Subtletly Rogues and Fire Mages in Cataclysm

This is probably going to be one of those controversial posts, but I think if you really sit down and think about it and don't post a knee-jerk reaction, you might agree that it makes a lot of sense.

"Balance" means two different things to Arena players.

For some players, the most important thing is for their favorite spec to be viable. Balance for them is all 30 specs being about equally powerful or perhaps even in about equal proportions.

For other players, and I'd categorize more of the very high-end in this camp, the most important thing is for the fights themselves to feel balanced, even if that means not every spec is truly competitive. Some players might even be happy with only RMP as a viable 3s comp, so long as the matches felt like they were won by skill and not by cheesy maneuvers or dumb luck.

In a perfect world, you could accomplish both goals, and we do work towards both. But at the end of the day, it is also realistic to choose one as the higher priority goal. We made a lot of effort to get more specs into PvP in Wrath, and overall we've had a lot of success there relative to past seasons. The LK seasons have been pretty diverse, though Fire and a couple of other specs still aren't there. But that also came at the expense of actual player vs. player balance, particularly in the earlier LK seasons.

One of the reasons we are focusing on rated Battlegrounds for Cataclysm is they put less emphasis on the class composition of the teams and more on the coordination of the team. The fewer number of players involved, and the more the goal is centered around killing someone then accomplishing objectives, then the more important the number and power of individual tools belonging to a single spec become. Once you go to even a 10-player team, then there is a lot more flexibility and historically under-represented Arena specs can come into their own. It's easier to have synergy the larger the team size and even double up on some classes and specs rather than have so much power determined by whose crowd controls don't diminish with each other.

As far as Arena balance goes, it's an interesting debate on whether it's more important that things feel really, really good for a small number of classes or more important to have a large number of classes / specs participating.

Q u o t e:
Also it is just bad design to say you want to balance all 30 Specs. and not do it.

Pick a philosophy, are you balancing all 30 or are you balancing based on classes, many people would rather not play a hybrid (i.e ret) and get pushed around trying to be balanced while blizzard makes up their mind on whether they are going to balance only holy or ret and holy.

I wouldn't call it "bad design." Just challenging. Maybe it would have been easier if WoW had been developed with 10 classes instead of the virtual 30 we have now, but that ship has sailed.

We try and balance around specs first, but if we can't quite hit that, we fall back on class. It would be awesome if Fire mages were competitive with Frost mages in Arena, but failing that, at least a mage can have a Fire build for PvE and a Frost build for PvP. If on the other hand mages themselves had no viable spec, then your only choice it to roll an alt. As easy as leveling is these days, it's still not trivial.

Q u o t e:
For classes with roles that essentially do the same thing, won't the one that performs better, even only if slightly always be chosen? You can buff fire PvP but if frost is only better by a slim margin it will still be the spec of choice.

"Performs better" in a PvP context is really hard to define. It has little to do with who is highest on the damage meters. You can look at who wins the most matches, but even then I don't think you are looking at actual power as much as popularity. As soon as someone comes up with a new strategy, that popularity can shift, even if the abilities don't change at all. Skill still has a much bigger effect than class or spec in most cases. While a good player might not be able to choose any of the 30 talent trees and be as succesful, they are rarely faced with just one choice either.

Q u o t e:
Can you please elaborate on where the sane controversy is over whether or not your whole player base -or- only 50% of your player base should be allowed to participate in arenas at a relatively competitive level of play? Are you proposing that half of your player base just shouldn't be able to succeed by default simply because they picked the wrong picture at the starting screen, as "interesting" design?

To be clear, this isn't our design, but you could design the game where 5 specs are PvP specs in the same way 4 specs are PvE tanking specs. If you rolled a shaman and really, really love to tank and perhaps even rolled your shaman back when they were tanks, then you are just out of luck. If we went that route (and again we're not) then we could provide a really balanced PvP experience for those 5 specs because we could focus all of our attention on those few. There is a reason RTS games who go for massive differentiation (like StarCraft II) have only a few races, while RTS games with many sides (like the Age of Empires games I used to work on) don't go for massive differentiation.

There are plenty of players out there who could care less if Balance druids or Fire mages are ever viable in PvP so long as there are some classes / specs that they can choose which will provide a really balanced, compelling, dynamic game for them. There aren't many posting in this thread, which frankly doesn't surprise me, but they are out there and their opinions count too. You can argue they are a very small minority of our player base, but they are also the ones for whom class balance discrepancies are most meaningful because their skill at the game is so refined. In the same way, we spend a lot of effort on heroic LK 25, even though very few players have the ability to experience let alone beat that encounter. That's also not to say we spend 90% of our encounter time on the Lich King and ignore the 5-player dungeons. Make sense?

Q u o t e:
Personally GC, I wish Blizz would go back to a pve spec, a pvp spec, and an all-around spec. Balance wise, it would lead to less problems. If you are a Mage and like fire, but fire isn't viable in pvp and you do it anyway, you are a bad. Just because you chose the wrong spec doesn't mean that Blizz should fix it for you so it is, imo. The best or most competitive players will choose the spec that has the highest chance of success.

That might work for mages, but it doesn't work well for paladins. We'd have to either decide paladins can only heal in PvP or support all 3 of their specs, but only 1 mage spec.

It was definitely a lot simpler to balance PvP when Arms warriors and Frost mages were the only trees of those classes anyone expected to be viable, but then players rightfully asked why we even had talent trees for Balance druids and Arcane mages if they really weren't going to be supported.

Q u o t e:
What if all the mandatory talents across the board wherent so game-breaking? Wouldnt you be in a better place as a designer to make changes if you didnt have these giant sharp pointy objects in the trees waving a big sign that says "DONT LEAVE HOME WITHOUTIT"

If talents aren't mandatory (for PvE or PvP) then they are considered marginal. If your talent decisions don't actually matter, then that feature becomes a lot less compelling. You could advocate I suppose a design where each individual talent point is even with every other, but given the enormous diversity of situations that you can find yourself in, that's a pretty tall order.

Q u o t e:
I'm disappointed you take this view.

I don't take that view, and I tried to take great pains to point that out in my post. But many players do. It's not like it comes down to a vote or anything, but I was trying to present why it's not as simple as just piling on PvP abilities to e.g. Fire mages until they show up in a lot of high-ranking comps.

Q u o t e:
I'd call it bad design.

No one forced you to make 3 specs. in fact, I know my group of friends believe you should have never gone past 2 specs and some feel you should have just stuck with 1 spec and let players choose X amount of abilities out of X total (like GW).

You could easily just make ONE spec per class in arenas so there is balance.

Just because you started one way, doesnt mean you could have changed the design, even after 5 years.

If you came and said, you know, we're going to chop every class down to 2 specs, Im sure you would have a riot on your hands from some and others would be cool with it. And those that riot would still play the game.

It was before my time, but the talent trees were developed in response to beta feedback that all say warriors played the same and players weren't making any decisions about how to improve their character beyond a certain point. Maybe 3 wasn't the right number, or maybe the designers should have said that paladins and priests are healers and don't have a damage-dealing mode.

In any case, those decisions have been made. While we aren't afraid of making a really controversial change if it improves the game, I'm not sure sacrificing some talent trees really does improve the game. It might make PvP or even PvE balance easier to achieve, but it cuts down on the number of ways to play the game or even sheer depth. For every number-obsessed power gamer there are thousands of players who just like their BM hunter or Frost mage and don't care if they can't top meters or win Arena because they're never going to do that content anyway. Those guys could very well be devastated by just taking away the class that they love. I think it's the kind of thing that might cause a big loss of subscribers. It's really had to support as logical any change that might be "good for the game" but causes a lot of people to quit. What does that even mean?

Q u o t e:
GC I think it's one of the best and insightful posts you have ever made...good job. The post really helped me understand the design choices that have been made.

Cool. I'm always a little reluctant to make the posts that I know might lead to a lot of flaming. This one wasn't as bad as I suspected, though clearly there are some unhappy players that just want their dude to be Arena awesome and aren't as concerned with other considerations.

Q u o t e:
How much importance do you place on the roles of specs when looking at balance though? I'll avoid my obvious bias with paladins and look at shaman instead. They can fill 3 different roles in PVP. Do you guys try to balance shaman around being able to fulfill each role? Druids would be another one. When looking at druids do you guys prefer to balance just around resto or do you take balance and feral into account as well? Even a class like priests that can heal or DPS. Where's the balancing point?

We do place emphasis on role. A player who loves her Shadow priest may have no intention of ever healing and may be really frustrated at the thought of a hybrid tax at all. Telling that player to go heal or go home feels worse than telling a Blood DK that they need to go Unholy to PvP. DPS specs can play very differently from each other, and it's awesome when players just end up preferring the abilities or even nuance of one over the other. But you're still filling the same role.

Q u o t e:
So, I think there are two paths you can take with arena balance, and they run two different risks. You can try to make all 30 specs viable and in doing so, run the risk of making one or more of those far stronger than they're supposed to be. Or, you can focus on a smaller subset of specs and run the risk of alienating players who don't like or want to play that subset and want viability outside of it.

There is also a hybrid strategy, where players can generally play whatever they want to for purposes of winning some matches and getting gear, but in the rarefied tournament-level air you still need to gravitate towards certain classes / specs / comps to really be competitive. I'm not saying we're going to do that, but it might be better than just declaring some trees will never be supported in PvP or nerfing say RMP every time it gets chosen too often for a tournament.

One of the first things you see after a tournament though are the "Big surprise -- none of my class" posts, which suggests that won't be good enough for some folks.

Q u o t e:
#2 A lot of players can't help but feel that WoW politics plays a roll in this. In that, if too many classes exist with a certain spec (such as Ret vs Holy), then the most popular and least contributing spec gets nerfed. It's obvious that a Holy Paladin would be contributing to the WoW community then a Ret, since healers aren't as popular as DPS. Why must the player be punished for choosing to be a spec that would be involved with WoW politics?

This smells like persecution complex. There is no "WoW politics" with regard to class balance. It's not good business sense to beat up one tenth of our classes or one thirtieth of our specs for arbitrary reasons. We want you to like your class because then you'll tend to stick around and play more. Giving you a reason to quit isn't smart.

Q u o t e:
If you read the thread, and GC's comments, that's part of some peoples issues: they AREN'T trying to push every dps spec to 100%. GC said as much with the role choice of the priest versus the spec choice of the DK. Point. Blank.

That wasn't really what I was trying to say. I've been trying to stick more with how things should be and what the priority should be in getting there. We want all specs to have a place in PvP (and PvE for that matter). Some players just want to know which are the best PvP classes or specs so they can go play those. Others really like a particular class, say paladin, but really don't want to do some of those roles, say healing. Others like Lhivera really like the playstyle, spells or even just the idea of a particular tree within the class. Some players are fine if they can play their spec without feeling like a total idiot for doing so, while others won't be satisfied unless the dps tracking sites end in a 10-way tie and every tournament has about 30 specs represented.

All of those things are important to non-trivial slices of our player base so they all have to count for something. They aren't necessarily exclusive either, but a big part of game design, especially the runaway locomotive that is MMO design, is deciding what is the highest priority.