Are the Developers really out of touch? Misunderstood? Or Dishonest?

Every time i read Blue Quotes from MMO Champion i wish i could get into every back and forth i read.  It makes me wonder so much!  Like why does Blizzard always tend to feature 1 or 2 overpowered class in any given season?  While during that time like now for example, they swear so much their goal is equal balance every time you read their quotes.  It always comes across as so genuine, which GC seems to be very good at.  Where as the jaded, and conspiracy theorists would say they do it on purpose.  Is GC truly that dishonest in their true motives vs what he tells the players making the conspiracy theorists right?   Or is balancing WoW THAT difficult where its too hard to do any better ?  Granted WoW is a huge game but how can you intentionally have such a HUGE imbalance like Resto Druids from S2-4 for example that went on for a such a long time?  How can you justify that under this idea they strive for equal class balance all of the time?  Thats just one example and there are many more that can be brought up.

Well here are a few quotes from GC recently i was very curious about, that left me even more puzzled about how these Developers operate in their strive for harmonious class balance, so they say:

Q u o t e:
#1 - Is it okay for a Ret Paladin to do 80% of a person total HP in just a couple GCD's while his target is stunned?

No, and we have said as such in many threads over the past few weeks. It's not the Rets' fault -- it's just the way the class is designed where lack of a real resource cost and cooldown-limited abilities means they can front-load the damage.

Smokeee:  So its okay to just let this class be the broken wrecking ball it is?  The fact that the Developers didn't come up with an intelligent design for the new and improved 'Ret' before instituting the class, all of us non Rets have to pay for it by making the class stupid OP'd, literally?  Its obviously not the Rets fault he's running around 2-3 shoting everything with a few buttons, of course he's going to think its fun.  Who can blame them for coming out of the woodwork and being fotm?  It just seems wrong that these Developers haven't yet figured out how to design a class's abilities to work within the same framework of all of the other classes in the game, and then purposely and knowingly making them overpowered as a result.  Knowing and acknowledging this fact while doing nothing about it is contrary to this idea balance is the ultimate goal that GC conveys sincerely day to day in forum replies.  Can someone play devils advocate?  Because i'd love to know how they can come close to rationalizing these type of decisions while contradicting themselves to the community. 

Its ironically like a lot like the same rationalizing thats made 1-2 classes blatantly OP'd for every season now, and the class reviews that occured before Arena.  The jaded conspiracy theorists would call it Dev's spinning the Fotm Wheel.

Q u o t e:
I'm not sure which cool kids you are talking to, but the vast majority of these posts on this forum tend to disagree

I'm not sure how you measure "vast majority." A great many of the PvP complaints are about how people can't kill healing paladins, priests or druids. If you look at which comps are doing well in PvP, nearly all have healers.

Now there are a lot of concerns about how casters are struggling against melee, but we don't think that is a "burst too good" issue. For the players complaining about Arms and Juggernaut, the issue is not that they get Mortal Striked for 10,000 or whatever. Plenty of casters can get off big nukes, but they aren't the problem du jour according to the forums.


Smokeee:  Yeah getting off 10k is conditional on the target being frozen and getting a 2.5 second cast off and hoping they both crit and i have top gear.  For a Ret its standing next to something for a few seconds.  For most other melee its about wacking them a few times and building up that 10k burst in combo pts/runicpower/rage with instants, meaning its more likely than any caster getting off a standstill 2.5 sec cast.  Poor lil clothies with manashield and the hoops they have to jump through for their burst

Q u o t e:
#2 - Do you honestly believe 8-11k Frost Strikes from Frost DK's is fair? Yea, the attack that cannot be dodged blocked or parried. What about 7-9k Scourge Strikes?

The DK has to have a lot of runic power to use that ability, so they can't unload with it right off the bat the way say a Ret can. Unholy is still far more dominant in PvP, which makes us think this problem is a little overblown. We might remove the dodge and parry prevention from it, which we added to make sure DKs didn't just Deathcoil instead. There are enough talents for Frost Strike now that it's going to be attractive regardless.

Smokeee:  See what i mean?  Woe is me Runic Power! 

Q u o t e:
GC. You really think getting off a Frostbolt Ice Lance shatter combo is equivalent to the sustained damage melee classes can put out? You have to be kidding me? lol

Sustained damage != burst. If your contention is that melee do too much damage to casters, then say that. Don't say "burst is out of control." When we hear "burst" we think early last season's Icy Touch and Arcane Barrage where someone could take you down in 1 or 2 GCDs with almost nothing you could do. If melee are able to stay on casters too effectively, that is a very different problem requiring very different solutions.


Smokeee:  How is saying "melee do too much damage to casters" any different from saying "burst is out of control" from a casters viewpoint?  How was the initial Arcane Barrage Mage any different from the current Ret situation, with the exception the Arcane Mage runs out of mana and becomes completely useless for a minute every few minutes?  And the fact that many Mages had to convince Blizzard to nerf themselves for the sake of balance?

Q u o t e:
8k Frost Strikes and 6k Scourge Strikes are not too much burst because they have to use runes for them? How do the resources used have anything to do with the damage put out? Yes, it's limited how many times they can do it in a row (that makes sustained lower)- but the attacks are doing a crazy amount of damage in the period of time when they use all their runes (that's burst)

Yes, the resource has a ton to do with it. Nobody complains about PoM Pyro (much) because it can be done so infrequently. Frost Strike and Scourge Strike are essentially finishing moves. It's harder to use them as openers.

Now that's not to say finishing moves can never be unbalanced, but I must admit to being a little surprised at all the focus on DKs. They were without a doubt too good last season, but currently they are below rogues in the brackets that "matter" and far below healers across the board. If I wanted to stack the deck to be succesful in Arena, I would be rolling a Disc priest, not a DK.


Smokeee:  How is POM pyro, a 2 minute CD, comparable to a class's finishing move even if it can be frontloaded?  Finishing moves are a regularity of play, POM pyro is a long CD ability and very nerfed one at that(w/o AP).  Again i don't understand the logic here to justify. 

And for the record every time i run into a well played, well geared DK, i wonder how the hell a class can be designed around THAT much survivability while having as much dps, including aoe?  I thought class design was built around give and take, where exactly is the give part of this class's design?

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Q u o t e:
#3 - Why are the only people who value Resilience, well at least 900+, casters and healers(not paladins obviously)? Melee gets about 5-700 max and then is able to wear PvE gear and gem for straight dmg. Where is the balance here? Resilience does nothing besides lower healing and caster dmg basically while providing minimal (at best) survivability. Is this okay? If i wore PvE gear i would... well i am confident enough that people know what would happen if a Resto Shaman wore PvE gear into arena's what would happen.

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We're not convinced melee stop improving their resilience. Typically that only works for a class with such high CC or defensive potential that they just aren't taking damage much (rogues typically have fallen into this category). Resilience doesn't lower damage -- it lowers burst damage. It means you have to whack at a guy a few times and can't just explode him on contact. It means you have to play smart -- blow cooldowns, use crowd control to minimize defenses, tie up the healer and otherwise cause damage at the right time instead of just causing damage. Remember as a caster, most melee have no inherent defense against you -- their armor does *nothing* versus magic damage.


Smokeee:  Remember as a melee, most casters are made of cloth and therefore can be 3 shot.  Don't forget every melee class has anti-caster abilities like spell reflects/second wind, ams/ibf, clos/vanish/evasion, etc. on top of the many newly given catchups and snare-outs of these kiting to survive poor lil clothies with manashield    Don't forget death grip changed everything for this poor lil clothy, the same class that has a flat 6 sec silence.  Who needs catchups when you have a class that brings the poor lil clothie to the melee zerg for the slaughter? 

Poor lil clothies with manashield

Q u o t e:
It seems that you guys continue to balance PvP issues around the top percentages of arena play, as if that's where most PvP in the game takes place. While I do read a lot of forum complaints about hard to kill healers and melee burst on casters, these all seem to be arena related issues. The large majority of the player base never sees these things in high end arena matches, so they're really irrelevant to most of us. Things we do see are DKs and Ret Palys, in large numbers of course because that's how things trend when a class is OP, running rampant in the battlegrounds. This is very indicative of the trend to balance the game around the small percentage of players at the cutting edge of either PvP or PvE.

This is a fair point, and we do spend effort on BG and world PvP balance. I don't tend to focus on it much in these forums because so many players here seem to be more concerned with the 2s and 3s Arena environment. I'll make an effort to talk about other aspects of PvP more. We don't just balance PvP around the top percentages of Arena play though.


Smokeee:  Bull****.  Every reply in terms of how the Dev's balance is based on Arena play and high end representation in terms of PvP.  Every class balancing reply has aluded to Arena.  Never have i heard GC or Kalgan cite BG's or world PvP balance, as a reason for any class changes.  Not that this is a bad thing for most of the audience here at Gameriot, but i find this to be blatant double speak to appease the masses that they aren't bias towards the top end, in other words being politically correct, but not honest.  I'd rather him say what many Arena players say which is "there aren't any rated BG's or premade competition yet so why pretend to balance around imperfect play?" which comes across as elitist but hey, it at least has some rationale to it. 

This reply in particular seemed indicative of spinning and lies to appease the player base as a whole.  Especially the part about how he just doesn't focus on it on the forums because they don't seem concerned(guess he's overlooked the 28 page threads on General that pop up every few days) but they supposedly do, yeah right lol.  Just keep pretending BG improvements are coming like you've done for the last 2 years with nothing to show for it, it at least keeps the average players hanging on a thread forever.

In conclusion i have to say GC is dishonest, the Developers are dishonest, and balancing WoW can't be as hard as they pretend.  With blatant and glaring imbalances that they are clearly aware of, that regularly occur every season, with nothing being done to address them while hotfixing other less glaring issues for other classes or nerfing them entirely.  More importantly talking with sincerity that they strive for class balance in every way but its so difficult and we just don't know seems so hypocritical given their knowledge of major current imbalances they seem to be okay with for highly questionable reasons.