- spec tuning should happen bi weekly, similar to what Riot has been doing for a literal decade- you can't nerf destru/surv (substantially) right now as it would !@#$ over loads of rerollers as well as hardcap the key level as you simply won't be able to do a 30 anymore (except maybe NW)- youre missing that BfA corruption season had the same issue with BM. how is this any different now? balance has always been an afterthought for M+ and while that certainly has to change, coming up with this now is kind of weird. feels heavily skewed by public outcry that for once the classic strong specs (rogue mage havoc balance) arent top damage for once.
Outlaw still competing with tanks on DPS meters in M+, so yes balance is very bad.
TL;DR - Stop complaining about class balance when the entire purpose of having different classes is variety. If they made every class identical, what is the point of having more than one? —Using the top 95% as a benchmark for average player performance is most of the problem with this sort of analysis. Literally every class has advantages and disadvantages when played at a high level. Demon Hunters are prevalent in early tier prog because their base damages are high and their play style is very straightforward. They fall off in later tiers due to bad secondary stat scaling compared to Warriors and DKs. Mages and Warlocks (mainly Fire and Demo, respectively) have very strong one minute damage profiles that can be used for either add-specific fight mechanics or to push hard phase transitions. Holy Paladins and Disc Priests heal predominantly through high mitigation as well as having very consistent damage for fights with tight DPS checks and moderate healing requirement. With highly coordinated raiding guilds, this is invaluable. —There’s literally a hundred examples of mechanical stuff like this in the game, but every other post like this is the same “X class sucks, or Y class is OP, fix now or I stop paying”. Statements like this are logically flawed for several reasons. If you really enjoy the core mechanics and stylistic difference of classes and specializations, none of these points actually impact your gameplay. -OR- If you’re competing at a high level, something as simple as mechanical differences and time commitment won’t deter you from rerolling to a different class/spec to gain an advantage. Maybe stop lying to yourselves about why you play the game.
Posting as a Destro lock. What people tend to forget about us is that if the tank cant stand still and tank in (M+) we suck...Beginning of patches are always generally bad for Destro when tanks can't really face tank at all and we end up chasing with rain of fire.Classes like fire mage and mobile casters are much better off until you see the swap from kite meta to face tank it.The amount of time just this expac where I have been told if I'm not playing X warlock spec I'm wrong is insane.Locks are usually unloved and probably will be unloved again next expac so please just let us have our glory.Also buffing an aura for destro was 100% the wrong move. If anyone looked at the warlock forms no one asked for the aura buff but rather a flat damage buff to chaos bolt cause we knew how insane an aura buff would be.
Classes/specs offer a variety of toolkits designed for different situations. The problem is that M+ doesn't offer variety.M+ should never be the balance factor since they're mostly the same dungeons the entire expansion. And every M+ is about the same basic strat of "group and aoe down" with a few changes here and there.Unless they homogenize the entire class/spec system (which we asked them to back off from it a few expansions ago) so every class/spec plays the same with the same toolkit, nothing will change playing the same dungeons for two years.You get huge changes in raids, because we get new raids with new encounters during the expansion. A spec that was bad in Nathria or Sanctum may shine on Sepulcher.Top percentile will use whatever is the best, even if for just a small increase, and everyone else will follow that. Others will copy their strat/playstyle and will not able to play anything else unless the top percentile do (so they can copy again). How many times we heard people saying "nah, spec X is crap, play spec Y" while the "crap" was 1%-3% lower (while actually providing some nice tools if players ever decided to use it).With so many specs, sometimes a few builds for the same spec and extra systems, balance is not "terrible".
The weekly posts they do that are meant to show the difference between top and bottom are only around 15%. Been playing since vanilla, and its literally some of the best balancing I've seen in the game, probably ever. All specs are viable for all content, its just the community once again knee-jerking into sobbing about balance because its their favourite hobby.
Not only are classes horribly imbalanced but so are individuals specs. This is especially evident in pure DPS classes where very often only 1 of the 3 specs is even remotely viable in most competitive situations. And it’s a purely balancing issue because it almost never has any correlation with skill. Take Mage as an example. Even an average Fire Mage has been able to outperform highly skilled and experienced Arcane and Frost Mages all throughout SL both in PvP and PvE. It’s a really big problem frankly and it affects virtually everyone who plays the game beyond the most casual levels. And it’s been going on for years.
I actually think it is balanced to an acceptable degree, with a few outliers. I've seen every tank work on 20+ and every healer (except Disc Priest). DPS I've seen BM hunters that hit a lot in 20+, people just went massively to survival. Warlock is possibly is the main outlier, specially because of how easy the infinite shard/rain of fire rotation is to perform.Surv is strong, but it is being dropped at times in favor of Sub or Mages (both Fire and Frost). I've Shamans, Warriors, Havoc and even Balance druids doing well too at 20+ keys.Honestly, with the exception of specific cases, like Feral and Affliction, most classes are fine.The main issue is a community one. People wont invite you if you are not in Meta, no matter your I.O, ppl will change classes sometimes without even knowing why, and finally, ppl will come to forum and base their assumptions out of teams pushing 27+ and warcraft logs bars.
As I said in my bio, I've tried branching out. I've found that unless I played a Beast Mastery Hunter, I always hit a wall while playing. So, I would consider that bad because I always thought the point of multiple classes was to play them all. Still, I might respec into WindWalker on one of my alts.
class balance is bad and the balance class is bad
If you have one spec that is useless in the game then yes, balance is !@#$.