Tom Chilton explains early WoW class balance (or lack thereof)
by Michael Sacco 
Mar 5th 2010 at 5:00PM
Speaking of, I wonder if there's anybody that could shed some light on that last bit. Maybe Tom Chilton, the lead Game Director could, in his latest interview on the five-year anniversary mini-site.
As it turns out, Chilton was brought in in early 2004 to work on the PvP portion of the game, but ended up handling a lot more when the honor system was put on hold to handle more pressing concerns, like making gameplay interesting.
Kind of explains a lot, doesn't it? Like Lacerate, for example. People who complain about balance nowadays really have no idea how bad it used to be, or how much Blizzard's process for fixing it has improved. Chilton goes into more detail about WoW's early development in his full interview on the Battlecry site."From April until the game shipped, the vast majority of my time was spent working on the design for the auction house, the mail system, and implementing the talent trees for every class. I was the only person available to do that -- our other class designer, Kevin Jordan, was mainly focused on ensuring that all of the classes had spells and abilities up to level 60, and managing the flow of when you'd get which ability. Kevin and I, and Rob Pardo, and Mike Heiberg from the StarCraft team, all worked on that part of the game. It was exciting, but it was weird -- my experience with some of the classes was making a character of that class on an internal server, playing it up to level 10 to get a feel for how the class played, and starting to make 60 levels worth of talents. A lot of my early experience was trying to get familiar with every class."
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Interviews
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Andrew R. Mar 5th 2010 5:10PM
Blizzard is constantly learning not only from their own mistakes but from the community. If it weren't for people finding the best spec, rotations, bugs, exploits, etc then we wouldn't have the game we do today.
Everyone complains about balance but look at how things have changed from the first day you played and look at how things are now. Blizzard has a better grasp on class balance and almost every other aspect of the game. It's what keeps WoW on the top.
/fan boy "I love Blizz, have my babies!" speech
uncaringbear Mar 5th 2010 5:17PM
I'm not disagreeing that Blizzard has done a good job since the early days of WoW, but we should never forget that this is the same people who let Arenas completely derail their efforts at class balancing. Blizzard is still struggling with this legacy to this day.
Braundo Mar 5th 2010 5:12PM
Lacerate, the greatest 31-point talent in the game.
Mike Mar 5th 2010 5:25PM
Dual Wield for Enhancement. Much more game-changing.
thebvp Mar 5th 2010 6:19PM
No, that's lightwell.
Mattimus Mar 5th 2010 5:40PM
Blessing of Kings, the 31-point Retribution talent.
Swarfy Mar 5th 2010 5:21PM
"But no one really enjoyed running Molten Core. "
As someone who's played since launch as all the roles (healing in Vanilla, ranged and tank in TBC and now a tank/melee in Wrath) I immensely enjoyed running MC. My fiance and I run it now for fun and We take other people through most of the old world raids. MC is the one that people always ask to run again. The only downside to running MC back then was getting 40 people together a quarter of which were mouth breathers and wouldn't know their head from a hole in the ground. That was the only thing I disliked about MC, the zone as itself though was awesome and I wish there were more like it.
Mattimus Mar 5th 2010 5:43PM
A lot of the fun in a group scenario is what people you're with. If you have a lot of close friends who aren't loot-crazed and only with the guild for their Tier 1, Molten Core probably was fun.
From what I've seen and heard, most peoples' experiences in Molten Core were rather middling -- they didn't necessarily have more than a manageable handful of people that were unpleasant to bring along, but neither did they have a huge group of friends laughing and having a good time. It was a weekly trudge through one of the more boring raids yet; there's a reason so many folk called it "Molten Snore" (sometimes Molten Bore, but I know I'm not the only one who genuinely got sleepy inside MC for some reason).
n1nesp1ne Mar 5th 2010 5:58PM
Molten Core is a giant cave. Hogger has more interesting surrounding. It's the most drab place on Earth and even the enemies all look the same.
Hollow Leviathan Mar 5th 2010 8:00PM
You can defend ANY OTHER RAID, any of them, except for MC and I will listen attentively. BWL, AQ20/40, Kara, all of them were fun and fine and interesting at least in places, at most, for the whole run. But MC is just terrible. Just. Terrible. The only good part of MC is that Ragnaros is not a palette swap of Geddon, but, despite the entire rest of the raid, cool and interesting.
Snowfeather Mar 5th 2010 9:20PM
I healed MC on my druid, then brought my warlock, then brought my hunter. Druid is exalted, lock and hunter at revered I believe, and nearly had full T1 on the alts. I can honestly say I enjoyed MC >.>
I had a great guild at the time, pushed for server firsts, but unlike most hardcore guilds we had a lot of fun. I think some of that was due to the fact only about 12/40 of us were on vent at a time, and usually we were instigating others on vent to do silly things. Like pull the giants at the beginning with pally bubble while people were buffing and not paying attention and then running out while they either wiped or tried to handle it.
I still really enjoy going back to MC now honestly, and helped a lot of my friends that started in TBC get exalted for the achievement. I guess its all in what you make of it, but when you mark Garr adds by leapfrogging hunter's mark and focus between tanks and warlocks; then have a warlock drag their add all the way back to Magmadar's area until it becomes a raid boss on its own and 1 shots everything; you haven't really eked out as much from the instance as you can.
Hollow Leviathan Mar 6th 2010 2:40AM
Sure, you can make anything fun with good friends, I'm glad you did, but you can have fun with just a stick if you set your mind to it. Regardless, a stick is not really optimized for engaging an audience with good storytelling and fun and involving strategies (just like Molten Core).
Kanuris Mar 9th 2010 8:14AM
Swarfy clearly never got past MC and into BWL.
Running MC is a borefest. The bosses are uninteresting, the mechanics are easy to deal with and there's a Fire Resist gear cockblock for some of them. Top it off with legendaries that are mostly a case of "Pray for a 2% drop chance" and you have a boring raid.
And the icing on the cake? Once you were finally past this borefest into the much more interesting BWL, you STILL had to go back and farm MC. Just to get to Rag who dropped the T2 pants. Rag himself is a pretty decent fight, but the joy of whacking him is offset by the dull raid through everything else to get to him.
Squirr3llywrath9 Mar 5th 2010 5:24PM
Most of the people who complain now probably haven't been 1 shot by an ungodly windfury proc of old. I'll take dying in 20 seconds over dying in a second any day. Also vanilla shadow priests were pretty OP as well. All in all it seems like blizzard is doing better at fixing things.
Ilmyrn Mar 5th 2010 5:38PM
I leveled my Paladin as Prot in Vanilla, and I distinctly remember being healed through a Dead Strat run by a Shadow Priest DPSing. It was one of the smoothest runs ever.
I have no idea how she was geared or specced. (Long before Armory and talent inspection), but that cemented a soft spot in my heart for shadow priests that's remained to this day. If I can find a shadow priest for a raid I take them in a heartbeat.
Rich Mar 5th 2010 5:54PM
noob tip from 12/2004: You see a shaman w/ an arcanite reaper, RUN.
Nood: How far?
noob tip: Until you can't see them anymore.
Also - one shotting ANY clothir with my barman shanker was fun.
Edge Mar 7th 2010 2:38AM
So THAT'S why we suck so bad now in PvP. We had our fifteen minutes of fame when the game first started. Admittedly I wasn't around then so that makes me a sad enhancer.
Ok we don't suck that bad as long as you keep telling yourself, "your support, until you wolves are off cooldown"
Blend Mar 5th 2010 5:30PM
Anyone else catch the new Instance name Blackwing Descent in Blackrock Mountains? *girlish fanboy squee*
Scionic Mar 5th 2010 5:32PM
"But no one really enjoyed running Molten Core. Or the old honor system."
I understand the need to make an impacting statement, but you lost me with this. I did enjoy Molten Core - I enjoyed it the first time decked out in Valor gear, and I enjoyed running alt through it on off-nights from AQ40/Nax. The old days may be gone, in some ways for better and for worse, but giving a blanket statement like that and positing it as truth isn't the best thing. Wow.com has always had a better line than this; please don't sink below it.
Novead Mar 6th 2010 6:38AM
Agreed. There were lots of people that did enjoy Molten Core and the old honor system. Me being one of them.
There is no fact that states that the old honor system and raids like Molten Core was worse than the current versions. It's just personal views.