World of Warcraft: Current Year

velk

Trakanon Raider
2,539
1,127
Ive often thought a Bard could sort of act like how a Healadin heals you for more the closer they are to you. Bringing Twisting back to life in WoW, where Bards would have an arsenal abilities that correlate to each type of play style. A 20 player raid having up to three comfortably. A bard for the tanks and melee dps, A bard for the healers, and a bard for the ranged dps. Each specializing in a tree that would give them the best songs for the classes theyre playing too. Being able to fine tune to each, or be a jack of all trades for dungeons. Up close getting maximum effect, further away getting extremely low.

It's crazily hard to balance group buffs - see the debacle of disc priest this expansion. Think of even a super simple example - if the bard does no damage at all, and just buffs other people, how much do you buff them by ? Assuming 2 tanks and 4 healers , you have 14 dps spots other than the bard ( 1/2 each for tank ) so they need to buff it by at least 7% to be worth a raid spot over any random dps. This makes them hot garbage in 5 man, but we'll skip that for now.

So if you set it to 7%, if you run 3 tanks and 6 heals the bard is instantly bad, and if you run a 30 man they are grossly overpowered.

But then you have two people who want to be bard, you have one less person to buff and the percentage is off again.

This kind of things leads to over-complicated stupid systems like absolution.

Mixing in tank or heal buffs makes it even worse, because tank buffs in general are either required or useless, and the number of healers required varies wildly even in mythic.
 

Foggy

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
6,236
4,809
It's crazily hard to balance group buffs - see the debacle of disc priest this expansion. Think of even a super simple example - if the bard does no damage at all, and just buffs other people, how much do you buff them by ? Assuming 2 tanks and 4 healers , you have 14 dps spots other than the bard ( 1/2 each for tank ) so they need to buff it by at least 7% to be worth a raid spot over any random dps. This makes them hot garbage in 5 man, but we'll skip that for now.

So if you set it to 7%, if you run 3 tanks and 6 heals the bard is instantly bad, and if you run a 30 man they are grossly overpowered.

But then you have two people who want to be bard, you have one less person to buff and the percentage is off again.

This kind of things leads to over-complicated stupid systems like absolution.

Have their abilities scale according to the number of dps in the group/raid. Shit ain’t hard.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,836
13,353
Or just go "wicked old school" and make it so the buffs are group wide, not raid wide, and you have to put some thought into what classes go into what groups.
 
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Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
27,134
71,935
In TBC they experimented with giving a reason to take every spec for every class and after rampant class stacking during the expansion they bailed on it pretty hard.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,836
13,353
Rampant class stacking has happened in every expansion and every iteration of this game. Impossible to balance it so everyone is equally desirable in a raid scenario when you have this many class specializations. The powers that be at Blizzard, for whatever reason, still think they can achieve this pipe dream of "class balance".
 

Foggy

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
6,236
4,809
If class stacking occurs due to a few specs being superior dps on a fight, so be it. That only affects the extreme high end of raids. The inexcusable class stacking is when it occurs due to fight changing abilities like cloak, bubble, and turtle. How they have not directly addressed those abilities is baffling.
 

Kreugen

Vyemm Raider
6,599
793
Balanced, yet highly specialized!

With my preferred class/spec I can potentially perform good to great* if I...
:p use the same shit as always
:rolleyes: swap out a talent
;) change some gear
:( change spec and much of my gear
:eek: have a third spec and even more gear
:mad: start over with another class​

*Can change at any time without warning.
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
37,961
14,508
If class stacking occurs due to a few specs being superior dps on a fight, so be it. That only affects the extreme high end of raids. The inexcusable class stacking is when it occurs due to fight changing abilities like cloak, bubble, and turtle. How they have not directly addressed those abilities is baffling.
Well they addressed it by not requiring them in abt
 

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
29,948
29,762
They need to make spec stats universal across a class.

A frost dk should be using the same gear in every slot as a blood or unholy dk except for trinkets which have a proc/click.

Once they get that working people will be more comfortable adjusting to balance changes per spec of their class.

I can’t imagine gearing a Druid across specs to be viable without bags and bags of gear.
 
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cabbitcabbit

NeoGaf Donator
2,621
7,902
In TBC they experimented with giving a reason to take every spec for every class and after rampant class stacking during the expansion they bailed on it pretty hard.

I miss being able to add +crit to a boss along with Blessing of kings/strength/Wisdom for the whole raid. Made me actually feel useful despite my mediocre dps.

Now I just do mediocre dps and can give mana regen to a single person.
 

Aaron

Goonsquad Officer
<Bronze Donator>
8,108
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The solution is so simple it's mindboggling you all haven't seen the solution to all this class imbalance! Simply remove all classes but hunters. Turn BM into the tanking spec and Survival into a healing. Simple! Can't have class imbalance if you don't have more than one class anymore! BlackManThinking.gif
 
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Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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14,508
Every spec does use the same gear, they don't use the same secondaries. If all specs used the same secondaries people wouldn't have a reason to play
 
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Ao-

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
<WoW Guild Officer>
7,879
507
Every spec does use the same gear, they don't use the same secondaries. If all specs used the same secondaries people wouldn't have a reason to play
Warforge and Titanforge would keep them playing though!
 
  • 1Barf
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a c i d.f l y

ಠ_ಠ
<Silver Donator>
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Level 80 Concordance.png
 
  • 5Worf
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Daidraco

Golden Baronet of the Realm
9,217
9,323
Turn BM into the tanking spec and Survival into a healing.

You're being coy, but I actually agree with those changes to the Hunter. I liked the "idea" of survival this past expansion, but they dropped the ball on its implementation. Theyve done away with much of the variance of tamed creatures, but if a bear had many of the same tanking abilities as a Druid Bear. Turtle having similar tanking abilities to a Warrior etc. I could see BM working as a tank easy. Or switch the Survival and BM idea around and have pets similar to the Monks Healing pet that heal and survival be an avoidance build for tanking. Marksman does what its suppose to, and does it well. As it stands now, I just dont think they know what they want to do with all three specs for the Hunter. The class as a whole is suffering for it.

I would like to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt and say that they organize raid boss abilities within each expansion as a whole, over the course of all raids, in order to have a handful of classes shine per raid. So you have this constant trend of this group, then this group, then this group and everyone has their turn. Theyve homogenized classes so much over the years in the name of balance, that Im sure theyre afraid that they'll strip away what actually makes each class unique if they continue down that path. Hence the organized raid boss abilities.

As for the bard, if it acts like a paladin from WoW or a paladin from Diablo - it achieves the direction I was going with. Much in the same way of making the buffs "group only" but instead, just being based off proximity. Using versatility for example, if a bard is standing within 5m of the tank and the melee dps, theyre getting 2500 versatility, while the ranged dps 15m away are getting 500 versatility. His second song is a DoT on the mob(s) and his third song is movement speed. So from a player perspective, you have to pay attention to your position, your song targets positions, stay alive, twist three songs, and do a simple rotation of either light healing abilities or dps abilities.
 

Aaron

Goonsquad Officer
<Bronze Donator>
8,108
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Yes, I was being (slightly) coy. I have been playing a hunter as my main since late vanilla through all the expansions. I've seen it go from being an absolutely amazing and unique class that I loved to play to being one I play simply because I have so much invested in it. I'm not thrilled with what I see in BFA so for the first time I'm contemplating making a new main, and even switching to horde. Been thinking long and hard about whether it should be a druid or shamie. Resto for dungeons but boomkin or ele for solo play.
 

Sludig

Golden Baronet of the Realm
9,007
9,315
So..... finally got heirloom ring from ship missions..... discover there's actually 3... what a waste of heirloom upgrade items to try and use them all. So I'm working on mission for a second. Second time 98% chance mission fucking failed. Fucking horseshit. WTF is this a hairbrained schemes engine. (Notorious seemingly false %'s in their games)
 
  • 2Worf
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a c i d.f l y

ಠ_ಠ
<Silver Donator>
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Maybe you're the 2%. There's plenty of other shit that's bullshit. Like failing at 200%. Or only 50% of a talent working.
 
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  • 1Worf
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