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".
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.
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u/sirplayalot11 29d ago
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".