Class Balance Philosophy in Season of Discovery - Damage Output vs. Utility

经典怀旧服由 Wowhead 发表于 2024/06/26，13:08

Overall damage in Sunken Temple Phase 3 Week 12.吸血鬼之触元素诅咒most recent class updateNoHitJeromeJosh Greenfield

NoHitJerome

How do you approach the utility vs DPS problem? Mages/Warlocks bring a lot of utility, but those players also want to do Top 3 DPS. Not easy to keep everyone happy

AggrendWoW

Gonna preface this by saying that the term "utility" is a bit ambiguous and means different things to different people, but let's assume we are talking about things like Curses, Windfury, VT/VE, etc. Majorly impactful tools for the group.
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This answer is going to get me a lot of hate from some circles, but just being honest, utility *is* something the team considers when making changes to output. If you have super heavy utility, the team isn't likely to expend as much effort to ensure you *top* the damage meters. That being said though we aren't looking to directly put our boot on the throat of classes that have historically had higher utility either. If the chips fall and shadow, or feral, or shamans end up high on the meters we probably won't look to nerf it unless its really out of line. If they find themselves lower on the bar graph, same deal, we aren't likely to rush to buff them unless they are really really off (though we are much more likely to buff than nerf, in general).

Some folks *hate* that utility enters the equation when discussing output at all. Some people also really like being a swiss army knife for their group as well and it gives them a sense of purpose past just doing damage. No bad or invalid opinions there. It's just that, opinion and depending on your echo chamber the opinions vary wildly. The team tries to be sensitive to as many different positions as we can, but its difficult.

We are pretty far from vanilla in SoD, no doubt, but we aren't fully in a "bring the player not the class" area of homogenization either, so we just have to be careful about enabling classes with enormous utility to also dominate the damage meters or else the "why would anyone ever take to a raid ever!" concern might become actual reality.

This is why we talk about not looking for perfect balance, because to us balance is about more than pure output and its at times very situational. We will not make everyone happy and there are some people that want something we can't or won't deliver for whatever reason. We just try and do what we can that makes sense at the time. Sometimes we make mistakes while we are at it too. We are just trying really hard with phase 4 to start in a good place with how classes play mechanically. That's the most important thing to us right now, and we'll worry about the numbers after that. It won't be perfect with how fast we are moving, but we already feel better going in this phase than we felt going into the last phase.

AggrendWoW

Yeah in our retiscence to nerf too heavily we probably let them play in the sprinklers for too long, to be fair. Not sure we'd do that again but we are, in general, very hesitant to nerf. It sucks to get nerfed.
Shadow Priests

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