it was implemented.
in most cases brnging it was detrimental to the groups and lowered the performance which could have been better if they just brought even devastation evoker
