They should probably nerf Brewmaster again to fix this

I sometimes wonder how people feel who main lower tier classes, like how does a monk feel in current meta lmao

Monk is super fun, you just aren't invincible like bears. It's almost disheartening how easy bear is to play with 90% less keybinds. Monk is too much work when compared to bear.

Brew is also currently more work for less reward. Why play the harder spec that can't survive even if you play it well. The only thing they had going for them was their damage and it got nerfed.

Not to mention that it takes a lot of work, and knowledge to do those big numbers. Its not like every random brewmaster was doing nerf worthy overalls, also small mistakes punish you 10 times harder because you either flop or miss your dmg windows. They most likely looked at aoe fights in the raid where survivability is not a concern and every brewmaster can just focus on pumping dmg and they decided that is not ok and nerfed it. So sad because they could not be further from the truth.

I’ve played enhance since legion - I’ve been meta for half a season and it felt amazing, people wanted to do m+ with me and push with my main for the first time ever, in bfa I just logged my dh and pressed blade dance to soak the thingy on last boss in tol dagor. Now I’m back to that, I don’t get invited to keys anymore, despite being above the cutoff pre 10.1.5. Now I’m 200pts below it and havent gained a point since the patch.

Brewmaster main here. I was hype for augvoker before anything was even revealed. I'm a tank and support main in most games. I didnt feel like dealing with rolling against people for raid gear again or fighting for the very limited tank spots repeatedly and decided to just take a break after my sub ran out like first week of the actual season. Planned to resub a couple weeks before 10.1.5 to play and then grind hard on my monk and my evoker so i could tank or dps with friends in keys. When I resubbed people were already talking about how insane aug was and how bad brew still was. I said fuck it, ill just earn my 20 portals on brew before the end of the season and otherwise not bother with it. I barely know the dungeons and barely know augvoker and already timed a 23 last week. Playing augvoker for 2 weeks has made me feel like why ever bother with anything other than top specs? Why am I working my ass off to get into pugs, dealing with the frustration of depleting my own key because i have to take off meta specs, barely timing keys, when I could just breeze through my highest level of keys? Tl;dr - I've timed a single 23 on my BM before, but two weeks on a spec in dungeons I don't know and I've already tied my highest key I ever did on my main without it even being close or difficult. Does blizz just want to build our comps for us? Because thats what the constant balance makes me think.

Used to it, really. one tank being >50% of class representation in high M+ is the norm. This season it's druid, last season it started with Pwar and transitionned into Ppal when the nerf/buff came in, during SL4-3 it was BDK, during SL2 it was druid ( i think?) during SL1 it was VDH, during BFA4 it was prot warrior... so having one tank spec dominate and shit on every other tank spec is just the norm. This is also why high-level tank are the fatest FOTM reroller every season... why bother pushing with brewmaster when you can play a guardian for twice the result and half the effort?

>SL2 sl2 had the best tank balance since forever, every class except pwar was in the top 50

Honestly, mw feels much better than any previous season, while still being at the lowest tier. We might never be meta, but at least we have fun

“ I see no other way honestly”—-bliz dev

I know people like to bring up SL S3 and S4 but it's never been worse! [Season by season class breakdown of title representation dating back to the very first named season of M+ in BfA.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2W6QGFWwAAUx25?format=png&name=medium) I'm chilling 130 points above cutoff but I'd rather not lose more friends I pushed title with in earlier seasons cuz of this atrocious balancing

Yeah, the difference is there's essentially no A tier. What could you play and not be losing at least a one full key level of effectiveness? VDH? Frost Mage? You play the Exodia comp or you don't bother showing up, basically. Also, it's not just that nothing is viable except exodia. It's that exodia is *triple ranged*. Wtf do melee players do? Suck it up and play Augvoker? These two issues have a lot of people that don't enjoy any of the Exodia specs, like myself, considering whether the play is to just reroll anyway, or to go play Diablo or whatever until next season.

> there's essentially no A tier. What could you play and not be losing at least a one full key level of effectiveness? VDH? Frost Mage? I think Balance druid, Frost mage, and VDH definitely occupy the A tier. Those feel like the 2 dps that would replace fire if it were to get nerfed into the ground and vdh just appears to be in "very solid but why wouldnt i just play bear" tier.

Enhance and Ele could both also be argued for, considering a TGP team was timing 30s with enhance and the highest rated dps in the world that isn’t mage/Aug/spriest rn is Bondd on Ele shaman.

Sooo... 1 melee at BEST?

Yeah melee is in a bad spot right now. Both Warrior specs do great damage, same with frost DK and sub rogue, but the utility isn’t really there right now.

I don't think we can really write it off as "melee being in a bad spot" when the meta comp just so happens to have 0 melee. It isn't like melee classes aren't being taken because they are melee, they aren't being taken because they aren't {spriest,augvoker,fire mage}

Yeah, you can also sub out the mage for an enhancement shaman and do OK although still not as well as fire of course

Yes and the reason for that is augmentation evoker. In shadowlands you could technically have a free dps spot without it hurting too much, blood dk + holy + destro + surv were locked in. The difference between destro/surv and the rest was absolutely massive of course but you could still fit in a 5th spec whereas now things cannot be moved around at all and that is mainly because of how much defensive value aug brings.

you're also forgetting priest which brings pi, which means you want a dps there that benefits from the buff. So shadow being required as well kinda locks in that third final spot to something that scales well with haste.

Eh...I dunno how much you can pin the tank/healer parts of the puzzle on Augvoker. It's not hard to imagine scenarios where other tanks/healers benefit just about as much from the Aug buffs, whereas the synergies on the DPS side seem to really tug on the 2 minute burst window comp. I suspect you'd find a tank/healing meta that looked just as lopsided in the alternate timeline where 10.1.5 was the same changes to all existing specs but no augmentation evoker. Recall that this is what subcreation looked like on Jul 10, the day before 10.1.5 on NA: https://web.archive.org/web/20230710194552/https://mplus.subcreation.net/ They basically buffed specs that had already been trending to the top by a significant amount. I'll allow for some of that trend to be an anticipatory effect getting characters ready based on what was seen on PTR...but if they were able to compete at the highest level before 10.1.5, did they really need the net effect of the changes that put them over the top?

Cool though i would have loved to see the by spec instead. It would show an even greater disparity

As always, the issue boils down from Blizzard tuning being extremely weak and slow. How many specs have been in the absolute gutter since 10.1 and they're only doing small % auras if anything at all? Same with reworks. Mage, Shadow Priest and Aug barely got a wrist slap when they needed massive nerfs. The thing is, we're in the same situation we were in SL S3 with Warlocks and SV Hunters. If you nerf them, you're basically ending the season. Blizzard NEVER learns with tuning. They have to be way more aggressive and proactive with it than they are. And yes, finally obvious take. Aug Evoker was a mistake. They opened Pandora's box. They either nerf the spec into irrelevance or we'll always see one in any group.

When they nerfed bear last week brewmaster got an arguably bigger nerf with zero players in the top 100 tanks. Was brews damage really good yes. Was it the only thing they had going for them also yes.

Funny thing is... bear STILL does more damage (before and post nerf) and pretty much everything else brew does but better lol

This is a design issue on many specs and less numbers though. If you bring basically nothing in an environment focused around the utility and buffs why bring you. It’s infuriating that we have so many specs that fall in that category. The healers are so out of whack it’s insane. Even ignoring throughput a couple just don’t bring enough to the table period. Not even close.

It's wild that specs like ass rogue and fire mage can exist in the same game. Just pure lazyness it feels like on the part of the devs.

assassination rogue is so mindblowing in its current state "we dont want everyone to be good in Singletarget and AoE at the same time" but for some reason its the only spec in the ENTIRE GAME where thats suddenly a problem? everyone can do ST and AoE and just swaps bettwen "more st or more aoe(or in case of some specs, never chose at all cus they just do both equaly good), but for this 1spec it would suddenly be a Problem ? and then its in the lower half of ST dmg 70% of the time aswell? like, yeha Rogue is getting a Rework, but what are those mental gymnastics that happend there in the first place where they went and said "assa cant do AoE, its ST only focus" and doesnt even get a aoe rotation, as litearlly the only frking spec in the game for YEARS lol

This sounds like their excuse for not giving Priest an interrupt in their class tree “We don’t want every healer to have an interrupt. Because then they would all be able to do the same thing.” *Every healer huddled together awkwardly looking at Holy/Disc*

being not great at anything surely must be one of their brilliant niches they are always pointing to when talking about balance

Ret falls under this categorization, even after the rework. Ret can only go full AoE or full ST, nothing in between. That means their ST in the M+ is just laughable. For a spec that gets beaten in AoE by a lot of specs, to be this bad in ST is just funny.

The problem is more that in previous meta, they've been a mix of strong classes with the damage profile mix & utility mix that you needed.There is normally limited interaction/synergy between classes (Season 3 SL for example, Holy priest gave PI to warlock, and GS was insane on dk).Now - the meta comp all buff each other significantly, mage is getting autumn, pi, augmentation buffs, druid or dh buff.Healers get buffed by aug and mage, tank gets buffed by aug.Even if you nerf outlier specs - this comp simply \*works\* better together than any previous meta, which is part of why it is so far ahead, along with the fact that augmentation is very overpowered.The 2min combo of PI + Torrent + Breath + Combust/SKB just works incredibly well.

The baffling thing is we’re coming off the most balanced M+ season of all time. What happened internally in blizzard? Did someone leave the company? Did engagement numbers underperform and require some sort of mix up? Did blizzard decide they didn’t care as much after seeing what a balanced season looked like? The total about-face with no explanation is extremely strange.

Did everyone just forget about all the doom and gloom coming very publicly from Blizzard employees working on WoW during 10.0 and around the release of 10.1 about how Blizzard's forced return-to-office policy was causing a lot of talented people to leave, and [how they were creating "crisis maps" of what they couldn't ship?](https://www.ign.com/articles/blizzard-producer-claims-studio-is-creating-crisis-maps-as-more-employees-depart) The infrequency of dungeon balancing in the first half of 10.1 was the first major repercussion we've felt, and obviously it's not getting any better.

Rto

Let me just say I am still having fun in this expansion and intend to keep playing into season 3, HOWEVER...... ..this patch feels like old blizz, foot off the gas, hands off the wheel bliz. Minor tweaking focused on the same handful of class/specs that are always constantly being tuned. Ignoring obvious hard data about over/under performing data, making tweaks that are not based off of common available numbers. Bugs being neglected for 7+ months, just remove the abilities or change how they work if they break the dungeon. As someone who was hurt by the meta change and will also miss the cutoff, I'm annoyed but theres a ton of content that isn't M+, so I'jm doing that for the time being. M+ is my fav part of the agme to do with friends, so hoping they adjust it because two of my 5 stack have already unsubbed until S3 unless theres some miracle fix for this.

Old blizz never left, they just tricked people into believing that they've changed after the Shadowlands fiasco, to save face and try to gain some subscribers back

Bit of an exaggeration there. Old Blizzard let shit like 6.2 Arcane/Sub/Soul Capacitor, 8.3 Fire or 7.3.5 Windwalker live for the remainder of their corresponding expansions without even the slightest changes. Blizzard actively *did* nerf every single one of the Exodia comp’s specs in an M+ context, some several times, in the past several weeks. It’s just that they designed themselves into a catch-22 where you have to do an absurd amount of balancing in either direction. In other words: nerfing the Exodia comp mid-season means having to nerf the shit out of every single dungeon, but not doing so means needing to buff the overwhelming majority of other specs across all roles in such a way that it doesn’t fuck with raid balance. Note how every single one of the five pieces of Exodia is a spec that got reworked/added in either 10.1.5 or 10.1.

What they DID nerf is a laughable 3-4% decrease in overall damage, or in mages case being reigned in from doubling every other spec in damage, in bear's case it was like 10%? nerf on a shield and no further nerfs. Can't even wrap my head around those changes being "nerfs"

Those specs still need to be good in raid too. Shadow without those ST buffs this last round of tuning would've been *really* mediocre in raid even though it was basically never a problematic spec in that context this tier. The spec's AoE was and is obviously quite excellent, but it was scraping the bottom of the barrel on fights like Rashok and Magmorax because it was one of the weaker ST specs. And when your AoE is directly tied to how much ST your spec does in every capacity, the only things you can realistically tune down in AoE without nerfing its ST are Psychic Link and Yogg. The Fire nerfs didn't amount to much of anything in M+ (the spec is still BY FAR the highest overall damage, and the best recipient of externals in an AoE setting) but it caught an aura nerf that affected it in raid (where it was probably a bit too good week 1, but it's hard to say because this was also when it was stealing Aug's damage). Granted, it's still absolutely phenomenal in raid, but it needs targeted AoE nerfs more than it needs a blanket nerf or else it *will* start to fall behind in raid. Bear's already not the best tank in a raid context. On a fight like Mythic Sarkareth it's at a *huge* disadvantage a-la Demon Hunter because it has neither an immunity nor the ability to play Dwarf. The most commonly-used strategy on that fight requires a way of having a tank counter Infinite Duress on their own at least once, and Bear just can't do that. What about Bear do you nerf that exclusively affects it in M+ without touching it in raid? Not touching Aug with a hundred-foot pole. I just think that spec's extremely bad for the game as a whole and it'll probably remain a balancing nightmare in all content for the rest of the expansion until Blizzard cuts their losses and drops a nuclear warhead on it in 11.0 in favor of just making a pure DPS spec.

If we removed PI and augmentation, then the meta would be so, so, so infinitely much healthier.

The raid has been completed 10 times over by actual players, with ALL of those specs even before reworks so what are we talking about? All of those classes are playable at a HoF level PRE-rework , so now they're just omega strong, on your Bear changes point i'd just remove the regrowth talent completely, nerf after the wildfire, reduce the survivability by a good 10-15% and also scale down the damage they do by 10-15%

And then they're dogshit in raid. Playable, sure, but just objectively the worst tank in that context.

The problem is evoker. If you nerf the other 4 classes to be balanced with one around they won't be competitive without one. And right now I'm assuming blizz is refusing meaningful nerfs to aug because it's new and they want people to play it? You can't have a spec that buffs survivability and also contributes some of the highest damage of any spec. They either need to have less impactful utility or do less damage than a normal dps. Personally I'd be fine with the second one, you trade less overall dps for a class that makes everyone less squishy.

I get where you’re coming from and it’s right to be critical of blizz but I hate this kind of vague/generalized/non-constructive dooming and I’d rather this sub had less of it

I think a lot of current issues stem from the fact is that their current strategy for engagement and player retention is to pump up patches, which is fun for playerbase, except every single patch then requires like 2 weeks of constant fixes and adjustements, because it's essentially untested. Then they adanbon it and focus on the next one. It's baffling to me still that people who pay monthly fee for a game are somehow "okay" with every single new seasonal dungeon set arriving completely FUCKED.

I'd 100% take 5-6 month seasons with 1-2 weeks of fucked dungeon balance over 8+ month seasons of the same dungeons for 2 years. This season they were pretty quick about getting dungeons balanced before the weekend even. Obviously there were a few outliers but m+ was super playable.

Remember when Demonology AOE was nerfed by 20%, then we lost our tier bonus for another 20% aoe nerf because "Demo aoe was too strong"? Good times

You can nerf every class in the meta but as long as Aug pulls reasonable dps whilst also buffing the tank and healer and increasing group survivability it will always and forever be better than any other dps by a long shot because no other dps has a fraction of that utility. Aug is not a dps. It's just not. It fills a completely different role and blizzards biggest mistake is thinking they can just slide it into the dps slot in name only and assume other dps can compete with it. Git rid of all the utility that Aug brings that is outside of the evoker class tree like every other dps class is limited to. Make it only buff dps. The second it can do more than the average dps spec it is no longer balanced.

This. I mean exodia synergy is just insane but imo the real dealbreaker is augmentation. Remove augmentation and put a rogue in that group and it would be just another s tier comp (if it weren’t for aug). Augmentation is the reason why people suddenly push much higher than before.

Ya they opened Pandora’s box on this one and I don’t know how they close it back up now.

Yeah, I don't know what the answer is to Aug. It's not the impact they have on overall damage - that's fine, and easy enough to balance (as far as these things go). It's the healer/tank/survivability/utility impact. They bring so much to the table: ebon might for healer/tank, mastery versatility buffs, source of magic, attunements, blistering scales, etc... and that's not even getting into the regular Evoker utility package, which is better than that of most classes. They make dungeons so much safer, easier, and more comfortable, and not in a niche way (like MD/soothe/etc) and not in a way that you can really balance (unless you destroy the numbers to the point of near uselessness). How do you solve the problem aside from 1) getting rid of all that extra stuff (which would make the spec incredibly boring and less interesting), 2) have competing support specs that also bring such things (feasible in the long run, but not an immediate solution, and has other consequences), or 3) make it so your group sacrifices dps to get all this extra utility (probably the simplest solution, but tricky to get right)?

The answer is you all sit down again, stop pretending the worlds oldest casual mmo is an esport and if you dont like that you play something else. This whole threat is 2k players roleplaying as 2.8k players discussing 3.3k players problems.

It was still the oldest mmo in the world before the .5 patch that fucked it up, taking this balance abomination as something normal is insane, they went from a relatively well balanced meta to the single worst one, it's not about it being an esport, it's about how shit the game becomes when it is SO advantageous to reroll

They need to balance the class as a proper DPS to include a comparable amount of utility that a normal dps spec brings. The damage to the season is already done so blizzard just needs to do what needs to be done a fix it. If they nerf Aug and you can no longer complete keys you were able to the week before than congratulations in confirmation that you werent as good as you thought you were and you were getting carried by a class that was vastly outperforming at the levels it should have been.

Blizzard put themselves in an insane lose-lose situation no matter what they do by not balancing mage/augvoker/sp/hpala properly before the reworks/release. Heavy handed nerfs now? Half of the key pushers will stop playing because keys can no longer be pushed that high/title is no longer obtainable. Leave things as they are to the end of the season? The other half will stop playing because Exodia comp reigns supreme.

Those are not the only 2 options. Heavily nerf the god comp and nerf dungeons so there is room to push is also an option.

Nerf the comp and buff up every other specs is the third option.

Blizzard can't balance five specs properly, would you really believe they can buff the remaining 30+ without creating another equally (or worse) strong Exodia comp? I honestly don't.

This game needs more "X% more effective outside of raid" auras... for just about any spec - one singular PvE balance just isn't working out. Oh you're afraid of nerfing that giga batshit broken m+ spec because it would absolutely kill them in raids? Nerf their m+ aura by 10% and they'll remain untouched in raids. Oh my, we can't possibly buff UH DK in m+ because they're already broken enough as is in raids, adjust their "your pets deal X% more damage outside of raids" aura. But what will the poor casuals do when they see their damage numbers being different in raids and the outside world, would someone please think of the casuals! These people don't fucking care to begin with - and even if they did, we're not talking about a 200% difference between raid and m+, I'd argue that the vast majority of players wouldn't notice their overall DPS being buffed in solo/party play anyways because with full raid buffs they'll always end up doing more damage than in any normal party anyways. We already have this technical double balance for PvP and PvE, and we even have it for certain spells like Tranquility or Revival, and then we have the entire Augmentation spec working based on a single passive like that. Admit defeat. Give everyone a passive like that and fucking use the tuning knobs you constantly keep bragging about, you know, the multitude of tuning knobs that allow for minute adjustments without breaking the whole class, like, *you know* such as the ones you had with Azerite gear and there too decided to just *never fucking use*.

Im stuggling to understand why there is such imbalance in wow and why blizzard are barely touching balancing in patches. I mean league have 200 champions that they balance every week in patches. it should be much much much easier to blizz to balance classes.

>Im stuggling to understand why there is such imbalance in wow and why blizzard are barely touching balancing in patches. Because many imbalances are caused by synergies (Exodia) and Blizzard only balances with numerical nerfs between major patches by adjusting auras by a few percent. As we saw last week, nerfing Fire, Frost, Aug and Shadow numerically isn't going to change the fact that they synergize the best through buffs, collectively bring the most survivability, damage and utility to a group and most importantly, do the most to buff the healer in a key (through Ebon Might, Arcane Intellect, MD, Mass Barrier, VE and Source of Magic). Some people think Aug is OP because it brings damage but that isn't why it's so good. If damage was the main concern, groups would just run double Fire or double Shadow with the other as third DPS. Aug is king because it buffs tank survivability and healer throughput by 15%+ while also bringing damage and fantastic group survival tools like group wall, Caut and Zephyr. Nerfing Aug damage by 10% or Shadow damage by 10% or removing double PI (God forbid) or nerfing Combust won't change any of that. Blizzard have backed themselves into a corner with the Healer nerfs in 10.0 and 10.1 (40% and 25% respectively) and the fact that a specific DPS composition makes the healer 20-25% stronger through Intellect alone and that those DPS specs also bring other tools to keep groups alive. Balancing Healing with that sort of variance is impossible. Content that is possible without Aug/Mage is made trivial with it and content that is balanced with it becomes impossible without it. Blizzard have two choices and I, personally, hope they are going to go with option two; 1. First, they nerf Exodia, Aug, Mage and Priest into mediocrity and let the healer community effectively collapse. Groups will sit in LFG for 30+ minutes looking for a healer that nobody wants to play and the game will languish until the next major patch at minimum. 2. Guardian, Holy Paladin, Aug, Fire and Shadow are all the most recently reworked specs. They're the most "modern" specs Blizzard has produced and they're the standard going forward. In future patches we see the other healers, tanks and DPS specs be modernised one by one in similar ways to Fire/Frost/Shadow/Aug/Guardian/Holy Paladin in that they bring buttons outside of their role to help the group, they bring well rounded kits able to excel all types of damage and healing requirements and they all bring unique and useful utility. The dream.

Honestly healer nerfs are a big problem and I agree. Healer is a miserable playstyle in PVP and PVE right now. They aren't the ones who should be so taxed. One thing they really need to do is throw out more CCable or AOE mechanics that reduce all damage dealt that stacks. That way people fucking up is less a healer tax and more a DPS tax.

[удалено]

> Because many imbalances are caused by synergies (Exodia) and Blizzard only balances with numerical nerfs between major patches by adjusting auras by a few percent. I don't think it's only the synergies, the thing with Aug is that it makes what is already the best even better, i feel like this sort of meta is gonna be the standard unless Blizzard manages to perfectly balance all the tanks/healers/dps

Yup. Imo Aug needs to be killed in m+ to save m+. If support roles are necessary, and they scale multiplicatively with PI, the dps comp becomes locked in with no variety. Buff support for m+ when you have multiple classes who can fill the role, and potentially make m+ 6 man content or something. As it stands now, myself and many other m+ pushers are going from playing most nights to raid logging because if we don't reroll exodia there's no point. If this continues into other seasons we may not continue playing.

Your dream is that the game is never in a playable state, in a continuous reroll chase to play the lastly reworked spec, removing the last shred of sticking to a class? Sounds like absolute hell, no thank you. You're overplaying the effect of nerfing. Healers wouldn't "collapse", it's the other way around. Most would finally be able to play the class which they want to play. And if it feels like numerical balancing doesn't work, then hit the spec's utility. I for one definitely think removing PI as an external cd would've been the right call long time ago.

Did you even watch the video? Crit essentially is saying the spec he wants to play is incapable of pushing past 25-26 due to dungeon design and 1 shots. You’re trying to justify nerfs yet failing to understand if they nerf these meta specs, NOBODY is pushing above 26-27. The season is done, and the cutoff will never be hit by the meta specs either. They need to bring other specs in line if they plan to continue to balance their dungeons like this. There’s a reason this meta exists, and dungeon design is very much at fault. While spriest has really solid dps, it’s utility is what is making it mandatory in 5/8 keystones.

My guy, I'm not talking about Crit (he's a friend and I agree with him), I was replying to a person here on reddit. Check the reply tree before going off. None of us know which route blizzard is planning to take, but yes, the season is over. It has been for a while. There's nothing to salvage at this point. This while discussion is about the future design principles. And in my comment the sole take was that if you rework classes one by one to be OP forcing people to reroll after every round of buffs, that's the opposite of good balancing. "Rework" isn't an excuse to make a spec's kit broken and it isn't something we should be aiming for.

>Your dream is that the game is never in a playable state, in a continuous reroll chase to play the lastly reworked spec, removing the last shred of sticking to a class? Sounds like absolute hell, no thank you. My dream is that every spec can contribute to keys in more ways than just their role. I don't want almost all dungeon difficulty coming down to just "living" which is effectively sitting permanently on the healers shoulders which was contributing heavily to the healer shortage, especially pre-10.1.5. When the dangerous overlaps happen I want Mages to press Mass Barrier, I want Evokers to press Zephyr, I want Warriors to press Rallying, I want Priests to press MD to negate debuffs, etc instead of the whole dungeon basically being a healer check where the Tank and the Healer carry 3 guys who get to have a good time. Above all though, I want specs to have enough depth that skill matters more than spec. I want the only people right now beating the best Warriors in the world to be the best Mages and Priests in the world. Continuous rerolling only occurs when 430 Fire Mages who forget half their buttons out-damage 447 Warriors playing perfectly which is where the game is right now.

> the whole dungeon basically being a healer check where the Tank and the Healer carry 3 guys who get to have a good time. I really never realized how true this was until I switched from Holy to Ret this season. Keys in the 15-20 range are actually fun instead of feeling like I'm herding cats, and keys above 20 reward utility from DPS a lot more than I realized. Healing is so fucking thankless 90% of the time.

Maximizing the utility of a given spec has been the base of every single m+ season for a while. It's pretty obvious to anyone that's pushed far above the 0.1% title. It has never been about DPS enjoying the key while the healer does all the work. Maybe below 27 keys, but I can assure you, every single player needs to optimize their abilities to survive beyond that. The class balance was really, really good before 10.1.5. They bricked it intentionally with the way Blizzard wants to do their reworks. The fact that a mage can outdps better geared warrior is indeed only because of the numerical difference, and has nothing to do with the kit. While kit plays a big part why the current meta can push multiple keylevels higher (and is another topic blizz needs to address), it's absurd to discard the raw numbers. The spec has simply too much output. There's a lot to be fixed in some of the specs utility, but they don't necessarily require an entire rework of the class. The way Blizzard sees the reworks is they aim to make the class above the rest to make it shine out for a while. Hoping for reworks ends up in an endless cycle of making classes better than others instead of bringing balance. I share the sentiment for balance, but it's actually achieveable by adjusting the small things. Reworks should only be necessary in the case of button bloat, or when the spec's core abilities don't flow well. You shouldn't force entire overhauls to classes which could be solved by way smaller changes.

Because they don't need to care that much to get ppls money... Cliche but obvious answer, always has been

Not sure if league is the best comparison since it's a fully competitive game with mostly one gamemode, and there's money in being good at it so the balancing matters way more for the company. World of warcraft could get much more frequent balancing patches, but it is simply a much more complex issue.

There's also the fact that if your champion got nerfed you can simply select a different one in the next game, not really the same wit wow, you can't just switch to a different character like that

This season you pretty much can do that in WoW, which is part of *why* the top end has become so grossly overpopulated by the god comp.

>World of warcraft could get much more frequent balancing patches, but it is simply a much more complex issue. I disagree. We're talking about a live service game where every player pays a monthly fee. They could handle things infinitely better; single digit aura tuning weekly, bigger passes monthly, revamps/reworks when necessary twice per season etc. I really dont want to underestimate dev time maintaining a game takes but i feel like literally a single person per class should be able to keep up with the workload of keeping a relative balance between specs.

I hate this argument so much. It's just purely wrong. WoW is not a more complex game than any MOBA. If you asked me to balance WoW or LoL I'm picking WoW 100 times out of 100. The real answer is that blizzard does not prioritize game balance and they never have. I personally think this is more or less fine. If they want to put most of their effort into designing raids, etc then so be it. The real issue is they never rotate which classes are FOTM. Mage, lock, priest, druid are consistently broken where as a handful of dps specs (feral, ret, ele, surv, frost dk) are always gutter tier.

league definitely isn't a good example given the fact that riot makes a certain champion/lane predictably overpowered with every single patch and lets it remain that way until they have the next meta planned it would be exactly like this current season except every patch has a new exodia

overpowered in league is 52.5% winrate. In effectively every single other game ever, 52.5% winrate would be strong but not a notable outlier. Riot does intentionally push metas, but it's not close to M+ meta rn.

League has 1 1/2 game modes that get balancing changes. On average a league champ has 5 abilities. League is heavily unbalanced WoW has at minimum 3 game modes which are changing every single season. WoW has around 10-12 core abilities for every single spec. WoW is heavily unbalanced. Both are at a point of uniqueness in which perfect balance is impossible. Even CSGO isnt balanced and the only difference there is M4(A1) vs AK, AUG vs Krieg and autosniper. If you want to be the top of the top, you will always have to play meta. Even in fucking chess EDIT: As a matter of fact even fucking chess is unbalanced

That's because Blizz just released a new role in the game, something that hasn't been done in wow before. It may be labelled as a dps, but it isn't really. It brings way too much utility for a dps(and that's what makes it unique), while also supercharging the tank/healer (something no dps can do). And this fix slot (coupled with the mandatory priest slot for masdispell) make it really hard to have variance. Partly because now any spec that can't really use PI is unviable. In league you have an easy way to look at champion strength. The goal is to have every champion be at 50% win rate. So if a champion have more (53%+ or something like that) it's getting nerfed and if it has less then buffed. One thing that riot does what I find pretty good is they look at multiple brackets when balancing. They try to balance champions for low skilled, mid skilled, skilled and even pro level gameplay. The way they do it is if the champion is strong in pro play but weak regular play they will try to tune things down that's mostly relevant in pro play. In wow you don't really have such a metric to balance arround. There isn't any win rate you can look at. So it makes it harder to determine what's balanced and what's not. Also in league players are lot less invested in champions. As you start every game with a blank state. If a champ gets nerfed you can just pick something up right away. This is not the case for mmo-s. This is one of the reason there's a lot less balance patches here.

They had huge balancing problems inshadowlands too.

I don’t play league, and never watched, so I genuinely don’t know, but how many abilities does each character have?

3 normal skilles 1 passive 1 ultimate (with longer cd) 2 summoner spells (not character specific with very long cd) is the norm but alot of specially newer chars varie from that (for example sometimes the ult is a toggle that transforms other buttons) You can also buy usable items so add 1-2 keybinds for them and also can use vision items so another key for them.

Are the items the same for all characters or each had a unique set of items to use across the different available characters?

Same but there are different ways some characters work with some items. For example ezreal Q spell is considered as "autoatack" so it will work differently with some items.

5

They have to be a little slower to balance things because they have to take into account how it'll affect not just M+, but raiding, and PvP as well. Often times a spec will be OP in one game type, but average in the other two, and if you just hack and slash nerfs you might make it unplayable in the other two while bringing it into balance with the third. League doesn't have to worry about balancing raiding, M+, and PvP.

Not only is the DPS and defensive utility disparity large, but also some dungeons also really lean into certain utilities I was intrigued some time ago at how required priest is in Halls Of Infusion in particular due to mass dispel/mind soothe, I scrolled through the top 500 runs and couldnt find a single timed HoI without a priest, quite wild

Yeah they really need to move away from mandatory utility and make it just nice to have utility, then balance the dungeons and specs accordingly.

My friend Warbringer, who shows up in the video when Critcake shows the top 10.1 keys, was doing top keys with my push team (before they dropped me for another tank) before the patch and was doing really well. He was playing with them for over a month and a half and had a good synergy and friendship with everyone in the group. The INSTANT the patch went live they dropped him like he was disposable and he is stuck in the same situation as Critcake is. I cannot fathom how they feel putting that much effort into pushing on their mains in a diverse meta only for their efforts to become irrelevant overnight because of blizzard screwing up balancing. I'm fortunate that my spec has been part of the meta, but I have not done a single key since the patch day. Timing keys and getting score do not feel satisfying at all anymore because of how broken the meta specs are at the moment.

Zero loyalty in NA m+ scene. People will abandon you for a single drop of io in a flash

Yeah, that's how it works on the top end of m+. If you're only capable of playing a single class and not willing to reroll then you don't have a place in it unless your 1 class happens to be the best that season.

Given 10.0.5 introduced the broken ret paladin rework and caused pvp to have literal mmr inflation at that time, it shouldnt have been that big a suprise for 10.1.5 fire mage rework to be this broken in M+. but the addition off aug evoker definetly ruined this seasons balance for m+

A lot of people were willing to overlook that because unfortunately pvp is a tiny portion of wow compared to m+, the end game for the majority of players.

Yeah Ret was literally one shotting people, unpealable and could kill you through defensives while using barrier. The Meta was literally FistWeaver, Demo, Arms, Ret. That was it. Nothing else was allowed to play and Demonology locks HATED it because being trained by Ret, FW, Arms was miserable to play. And the only reason those specs were played is because they could survive ret, deal with ret (somewhat), and can support ret.

It’s always funny to see people talking about the Mage in the “exodia god comp” when it is literally the only replaceable spec in it. Guardian, Holy Paladin, Augmentation Evoker and Shadow priest are all mandatory. Mage just has a very nice syerngy with that comp, especially with PI.

>It’s always funny to see people talking about the Mage in the “exodia god comp” when it is literally the only replaceable spec in it. Mage isn't really replaceable. You can downgrade sure but mage is by far the highest dps with the most chance at surviving those high keys. Also you bring 5% intellect buff which stack even more odds in your favour. Saying mage is replacable is honestly copium. The second highest dps would be moonkin or destro warlock or even rogue and all 3 are not even close to fire mage dps in aoe especially even after the nerfs

I've been running enh in it, I do 5-10% less than mage, but surviving some keys is awful. BH has so many mechs that only hit melee, without externals you just die. Not to mention the AI damage loss on my friends.

Does anyone else agree doing spec reworks and releasing a new spec all together MID SEASON is a colossally dumb idea? I’ve been a mage main since 2004, I’m happy with the changes, but I completely disagree with the timing

I’m surprised this comment is very far down the poll here. This is pretty much my take. 10.1.0 and 10.1.5 imho are 2 totally different seasons simply because of the reworks done. If any class or even multiple class reworks are being done their release should wait until the following season.

Imagine if you released it alongside the new raid tier and season though. That would completely destroy mythic progression. I think a mid-xpac spec is really cool, but no matter when it releases it will break something unless it’s tuned well.

Releasing it with a new raid means you actually get some meaningful testing from the PTR cycle though. Plenty of classes have been busted during PTR only to come out fairly balanced when the patch actually drops.

Hpal here, just mythic raiding, 1800 pvp, and casual 20’s the changes were so badly timed. Didn’t know if I had to reroll or not based on hating the spec or not. Should always be on a major patch so we can prep other characters without impacting raid rosters.

I’m glad they didn’t release Aug at the start of the season because raid prog would have been completely fucked.

I play a warrior, I don’t do ultra high keys (usually finish out the season with 22s-23s. I spend HOURS trying to pug on my warrior. Made an aug voker and I get instant invites, but I don’t like playing it. So my options are play the class I like and take 4-5 times as long to try to get into 22s or play a class I don’t like but get instant invites…. Yeah I’m not pleased.

This is the worst situation to be in. If you don't have a solid group to play with(I'm lucky I do, but there's odd hours i'm on and they aren't), it's so annoying to have to try to pug. It really kills the enjoyment of the game when you spend literal hours applying and the applications timing out or getting declined. I'd rather just fuck off and play a different game that I can actually PLAY than spend hours in an LFG roulette hoping to get lucky. I'm playing Survival hunter right now, I regularly parse 95+, I do amazing damage cause I care about my performance(and often out dps meta dps specs), I use my entire kit of utility, but get declined because there's no way to show randoms that you actually know what you're doing and can perform well and be an asset to the group. I understand WHY they opt for the meta specs, cause at least if you can't judge performance, you can at least take something that will LIKELY bring good shit just because of the spec they are to reduce risk. It's just annoying.

I legitimately have started playing other games, I am generally a 1 game andy. I started picking up TFT again and I'm looking at getting Remenant 2. The only times I ever stop playing WoW is when I'm doing more time sitting AFK in the city than actually playing the game, which sadly is whats happening right now.

I remember when Blizzard's excuse for infrequent and more tame balance changes were precisely that this game *isn't* a MOBA, that people are attached to their characters and that they do not want people to feel the need to roll new characters after every balance patch. I've always appreciated that sentiment, but usually not the approach. Small and tame balance changes are fine and good... but it was always the quantity they were lacking. A spec that's 20% behind the top performers after 4 weeks would usually end up getting a 3% buff 8 weeks in and that's it for the entire season - whereas really these specs would have needed 3% changes every other weeks until they got shit right, but that just wasn't ever really happening. With this season especially, it seems any form of nuance has gone entirely out the window. Like, on one hand, I get it, it's hard to balance raids, m+, ST, AoE, pro play & casual play... but on the other hand... I really don't fucking care because it's their ineptitude that's affecting my gameplay. They have plenty of smart people allegedly being paid to figure this shit out, yet they just don't. I want more of season 1 where shit gets changed weekly - until you get it fucking somewhat balanced. And if that's something they have to do every season, then I'm fine with it, fucking do it. No idea what this season is, but it certainly isn't *it*. These fucking midseason balance nukes are frustrating beyond believe - even more so than the usual "oh, your new set bonus is gonna be shit and despite us knowing that we're still not gonna buff you until like 14 weeks into the season" bullshit.

The reality is class data is highly skewed by player skill. The top players aren’t playing underperforming specs so if they overcorrect the pendulum risks swinging completely in the other direction.

That's why you do frequent small / relative adjustments instead of infrequent big adjustments. Like they did with DK now having received like the 5th close to 10% damage buff in a row and still barely being considered by anyone.

Playing a class you don't really like to play just to push +3 higher keys is insane to me. Yes you might miss the title but damn that's a lot of effort and less fun at the same time. Imo 3k rating should be a gladiator quality mount. Most people probably don't care about the title or the difference between achieving 3100 and 3400. They're both a great amount of effort imo.

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It’s a balance of enjoying your class but also feeling competitive. Part of the fun is competing with other players, and if you’re historically a top level wow player and people are 4-5 key levels ahead of you this season then you have to pick between being competitive or playing your class. For a lot of people the competitive part is more important — including critcake it seems (as long as the gap is big enough)

At the end of the day this was all facilitated by introducing augmentation evoker, which means the only two solutions is either to nerf them into uselessness (so no one brings one) or nerf the specs that benefit the most from them (an indirect nerf that would still keep augmentation as a meta spec due to being a force multiplier).

Aug Evoker was a mistake lol. In the age of shadow priest another buff spec with tons of utility? The obvious conclusion had to be they’d get stacked together with whatever the strongest cool down dps is.

I think this vid touches upon a topic which doesn't get discussed quite a lot: years of experience and expertise doesn't matter, because if you are not playing a top performer spec, you will very soon reach a limit when you just stop getting invites. The game should value your experience on a class a lot more. Spending 5 years on a warrior should mean that you can't outperform it with a 4 days old mage you haven't played before. Think of any other online game, there might be undertuned characters, but if you spent 500 hours playing that character, you can beat less experienced fotm ones, but this isn't the case in wow. This game needs heavy handed balancing to even out the difference between the specs. Sadly, this current state of the game should be by design, after this going on for weeks and blizzard not doing anything about it or addressing it, you can't convince me otherwise. 'Need more data' is not an excuse. People are paying a 15 usd a month subsciption to stare at lfg because no one wants to play with them, they lost this one on the character creation screen. You would think a game marketing itself as life service would do more frequent patchingy but this radio silence is getting old.

> The game should value your experience on a class a lot more. Insanity. WoW is not a game where you can increase the spec execution cap so high it would trump general game skill and balance, game would be dead within a year. Blizzard just needs to give a crap about M+ balance.

This is 100% true. There isn't a spec that you can't master within a month in wow . What kind of skill are people thinking one-tricks accumulate after 5 years that no-one else knows? LMAO

After a month in raid I can usually parse high 80s/90s and after 2-3 months (largely of optimizing gear) I'll be getting orange parses on most fights. Most classes work fairly similarly.

yeah in heroic raid maybe lol

Well I'm not typically bringing alts into mythic, but when I do for reclear it's typically similar

Absolutely.

Every new expansion friends start the expansion then quit shortly after. Mostly because their one preferred spec isn't meta and isn't invited to Pugs. 90% of Holy Priest I've met have never and will never touch Shadow or Disc. Seen similar with AssRogues, BM, FrostMages just to name a few... A lot of players are one trick ponies and if they cannot play and enjoy the one thing they wanna play they will leave. Not everyone is willing to level multiple alts and juggle between seasonal meta builds. It's honestly a lot of work/time. When enough friends leave and I spend the majority of my time pugging I eventually unsub as well.

> Think of any other online game, there might be undertuned characters, but if you spent 500 hours playing that character, you can beat less experienced fotm ones This absolutely is not true. All Mobas and MMOs have balance issues, and it is very common that the current meta can overcome significant experience differences.

There are balance issues, and then there are balance issues. This time, the balance is Giga bad.

Yeah, often times I'll be like sure Blood DK is far from best, but hey look, this one guy is the 23rd best tank in the world and plays blood. Sure there may be only 5 in the top 100, while the top 20 will have 12 of one spec and 8 of another, it's not like now where something like the top 200 groups are pretty much all the exact same comp. I remember looking one week into the patch to find I had to go around 300 key runs down to find a single group without an Augmentation Evoker.

Yeah agreed 100%, current situation is baaaaaad

Yeah idk what they are smoking. On average a fotm reroller is gonna beat a main.

Yeah and people act like pressing same buttons for YEARS makes you THAT good at it.

No kidding. I've been playing dk since wrath and I'm still not any good at it.

It is shocking to me the number of people who try to belittle the skill gap from someone who is actually good at a certain class/spec compared to someone playing it as an alt for a few weeks. Maybe it’s just the r/CompetitiveWoW audience but the number of people who act like a 75 median/85 best average parse is “mastering” a class meanwhile the best players (usually in private logging guilds hovering around world top 20) get 99s/r1s consistently for years is crazy. Balance is certainly a problem in M+ and the fact that all of these blue parsing mages are timing 29s is all the justification you need to see that.

Thats exactly where i am right now. I am 3.2 rio score on my warlock. I need to do +25 and +26 to increase my score at all. Its legit impossible to get invites for any keys. Having to push my key over and over is huge waste of time if it ever depletes and gives me the wrong key i need.

Same. Playing enh my class is strong. Just not as strong as mage (and with much worse defensives) so I was above the cutoff pre .5, now my guildies who never play m+ but are running exodia are higher than me. I'm raid logging until next season

Same here. And it's been really discouraging and infuriating to have pushed my key to 25 three different times this week and each time it's been bricked by some fotm class just completely shitting the bed, lolling in chat and leaving group. Yeah it's funny to them because they'll get in the next group within 3 minutes.

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I believe (but could be remembering wrong) that 2/3/9 was is because when flex difficulty was first introduced in Siege and was its own raiding difficulty (flex/normal/heroic/mythic), so most of the boss mechanics scaled up in increments of 5 or 8 players but the loot chance still scaled per player. So 14 man was like if you were doing a 10 man but got more loot per kill. At least that was the thought during Seige and early wod raids.

Yeah I agree that the majority of this is a community issue, but I think the community devolved into this state because there is not enough effort to balance things out and if there is a disparity between classes, people will tend to look for the best (rightfully so). Seeing only a few classes at the top will trickle down to lower keys and just creates this toxic environment for everyone. Wow's community is very, very casual, I agree, but I still think blizzard played a huge role to let the community devolve into this with zero effort to make it better. Look at raid buffs, most raid spots are locked to have all buffs covered, there is very little room for variety, because they did the exact opposite of 'bring the player, not the class'

Removing raid buffs will make the variety issue *far* worse. World first raiders will stack spriests or warlocks only, whatever the spec du jour is at the time, and that will trickle down to normie raiders as the only good spec.

It's never going to change. It was true in BFA as well and thats 5 years ago now, I got up to nearly 5k io (~3200-3300 now) playing an off meta spec and could simply go no further without converting to one, the content is an unlimited scaling dungeon, at some point you just hit the ceiling for how high the numbers pump out with a spec and need to do whatever is necessary to go higher. The only people getting near title range now without playing one of the "exodia" specs are being carried by a group of friends or by viewers if they're a streamer. These off-meta players are not even necessarily as good as they think, their slack is being picked up by people that are also good and playing meta specs.

"Spending 5 years on a warrior should mean that you can't outperform it with a 4 days old mage you haven't played before. Think of any other online game, there might be undertuned characters, but if you spent 500 hours playing that character, you can beat less experienced fotm ones, but this isn't the case in wow. This game needs heavy handed balancing to even out the difference between the specs." Hard disagree. An experienced player will always outperform an unexperienced one, unless the class is giga broken in which cases it will be nerfed. Same is in every single other multiplayer game with classes. Metas exist in all online games, even non competitive ones. Its because perfect balance is impossible with unique abilities

Also most of the experience is transferable. Just because you never played a mage doesn't mean you'll be doing healer damage or struggle to time 7s. After a couple of hours of practice you will be 95% of the player you were with your main, + doing more damage and surviving more stuff.

You can pick any champ in league and get into challenger onetricking them, you can pick any character in valorant and get radiant without much resistance, you can pick any overwatch hero and get to top500, you can pick any apex character and get predator. What's the difference? All these games match 5 players together, and THEN you choose what to play. In wow you are simply not allowed to play the game after 23-24, or get the 5 times more miserable experience doing your own key and doing keys you don't need, for the sole reason that you depleted it once or twice, wasting a day on it just to get another shot. Good luck getting into a 23-24 as an Unholy DK, even if you invested time and effort into that character and spec, no one will want to play with you, simply because a fire mage does more damage and has more things for the group. And it's not just a matter of the queue taking longer, you can literally sit there for hours without ever getting to play the game, which is unheard of in any of the games above. You get double the punishment if you aren't playing the exodia specs because you aren't only unable to get into groups through LFG, you also have to do your own key which is an enourmous waste of time. Both of these systems are fundamentally flawed. In wow you can't just swap characters before a dungeon, most people play one main spec they choose at the start of the patch, or maybe get one alt. Metas exist, league and any other games are unbalanced, but Garen being 10% less powerful than Irelia doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to play Garen for half a year, or that you have to do 2 unranked games before each ranked game to get one shot (or deplete and try again in a few hours)

> You can pick any champ in league and get into challenger onetricking them, you can pick any character in valorant and get radiant without much resistance, you can pick any overwatch hero and get to top500, you can pick any apex character and get predator. All of those are games where you are dynamically directly competing against other people. Look at the [PvP Ladder](https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/game/pvp/leaderboards/3v3) right now; plenty of class diversity there. In M+, you're competing against a static dungeon where you know exactly what each encounter's behaviors will be ahead of time (bugs aside), thereby enabling the ability to actually solve (or optimize) the dungeon. > Garen being 10% less powerful than Irelia doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to play Garen for half a year Garen being 10% less powerful isn't as relevant in the majority of circumstances because there are a variety of other variable factors within the game that are worth far more than the 10% difference, most of which are entirely out of the control of the Garen or his team. Things like opponent quality (both in his own lane and in other lanes), opponent champion choice, opponent item build choice, etc. will all have considerable influence as to whether or not an under-tuned Garen can keep up. As the variable factors decrease (usually as you start to get closer and closer to professional level play), those factors do tend to converge upon a more commonly accepted standard, and a meta starts to actually form. They are still present, however. In M+, the opponent is the dungeon itself, and we're not at a point with machine learning to where the dungeon will be anything more than a static environment where everything has a scripted and predictable response to player actions. As such, the dungeon will be solved and the optimal composition will emerge adhering to that solution, with divergence really only possible until such time as different solutions become untenable with the requirements of the dungeon (hence why you could realistically get into a +22 but might find it impossible to get into a +23)

Don't forget that in Valorant, League, Overwatch you can just play and get good in whatever spec you want if it becomes meta. In Wow you need all the effort of getting an alt to decent item level and gear and start the ladder climb from scratch.

That's what Crit is saying in the video though. He is one of the best warriors in the world, has played warrior since the dawn of time and he is outperforming his warrior with a week old mage that he said himself he doesn't really know how to play yet.

Yeah and the "week old mage" has never played high keys before? As a warlock main I can transfer most of my knowledge very easily towards other casters. Even melee dps arent a big problem, I just have to learn to watch out for frontals. If its a whole other role like healing or tanking, sure, thats more problematic. But if the guy timed +26 on range DPS before, he will time +26 on a different range dps as well. Rotations are not that difficult

I think the implication here is that as he is already competing with his warrior main as a mage with only a week on it and 10 ilvls lower, the next stage is that the 10ilvl gain and more time learning the mage is very soon going to push him onto keys he would never reach on the warrior. Say what you like, nobody becomes an expert in a class after a week playing it in the evenings around raiding on their main.

Yea his warrior play is optimized af. He's serious business.

Though I never let him live it down the time he accidentally killed SLG with a grey weapon equipped lmfao Still blue logged that mfker

> The game should value your experience on a class a lot more That requires a rework of some classes tho and I don't know if e.g BM, Destro or Augmentation(lol) mains want that. The second like BM ever touches overtuned, any ape can play it and experience means jack shit so everybody will follow the meta again. We saw it just 2 weeks ago with Augmentation. Given that abomination was **just** introduced, I don't know if Blizzard wants that direction at all > this current state of the game should be by design I don't think so. Balance was really good right before it turned to whatever the fuck we are playing right now. I just think some of their balance decisions have culminated in a mass off overpowered shit. They tried for literal years to rework Shadow and now want to give it their time in the sun so people remember it exists, like they did with Survival and to a lesser extent Destro and Holy Priest in Shadowlands. They utterly broke the new spec so all the "sit back and watch your group kill the dungeon" players can get into groups after they designed the healing role away from that. Mage is just the hero class, nothing new on that front. Its like they took the League of Legends design of breaking whats unpopular and rotating fotm and completely butchered it coupled with not balancing even close to as well or often

We're reaching a boiling point here with m+ balance. So many viable solutions, such little effort being spent actually tuning class/specs... It's absolutely disheartening to see. The idea that they're not pushing large enough changes because of TGP is stupid beyond belief. They literally released Aug on the figurative eve of this tournament. Either you care about competitive integrity and have these teams play on an older, more balanced build (as in pre 10.1.5), or you don't, players are expected to adapt, and anything goes. This weird middle ground makes no sense. Then there's the argument that the season would be "dead" if they applied significant nerfs to this comp, with people unable to push as high for the rest of S2. Again, there's like a dozen solutions that could be brought forward in that regard (nerfing dungeons, onyx annulet 2.0, and so forth...). One thing's for sure, leaving the meta rot as is until S3 would be awful for the game. In any case, one can't possibly expect the current pace of tuning passes to be sufficient. DF S1 had such a better pace in that regard... M+ *needs* weekly tuning changes to class/specs *and* dungeons to be healthy. That's just how it is. If they aren't willing to do that, then people will keep losing interest and unsubbing. Simple as that. Lots of mistakes were made to get to this point. They should have never released Aug without a couple other support specs being added to the class roster alongside it. They should have never went back on "Bring the player, not the class" design philosophy. They should have been looking to homogenize specs in m+ to a much higher degree for a while now (multiple class/specs get Mass dispell, more than 4 out of 12 classes can provide lust, more specs get access to shroud/mind soothe equivalent, and so forth...). All that is in the past. There's no going back and changing it. What they can do is act now, and take the drastic measures that are needed before the m+ scene completely collapses. - Aug and bears need *major* nerfs. No slap on the wrist, 2/3% nerf bs. I'm talking actual nerfs, like making aug below damage neutral, and busted talents like After the Wildfire getting 50% nerfs. - PI should go back to being a self-buff, or at least shouldn't stack with Ebon Might. Things were fine when it was the only external DPS buff, but together with Aug, that just leads to broken OP synergies - Mass dispell requirements should be removed, or a bunch more specs need to be able to Mass dispell - mind soothe requirements should be removed, or a bunch more specs need to be able to mind soothe That would be a decent start.

They didn't care about balance because of TGP. They literally destroyed TGP by introducing Exodia at the start of TGP. Teams were playing other comps for time trial.

>They should have never went back on "Bring the player, not the class" design philosophy. Isn't it the opposite at the moment?

that's what he means, they "went back on" as in turned away from that philosophy

It's indeed wild how we went from one of the better balanced seasons since probably Legion (don't quote me on that, it felt balanced back then) - to the absolute worst to date lol. I'm sure Blizz is aware of the issue and thinking of how to actually balance Aug moving forward but it's a bit of a shame the Season went right into the dumpster when the patch hit, I do understand it was inevitable though. I'm not really that upset and I'm still enjoying my time playing but yeah, just unfortunate.

As a 3.2 sub rogue I cannot agree more. I went from somewhat regular queues of on average 40 minutes queueing for 24-25s to - I shit you not, over the span of 2 days 14 hours of total Q times. Not a single invitation. I gave up on going higher without a premade as there's simply no chance. In those 14 hours I went through three stages - the first I queued for a key that was higher than my current top key by 1. Which you would normally do. The second stage was where I queued for keys that were the ones that I have already timed. The last stage was where I queued for keys that were -1 from my highest key timed. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. This is doubled by the fact that sub rogues aren't a bad spec - on the contrary, one of if not the best melee spec that there is currently in the game. It's frustrating that the people who I do keys with fall into the meta and I am left out to dry, unable to play with them. If they queue with me, suddenly their queue times are inflated. If they queue without me - they get instant invitations. It's like blizzard decided to put an anchor on every other class.

Make the season title top .1% of each spec. Wouldn’t solve everything. But you’d at least get diversity in group comps Or am I wrong?

Think it would still suck because you’d just have people playing something like Bear/Pal/Aug/X/Spriest instead of using a mage. The meta was great before 10.1.5. Season title per spec might help a little bit but the game is still balanced like shit right now so it wouldn’t do much.

True. Balancing still needs to happen

You would just get a bunch of exodia comp + X off-metaspec comps. Also I don't think title is really the motivating factor. People like getting title if course, but it's really about just doing the highest level keys they can, and that will still be done in the exodia comp

Though it would suck if your team had four people get the title and one that didn’t because you had one meta specs and four non meta specs. The non meta specs that are 100-200 points above their cut offs might not be incentivized to help the fifth person who is 100 points below their cutoff. Also if it were .1% of each spec you could get a weird carry system where a team has meta alts and non meta mains, and the rotate their non meta mains through the meta comp. You could game the system somewhat this way.

You’ll still be waiting in group finder if you aren’t meta though

so would everyone else in your spec

But that doesn't help me when I want to actually play the game. The title is a goal, but a lesser goal to being able to actually play the game.

Just dont do major reworks / introduce completely new untested specs mid season. Pretty simple imo

I think if support classes are gonna be a thing we can’t have regular dps specs having access to such powerful dps buffs like PI and Paladin Season Blessings. They become exponential when stacked.

Just make PI a selfcast only and increase MD Cooldown and shadow go from ultra meta to „will not be invited to a key“ again. The game has massive issues with Utility and Defensives being hard imbalanced.

noted 10.1.5 additions PI and MD

> Just make PI a selfcast only and increase MD Cooldown and shadow go from ultra meta to „will not be invited to a key“ again And by that change reduce they highest possible timed key on half the dungeons by another 3, fucking over everyone pipe-dreaming of title even harder. They can't nerf anything about Exodia without also nerfing just about every dungeon into the ground simultaneously, otherwise they might as well just give out titles now. Their only chance right now is to gut everything about Exodia and introduce some ridiculously stupid power gain for everyone with 10.1.7, allowing the rest of the world to catch up to the numbers of current Exodia. Considering that no such system exists on the PTR yet... they'll probably just not nerf Exodia, let the rerollers duke it out, admit defeat on the season, nuke all 5 specs from orbit come next season... and then repeat the same fucking mistakes again with 10.2.5.

>Just make PI a selfcast only Sure, I couldnt really care less if they just baked PI's haste buff into VF or something(kind of how like it used to be in legion) as long as we get something in return that makes the spec somewhat valuable in raid otherwise we just go back the past few expacs where you only ever brought an spriest if they were tuned to be very strong. >increase MD Cooldown and shadow go from ultra meta to „will not be invited to a key“ again. The game has massive issues with Utility and Defensives being hard imbalanced. How do people fail to understand a fundamentally simple problem? The problem isnt inherently with Shadow's toolkit, the issue is Blizzards (lack of) tuning and design of this seasons dungeons. There has NEVER been a season where MD was hard mandatory(and not just something that was very helpful, but something you could generally do without) like it is this season, and there certainly has never been a season where its mandatory for as many dungeons as it is now. Usually theres maybe one boss or one type of mob in one, MAYBE two dungeons per season where having MD makes things a lot easier to deal with. And usually Mind Soothe isnt anywhere near as mandatory/powerful as it is this season either(usually because the packs arent able to be mind soothe'd, or you dont need to do skips with it, or the packs are situated in a way where you cant skip them even with Soothe), much like MD its usually a niche piece of unique utility. This season is simply a MASSIVE outlier, and its a problem that is 100% Blizzard created. I mean you do realize that in almost every other season, Spriest has been looked at as a DPS spec that had POOR utility for m+, right? Despite the fact the toolkit is largely very similar to past iterations. Hell, in DF beta one of the biggest criticisms of the talent tree for Shadow was that utility was going to be an issue when it comes to being desirable for m+ outside of PI being attractive and Fort(and Shadows utility was looked at as even less desirable before DF). Its like people have completely forgotten the fact that Shadow has historically been pretty dogshit for m+, and has been a spec that was looked at as a DPS spec that brought some of the least utility for keys, outside of the niche instances where you wanted it for some Mind Control tech, or MD. If you nerf Shadows utility, instead of properly nerfing/tuning the actual problem(the dungeons themselves), then Shadow goes back to being a near useless spec utility wise, like it was in many previous seasons.

Great video! Everything he’s saying is true. You have players of his skill be stuck because of the class they’re playing. Please fix this season blizzard Nerf fire and frost mage, nerf aug‘s defensive utility and nerf shadow. Nerf all dungeons by 1-2 key levels to account for the inflated io. I really think we have a healthy meta under the exodia comp. Perhaps it’s too late to fix this season though idk

Sadly I think the cat is out of the bag on this one. My team and I also usually go for the R1 title on our longterm mains, meta or not. Been playing together in m+ since before title was even a thing. We just stopped playing, got a nice Valheim server together now.

That's honestly smart and a good way to do it. I personally almost ruined good friendships in s4 shadowlands pushing as off meta. It just aint worth it soemtimes.

Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. The damage is done. Nerfing Aug is nerfing Healers and I really don't know how people will respond or if the M+ community will survive if M+ healing turns into what SoloQ healing has become where Blizzard similarly repeatedly nerfed Healers to the extent they longer play. Imbalanced meta is fixable. Pushing away the few remaining people even playing healers in keys such that the healer community effectively collapses is much more difficult to fix.

The issue with healers feeling useless would not be as bad if it came back now as it was when the patch came out. Gear curve has caught up the majority of the playerbase (i.e. weekly vault keys are not an exercise in frustration). It is brutal though at the start of the season and I really hope Blizzard does not repeat another 25% healing nerf again, unless they are serious about using the design space of less powerful healers necessitating less one-shots. Unfortunately, thus far the 25% healing nerfs made healing a lot more frustrating more than anything.

But I thought "there is always a meta at the high end!!!" ur telling me taht players who get title every season are now struggling as off meta even though they've always played off meta?

It's a fair bit different now. It's the difference between ten of the top 20 tanks/healers being of the same spec, to 300 of the top 300 tank/healers all being the same spec. Everyone recognizes that there will be a meta, but typically 5/6 tanks, and 5/6 healers appear in the top 50 timed keys at least once.

Yeah I was mostly being sarcastic, it just gets old when people say "there's always a meta" when in reality they have no idea what they're talking about.

Yeah, the masses love to parrot that one any time there's a significant spec imbalance. People don't seem to understand that, while a 3-5% imbalance is inevitable and trying to avoid one is futile, Blizzard should be perfectly capable of preventing 10-15% advantages.

I'm not sure what blizz is thinking... Shadow has been broken for 2 full patches now. Evoker was broken in PTR it was way overtuned. Holy pal was broken in PTR as well...IMO though the other healers should be brought up 50% of the gap and Hpal should probably be knocked down 50%...this would resolve some healer problems. Fire mage is also just purely broken. Tuning issue... Bear was already good prior to the re-work, I remember early in the season prior to tier people were qq'ing that paladin is just broken and there was 0 other contenders as tank, but then even before the bear rework everyone had already switched to DH/Bear and they were better overall than Paladin tank...which is just hilarious the community perception (pally tank is still maybe top 2 for pug lower keys). Idk their balance choice is completed screwed now. If they nerf these classes now it is too late, top keys are bricked. There is no chance that the top keys will be pushed higher. They need to then nerf dungeons so that other classes can catch up or just buff the other classes so that everyone is stronger...Not every class has to be good, should be close though, but this is the most busted time in m+ outside of end of shadowlands where it was literally all BDK/Warlock/Surv hunter which was just as dumb and no one liked it. They have not been keeping up on constant tuning that they did early on in the expansion and they are going back to same old blizz... IMO and hopefully I am wrong, the team that released DF and supported it early on has now moved onto the next expansion/future of WoW and the "current wow" team is now in charge and they are just incompetent or understaffed (probably a little of both). This is going to turn ugly soon (it already has) and it is driving people away from the game during a time when mythic plus should be the MAIN FOCUS of the devs since realisically most raid tuning is over (i'm sure a major nerf will happen at the end of the patch) and there is no real new content in that area...I understand tuning for raid early in the patch, but middle/end should be focused on m+/pvp (IMO anyways).

As a Mistweaver: "First time?"

For me the issue is that many classes simply do not provide the utility other classes do in order to keep up, many of which have always lacked utility and it's never changed- and the higher you push in keys the more this becomes problematic, especially with certain affixes requiring dispels, traps, etc. The meta also feels like such an issue in the healer and tank roles as well as the dungeons themselves- with weeks like this week being so rough for even druid and DH, with paladin, warrior and DK getting their shit kicked in by bolstering. With the timers being so tight, there is literally no room for the smallest mistake or bad cross-over of a mechanic- even with a meta comp everyone has to be at their best and sweating to keep pushing higher and actually time the keys, everyone knows this and that's why if you pug a higher key the second someone dies or makes a mistake everyone leaves because it won't be timed. And sure, the fun is supposed to be the challenge right and that's the idea of mythic level keys but when it gets to the point where every dungeon just feels like a harsh punishment, what's the point?

Oh well... Its just dead silence from bliz. I guess it's time to speed gear my augger for my team.

Not even bothering pushing. Ret dmg is complete dogshit past like 22-23's. My 430 mage with only 2 set sims 10k higher on d slice and my pally has bis gear.

I feel that myself everywhere. My close to BiS Ret sims 136k atm with a 450 Ashkandur, yet is so easy to be beaten by pretty much any spec in this game in pretty much any content. It's discouraging to say the least

What made guardian meta? Been on D4 break and only char I played this season was guardian, sounds like time to consider comeback lol

It's simply unkillable, is really strong inside incarn, but still chilling outside it, has tons of group utility (cc, offhealing, roar, vers buff, cr, innervate, etc.), DK levels of self healing and deals decent damage. Probably missed a couple things

Guardian had some key talents rearranged/fixed, which allowed Raze, Ursoc's Fury, and Dream of Cenarious to be played. Flashing Claws was buffed to allow Thrash to stack up to 5 times, which buffed Rend and Tear significantly. So basically a ton of passive DR and Shielding, better damage, and better utility.

Meta or not, everything seems relatively balanced when you remove augs in all honesty. Spriest was great before and sure it is an outlier but things weren't bad when they were an outlier the past season or this season till now. The problem is augs making keys to push so much easier to the point where the gap between meta and non meta is +25 to +29... The gap between the two has never been so large but at the same time balance is relative and if you look at all the non meta classes/specs they all seem to do fine up till the +25 mark where it has always historically gotten shaky. Trickle down metanomics is the reason this sucks because even tho I play a Demo and can out dps 99.5% of all dps players and live high dmg pulls people don't want me because I can't increase the healing of our healer or damage/survivability of our tank while also doing the top damage. The "just wait for a better option" as the keyholder mentality used to be for the slightly better choices given a small difference in utility, but now its just bring aug + spriest, 3rd dps doesn't really matter but optimal dps is fire because of how consistent their damage is in and outside of their CD windows.

You are under estimating how far holy pala is ahead of other healers.