If this doesn't merit its own thread, I apologize in advance.

I'm wondering how people feel about the direction the different classes are going with the continued (and increasingly more significant) changes that are being made to the classes within WoW. Is Blizzard trying to open up new avenues to incorporate additional Hero Classes? Or are they trying to dilute the class discrepancies, so that no class brings something that can't be done (comparably, if not as well) by another?

What got me thinking about this was the major changes that have been proposed or noticed in regards to Hunters. As a class with no real 'niche' in WoW, Hunters have long been reasonably-good DPS, moderately-okay CC... up until Burning Crusade released, they really had no defining role. Now, their PvE role is Misdirect.

Blizzard seems to be struggling to find a way to give Hunters more utility, in order to make them a more central part of the game. It feels like too much at once, though - no dead zone (admittedly, a well-deserved buff), a possible healing debuff on Aimed Shot (part-Warrior), a possible ranged Disarm (unconfirmed, part-Warrior part-Rogue), a dispel effect on Arcane Shot (that is reportedly dispelling Ice Block? - part-Shaman), and the list continues.

Although there's "never" going to be 'class patches' again, where we'll see an extensive rework of an individual class, many of the changes coming in 2.3 seem to fit that mould - Warriors changed more significantly in 2.3 than they did in 1.6, in my opinion (deadly phrase, but there it is).



I guess what I'm asking is this - what end-state is class balance designed to arrive at? The game will continue to evolve, but at what point will classes have defined roles, static talents, and a niche that isn't subject to intense change on a bi-monthly basis? I'm not suggesting we'll ever see true balance, but what form will 'close enough' take? And after 3 years less a month of WoW, are we in sight of 'close enough' yet?

To be honest, a significant portion of the changes being made seem to be rather heavy-handed attempts to level the relative percentage of classes represented in the Arena ladders (recall Caster's data on the WoW General Forums - see theoretical impending Hunter changes). Some of the changes, like the new Warrior Whirlwind and Sweeping Strikes, clearly have PvE motivations - but swapping Sweeping Strikes and Deathwish appears to be motivated by the desire to alter the 'cookie-cutter' MS Warrior spec. I'm not omniscient, I don't know, but it seems more and more like the class roles in this game are predominantly being defined by their PvP utility, and their PvE value is assumed ("We balanced the whole game around PvE until battlegrounds came out, I'm sure it's fine!").

Maybe I'm restating or overstating the obvious, but I can't rationalize what Blizzard's vision of their spectrum of classes is supposed to look like right now, much less in the future as the game evolves.

There's also an issue of spec roles, within a class. For example, the Beast Mastery tree used to be the non-scaling leveling-up spec, then with TBW it became the PvP spec, then with TBC it and marksmanship traded places for raiding PvE and competative PvP. Arms has a similar, but not as drastic, story to tell: it used to be the middle-of-the-road spec, a dps spec that had some tanking ability, but after Prot got buffed the viability of a 31/4/16 MT was scuttled, and with fury getting the gear necessary to support it, it has become pigeonholed as a PvP dps spec rather than a general dps spec. Fire and Frost have flipped as the PvP vs PvE specs for mages. Etc.
Blizzard still needs to decide what to do with discipline, and has admited as much, and there are a few other trees that probably need a similar amount of focus and attention, like survival and retribution.

Just because they aren't doing "major class revisions" anymore doesn't mean that the class roles are set in stone. The entire hunter system as we know it, gearing talents dps role whatever, could be turned on its head if the shot system were tweaked slightly. The healing role of a tree druid could be entirely inverted if healing touch becomes a tree-form spell, and the viability of moonkin in a raid environment could approach that of elemental shamans if they reduced the shapeshifting cost or allowed some heals in moonkin forms. Hell, I wonder just how small a change it would take for everyone to want their priests to respec holy again.
What you're not going to see anymore is the entire talent tree getted dumped and re-done. That doesn't mean sweeping changes can't still be made.
I would note however that the warrior and warlock "class changes" patches should not be used as a benchmark. Blizzard was still timid at that point, and it was not until the third class revision (hunters?) that they finally manned up and gutted trees that needed it. Warlocks and warriors did not get proper class revisions until 2.0.

True, and I'm not suggesting 1.6 be the benchmark by which we measure class revision.

I understand that the classes are going to evolve and change, but what I'm questioning is the end-product that Blizzard (and, by extension, we as players) are chasing. I don't disagree that a few minor alterations could fundamentally change the way the game is played - if Lifebloom loses on-use trinket bonuses when the trinkets fade, will all Resto Druids be respeccing Feral?

The changes to Hunter shot rotations didn't overhaul Hunters' class role - giving them a healing debuff, a dispel, and a disarm might. What does that mean for the other classes? For raid setups? I can't imagine not taking a Hunter for Aimed Shot on bosses that could heal, and a dispel they can use as part of their regular DPS cycle has immense viability.

Where is the game going, and how are these class changes a part of that vision? That's what I don't understand.

Blizzard bit off more than they could chew. Balancing three trees for every class for PVP and PVE is impossible. There aren't enough "defining roles" to go around. And some defining roles (like high dps) are so crucial pretty much every tree for every class cries out for more.

In regards to the comment about Fire and Frost switching PvP / PvE roles - Fire was never the spec for PvP. Frost has always been, because of Ice Block alone.

Further, Frost was only a PvE spec because of Fire immune mobs in MC / BWL - the "Mage Patch" happened about 3-4 months after the opening of AQ I believe, and many many Mages [myself included] switched to Fire (which was better DPS even before that Patch) as soon as we had 8/8 NW and/or started completing the Enigma set. It was like pulling teeth to make the other Mages in my guild that 5/5 Enigma was higher DPS than 8/8 NW (the proc just allured too many of them).

Well, previously, frost was always competitive for overall DPS, even when you factored out the fire

I spec Frost because I like to PvP sometimes, and I don't want to respec to do it. My problem with frost, and the reason I basically switched to my druid full time is that do do "adequate" DPS as a Frost spec requires you to know what you're doing and stay on the ball 100% of the time, and to be full specced into Frost. To PvP you have to spec Frost/Arcane. However, by the time you get the 2 piece Tier 5, or start into Tier 6, Frost isn't even viable as the lesser spec.

I'd like to see Blizzard differentiate the Mage spec's by DPS patterns.

Arcane: Average Efficiency, average damage, largest delta between normal damage and Burst Damage, some control over burst DPS (Arcane Power)
Fire: Lowest Efficiency, High average damage, 'average' delta between normal damage and Burst Damage, minimal control over burst DPS (Combustion, Molten Fury)
Frost: Highest Efficiency, lowest damage, lowest delta between normal damage and burst damage, highest control over burst dps (cold snap + Water Elemental, or Nova + Ice Lance)

Efficiency should be calculated by essentially Theorycrafting the Mage doing DPS non-stop for 3 minutes (number used for example only). At this point Mages with identical gear access should be doing pretty close damage. At the second minute Arcane Mages and Fire Mages would have the same average damage, and after the third minute, Frost Mages would also have the same average damage. After the 3rd Minute, the 3 spec's would largely blur together, as timers would be on staggered cooldowns to keep everything within range.

Survivability can be used to balance when its actually applicable to the class. If Survivability is going to be the important balancing factor, they should be like Boomkins in mitigation.

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Avoiding a double post, what I really think Blizzard should do is stop adding so many talents to each tree every expansion. Its weird that there are talent trees you can't possibly max out. Compounding this fact is that some tree's have entire branches of their own. For example, Resto Druids can choose HoT healing, or Direct Healing, and they're completely separate Resto Talents. I think that the best designed spec's in the game right now are Feral Druids, and Prot Paladins. That doesn't mean there aren't problems with either tree, but after you get all of your main talents in the tree, you end up putting several points in one of the other tree's. 61 points in a single Tree shouldn't be encouraged.

They have definitely moved towards giving every class and spec viability or something to offer in the game. And by that I don't mean the classes themselves, but the actual dynamics in the game, such as raid encounters, Arena's, farming etc. This is very evident in the way raid content is designed. Every encounter entails a certain number of classes to outshine others, and this rotates on an encounter-to-encounter basis. While this can lead to raid-stacking, its actually working pretty well (with the exception of Hunters). I mean would anyone have ever thought that a Elemental/enhance Shaman, Spriest, Feral Druid etc would ever be viable before TBC was released?

I think its also very important that at the end of the day, that a DPS spec/class is a DPS class. A tanking spec/class is a tanking class. etc. The last thing we want to see is a DPS class/spec given shitty DPS output because they have the ability to FD, or CC, or have totems. Or a tanking class/spec being inferior to another, because they can also do DPS when in Cat form.

As long as every class gets a (close to) equal time to shine.

My point is that they are clearly making an effort to integrate the talent trees of all classes to relative equality. Arcane used to be a generally poor pve tree, now it is easily as good as fire when played by a good mage with gear. Frost will be buffed at some point just like all the sub-optimal trees of shaman/paladins are now, you can take it to the bank. They do not want Pvp/pve trees for the most part based on what they have been doing to talents. The only real exception to this sort of rule is tanking, cause you just can't tank in pvp.

I really believe this is something that can not be stressed enough. This is especially true of all the hybrid classes (all the classes that can do something besides dps). The deeper and more specialized you make each tree the more that class becomes 2 or 3 different classes completely. This is already apparent in TBC, with certain classes that play completely differently depending on their spec.

Healing specs are going to be totally different from tanking specs and DPS specs; the game is going to have to be balanced around not 10 classes but dozens of class-specs, which will make PVP and gearing a huge hassle not only for the players but for the dev team too. I really do not want to see the classes in the game turn into something like this, so hopefully they do some kind of side-grade form of advancement either in WoLK or later expansions. I personally would also like to see more hybrid-ness out of the hybridspecs, and make the fact that they can perform multiple roles accentuated not diminished as they are currently.

Pure conjecture, but I get this feeling too. Since Blizzard can't physically put out the same man-hours as the playerbase in figuring out every class in every situation, and so they probably looked at the population counts and judged from that.

So many of the nagging problems that don't get fixed make sense if you assume Blizzard is doing a lot of their balancing to try to make the populations of the different options equal (since logically one would expect an even distribution)

Why did rogues and DPS warriors go through the period of being pretty bad choices to play in early TBC and why did they let it linger?

Why do humans and night elves, with their terrible, uninspiring racials not get adjusted at any point to match the majority of other races in the game?

Why do druids and warlocks receive buff after buff and tons of attention and a few intermittent nerfs, when they're doing alright (and people cry about the latter being much too powerful very frequently?)

If one were to make decisions based on population totals, the logical motivator of economic decisions, so to speak: rogues, warriors and hunters have high populations and are popular, so they're powerful enough. Humans and night elves blow away most any other race in terms of players, so they must have something to offer because people aren't quitting over the racials. Warlocks and druids have traditionally been underrepresented, so they probably need to get more powerful until things even out.

I only have my gut feeling, but I would guess its these sort of logical-but-incorrect judgments about population dynamics that has led to a lot of the questionable decisions or inaction made internally, because it explains a good deal of the things that get complained about time and again but never change and the only other explanation I've seen is "favoritism," which is childish and I sincerely doubt.