Snoody said:
If you watch Zero Punctuation, you might remember his quote from his Torchlight review: "...while World of Warcraft continuously expands the standard array of character classes into one huge mess that's about as easy to keep balanced as a stilt walker with one leg on a treadmill...". He wasn't lying. While Blizzard is trying its very best to keep the classes balanced, they aren't doing it right. In my opinion, indeed of just constantly nerfing every class someone complains about (In patch 4.0.6., Death Knights were nerfed so many times they now resemble a 9 year old wearing Legos), they should slightly buff the other classes to COUNTER the overpowered class's power! Any views on the subject? Comment bellow! Please and thank you!
The problems are myriad, I think the big problem with Blizzard was that it wasn't quite expecting what WoW turned into (despite how it might seem) and actually ran with a lot of ideas that they thought would be fun to play with, but didn't much worry about game balance issues, and it's really both a PVE and PVP problem.
On the PVP front the problems are pretty obvious, with certain classes having advantages over others and abillities that are fine in terms of PVE performance simply being massively overpowered when applied to players. What's more when you look at some classes being balanced based off of things like crowd control, and then a heavy handed desician to seriously nerf crowd control because it's not fun for the people being polymorphed or whatever... well that's another huge issue all on it's own as there is no real easy solution to the problem. Then of course there are issues with racials and certain things like percentile hit point increases, and instant-cast radial stuns being nearly impossible to balance out, leading to certain races having huge advantages over others in the PVP front. The problem is compounded by wanting to keep to established lore and abillities certain types of characters/races had in the RTS games, but what works in a single player experience, doesn't quite work in an MMO.
On the PVE front the game is also a massive mess, due to the simple fact that specialized characters are screwed. Simply put the need for end game efficiency means that characters all need to perform at the same level in whatever job they are doing. Otherwise nobody is going to take "inferior" characters to raids and high end instances. What's more balancing encounters so they an be won by less effective hybrids doing jobs means that they will be really easy for specialized characters. The end result is that in the final equasion someone who knows how to play a character in a role is going to be putting out pretty similar numbers compared to someone else who knows how to play a character of the same type. Thus you see requirements even for PUGs like "must be able to pull 10k DPS" which is a matter of knowing rotations and having the gear more than anything to do with class selection.
What makes this a game balance nightmare is when you have hybrids like Paladins, Druids, and other characters who conceptually can do a little of everything. They have turned into monsters where they can perform any role needed by a raid with the right gear and talent spec. What's more when performing a role they still have all of their other abillities, albiet at a reduced abillity. A "Boomkin" DPS druid can still perform a battle rez, throw an emergency heal, or shapeshift into a melee or speed form in spurts for a quick advantage. Sure he'll never perform anywhere near as well as someone currently operating in a feral or resto spec but he can still do all that stuff. What's more in the middle of a raid he can just switch specs and pull a spare set of gear out of his pack to potentially replace a leaving group member of any type. This is really unfair when you start looking at characters like Mages, Warriors, and Rogues... the "specialized" characters who pretty much do one thing really well. Truthfully warriors are viable both as melee DPS and tanks, so it's mages and rogues that get really boned because pretty much any character can DPS, and in the final equasion there isn't any signifigant differance between the damage output of a specialist, and hybrid specced for damage. What support abillities exist for such characters are very powerful, but frequently nerfed. For example as a mage I went through almost the entire Liche King expansion with absolutly nothing I could crowd control because everything was undead. Diminishing returns made my "powerful" Polymorph spell almost a joke in PVP especially seeing as there are so many ways to break it now, and even in the new "Cataclysm" expansion in any area where it would be a game changer the mobs are immune (like say the multi-oaf pulls in Heroic Deadmines). On paper the mage might seem balanced just off of Polymorph, but in reality it doesn't work that way because any time that would be useful it doesn't work. What's more so many things are exceptions to the "blink escpes everything" description that you can't argue that one as being all that powerf either, especially seeing as they gave a rocket Jump to goblins as a racial. Mirror image is okay, but it's slow to come back, doesn't delude players or a lot of boss monsters, and tends to bug a lot of boss fights so in raids I've oftentimes been asked not to use it... so it's pretty much an uber abillity for just killing trash around the world (which everyone can do) but pointless when it would be really useful. Before anyone decides to start saying I don't know how to play a mage (which I use because it's the character I primarily play) I've been doing that class for many years now and have an insane amount of /played time since I have no real alts, I've been everything from an RPer to a hardcore raider rushing to try and get first kills and such ever since classic. The only class I think that gets it as bad as mages (which I play because I like wizards, no matter what I think of the class performance) is rogues to be entirely honest.
Another issue with things is simply the structure of fantasy MMOs. You have two major sources of power, items and class abillities. While all character types overlap here somewhat, warriors and other melee types by and large are equipment based. That's where everything, including their abillity usage, derives. The basic thing is how hard their weapon hits (which is intristic to the weapon) and how much armor they are wearing. With spellcasters and the like the bottom line is their class abillities, the fireball, lightning bolt, holy smite, or whatever else. What equipment such characters use is pretty much pointless in of itself, it exists entirely to augement their class abillities which represent the core of their damage output and game contribution.
In these games, it's very easy to reward the warriors and gear based characters, as they find new loot and become diametrically more powerful because of it. With casters it's a little differant because while they benefit from gear to a massive degree as well, everything comes down to the basic spells which tend to become obselete pretty quickly. For example the last "nuke" a mage or DPS caster gets at his top level pretty much stays there, it's base damage is set even if 3 new "tiers" of raiding are added to the game after an expansion launches and is level maxxed. Collecting new gear helps, but at the same time since only a percentage of things like "spellpower" gets added to spells it doesn't quite have the radical influance on caster performance that it does for another class. A warrior picks up a new sword or shield, and it has a much more profound effect than a mage equipping a new staff or robe. I've seen a new weapon increase a Fury Warrior, Ret Paladin, or Rogue's DPS by 10 to 15% at times depending on their set up and what they traded in. Even if a new caster weapon has say 100 more spell damage it doesn't usually work out to the same degree, especially when your looking at DPS in the thousands nowadays, and that not every spell in a mage rotation is going to gain the full benefits of that spellpower.
The problems are of course due to the simple fear that in PVP events making casters too powerful will result in melee types and warriors simply being laughed off and murdered with little chance to do anything. That's a logical concern, but the way things have worked out is that equal damage output, combined with FAR more durability, and numerous anti-ranged abillities like charges, intercepts, death grips, spell reflect shields, and similar things has made PVP a nightmare, as well as making it so that unless a specific fight has mechanics that make it hard for ranged, there are increasingly few benefits to DPS casters since in the end damage is damage and a warrior or melee type can deal out as much, if not more, damage than a caster, while at the same time being far more durable.
This is simply my analysis of WoW, which I incidently still play at least twice a week to raid. The game is however never going to be balanced, not because it's hard, and not just because of player whining over nerfs or changes in the status quo, but because the game is so fundementally broken from a design standpoint they would need to re-do the entire class and racial systems from the ground up (and by this I don't mean just talents like they already did), in doing that a lot of the game based around certain role assumptions would not work smoothly or make as much sense, and that would probably hve to be altered, even if piecemeal. In the end they would fundementally have to make an entirely new game... and while popular WoW is six years old. What's more Blizzard claims it is developing a new MMO and putting what it learned from WoW to use. Irregardless of the theme, I am hoping they have learned a LOT about character balance.
I will also say that you will notice that when talking about MMOs, or any kind of multiplayer game, I'm very quick to point out that game balance becomes before almost anything if you want the game to be decent. I think a lot of games have been ruined by people who came up with a cool idea, ran with it, and then we all saw that it just wasn't fair to other players who didn't have it. What's more game balance has to speak for itself, you can't put in "newb moves" with very easy usage and high power output (even if not the best things someone can do) and expect game balance, because everyone is going to exploit that kind of thing. Yes, it might seemingly make the game more approachable, but people who really want to play the game to begin with are going to adapt, and catch up with a balanced system as far as they can with their innate skill level. A "noob tube", "EZ Mode class", or Street Fighter "Shoto" system used by a lot of characters (with very easy to perform, very powerful, and very versatile moves), are all bad ideas when looking at the big picture, and the long term success of the game. Anything that can help a new player WILL be exploited by people who aren't new players and the results are usually both ridiculous and unintended, so game developers have to get well away from that entire train of thought.
