Balance in a fishbowl.

I'm not sure I follow why you call that a fishbowl. Usually when I hear that term, it is in reference to something that takes place very publicly. If we balanced in a fishbowl, you might be able to see all of the changes as we made them and why we made them. Many players ask for more transparency in the process, which suggests the fishbowl comparison isn't widely shared... unless I misunderstood your metaphor.

We don't balance around best in slot items, though my impression is the community cares much more about that. Most of our PvE balance is concerned about whether the group can beat the boss, and whether some members are contributing too much or not enough to that experience. Very, very few raids have all best in slot items (otherwise you kind of wonder why they are still raiding). We need to know the maximum theoretical dps (in this case), and how characters will scale with better gear, but we also need to know what classes will do with introductory levels of gear too.

We do spend most of our balance effort at max level, because that is where it is most important to the community. Very few players are raiding below max level. We do spend some effort to make sure groups can complete their quests or the level up dungeons though. We do not spend a great deal of effort on the 1v1 "I was ganked in the middle of Stranglethorn" PvP situations, though we do consider it as part of the process.

Hope that provides a little more transparency. :)

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Yeah, as I said above, I used it to illustrate that what balance was based on was fishbowl in size compared to the Aquarium that is the entire game.

Okay, that makes more sense.

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Very, very few raids have all best in slot items (otherwise you kind of wonder why they are still raiding).
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Then I guess I fail to understand what your process is for balancing the classes outside of Max level, or using BiS gear.

We balance at various levels of gear. We look at best in slot absolutely, but we don’t obsess over it, because it’s relatively rare and once a group has their best gear then the encounters are naturally going to be easier, so nobody is as worried about small discrepancies in numbers. The community does tend to obsess over it in my experience.

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Warriors were doing too much damage even without BiS gear.

We agree. The argument that warrior damage was only too high with excellent gear is an argument I usually see by warriors arguing against the TG nerf.

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However, it is disappointing that you aren't considering lower levels at all in your 40% spirit coefficient nerf, since there is no reason whatsoever to apply to it to the coefficients of mid levels when 80 and a few levels below would be sufficient. Outside of annoying drinking, most mana regen while leveling occurs while not casting, outside the 5 second rule, while running between mobs, precisely what gets nerfed most. Such just penalizes any who level up a caster instead of contributing to DK overpopulation.

We did look at it. We don’t think casters are in much greater danger of going OOM in 5-player heroics because the fights rarely last that long. The solo or level-up case is slightly different, but the reason we didn’t worry too much about the change there is because there wasn’t a lot of parity there in the first place. Shadow priests, hunters and Feral druids (to name a few) have very little downtime. Mages and warriors have a lot more brutal downtime when solo or leveling. This is something we’d like to look at long term, but we don’t think the regen nerf created inequity here – it was already unequal.

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here i was thinking this was about the "balance" druid tree....but once i saw a blue post i knew instantly there was no chance he would actually respond to moonkin issues.

Complaining about where blues post or don’t post it to invite a ban. Sorry for being heavy-handed, but we have been pretty clear about this. It invites too many posts of very limited contribution. (I’m also going to refrain responding to this topic for the rest of the thread so as not to derail it.)

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Because Blizzard wants DK/pallies to play with another class another than warlocks to bring up other classes' representation?

I suspect you were just trying to be snide here, but I will offer that we don’t actually balance with the intent of making class representation equal (in terms of total number of characters per class – I’m not talking about Arenas here). They are data we look at, but not something we view as a problem we need to solve. There are a lot of reasons players pick classes that have nothing to do with power (though power matters): ease of use, mechanics, understandability, or just looks.

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The problem with that is that people have been providing that kind of information with spreadsheets, making tons of referrals to EJ, posting DPS reports, and it's dismissed as "Theorycrafting" and ignored. If I recall correctly one developer said... "The trick to theorycrafting is learning when to listen to the players and when to ignore them."

As I have responded several times, we don’t ignore it. But we don’t rush right out and make changes just because the community advocates them. We are not turning over the balance of WoW to the community. We appreciate the feedback, but you should not approach things as “What do we have to do to get this change made?”

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Very, very few raids have all best in slot items (otherwise you kind of wonder why they are still raiding).
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Because raiding is fun? Not everyone has to get zomgpurpz to enjoy raiding. Otherwise it makes raiding a chore instead of something you want to do (especially in the case where you only need 1 or 2 more BiS pieces, for example). Speculation, but maybe this is Blizzard's policy for the current content being so lackluster: People want epix, not fun, challenging encounters.

I honestly don’t think a lot of players would be raiding if they didn’t find it fun. However, by the time a guild has run a raid enough to actually gear up every participant with all of the gear they want, we don’t really consider it a design failure if they’re a little tired of the encounters by that point. Is your metric really that a boss encounter should remain fun after the fiftieth or sixtieth time you’ve seen it? That’s asking a lot. :)

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If you don't balance around the theoretical best in slot items how do you balance at all? Of course "entire raids" don't have entirely BIS items, but large portions of them do.

I’m saying you can’t just balance around the best gear and assume that it all trickles down to lower gear levels. I think you can even make the argument that balancing around introductory gear is more important because that is the situation most players are going to be in when they try and tackle a new boss. If class A is useless and class B is overpowered at that moment, then class A isn’t coming back until the encounter is on farm, at which point they probably care a lot less about their contribution. I know that may sound weird and the natural reaction is “But the highest potential should be the most important!” But think about it for a minute.

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It's worth noting that the scaling discussion tends to be more prevalent (and perhaps more important) at the start of an expansion, because things tend to change a lot more between greens and epics than they do between one tier of epic gear to the next. The stat difference may be fairly steady, but some things (like hit, crit, etc) tend to "balance out" in higher levels of gear - you don't jump 10% crit going from T7 to T8, but you may well do that going from blues to T7.

Yeah, that’s valid. We totally understand why players might be concerned about scaling. However, consider it is only a problem if:

-- It happens, everybody notices, and for some reason we don’t fix it. This happened to some extent in Sunwell. It hasn't happened yet in LK and we intend to correct it if it does. (I'm not saying class dps was not too low or high in some cases -- that's different than scaling.)
-- It is actually holding your raid back or threatening your raid spot. This is actually less likely the more the content is on farm, which is usually the same point at which people are maxxing out their gear.
-- It occurs at item levels currently supported in the game. If your dps falls behind at item level 400, we frankly don’t care much because you’ll have new spell ranks by then, and the way we design, your mechanics may work totally different by then. It’s a problem if it happens between now and Arthas.

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Let's say you were leveling your Death Knight, and then a change went through that made all the strength on your gear only half as good. Surely you can see how that would displease some players?

Totally. I think the equivalent would be if we had nerfed spellpower for casters. Nerfing mana regen would be more like nerfing Death Strike and other healing for DKs. It might slow them down a little, but it doesn’t make them weaker in almost all fights except for very long or challenging ones (in which I would include raid bosses and Arenas).

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Equality isn't the issue. You're making a portion of the game that many people find to be tedious even more tedious, in order to make another portion of the game also more tedious. I'm sure you wouldn't put it in those terms, but from a player perspective that's what's happening.

I think that’s a good discussion to have, but I don’t think the answer is to buff OOFSR mana regen while leveling. That doesn’t reduce the warrior’s down time or that of the warlock compared to the mage. I can see a world with very little downtime for every class, but that’s a bigger change for the game. Food and water become much less of a feature for example. You can work around that by making their buff potential better, or just accepting they aren’t a big part of WoW anymore. But it's a change that has ramifications so we need to more fully explore if we like what the change does or not. Another solution would be to give everyone downtime-reduction talents and assume everyone has them.