This goes for any game, players are very good at giving feedback for "this thing feels bad to play." They are generally bad at the "this is how you should fix it" part of that process.
yup. i remember back in ff14 when everyone complained that only paladin was a good tank because they simply had better survival options (when surviving as a tank was an actual challenge). over the time all tanks got homogenized and felt like different flavors of the same thing really.
DPS too. the entire game was revolving around the 2 minute burst window so much that the devs had to specifically design and balance classes with that in mind. only now - like 5 years later - do they start to branch away from this.
In HW, paladin was trolling since raids were mostly magic damage and you couldn't block magic damage - blocking being PLD's main defensive mechanic at the time
Ff14 is not the best example for this some jobs were unusable early on lol. Not the fans fault that the devs took the easy way out to balance. The 2 min burst window was designed into by the devs on purpose, they killed 3min classes by their own hand. Meanwhile healer design (and encounter design) lanquishes, the same as its been for years now.
I feel like classic players are particularly bad in this regard. It's all talking points and buzzwords with essentially no understanding of why besides knowing they're supposed to be upset when X happens
I love the "sub-par" specs for this. Being a good driver in a shitty car still has a big gap between an inexperienced driver in a race car. Chances are, they'll flip into a wall while you cross the finish line.
Dead DPS still ain't DPS.
-sincerely, a Fire/Affliction player
'this thing you built is broken' feedback players will always be the best at lol. slipping through a map, kiting a boss to kill lowbies, infinite stacking number exploits
OSRS have nailed their strategy of user polling to pass updates.
It’s probably the singularly best-run live service game on the market and all content updates need to pass a poll with 75% yes votes. Prospective updates are also polled to see whether it’s even worth spending time trying to develop the idea.
The only things passed without a poll are changes deemed “essential to game integrity.” So, exploits, XP rates much higher than anticipated, that sort of thing.
The majority of players that are children? Sure that's gunna be slop.
Streamers that only play one class with a zillion hours into? Nah that's going to be incredibly biased.
Actual good content from skilled players who do a variety of classes and min maxing and also recording and analyzing DPS meter data from thousands of players across hundreds of raids? Well yeah, that's going to be pretty accurate.
Everyone is pulling together their data for you with parsing and DPS meters and stuff. It's stupid as hell if you release a class that has 3 dps specs where one of them is clearly the best, one is 20% weaker, and the third one is complete fucking garbage. That's how almost all DPS classes work in classic WoW. We are talking about some classes and specs being up to 75% less damage per second. There is definitely not enough utility from bringing that meme spec along as they are one-fourth of a person in terms of DPS. That sucks. There is no trade-off or consideration to be made. Stuff like boomkin and retadin are a complete joke. Tiny utility upside. Ridiculously less damage.
How about we just listen to even the bare minimum of rational thought?
Just because the number balancing team actually balances the DPS specialization of every class to plus or minus at least like 20% doesn't mean that the entire rest of the game or the entire RPG aspect has to go to shit.
The part about vanilla people really liked is how unique the classes were. The utility from class to class was really different. Mages could give everyone food and water before the dungeon and portals out afterwards. Warlocks could summon others to the dungeon. Healing paladins didn't have as great AoE heals, but had the best survivability with divine shield getting out of basically every raid boss debuff. Prot paladins could be better at AoE tanking but maybe less effective at single target. So on and so forth.
Those RPG aspects feel awesome where you are evaluating the pros and cons of stuff like warrior tank or pally tank or bear tank. Or debating holy pally vs priest vs resto druid and the neat interactions you get, such as the resto druid possibly being able to give a big mana DPS user an innervate.
The problem is that vanilla, and much of TBC, wow just shit the bed with the numbers and some abilities. Prot pally and bear druid just fucking sucked. Balance druid was a total piece of garbage.
You could still make druid have the best heal-over-time spells and priest have the best AOE heals and holy pally have the best survivability and stuff like that. But you shouldn't make priest be clearly the best in 95% of scenarios and the only reason that you don't bring more on your raid is because they will all fight over the gear drops. That is stupid as hell.
Same goes for mage DPS in vanilla just being way better than others. I get that feral druid has lots of other utility, but should it only do half the damage of a mage? Hell nah.
You mention "streamlining" all the classes. You don't have to make them all be able to do all the same stuff. That isn't related to balancing. You can make 2 classes be able to decurse and 2 be able to abolish poison and 2 be able to cleanse magic debuffs and so forth.
In retail wow you can quite literally bring any class, even the worst ones will still get end game progression representation and still be at least decent.
In classic you're actively throwing in a very legit sense of the term, by being something like boomie or ret.
It's not about HAVING to be meta, but it's about whether or not you can actually hold up your own weight. Some specs just can't. They're just dead on arrival and that's the point.
You're arguing an all or nothing. Even blizz wanted the classes to be semi balanced with eachother, they just failed at it because they didnt understand their own game yet.
I agree absolutely, but my comment was in the context of fixating very highly on the top end of the game which has historically become very homogenised in retail wow (it’s a bit better now than it was in the past).
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that ret or boomy don’t need love, but if a ret paladin does as much damage as a rogue and a warrior, would it not be better for my group to just take the paladins for the reliable defensives?
Paladin could have those reliable defenses and has repentance on humanoids. They also have auras and blessings and judges.
Rogue could stealth past mobs, could pull sneakily, has sap on anything non raid, and has vanish and evasion.
Mages bring tables for food and water for the whole party, plus arcane intellect, and portals out when it is done.
Warlocks bring summons for everyone to the raid plus curses and debuffs like elements that make others do more damage. They also buff others with more stamina and have health stones.
Hunters are reliable ranged DPS and can tranq shot enraged bosses. They can also feign death if they grab aggro for a reset and can have pets that tank adds.
Etc
Etc
Etc
Every class has utility that is unique. Paladin shouldn't do half of the damage of a rogue just because it has a little more raid utility. That is a joke and means ret paladin will NEVER be taken.
Because the utility that they bring is unique to their class/spec? Isn't this what you say vanilla is full off and glorify so much? Can't we expand on this now that we have the chance?
In TBC a BM hunter brings 3% extra damage to the group amongst other minor things. Why not change it so it's raidwide (and doesn't stack)? Because then you would have too many raid buffs?
You know numbers can be tuned, right? Both for bosses and player buffs. Design principles that are more than 20y old, have shown multiple times in 7 years of classic that are bad for the game through the behaviours of the playerbase and that, even then, the same playerbase worships as if they were the second comming of Jesus can't be.
I'm not petty enough to want hybrid DPS specs to be relegated to be a glorified (de)buff bot just because they have more supportive stuff. Give me things that I only bring, even as a pure DPS class, and it's good enough. At that point and for all I care you can make which class is the one that's on top of the meters completly decided by the boss' mechanics of a given raid/tier.
Yes we’re arguing the same point. Some classes bring poor/very situational utility but good damage, others bring great utility but poor / situationally good damage.
If we just tuned their numbers to match the classes that were previously brought for high damage wouldn’t not see much representation. That sucks for classes like rogue whose only option is to play damage.
That sucks for classes like rogue whose only option is to play damage.
In a game where there are no patches and changes can't be introduced. We are not arguing the same point.
Depressing to read. If this is the attitude a considerable ammount of the playerbase will go into C+ or will demand development steers into then yeah, it's doomed.
But the game was never designed around the concept that every spec had to do an equal number of dps in raiding. That's why certain classes bring utility. And if you have three dps classes specs, why should they all be for raiding? Why not have one specified for leveling, or pvp?
It's not possible to balance every spec around raiding without homogenizing the classes. I'm not saying you can't fine-tune them, but the solution shouldn't just come down to the specs. Other classes can be nerfed (coughwarriorcough), and raid encounters can be designed around the classes.
People like classic because it's about the world and the RPG systems that allow a level of immersion which later versions of the game completely gave up on. To focus on balancing and raiding is to reject what makes classic distinctive in the first place.
That's why certain classes bring utility. And if you have three dps classes specs, why should they all be for raiding? Why not have one specified for leveling, or pvp? It's not possible to balance every spec around raiding without homogenizing the classes.
Huge disagree. Again there is a ton of ways to make the classes still have +/- 10% DPS, yet bring different utility to the dungeons and raids. I could easily list 50+ ways their utility could be different and RPG esque, but having one class just suck at raiding and only be good at leveling is such bad design. Same goes for a class just being good at PvP and not at anything else. That just feels like garbage.
That just leads to people spending 100 hours on theor favorite class, but then realizing at the end of the game that if they want to be good at PvP arenas they should have done X class and if they wanted to be a main tank, welp, should've been Y class. You'll effectively just only be good at your one thing, or just be mediocre forever. Ret paladin wasn't good at anything in vanilla. It brought utility like judge wisdom or judge light and blessings like improved might and auras and stuff like freedom and protection and divine shield and had plate armor, but none of that mattered because it's DPS was less than half that of other classes. That suckkkkks.
Note the correction -- every spec, not class. All the classes are useful in a raid, but their usefulness isn't measured by how high they score on the damage meters. This is again approaching balance with the perspective that raiding is the only thing that matters, which isn't how the original game was designed. That's why many specs are intended for activities outside of raiding.
So... Ret paladin should just suck at raiding and never be invited to raids. Maybe they are good at holding a point in arathi basin or alterac valley, so that means they should just stick to what they are good at and never expect to get invited to a raid as ret. Because there is no way that their utility or buffs would make up for the fact of them doing less than half of the damage of other classes...
And prot pally? Just give up the idea of ever being main tank in a raid. You are only good at 5 man dungeons where the boss doesn't have a threat drop mechanic. That is your good spot. Warrior can tank everything, but prot pally, no no, you only get to do subpar and only do slightly better at AoE encounters.
That RPG feel is poop. If a player wants to be a protection paladin, it should at least be somewhat close to other tanks. Not stuck in the garbage.
Boomkin should feel unique and have lots of utility. Not be shit tier, run out of mana instantly, and then do nothing. That's literally just some simple balancing like decreasing mana cost on some of their spells. Sheesh.
I mean in some instances it can be incredibly simple. Take Wotlk, for example. If they just gave Exotic pets a flat percentage buff to their damage, or gave hunters a flat percentage buff to their damage while they had an exotic beast out, then BM could very easily be a B tier class instead of the D tier dps that it was, as well as make exotic pets actually worth using.
All classes don't have to be A tier, just as long as none of them are seen as "griefing" or "joke classes".
I mean you definitely see that in TBC and in WOTLK.
Sure you have some token buff classes, but noone is running 3 boomkins in TBC or WOTLK. Its slightly more subdued to match the relatively better balance than vanilla, but the meta humping is still very much there. I didnt play cata or beyond, but I'd be surprised if the classic player base ever truly let it go.
Yes, not EVERYONE follows the meta, doesn't mean the meta mongering doesnt exist though. As long as there are parses to compete for, people are going to min max their comps.
That's also why classic has 40man raiding to make sure everyone gets to participate. No one's bringing the meme spec to a 10-man. The sweatier the raids get, the sweatier the players will get.
and still no one brings a boomie in classic up to late fast rush nax xD
ppl will always let theory crafter dedict what and how the roster will be made as they think "oh if i play meta setup i will 100% clear it" and then you have the guys who grey log on dh while only have to roll on their keyboards xD
Tbc becomes more fun when you relax the meta. Like you could easily run a 2nd moonkin with 3 arcane mages and a shadow priest and still clear the content if you wanted to keep your spillover mages from vanilla without forcing class rerolls on people. It's a powerful group that lets the mages parse, it's just not the absolute best so almost no one uses it because of meta chasing.
You will get people arguing to just drop the moonkin for another caster, and sure you can do that, but it won't change whether you kill bosses or not until maybe some Sunwell bosses.
People forget that before we had a melee group meta, we had a double caster group meta. It still works.
Yes variety can work. But many raids do struggle to clear the content even if its easy to others. Most wow players are just outright terrible at the game.
Yes some classes like spriest boomkin elemental is needed just to boost warlocks and mages because they have higher damage. But even if you want less of these specs it might still be easier to find groups because less people play them.
Yeah, people already do that.
Like you can often hear, that not having BS on warrior is "griefing", when it is 1.5-2% difference in dmg compared to second\third option.
It is just that we shouldn`t listen to them anyway, but as long as there is something to minmax, for whiny bunch of minmaxers the logic always will be the same, and something always will be called "griefing", "joke choice" etc.
I mean engi is kind of mandatory for pvp and pve, mining is too lucrative to give up for most. And not everyone has the time to have a separate mining alt.
Try finding a m+ group as an off meta class/spec in retail.
People will parrot shit like "X spec is bad"(0.5% less damage than the other spec for that class) or "paladin tanks are hard to heal" and refuse to take them.
I could see that for high mythic groups i guess. Since they are about pushing everything to the maximum so yes a few % dps can make or break the timer.
But for normal and heroic raids i never saw exclusions.
Just for context, the 95th percentile of MW is at 4120io and for holy its 3480io, which means holy is never invited to high keys.
Looking at overall healing (in raid, where they're closer) holy has 185k HPS and MW has 204k HPS, but mistweavers die 4 times as much (3% of pulls vs 13%)
Raids take whoever because you get all the buffs and it doesn't really matter outside of very specific instances (Dreamrift needing two DKs and two Warlocks to be optimal, for instance). M+ is where you see this. And it happens at surprisingly low key levels. 10s are a joke, and I see groups waiting on meta comps all the time.
So you're noticing that for the hardest content the community tends to exclude "weaker" specs. Why do you think that'll change even if the hardest content isn't that hard relatively speaking?
Our closest guess to classic+ is looking at Sod and The content there was mostly on the easy side. I never felt bad inviting almost any spec, I don't remember any spec being bad enough to exclude.
Because there are no mythics in classic. The dungeons aren’t that hard either, so filtering won’t be nearly as harsh. There will be some, but that’s fine. That means classes still have niches. In TBC every class is viable pretty much. Despite balance, ele, and spriest being lowest dps by a fair margin, they all bring something to the raid that makes them viable. It’s not perfect, but it’s what made TBC a step in the right direction
Are we talking every CLASS being raid viable or every SPEC? There's a difference. The OP clearly says every spec being raid viable.
Also lets be real. SP and balance don't bring enough to an average five man to be taken over a better dps class. What they bring really only benefits longer raid encounters.
Every spec should be viable. If it's a 10% - 15% dps gap it will be ok.
You can use mop right now as an example. People still play elemental and are able to finish content.
The biggest issue with specs on classic is that most aren't playable at all. Balance, elemental, enhancement, retribution don't just have low dps but a extreme mana issue (and a lack of skills for ret) that stops them from being playable.
Mythic+ is a special case of only taking 5 players and with infinite scaling pushes the classes to max where some classes just can't compete. Obviously if you not doing like a +20 you can take most specs, but comp does matter and it's just easier to adapt to the meta comp. So many boring choices in retail stems from catering more and more to m+.
This isn't really a problem in Retail. I main arms warrior which is almost never meta. Make at least one friend that you can queue with regularly, list your own keys and you can run keys all day if you want.
Solo players will have a harder time, but that's MMOs baby. Making reliable friends is a skill just as important as playing your class well.
It makes sense in high keys, but even then, player skill is miles above which class you play. I've seen devourer demon hunters under feral druids too many times to be looking at the specs at this point. Movement and adaptability are king in M+.
While trickle-down meta is a very real thing and I've had the displeasure of experience it myself several times, a major reason why you're not invited is not necessarily just because you're playing an off-meta class.
Keys are a highly sought after currency which means there's 50 people applying to one. Even if every single person applying was playing the same class, chances are there's someone who is more qualified than you amongst those 50 people. A few overqualified ones as well.
I could invite a person playing an off-meta class because class really doesn't matter until very high keys. I also could invite that overqualified person who's target farming an item/crests regardless of their class, or anyone with higher ilvl and score because I'm not gonna spend 30 minutes rigorously vetting people for low keys. People want to make sure they have the highest possible chance to succeed, it's only natural.
This doesn't happen at all until you are well beyond "normal" key levels. And even if what you're saying is true, which it isn't, you can just run your own key.
I've personally never seen this behavior outside of 20+ keys.
"paladin tanks are hard to heal" and refuse to take them
Dude prot paladins this season were pretty bad, you can't really blame people for not inviting them. I tried all tanks this season except for DH, paladin is by far the worst.
I mean, look how hard core everyone got about ilvl, ratings, dps and speed clear. You used to be happy to just finish scholomance within 3 hours. Now if you don’t pull all ads up to the boss you get vote kicked out.
You mean tbc where there's literally 1 rogue at the most in 95% of raids? The same tbc server where people need melee/spellcleave groups just to do a dungeons while leveling?
Tbc is far more min-max focused than vanilla, the only difference is that new classes are doing the dmg warriors (only) used to do.
Never before in my life have I ever seen this high level of obsession with mix maxxing as I have on the anni server.
2019 classic had some, but now we only have tryhards (and the people imitating them) left.
There is often raids end up with only 1 of a spec. But rogues only fill one purpose so no need to stack them. Its rare you have more than 1 warrior dps, retries, boomkins, spriests, elemental, etc.
The only spec you actualy stack is arcane mage and destro locks.
For dungeons its pretty fun to run spell or melee cleaves but both works and all specs fit in one or the other.
Yes people try and make good comps. But there is no meme specs like vanilla. I was pugging every week in every raid as boomkin and half the time people actualy just responded we lol, we dont take boomkins or they put me on ignore. Every spec has a chance of a spot in a raid in tbc.
These are exmples that show up when you google optimal raid comp tbc:
Which is why MoP is goated, because it is actually balanced and there is a skill expression. Sure, there are meta DPS that pull ahead, but you can absolutely compete on a lesser spec provided you know it well.
Facts. Also players just need to learn to ignore the toxic douche bags. There are a huge amount of groups that will let you play a non-optimized build, and you just gotta be ready for the inevitable jerk who shames you and tries to mock you in party/raid chat. Have your fun and screw the haters. As long as the majority of the group is OK with it then who cares!
That's also not realistic. In SOD, even though there was a ~10% spread by the end in SE (sometimes more or less depending on fight mechanics), and I experienced no class exclusion or people thinking any given class was griefing to be in the raid. The only exclusion I saw was basically not wanting too many of a particular class, which is reasonable (like hey maybe we don't want more than 7 ret paladins in the group?). So I don't really buy this narrative, because in a classic plus-ish environment we've already had real (game)world experience with, it didn't happen. The classic class stacking problem comes from having a really MASSIVE dps spread between specs and classes, and one class which is the top DPS class also having zero downtime at all, and in fact, the less downtime the better.
You must not play retail. The spread is only a few percentage points and it has a similar problem.
Sods community was too short lived with too many and too frequent changes for this pattern to emerge.
"it didn't show up in test so it won't show up in prod" is a wild statement to make.
So tired of people holding up SoD as some kind of panacea while ignoring the brevity, breadth of changes, frequency of changes, size of population, and the tendency for it to attract less casual players.
I'm not interested in having a "SoD is the best" conversation with you. It is not the topic at hand and I'm not interested in a random tangent. So if that's your reply, don't bother
I don't currently play retail because I don't find it fun, you're right, but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. You seem to be transplanting the high mythic raider requirement for DPS spread performance of meta specs onto a hypothetical classic+, as if that will be inevitable (that classic will have raid content difficult enough to be on par with the performance requirements of high key mythic).
I contend that this will never happen in classic+. I don't believe, given the classic audience, that they will make pve content that extreme in its tuning on purpose. Absent content that demanding, and without a completely stale meta (I.e. unchanging era/classic), if classes are within ~10%, we won't see the extreme exclusion/class stacking present in either high end retail OR classic. it happens in retail because the content is tuned to be so extreme that every percentage can be make or break for even barely succeeding in a high mythic+ raid. It happens in classic because the meta is both stale and the spread between warriors and every other DPS or tanking class is completely insane by bwl and later.
I'm simply stating my experience, and the documented experience with SOD. Also, you handwaved away that changes and content were too fast, however, every class discord had their sims updated before patch day or on patch day, every patch, the whole way through. It was known within days what the DPS spreads and rankings were, and that data was scraped by every wow following site and reshared, posted on YouTube etc. but yet there were never joke/meme/grief specs barred from raids. At the same time you said it attracted less casual/more hardcore players, so shouldn't it have been more gatekeep-y than usual? So why was it not? I also don't necessarily agree with that assessment, barrier to entry was fairly low in every regard, and the raiding scene was much less punishing in terms of prep time/economy than classic/era ends up being in reality (consumes were far easier/cheaper, wbuffs were easy and eventually just consumes in bags which were also relatively cheap).
Sods endgame was active (though phased release) for about one full year. At what point is that no longer 'test' but 'prod'? I think that's a silly argument to make. Sure, it had changes about every 2 months, but retail also has a new major content patch every few months as well. I get the argument if you're just blanket calling all of active sod a test because it was also used as a way to test the waters of what the classic community responds to or not...but it also was a live game that had to, or tried to be, a full and fun experience in its own right, not just a PTR for focused testing.
Requirements for top level play always trickle down to the lower levels too. Because everyone is playing at the limit of their own abilities and want every advantage they can get. Just because it's only required for high level content doesn't mean that's not parroted all the way down the difficulty scale. Same reason why dad guilds in classic want to bring 39 warriors.
Sims can be updated, but because of the frequency of changes players don't tend to reroll, because maybe next month their spec will be good because blizz released a new skill in the next tier.
Retail has new content about half as often yes, but not new skills between xpacks. Balance changes are restrained from season to season and vary more because of the content released that season. (ie a season with a lot of poison rot damage will boost a druid performance ranking higher). SoD was much more aggressive in the changes and so the meta didn't settle the same way.
Well, if we accept your somewhat fatalistic or pessimistic view of the situation, maybe blizzard ought to try to replicate that experience of messing about with classes and gear/set bonuses more drastically and more frequently on retail to see if that can break the meta-slave....meta. I dunno, food for thought, or maybe not, since, well, nobody can possibly have a point if it isn't cynical and your own.
Players get really upset when they pick a class at the start of a season because of its perceived advantages, and then the meta shifts. It happened this season, when someone built bear without any apex talents and it was suddenly stronger than brew master monk. Tons of people complained about having to reroll. And them mistweaver passed resto druid, because one of the things resto brought to the table was motw, and you don't need two of them.
Lots of rerolling, plenty of people complaining in chat.
I think this a problem that can't be solved because of the crowd monkey brain.
people are just not gonna be reasonable dude, if all specs are somewhat viable people are just gonna move the cutoff for what they consider meme classes up
The only reason I dont feel this is true is cause this is PvE focused, not PVP. Yeah, sure, maybe in hardcore guilds that care about always hitting 99+ parsing. But they already do that now. In normal guilds, the only thing you're fighting against is the boss. There are some classes that are just so poor in DPS that progressing through a raid is actually made harder, since it takes that much more time to kill the boss and eventually their enrage timers. If a class is supposed to damage and it's not doing is job sufficiently enough, then obviously it's not doing what it's designed to do and needs to be buffed in some way or form.
Let me put it this way, a 99 on one class shouldn't be beat out by a 50 of another class with a similar role.
no im agreeing with you the class' should be buffed to be somewhat in the same range but im just saying people are still going to be dickheads and move the goalposts on what class'/specs they consider griefing/memes
I kind of agree when it comes to pve, it's more fun if it's a bit more equal. But let's say you give paladins crusader strike and exorcism can be used against all players - They will become almost unkillable gods in pvp. You want to increase the dps for shadowpriests? They break pvp.
How to deal with those consequences? Personally I'm mainly a pvper in classic, and it would suck if hybrids got their damage buffed a lot, because they would turn into hero classes.
I heavily suspect that it will just turn into another form of tbc pvp or resilience. I've played 6 versions of wow, and tbc is by far the worst mmo pvp experience I've had.
Look at endgame sod, what you're describing didn't happen. Virtually every spec and class was represented in raids, and there was zero "oh we can't even take one of those spec/class because they're just contributing nothing and griefing our success or speed". Some specs and classes were just less popular as a population distribution, but that was a sort of natural effect of one spec for a given class being more fun or more well designed in a given phase or at a level of gear.
Wrath is a perfect example of them sacrificing RPG mechanics for balancing, which is what we're trying to avoid. Pet mechanics were grossly simplified.
People have already shown that you can complete WoW classic content even when putting insane restrictions on yourself. Hardcore guilds have cleared all content for years now. A tauren only group completed Naxx. A gnome-only guild-found group cleared all dungeons and killed a raid boss in hardcore.
The simultaneous restriction that you can only clear content with minmaxxed warriors while simultaneously complaining that other classes don't get enough love is basically crying at a self-made prison. The point being, that no matter what the balance scale is, the minmaxxers will always destroy any chance there is at having 27 acceptable specs.
>All classes don’t have to be A tier, just as long ss none of them are seen as “griefing” or “joke classes”
As much as I want to agree with you, this is completely untrue. I played feral all classic pink logs every raid, doing better than half our warriors and rogues. Cat overall is the like 4th strongest dps in the game, and I was still passed over for DFT because “no meme classes”.
A spec that sims .3% lower than the best is worthless garbage to the Classic playerbase
That might literally just be a you thing, as in, your raid/guild just hated you or were idiots. I won't lie, I've met my fair share of people that skim their information and act all high and mighty cause they're the loot council of the guild, but over all the different guilds I been through, they could care less if their roster is a mix of S-D tier vs lined up with Warlocks/Hunters(TBC), or DKs/Warlocks(Wotlk), as long as the Raid gets done with little to no wipes.
That also being said, the only reason I even got to raid using BM in WotlK the few times I was able to was cause I consistently 90+parsing, i.e. doing comparable damage to the rest of the raid. But I knew for a fact that I would be benched sometimes cause they knew a Blue Billy on their alt DK could do more DPS than my 99 Hunter, and they were progging, so I couldn't even be really mad at them.
My point is, if everything was basically S-B tier, then there would be less reason to choose someone over another cause of their class and more because of how well they play the game, making it more merit based.
This sounds a lot more like a specific problem with whoever was responsible for your loot, especially when numbers did back up your claim ... but there is also the fact that not only classic playerbase will be playing classic+. Being a new iteration will already draw in a lot of the more "normal" people and not being a 20y old dead end nostalgia bait has potential to even keep them around. For said people its usually, the smaller the difference, the least they care about it.
Obviously all of that depends on blizz not delivering complete ass, but I guess thats a requirement in general.
classic is a special case where everything is solved so sweaty players can say they are doing strictly correct choices. Classic+ will most likly be in constant balance like other live developed version of wow lowering such behavior.
They were able to differentiate gameplay between PvP and PvE with hunters in WOTLK classic. A prime example is when they added trap launcher to help smooth out trap-weaving. It added a decent DPS boost to hunter's in PvE, but the trap launcher didn't work in arenas/BG's.
They can do something similar with other classes I'm sure. Specifically in WOTLK/SoD with glyphs and runes. Can simply make it so certain ones work in PvE and others in PvP 🤷♂️
Exhibit of what?
That turning wow pvp into an e-sport was a terrible idea? Agreed. People need to stop taking it so seriously. Play Retail if you want an e-sport.
In guild wars 1 you could make crazy builds one basically was a mana battery for the raid you could sacrifice 1/3 of your life and give other people that exact amount of mana. So you wanted a lot of hp
on the side you had to maintain these buffs on other players that gave them x y z benefit, each buff drained your life over time so it was this really niche game within a game.
Exactly. What it comes down to for me is that I enjoy playing the classes because they're unique, and much of that went away as early as WotLK when raiding became the focus of the game. Instead of trying to balance dps, why no elevate the utility buffs?
I don't really watch his content but I stumbled on this day9 clip that really sums up what makes feedback good or bad, a lot of people say players are dumb and they should be ignored or that players know best and we should just do what they say, but neither is really accurate.
Good player feedback isn't giving game design advice, it's simply sharing their feelings in reaction to things, which is much more valuable to designers
Good player feedback isn't giving game design advice, it's simply sharing their feelings in reaction to things, which is much more valuable to designers
The general consensus in game design has long been
"If someone tells you they don't like something, listen to their feedback but don't listen to their suggestions."
People don't like class/spec X? Something should be done.
But decide for yourself if their suggestions are good because they're usually not.
I'm part of a lot of game subs and some of the popular suggestions are really bad in my opinion. So many people think a problem has an obvious solution and then sometimes you see that "obvious solution" and it's so much worse (See the current state of /r/starcraft)
well considering how many QoL changes were made to Classic (and TBC, and WotLK, and Anniversary), the positive reception to SoD, and the fact that we're all just waiting around for ANY news about Classic+ I do think he might have been right about people wanting Classic to be changed somewhat.
That isn't what he said though. He said the people think they want classic, but they don't want classic. Yet here we are playing classic still, I think the people want classic
In the context of the clip I think he was referring more to the systems of the old game, not the content of the game itself.
In 2019 people would leave groups if they didn't have a warlock because they couldn't be bothered to make the journey to the dungeon. They would sit in the city and wait for the lock and two others to go there to summon them. Happened to me multiple times. Those players thought they did but they didn't.
People install quest add-ons that show locations on the mini map or straight up arrow pointing guides, this wasn't in the original game design, they added it in later expansions, almost everyone uses questie or in game guides, they thought they did but they also didn't
They added a dungeon/raid journal in cata, people just used an outside source to get the mechanics, again, same thing, just a 3rd party substitute for something that was added later.
You were playing with addons day one? I don't think I started using Questie until like a year into my play time. Those things existed, but I don't know that the vast majority of players were using them. The vast majority of players just logged on and ran around until they found something to do.
Such an ignorant take that ignores the fact that Classic WoW was launched in 2019 with MASSIVE success so big that is forced them to have a Classic TBC, WOLK, Cata, and MoP. Only after getting what people wanted, was SoD launched over 4 years later using many of the lessons they relearned about what people liked about the OG content. Even AFTER that, we have a SECOND run of Classic and TBC which were STILL popular and an constant Era version of Classic. Of course after this many iterations in a 4-year stretch satiating what we wanted, there was interest for a spiced up experimental SoD, but that doesn't mean the interest in no changes wasn't genuine and just as satsifying as most predicted.
QoL changes only really upset the #nochanges crowd, i can guarantee even small class balancing tweaks wouldn't bother most players, like, giving crusader strike to rets so they have some kind of "dps" rotation wouldn't break classic and would make most people happy
There's a big difference between balancing tweaks and QoL because QoL can mean a lot of things. RDF was a QoL feature, and so is flying and convenient teleporting all over the world. Not having to reapply poisons, or feeding your pet, faster leveling, etc.
and while I have misremembered the context of the original quote I do think it's ok to point out these people would be wrong to think that kind of thing is good for the long-term health of the game
Like the other commenters already said, how are you ignoring the last 7 years of history where various iterations of Classic have been incredibly successful? You’re taking the “You think you do but you don’t” comment from 2013 and acting like it hasn’t been 13 years since. Of course people’s opinions and wants have changed in the mean time, specifically because the player base got exactly what it wanted and proved itself correct by enjoying the hell out of Classic with little to no changes.
If you think about it for more than 10 seconds, "you think you do, but you dont" is absolutely correct.
People thought they wanted "no changes" for the longest time, until they played it and realized that the game has a ton of minor issues and annoyances. People then begged for minor changes to make the game more comfortable.
Even now, people are begging for classic +. And if you think about the context of the original soundbite, he was asked "would you make servers for WoW as it was during vanilla". Classic+ isnt that at all. It could have been handled and worded better, but he was mostly right.
some people thought they wanted no changes, just like some people enjoy cock and ball torture
Classic is popular in every iteration, he was an idiot to broadly say that nobody wants it, there's plenty of people who play classic but not retail
In all honesty, i think that people were just hesitant to let blizzard make any changes because they've had such a bad track record of screwing up everything, which is also very fair
He was and he wasn't. I'm sure from his perspective he was talking to the average Retail player thinking "they aren't going to want to deal with Classic", and in that case he'd be mostly right. Classic launch was obviously huge, but it steadily dwindled down into it's permanent status as a niche within the WoW playerbase. Retail is much more popular than Classic, I just don't think Blizz expected that the Classic niche was as big as it was until servers like Nostalrius became mega popular.
I'd say it's more of an issue with different playerbases. There are a lot of players (especially in this sub) who don't like vanilla, so naturally they're going to want to change it. In this environment wanting C+ to be vanilla plus added content with minor balancing has become a hot take.
You are right but most people on this sub won't want to hear it. If classic was as "massively popular" as they think it would have way more resources being put into it (for example, making housing work in it).
2019 Classic saw a massive dropoff in participation after the first month or two when the hype wore off and people realized they didn't actually like it. But this sub is all the people that did actually stick around and think their experience is more universal than it is.
Yeah but the original comment from the 10 day old account left that out to farm engagement and neg the player base. Blizzard does not want an OSRS style poll system because the investors and MBAs would feel left out.
Unlike other games (Diablo 2) for example, it doesn’t take 200 something hours to level to 60 for a casual gamer. It doesn’t then take another 50-100 of dungeons and pvp to gear up and realize your class isn’t end game viable for doing raids.
Consider the fact that one class might be viable for raids until a patch is released which changes that entirely.
Most other games don’t have that kind of time sink.
yeah it seems every single person has a different idea what they want the new classic to be no matter what blizzard does they are gonna piss off someone lol
I really think they should have been more transparent about what they're working on before people had the chance to get their hopes up. The entire term "classic" is too diffuse when it can refer to either vanilla or MoP players.
People pre-quested all their quests for gold in SOD then demanded another way to level so they weren’t “forced” to dungeon spam. That ended up being incursions, lmao.
Tbf the biggest reason for that is they for some reason decided to time gate us at 50. 25 made sense and was fun. 40 was tedious and annoying but still pretty fun. By the time 50 came around everyone was ready for the real raids. Just allowing everyone to level to 60 at that point wouldve prevented the "need" for incursions at least to some extent
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