the purpose of unbalanced classes especialy DPSs is to motivate people to reroll and potentialy buy token for level max or for having gold to regear etc.
If for exemple you love to play mage since 5-10years and blizzard wants to keep you in game AND make much money.
The way they use is to destroy the class to the ground, forcing you to leave the game OR to reroll then potentialy buy token, golds, etc.
if you re a Metaboi, and you play warlock affliction since 10years, Blizzard just need to destroy your class forcing you to reroll and buy a token for your new reroll and starting m+ new season with the meta class.
Because this is an mmo, its supposed to be fun. Its not a pvp e-sport. Perfect balance will never exist. Its as good as it can be to keep the game fun.
Because with the amount of DPS specs with different nieches, damage profiles and unique class mechanics, it is literally impossible to account for everything and have a perfect balance.
They could absolutely close the gap a bit between specs, but I am of belief that that would have more to do with encounter design and less with specs and numbers themselves.
encounter design
being every boss fight/trash pack has a combination of all the things each spec wants (which is impossible because the same boss/mob pack can’t be pure ST, but also 2 target cleave, but also 3 target cleave, but also mass aoe, but also spread aoe at the same time )
In other words, he dosent have a “divine storm” to AoE all the mini-adds. But that is just padding damage.
Enh has amazing cleave and priority damage. So the “big-bad mob” will die sooner.
The reason it was not “meta” sort of speak in M+ has nothing to do with overall damage of Enh. It had to do with very poor defensives and the 1-shot mechanics in DF dungeons. Like ALL shamans to be honest…
Ret for example wasent meta because rets give up a lot of prio damage for those divine storm AoE, which cost 1 GCD. Ret dosent have many “hit X target for full and spread 50% of that to other arround him” abilities. So its either Divine Storm or pure ST.
So for example, in BH in the tree corridor rets destroy recount. But that is because of all that padding damage on the mini-lashers. What you want is to focus down the tree so he stops summoning the mini adds. Or the Rotburster (the one that places the totem).
The lashers make up like 250k of the top paladins DPS, he’d still be doing 830k~ dps if you straight up removed the damage to the lashers, which is a lot higher than the highest log for enhancement.
On ST, like on vexamus, he’s pulling almost 50% more than the highest log for enhancement shaman.
Its not just lashers. That pull comes with 3 big plants and (usually) 6 wasps. Those divine storms hit all of them. Enh does not.
But that is not all. In AA you also have the big serpents that charge + a ton of useless adds.
You also have the mobs that cast “sleep” in the room of Vexamus + a bunch of useless adds.
All those require focus targeting.
Im not saying Enh has been in a good spot before the rework. What I am saying is that Rets and Enh have different damage profiles. There is no “one is better than the other” situation.
And to succesfully complete a dungeon in high keys, you need both damage profiles. Its the best combo.
When you got 1 big spider and 50 mini-lashers you want Enh to nuke the big one and the ret to nuke the mini-things.
But when you compare performance you cant just look at “dungeon overall” like you did on your origninal post. You need to look deeper than that.
And that includes spec popularity. There are so many Rets that the chances of a great group with fantastic sinergy are higher (in PuG). Unlike Enh which is played by nobody.
My take and the way I interpreted the way they explained it is, they gave up, then tried to sell them giving up as an alternative method to balance the game.
They said one day that they change classes and specs and kind of let whatever ends up OP be OP, with the idea that naturally this way every class will shine at some point rather then not at all rather then meticulously balance everything so that every change its all roughly in the same ballpark. Really aggregious differences might be patched
meanwhile this has caused specs to have been dead for longer periods of time or to just reign above all other specs in its role by heads and shoulders
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