Sorry to reply to such an ancient post, but I disagree. I peaked at 2200 last season, which is well above average but still miles from the top.
One late night when few people queued we got to play a series of 5 consecutive mirror games against Spoh/Serennia. We got schooled. Absolutely schooled. Words can hardly describe how badly we got owned. And not the "lol5luckycritsinarow" way but the "wtfcouldwehavedone" way.
What is the point of this? If the druid class was balanced around what Spoh can do then I might as well quit, because I would be useless as a druid. And that same night, we played against some 1800 mirror team three times in a row and did to them what was just done to us. What would that druid do if the game was balanced around Spoh? And 1800 is still top 10%. Further, where are the future skilled players going to come from? Everyone starts out small. If one class is completely useless at 1500 then it is unlikely that people will stick with it until they are 2300 skilled. You can often cut off the top of something, but you can rarely cut off the bottom without it collapsing.
I agree that druids scale amazingly well with player skill while pallies don't due to lack of advanced options. But the solution should not be to balance for 2500s. If that means that WoW as an e-sport is dead, so be it. But you cannot balance the game around the top 0.1% and require the rest of us to reroll the "designated easy mode" classes or quit. Because I will not level a pally if they do decide to balance the druid around Spoh.
The solution is to give pallies more ways to distinguish themselves. Dodging CS as skill-defining ability does not cut it.
EDIT: Also, druids did not get buffed due to terrible players. Druids got buffed due to a lack of 5v5 representation. If you look at the 5v5 numbers, druid representation steadily declines in 5v5 as ratings go up, because many of the druid tools that make them OP in 2v2 do not work in 5v5, and because teams get better at locking down the druid. The skill ceiling, while incredibly high in 2v2, is not actually that high in 5v5 for druids. With three people on me, travel form is not really an option. The biggest skill in 5v5 is positioning, just like for many other classes.
Whether or not this is a valid reason is up for debate, but to me it is clear that Blizzard looked at the 5v5 numbers and felt the need to fix them, 2v2 be damned. 3v3, I honestly think druids are just right. We work with more lineups than priests but priests are generally stronger in the lineups they play. Pallies and shamans need help in that bracket, everyone knows that.
Originally Posted by Praetorian
No, it's not irrelevant. That's part of the concern. Honestly, druids have bad players to thank for their buffs, and druids are by far the hardest class to balance in arenas. A mediocre druid is really, really, really bad. The kind that just sits there and keeps HoTs on like he's healing in a raid. They're awful, but a paladin playing that style works much better.
Take a mediocre paladin and a mediocre druid, around 1700ish. The paladin may stand in the open and spam FoL and some Holy Light when needed. He will BoP his target when his target gets low from melee, and he will bubble when he's under pressure and panics. He probably casts Freedom too, either on himself if he's being snared by a warrior or something, or on his partner. Not optimally, but he'll use those abilities because they're obvious. He may not use BoSac at all, probably uses HoJ poorly, etc. But the thing is that this play actually isn't that far off from the play of a 2000+ paladin.
Now, the mediocre druid. He'll heal with HoTs because that's what they do. He may barely use CC at all, but probably tries to cyclone the opposing healer. If he's focused, he'll run around like a chicken with his head cut off and crumple. He might go bear so he can absorb damage better. I've seen a lot of bad druids at low ranks (and some at higher ranks even), and this is how it plays out. But it's like a completely different class than a 2k+ druid.
To 95% of the players seeing these two guys, paladins seem very strong and druids seem mediocre and maybe a little fragile if anything. So paladins get nerfed and druids get buffed. Yet druids have so much more potential; when you put them in the hands of a truly skilled player who can use the CC appropriately, can kite and mix up travelform to break snares and get out of LoS, bear to feral charge offensively to help lock down enemies and defensively to get away, etc., it's maddening. They're like ghosts you can't pin down yet who keep themselves and their partner alive, yet if you ignore them they will cripple your team with roots and cyclone.
But most players aren't seeing that level of druid. But it hardly means it's irrelevant in terms of balance. If a theorycrafting player in optimized gear can put out ridiculous amounts of PvE DPS (see, e.g., MSD arcane mages), that gets them nerfed even though most players can't even approach those levels. Tuning takes multiple levels of skill and experience into account elsewhere, and it certainly should in PvP. It especially should if anyone at Blizzard still has any aspirations of promoting WoW as an eSport.
Here's the core of the problem: Paladins (and shamans to an extent) only "seem" equally good at lower levels because: 1) their "unskilled" playstyle more closely approximates what a "skilled" player should do, due to fewer choices available to the class at any given time, reducing the number of mistakes one can make; and 2) "unskilled" opponents are unable to capitalize on their weaknesses. A 1700 mage who's trying to kite and being focused hard isn't going to CS me the instant I start to cast an important heal. A 2300 mage will. A 1700 warlock probably puts Agony on me and maybe even has his felhunter on auto-lock (seriously I've seen this even at 2000, wtf?). A 2300 warlock is going to Tongues me and time a spell lock to land right before my painfully slow heal would've completed, otherwise using his pet to munch any groundings I may drop next to me.
I think balance shouldn't assume poor play. It's not fair to say that we have no answer to someone trying to CS/spell lock us because most players aren't good enough to time that ability properly or to remember to use it. So many games that I've won, I knew were gifts, and that frustrates me. I knew damn well the mage had CS up because I was following it since his last one. But I said "fuck it, I need to heal or my partner's dead" and just spammed LHW for 10 seconds straight. No CS came. If one had, we'd have lost with certainty. But we won, because the opposing team was too uncoordinated (or maybe just the opposing mage) to exploit my glaring weaknesses.
But I think the arena game in fact has to be balanced around the 2300+ level, because then at 1700 you have a bar by which to gauge your progress. (Note: I am not at the 2300+ level myself. I've peaked at 2250ish so far, but it's something towards which I continue to strive, and I love getting to play 2300-2400 players -- except when they're on goddamned 2000 rated point-selling/feeding teams that kill our rating -- just because the style of play is so markedly different and I always learn something.)
But in balance terms, it's a lot more satisfying to be able to say, "Damn, yeah, we lost because I missed that CS, my bad, I need to work on paying attention to my focus target more" than it is to say "Fuck, we couldn't have done a fucking thing there." Balance the classes so that it's "fair" when people play well. You can't balance around the assumption that the average player is going to make all kinds of mistakes, because that's actually not balance at all.
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