Game Design Choices and Overpowered Classes

[jpark]

This is not intended to be a topic about specific classes per se and whether they are overpowered.

Looking at the history of decisions with this game, barring DKs, if you are going to have an overpowered class it is because:

1  Player base.  Dollars count and if a class is very popular collective QQ will push for more power.

2  Class representation.  Underplayed classes that happen to be overpowerd will not get nerfed, and may even be buffed more to increase their representation in game.

We can throw out examples for each of these but lets try to avoid arguing about a specific class.  My question is which you think, if any, accurately describes Blizzard's  game design choices for class balance.

[K9]

Everyone thinks someone else is overpowered, and neither of those ideas describe Blizzards behaviour.

[Merusk]

Yeah, by the logic of #1, Hunters would have been overpowered wrecking machines until DKs came along.  They were not.  They were easily shut-down in BGs by players who knew what they were doing and had (and still have) some big issues in Arenas.

By the thought process of #2, Shaman should be getting constantly buffed.  They are not.

Now, if you're going to QQ because you got your ass beat by some class you are not, head off to the official forums.

[Hindenburg]

Always liked to think that the class that the designers are playing will manage to get some favors thrown their way.
There are some times when this appears valid, like when they finally removed that retarded 10sec rotation stuff from hunters, and times when it falls on it's face.

Blizzard behaviour is mostly random. Better now than it was in the past, though, when it was pretty damn clear that they had absolutely no idea how some classes worked.

[bhodi]

The other thing you have to consider is that they deliberately made some classes harder to play than others. At one of the blizzcons (I have no link for this) they admitted that they made the paladin class deliberately easier to play than some others. I'm not sure why they don't even it out a bit.

For example, as a shadow priest, I think I have it the hardest in the game (except possibly one of the warlock specs). I have 3 dots I have to keep and 2 abilities I have to keep on cooldown up at all times plus two additional filler abilities on the mob to do decent damage. And I'm not even able to pull anything more than average DPS, even if I do everything exactly right. I'm very middle of the pack.

Ret pallies have 3 abilities they rotate between. Elemental Shamans only have to keep the flame shock dot up and spam lightning bolt and use lava burst on cooldown. Mages are nearly as easy, especially frost mages. Warlocks are in the same boat with a very complex rotation. Feral druids' rotation is complex. Balance druids keep one debuff up and spam either wrath or starfire. From all reports, DKs are dead easy, though I've never played one.

The best example is a guildie of mine that played a fury warrior. He finally got frustrated and switched to a survival hunter. He leveled up his hunter and came in, decked in blues and a few epics he had scrounged from the AH - he was doing 1.5 the damage of his fully decked out and geared warrior. When he got equally geared, he went from the bottom to the top of the DPS charts, he went from 2.5k to 5k DPS.

I don't know if that's class disparity or if hunters are just much easier to play but it was a gigantic change. Now the other underperforming warriors are feeling pressure to switch classes as well.

It seems like blizzard has JUST started to either pull statistics or look at the statistics they have always pulled to try and adjust the game - they have been adjusting content difficulty based on number of people clearing bosses, detuning ulduar until they get their target numbers. This next patch is an indication that they want more and more people to see the content they've worked so hard to put together. I don't know why it has taken them years to start doing this, but from anecdotal evidence (blue forum posts, interviews) they have gone from making changes solely based on their in-house testing people to using their in-house testing coupled with performance statistics across realms.

Hopefully they will start to do the same for classes as well, an overall averaged DPS per spec SHOULD give them an indication that something is off and that some classes need love (either in rotation simplification or flat out damage buffs). The in-house testers are NOT your average player, any more than someone in a server-first guild is. I just worry that they won't be able to capture DPS due to the immense amount of logging required (as opposed to wipes/clears which are few in number and easy to track.)

[Merusk]

Hunters have always been easy and solid PVE dps.  They're no long as easy as the BC days where it was literally 1 button to be top dps, but it's still easier than the MC days where you had to worry about clipping autoshots.  I dropped mine not because of PvE hate, but because of PVP difficulty.  That's 'their balance' from old, old posts.

DKs are marginal difficulty. They have 2 resources they are supposed to manage. Runes and Runic power.  Each spec plays differently on these aspects and I'm most familiar with Unholy, which is reportedly the best DPS spec.

As unholy, managing runes as means keeping an eye on your  Disease Dots so you neither clip diseases or miscycle your death runes while weaving in a ghoul frenzy in place of a plague strike.  Runic power management means keeping Unholy Blight at 100% uptime while having enough to pop gargoyle when it's available and interrupts when you need them but not having so much that you overfill your bar and waste the RP you generate with each second and each strike.  It's nowhere  as lulz-ez as Hunter ever was, but it's not as difficult as juggling shadow priest or warlock dots proved to be when I did some time with those classes at 70.

Warriors have a bitch of a time because Rage still seems damned streaky.  There's some fights that the dps warrior in my raid wipes the floor with me, but that's on short AOe trash and based on his ability to spam whirlwind.  If it's a single target fight like General or a sustained AOE fest like Thorim I'll mop the floor with him.   We both fall way, way behind the rogues and locks.

[bhodi]

Oh another interesting subset of this conversation.... with everyone uploading all sorts of stats, with some decent queries the general public now has a  baseline for drawing and confirming their own conclusions or suspicions.

For example, you know that warrior tanks kind of suck, even though ghostcrawler swears they are OK and has been taking a lot of flak on the forums? (He believes that haste is an actual viable and valuable stat for warriors!) Check this out:

Ulduar TPS for Tanks  GEE, what seems under-represented?

Know how paladins have massive throughput? Know how druids can keep up HoTs on the entire raid? Want proof it's effective? (Priests are getting the nerfbat this coming patch with penance & prayer of healing reductions! Gotta keep them from being overpowered like they are now!)
HPS
EHPS

Think your class sucks / is overpowered on max / high end DPS?
top 50 DPS averaged for ulduar bosses
Top DPS on bosses

Notice priest is on the bottom or middle of the road for most non-gimmick bosses and doesn't show up at all on the top DPS *OR* HPS chart :)

Curious about your spec balance when you have two different DPS specs and if their effectiveness is even on the top-end raiding guild level?
DK Balanced
Hunter Balanced
Shaman Sort-of-balanced
Rogue Not balanced
Druid Not balanced
Warrior Not balanced
Mage Not balanced


So, remember I was talking about percentages during a clearing of ulduar? Well, thanks to stats we can see our own percentages! Look at the "Kill/Wipe" pie charts drop as you progress through the instance...

Remember that all these stats are WAY ABOVE your average, since most people that aren't in the top 25 guilds on a server don't upload logs at all.

[K9]

Interesting stuff bhodi.

[Musashi]

I'm with you on most of that stuff. 

But the healing thing is misleading.  Yea, Pallies are the most effective single target healers.  Yea, Druids are the most effective raid healers.  But Priests are still the most versatile healers, with really important cooldowns.  Healing meters lie.  Healing isn't balanced for throughput, nor should it be.  I'm not saying the Priest nerfs are justified.  Just saying throughput isn't really a good indicator of what's overpowered and what's not.  Those charts show the top guy in a bunch of different raids, but I'll wager all of those raids had at least one healing spec'd Priest.  DPS and tanking are kind of different, in that if the class is underrepresented, it probably means it's safe to not bring them to raids.

[Merusk]

Ghostcrawler is a moron.  He always has been, and I'm amazed that people are only just beginning to realize this.   I guess he's started making enough idiotic statement about classes other than hunters.

[Hindenburg]

Yeah, that he's an idiot has been clear ever since he said that hilarious sentence about the difficulty involved with balancing rogues.

[Merusk]

http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/07/ghostcrawler-telling-nothing-at-all.html

I'd say that's a far better guess at Blizzard's design philosophy than the original posting.

[Fordel]

Always liked to think that the class that the designers are playing will manage to get some favors thrown their way.
There are some times when this appears valid, like when they finally removed that retarded 10sec rotation stuff from hunters, and times when it falls on it's face.

This is probably the largest factor out of all of them. Everyone wants their class/spec to play a certain way, little more here, little less there, but only the Developers get to actually decide what direction a class goes.

A shit load of class design choices come down to a Developer going "I like it this way, the end". Pretty much arbitrary.


Blizzard is better then most at seeing that they have a pet idea for the most part, and killing it once it doesn't pan out... but they still have their moments of 



If you don't like a mechanic, but Blizzard DOES, either get used to it or reroll.

[Jayce]

I haven't raided in a long time, but you guys seem to be vastly oversimplifying things.

You can't look at straight DPS or HPS to indicate who's overpowered or underpowered at a given time.  I haven't seen anything above about moving vs nonmoving fights (moving fights favor the DOT and shoot on the run types), force multiplier stuff (Heroism, group replenishment), debuffs, bosses where positioning can play a role, wipe insurance (combat res, soulstone), and lots of other complexities.  

Contrary to what that guy at the link said, PvE is NOT pure mathematics. Force multipliers don't directly contribute DPS, but they may keep the top DPSers non-empty on mana or increase their DPS due to debuffs (COE for example).  Can you count that as DPS? Because it wouldn't have been there otherwise.  Also, most everyone seems to be running Naxx or Ulduar nowadays.  Is every single type of boss fight available represented in the current crop of bosses (in this case, I really don't know).  Or is it slanted toward ranged or melee?  Physical or spell damage?

[Trebes]

Ret pallies have 3 abilities they rotate between.

Five or six, actually. If you aren't using glyphed Exorcism and glyphed Consecrate you are going to end up with pretty shitty PvE numbers, last I checked.

[K9]

Ghostcrawler is a moron.  He always has been, and I'm amazed that people are only just beginning to realize this.   I guess he's started making enough idiotic statement about classes other than hunters.

For me the penny dropped when he tried to justify the nerf to penance. Seriously, they could add 0.5s to the mana burn cast time to the glyph and get the same net result, without hurting Disc in PvE, where we are fairly balanced.

That said, I feel that the aggressive balancing the game is undergoing is in some regards less enjoyable than the unbalanced game I once played.

[Fordel]

I haven't raided in a long time, but you guys seem to be vastly oversimplifying things.

You can't look at straight DPS or HPS to indicate who's overpowered or underpowered at a given time.  I haven't seen anything above about moving vs nonmoving fights (moving fights favor the DOT and shoot on the run types), force multiplier stuff (Heroism, group replenishment), debuffs, bosses where positioning can play a role, wipe insurance (combat res, soulstone), and lots of other complexities.  

Contrary to what that guy at the link said, PvE is NOT pure mathematics. Force multipliers don't directly contribute DPS, but they may keep the top DPSers non-empty on mana or increase their DPS due to debuffs (COE for example).  Can you count that as DPS? Because it wouldn't have been there otherwise.  Also, most everyone seems to be running Naxx or Ulduar nowadays.  Is every single type of boss fight available represented in the current crop of bosses (in this case, I really don't know).  Or is it slanted toward ranged or melee?  Physical or spell damage?

Just about every type of boss fight you can think of is represented between Naxx and Uluduar AND people do take into account 'force multipliers', but they are far less of an issue since multiple specs can bring just about every debuff/buff in game now. There are very, very few unique mods in that regard anymore.

Like, to continue with CoE, Balance Druids and UNholy DK's both bring that specific debuff, and they don't incur a personal DPS loss like a Warlock could. Balance Druids specifically end up bringing half a dozen 'raid mods' to any group they join, so are welcome no matter how variable there DPS ends up being. The only exception being the super hard modes or whatever, where you can't afford someone who can't guarantee their DPS numbers for that fight, but even then, its rare to see someone being sat.

[Merusk]

Yeah, one of their 'rebalance' goals prior to WOTLK being released was making sure no class had a unique buff or debuff, and you can't stack them like before.  There may be some that do it better, or without hurting their spec's rotation, but all buffs and debuffs are supposed to be covered with 4-5 classes.*   Their stated goal was so you can "bring who you want," and not be forced to take along that attention whoring warlock who does shitty dps and won't shut up, but is the only class who can debuff Boss#12.

*Except, I note, Fort is still the sole domain of Priests.  I'm not sure if Paws stacks with Fort like it did before or not.

[Fordel]

MotW, Fort, Kings are all still unique and stack with each other.

Bloodlust/Heroisim is as well.

Battle Rez is still Druid only, unless you want to count the DK Ghoul rez thing.

[Lightstalker]

Purely fair balance between classes is a bad thing for most players from a guild perspective.  When there is a FotM class or spec you can take an average player and get above average performance from them.  When everything is more or less even you realize most of your players aren't worth bringing.  The greatest problem with "Bring the class and not the player" as a design paridigm is the assumption that most players are worth bringing. 

The evening of abilities that we've seen over the last few patches (3.0+) also makes it harder to work out who isn't putting up the right buffs.  Now we've got stacking issues on buffs and debuffs (Shaman and Paladins, Shaman and DKs, Rogues and Warriors, etc.) in addition to several classes all eager for someone else to do the raid buffing work.  Granted, we had some stacking issues before, but now it is the rule rather than the exception (as the last 2 posts sort of illustrate - not counting Focus Magic, Wrath of Air toetm, Heroic Presence - racial).  Now everyone has to know everyone else's capabilities in the raid situation instead of knowing, by virtue of being class foo, that they need to put up buff or debuff bar.

I don't know that imbalance of capabilities is by design, I think they've deliberately tried to balance things across classes and specs.  I think imbalance of play complexity is by design - and it is a relatively good idea to cater to a wide variety of playstyles and difficulty challenges.  Somedays I pine for my 1-button rogue but most days I prefer using 20 abilities regularly and having the positions of another 28 memorized in case that additional utility is required (as enhance). 

Removal of downranking was probably a bad choice due to the gross simplification in healing straight across the game.  Sure it caused balance issues, but balance issues aren't necessarily a bad thing in the long run despite the gnashing of teeth the players may perform. 

[Paelos]

While PvE isn't simply mathematics, you do notice when the math completely ignores a particular class. A good example is the threat generation from everybody else except warriors. Those kind of things should be GLARINGLY obvious to anybody with a brain that one class isn't functioning with the same deck as everyone else.

[Sheepherder]

Did they ever fix improved spell reflect granting the threat to the target rather than the warrior, by the way?

But yeah, balance is purely a numbers thing, and it should be, because the opposite results in fucking retarded shit, like DS warlocks.

[Hindenburg]

Purely fair balance between classes is a bad thing for most players from a guild perspective.  When there is a FotM class or spec you can take an average player and get above average performance from them.  When everything is more or less even you realize most of your players aren't worth bringing.  The greatest problem with "Bring the class and not the player" as a design paridigm is the assumption that most players are worth bringing.

You think it's bad today, you should've raided back in the MC days when people called you a prick because you wanted to force every dps class to use damage and threatmeters... those fucking purist dandies. 
Heck, it was well known that every single damn guild carried a percentage of terribads along in their 40man raids.

[Sheepherder]

Purely fair balance between classes is a bad thing for most players from a guild perspective.  When there is a FotM class or spec you can take an average player and get above average performance from them.  When everything is more or less even you realize most of your players aren't worth bringing.  The greatest problem with "Bring the class and not the player" as a design paridigm is the assumption that most players are worth bringing.

And when there is an underperforming class with excellent players?  Yeah, tough shit.  It's you're fault that you didn't have the foreknowledge to pick a class that would be good a month from when you made the pick.  Grind another 70 levels you stupid fucker.

[Paelos]

Smart raid leaders notice things beyond meters. They are a very stupid way of judging your raid talent. Good leaders look at people that have good survival early vs. those that don't. They look at people that do a job when asked vs. those that fuck it up when you get them outside their rotation. You look for people that can adapt vs. those who can't find their own ass if it's not written down on the monitor. You also look for people that know when to give suggestions and when to STFU and do the job.

A raid with a bunch of meter whores doesn't mean you'll win. Especially because most raids rise and fall on your healers, and judging them by meters is in many cases completely retarded.

[Xeyi]

http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/07/ghostcrawler-telling-nothing-at-all.html

I'd say that's a far better guess at Blizzard's design philosophy than the original posting.

I agree with this article in parts.  I was frequently reading on the forums about a disc priest's lack of healing throughput while never really experiencing this for myself either through Naxx or Ulduar.

It's only now we've starting doing hard modes that it's really becoming apparent that there's an issue (Iron Council and Thorim done so far).  If weakened soul is up and penance is on cooldown my throughput drops drastically, and spamming 4.5k flash heals in those o'shit! moments makes me feel like a third wheel.  It's only now that tanks are being hit hard enough, and fast enough that it's starting to become a problem.

I'm really not looking forward to the penance nerf 

[apocrypha]

Ghostcrawler is a moron.

You know, in every single MMORPG I've ever played the people responsible (or the public face of those people anyway) have always been labelled incompetent, retarded, biased or stupid by large sections of the vocal playerbase.

Just saying.

[Bzalthek]

And at times they really are.  These are people who, while maybe passionate, are just doing their jobs, and sometimes that requires PR fluff.  They have no idea what they're getting into when they face the unwashed masses.

PR Flunkie:
I had no idea--

Forum Dwellers:
No.

PR Flunkie:         
I mean I've heard of--, but I've never actually seen... I mean, what exactly do you do?

Forum Dwellers:   
We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out.           
We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off.
Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as an entrance somewhere else.

They don't have the sheer collective manpower to evaluate and decipher all the ins and outs of the game they're working on despite having excellent tools (sometimes) to work with.  I have sat in vent chats where overzealous people, with wildly disparate careers, skills, specializations, and outlooks theorycraft over the most banal shit.  They will throw parses and logs through quantum formulas, statistical analysis, and even apply Newton's Law of Cooling on it if they think it will help make sense it.  They're not always right, but by god they put it through the ringer.

But the important part is that sometimes the PR Flunkie is just fucking wrong, and no matter how many women you sleep with, suck one dick and you're a cocksucker for life.

[Merusk]

Here's the thing. GC isn't a PR flunkie. He's not just some poor schlub who has to go out there and talk about the design decisions of other people and isn't always kept up on the latest thoughts.  He's the Class and Systems Design lead!   He FREQUENTLY makes comments that illustrate he does not know how the classes work in the most common ways.   It's incompetence at worst, ignorance at best and both are bad for the guy making decisions to be illustrating.

[Bzalthek]

I was just making a general comment so I used the term PR Flunkie as a catchall and not being specific about a single person.

(I agree completely by the way)

[Righ]

Here's the thing. GC isn't a PR flunkie. He's not just some poor schlub who has to go out there and talk about the design decisions of other people and isn't always kept up on the latest thoughts.  He's the Class and Systems Design lead!

This could of course be an indication that people are given meaningless titles in Blizzard and that he's just a PR flunkie or a project management clerk. I've met "senior designers" before that spend all day updating MS Project and asking the real designers for TPS reports. Perhaps he's one of those. 

[Lightstalker]

Purely fair balance between classes is a bad thing for most players from a guild perspective.  When there is a FotM class or spec you can take an average player and get above average performance from them.  When everything is more or less even you realize most of your players aren't worth bringing.  The greatest problem with "Bring the class and not the player" as a design paridigm is the assumption that most players are worth bringing.

And when there is an underperforming class with excellent players?  Yeah, tough shit.  It's you're fault that you didn't have the foreknowledge to pick a class that would be good a month from when you made the pick.  Grind another 70 levels you stupid fucker.

That isn't a problem unless you measure success by sitting on top of the damage meter.  A mediocre class with an excellent player is no longer a liability to bring to the raid (e.g. not like a poor player in a mediocre class).  Sure, there is an opportunity cost associated with having your best players in non-optimal characters, but you know that the relative rankings of classes will change in 3-6 months so why sweat that anyway. 

In Vanilla those below average classes often had exclusive buffs or debuffs.  With an excellent player at the helm you could be certain that raid utility was always in effect.  Today even excellent players have trouble identifying the support classes and eliminate their raid utility in the name of putting up respectable DPS.

At 70 Hyjal was an 8 man instance, the other 17 people in the raid were just there to serve as ablative manpower and hopefully speed up the boss fights.  Any group will stratify into those doing the carrying and those being carried - one Guild's Bads are another guild's star performers.  So recognize that you'll always have the carry/carried tension and move on.  Excellent players aren't viewed by management as being carried regardless of their class' relative ranking.  Their own perception is the hardest part: we're losing a Moonkin because she's tired of sitting 12th on the damage meters regardless of how well she plays (great, another rogue.  It's about time to bring back 360 cleave, isn't it?).

[Paelos]

Hyjal's a pretty good example of getting away with bad players until to you go to Archimonde. Then, the fires and knockbacks would expose your raid to the pain because one or two people just couldn't get it right. Then, the domino deaths would start.

I'd say the best example of being able to funnel poor players was probably Gruul's Lair. There was very little to do there except not shatter folks. Even some of the worst players could figure out what number they were supposed to be on a diagram. I mean Gruul's was very much a 5-6 player zone with everyone else just fucking around unloading on stuff.

[Ratama]

You know, in every single MMORPG I've ever played the people responsible (or the public face of those people anyway) have always been labelled incompetent, retarded, biased or stupid by large sections of the vocal playerbase.

Just saying.

That's because every person in said position of every MMOG to date IS/has been at least two of those. GC is a fucking biased moron, just like the rest; he's just fortunate enough to be able to ride the coattails of Blizzard's technical people, which are the best in the business.

Switch GC and MJ, for instance, and WHO still goes down in flames, and WoW stays a fad and in the driver's seat.  Meh.

[Sheepherder]

That isn't a problem unless you measure success by sitting on top of the damage meter.  A mediocre class with an excellent player is no longer a liability to bring to the raid (e.g. not like a poor player in a mediocre class).  Sure, there is an opportunity cost associated with having your best players in non-optimal characters, but you know that the relative rankings of classes will change in 3-6 months so why sweat that anyway.

1. CC: or, why a number of classes weren't allowed to do heroics in TBC.
2. You're losing a boomkin?  Man, it's almost as if that "separate but equal" shit isn't actually fun for anyone involved.
3. Support classes like you aforementioned boomkin take an even harder beating in smaller groups, where their buffs don't count for as much.
4. If at any point classes become actively excluded from content they will fall behind the gear curve, and six months down the road they will be even more fucked because they have neither gear nor use.