Posts with tag Class-Balance

What I love about these posts is that little glimpse of insight they provide into the thought process that goes into balancing the class mechanics in a game like World of Warcraft. I'll be honest, I'm glad I'm not one of the people involved in that job. To me it seems like an endless headache to try and make sure all classes are different enough to feel unique, but similar enough such that a raid or dungeon group isn't punished for lacking one indispensable class, and I wouldn't have the patience for it. But I certainly admire and respect those who do!

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If you're wondering how your class has changed in patch 5.2, Blizzard's Ghostcrawler and Daxxari have joined forces to give you details on exactly that. This installment covers Death Knights, Druids and Hunters, so it's working alphabetically in case you're wondering where your class is.

While the patch notes serve to give you the details on the changes, this series of posts exists to give you the motivation and reasoning behind the changes to the classes. Why did they buff this or nerf that? The motivations towards each change are explained in detail, letting you get a sense of just what's going on for you in patch 5.2.

Ghostcrawler and Daxxari - Patch 5.2 Class Review Part 1

In terms of talent adjustments, while we're still happy overall with the Mists of Pandaria talent overhaul, we do recognize that there were some talents that weren't tuned as well as they could be or just weren't attractive. That's not to say that all talents should be all things to all players all the time; some talents are situationally quite attractive, and we're happy with those. On the other hand, others just never see much use and we would rather provide players real options for each talent tier.

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Part one is up now, so keep an eye peeled to the official site for more.

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Death knight complaints and requests can change with patches, dealing with current issues or balance problems, but there are other death knight requests that come up time and time again, and will probably be asked about until the day they finally shut down the servers for good.

This week, we're going to look at three requests that probably will be around that long, just because it seems very unlikely Blizzard will ever fulfill them.

The power of the hero class

The "hero class" moniker has a long and storied history. It comes from Warcraft III, where hero units like paladins and death knights towered over the rest. By design, you only had a few of these every game, and they had more powerful skills that allowed them to dominate the battlefield when deployed.

When WoW came around, rumors of the hero classes spread throughout beta, but in the end, Blizzard went away from the model. Paladins, a hero class in WCIII, were made a regular class, for example, while other hero class mechanics, such as the Far Seer's Chain Lightning, went to regular classes.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we endeavor to answer that age old question: Which spec will other people insist my mage needs to be? We will try not to resort to that age old response to that question, which tended to involve punching those other people in the mouth.

One constant, no matter how hard I've tried to ignore it, that has always existed in WoW is that one spec is always "best." The class designers are constantly tweaking the numbers and trying to keep things balanced, but once we all sit down with our collective calculator and spreadsheet, one spec always emerges to rule them all.

It has been a sad reality that while we have always had freedom to choose a spec and personalize it to fit our preferences, when it comes time to raid at high levels or take part in PvP at high levels, that freedom essentially vanishes. You can make arguments for utility over damage or for certain specs in certain fights, but in most cases, under most circumstances, you're going with whatever cookie-cutter spec the internet has agreed upon that week, or you're not getting an invite.

Well, now we have a fresh expansion to leverage our calculators and spreadsheets upon. It's still early in the beta process, and hard numbers are in short supply. Still, the overall design of the specs seems to be fairly well-defined, even if the actual percentage points are still in flux. What conclusions can we draw at this stage? Which spec looks to put out the best damage? And most importantly, which spec will let us kill warlocks most efficiently?

Community Manager Zarhym has posted a thread over on the official forums soliciting player class balance feedback based on their experiences and number crunching in the beta.

Mind you, this is not meant to be a simple thread for pleading for buffs to your favorite ability. Blizzard's looking for serious theorycrafters slinging serious math to justify their positions. In addition, while this thread does mean the dev team feels numbers are in a solid place right now, it does not mean beta class balance is done or that further issues won't be addressed. Right now, the devs want to give player beta testers a chance to run wild, crunch numbers, and reconcile their data with Blizzard's data.

Read on after the break for the full text of Zarhym's post, and if you have some serious analysis to share, go post in that thread.

First off, we know that game balance is an eternal goal. As the game evolves and becomes more complex (as it does every expansion, because new abilities are introduced and new classes or races make their debut), balancing them all for every role they can fill and every aspect of the game (Arena PvP, BGs, 5-man instances, raiding) becomes ever more complicated. Abilities that seem minor in impact can mushroom in importance due to synergy with other talents or abilities. As an example, Vengeance in PvP became important enough to cause it to be turned off, as gear improved and health pools rose.

This has been the case in World of Warcraft since its debut. Heck, thanks to Indalamar, warriors got nerfed before the game went live. Balance is ephemeral. Your class may be on top one day, but your day will end. Anyone who's tanked for the past six years can attest to the roller coaster of which class is best at which aspect of the role. There was a time where paladins were the undisputed kings of AoE tanking, a time before Death and Decay or Blood and Thunder.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week we look at a few mage-related questions, and the answers to those questions, which end up raising even more questions, which then get answers that only provoke even more questions ... it's like an episode of Lost, only one in which the smoke monster was made of frostfire. I'm 99% sure Desmond was a mage, anyway.

So just a heads up in case you haven't seen it somewhere else: The latest build on the PTR is tagged as a release candidate, which means patch 4.3 is imminent. I'm expecting it some time in the next few weeks. I wouldn't be at all surprised to be eating turkey and pie while queuing for the Raid Finder. Although, disclaimer: I eat turkey and pie for every meal. In other news, my heart just stopped. No worries, though. That also happens every meal. It's nothing a good chest compression or two can't fix. Look for a mage patch prep column right here next week.

Now, on to the business at hand. On Wednesday, the developers allowed us to pick their brains with all of our most burning questions about our classes. The mage community asked some good ones, and some of them even got answered. And though the answers given are perhaps not as definitive as you or I may have preferred, there's still a great deal of enlightening information to be gleaned from what the developers did share. And no, my own question -- "If I turn a warlock into a sheep, then hit him with a Pyroblast, then add a bit of mint and some red potatoes, what should I serve for dessert?" -- wasn't answered. Though I think we all know the answer to that question is "pie."

With patch 4.3 on the horizon, Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (lead systems designer) has taken to the WoW community blog to discuss class and balance changes that are coming with the next big update to the game. Ghostcrawler had previously discussed some balance changes in part one of his balance change blogs, but it was missing some classes that Blizzard wasn't ready to talk about just yet. Now, we've got notes and discussions on each class currently in game. I'm a huge fan of Ghostcrawler's to-the-point blog posts about the focus and design of classes, and this is just another in the now long line of awesome insights into the design process.

Death knight and druid tanks are getting some buffs to bring them more in line with the block-heavy warriors and paladins, and block capping for both warriors and paladins is not being discouraged. Feral druids are getting a Glyph of Shred change that will hopefully help their rotations, and beast mastery hunters are getting a slight buff. As we found out from before, paladins' Holy Radiance is getting a change to be more of a focused AOE heal, and priests are getting a buff to Guardian Spirit.

Shaman initially were hit with a huge Wind Shear nerf, which has been rolled back slightly. Demonology and destruction warlocks are getting a slight buff to be more competitive with afflocks, and hopefully warrior "charge jumping" has been fixed for good. You've promised me this before, Ghostcrawler! Where's my charge-jumping pony-moose? Check out the full blog post after the jump.

Today's class balance Q&A has ended and went off without a hitch. With so many developers participating, the answers came fast and furious. (That's a good thing!) Every class was touched on at least a little, and we even learned a little more about Blizzard's intentions with inscription and other non-class topics that do ultimately impact balance overall.

If you're at work or otherwise away from your computer and were unable to attend the event, don't sweat it. We have a transcript of the entire event for you and we've broken it all down by class.

• Death Knight
• Druid
• Hunter
• Mage
• Monk
• Paladin
• Priest
• Rogue
• Shaman
• Warlock
• Warrior
• Miscellaneous

Or if you want to read the whole thing in one go, no problem. Just click through the break below and you'll be able to read the entire transcript in all of its glory.

Hot off the heels of its wildly successful Mists of Pandaria live Q&A, the WoW dev team plans to hold another online Q&A, this time on the subject of class design and balance. Community Manager Zarhym's just announced that it will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 9, from 10:45 a.m. to noon PST. The chat will be held on CoverItLive, hosted by Bashiok and Zarhym. Answering questions will be Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street along with Celestalon, Koraa, Watcher, Wradyx, and Xelnath.

As with the last Q&A, the chat will use the CoverItLive system, so make sure you're signed up and familiar with it if you want to ask a question. Check after the break for the text of the announcement.

BlizzCon's just around the corner, and while we discussed bandaid fixes last week, the recent winding down of the class feedback threads and the existence of a class talent panel at BlizzCon itself suggests that we may be getting so more long-term information soon, if not on the death knight class, on the general focus of class development in general. With that in mind, this week I wanted to discuss some of the possible long-term changes the death knight class could use to keep it fresh, relevant, and fun to play in patch 5.0 and beyond, some of which we might just expect to hear about or ask questions about this coming weekend.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Your host for the shadow-flavored Wednesday edition is, as always, Fox Van Allen -- an indestructible specimen of draenei might. In fact, there are only three things that can even dent his armor: saccharin hugs from his holy counterpart Dawn Moore, caramel corn and that stupid bug that kills you every time you try to enter the Maelstrom in the Cataclysm beta.

I've noticed that an awful lot of people seem to be playing shadow priests these days. Way more, it seems, than back in the days of Ulduar. Now, that can mean one of two things: Either Blizzard has gone the distance and finally made shadow priests competitive enough and fun enough to draw in large numbers of new endgame raiders, or -- and I'm going out on a limb here -- my columns here have been just so popular that record numbers of priests are forsaking the light just to be more like Fox Van Allen.

You can probably make a stronger argument for the "Blizzard fixed our class" reason, but that doesn't really do much for my ego or make a good segue into today's article. So, for the purposes of today's Spiritual Guidance, I shall be the shadowy beacon that made a spec popular through naught but the raw power of his own charisma.

As you can imagine, such a shadowy beacon gets asked an awful lot of questions. Occasionally, in between all the people asking, "Can I buy you a drink?" and "Can I have your babies?", a shadow priesting question gets asked. They're seldom involved enough to write a full article about, but I feel like I have a responsibility to shadow priesting kind to answer them, regardless.

And so today, I'm taking on a few questions about patch 4.0.1 and Cataclysm. Let's jump right in.

Now that patch 4.0.1 is live, what's going on in the Cataclysm beta for shadow priests?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Even weeks when your shadowy messiah, Fox Van Allen, is nursing one heck of a headache -- along with, presumably, everyone else who's still suffering from the non-stop party atmosphere of BlizzCon 2010.

Let's start by saying that BlizzCon 2010 was an absolute blast. I met most of the WoW Insider crew, got to smell Mike Sacco's hair yet again, got some amazing swag and got to eat at Jack in the Box no less than five times. The best part, though, was probably meeting Orkchop (pictured above with WoW Insider's moonkin blogger Tyler Caraway, who can only aspire to be as amazing as Orkchop). The dude is an internet celebrity. For real.

But enough about how awesome Orkchop is. Let's talk shadow priests, and how awesome they are.

Now, I'm not good at sugar-coating things, so I'll just come out with it: BlizzCon 2010 was pretty disappointing in terms of World of Warcraft-related content. The biggest news out of the convention was the new loading screen for Cataclysm. Really. That was the big news. Seriously. And it's just a palette-shifted version of the Sindragosa loading screen.

Despite the lack of earth-shattering news, I made sure to take note of all the shadow priest action. There wasn't a heck of a lot of it, but what little ground was covered was hugely important to the future of the spec. The good, the bad and the non-answers -- we'll go over it all after the break.

If you've played World of Warcraft for any length of time, you've probably heard the refrain that game balance is most important at endgame. Whatever endgame happens to be at that time (level 60, originally; level 85 in Cataclysm), the idea is that a little weirdness in talents, abilities, survivability or damage output as you level up isn't as important as making sure things are working properly at maximum level. While it may still be true, recent forum posts indicate that the leveling game and even the current, soon-to-be-moribund maximum level of 80 are seeing more balancing passes now than one might expect.

Ghostcrawler - Re: Question about design priority

We are going to spend some effort adjusting numbers for 1-80. It's not as big a priority as 85 because frankly, more players care about balance at 85 than they do lower level balance. As some folks have pointed out, inexperienced players almost by definition, don't place a premium on balance, and experienced players tend to not worry about balance much until they're at max level since things are changing so quickly.

Rather than adjusting everything independently, we tend to focus on max level and then work backwards from there. It doesn't help to nerf say rogue damage by 5% from level 1-60 if we then find we also need to nerf it at level 85 and then buff the 1-60 numbers to compensate.

There is some goofy stuff going on at lower level, but we'll get it all straightened out. After spending so much effort revamping the old zones and quests, we don't want the leveling experience to be an odd one.

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I wouldn't call it a change of direction, as Blizzard has never said it doesn't adjust lower levels, and clearly a great deal of Cataclysm's focus has been on content for leveling players, but it does show a willingness to make changes in the face of oddities of design. (The original poster notes things like rogues soloing Scarlet Monastery while level-appropriate.) With more people than ever leveling through battlegrounds or the dungeon finder, the lower-level experience is actually pretty compelling and important. It's good to see some design time aimed at fixing its problems.

With the final content patch of this expansion on our doorstep and Cataclysm following close behind, we'll be taking the next several weeks to look back on Wrath of the Lich King and everything that made it what it is, for better or for worse, in Wrath Retrospective.

Wrath of the Lich King is coming to an end, and with it one of the largest experiments that Blizzard has ever done in the history of WoW. At the onset of this expansion, we were all introduced to a new class; the death knight. The addition of a new class has major complications on the game as a whole: how they fit into PvE, how they work in PvP, what buffs and debuffs they bring, what roles they fill, what unique utility that they provide. All of these things have changed the face of the game as we know it. though fairly new arrivals, death knights have been integrated into the game almost seamlessly; the craters that they made when they first arrived, however, are still highly visible to those that know where to look.

There were a lot of misconceptions about death knights when they were first released. Once they were announced, Blizzard classified them as being a hero class, not to be confused with your ordinary, run-of-the-mill class. To many people, this caused worry that death knights would be grossly overpowered and far superior to all of the others. Blizzard was quick to point out that this was not the case, but it did little to assuage many of the fears that players had. Still, death knights have had their ups and their downs all throughout this expansion, and if that is not a case for removing then from hero status then I don't know what is.

What can we learn from death knights? What has all of the work done with the significant re-balancing changes and the major talent changes taught us about WoW in general? How can we apply that knowledge to all of the other classes in the game? That is what I wish to explore to day, and I hope that you will join me.