Philosophy of Balance

This blog is basically a look at how balance has changed over the seasons and IMO got ruined with Cataclysm taking it a few steps too far, bare in mind this was written back in late WOTLK.

In any competitive game, we've come to expect a degree of balance. Throughout E-sports there has always been little imbalances between things, an example being the map layout for DotA/HON slightly favouring the Scourge/Hellbourne for bottom rune spawns for a while, or ZVX on a close posistion spawn on Metalopolis. In TBC we had druids being the superior healer for nearly every comp due to moblity and lifebloom being fairly broken, in WOTLK we had the same situation where druids became incredibly tanky towards the end, In Cataclysm it looks like we're heading the same way when resilience increases and HoTs become more effective (think about, druids were okish/bad in s1/5, good in s2/6 and progressively better from there, having them being good in the first season doesn't look great for the later ones). The issue with this is that the philosophy of balance has headed in a completely different direction with the introduction of 'all 30 classes/specs must be balanced'.

Disclaimer: This is ignoring obvious things like druids/pve gear/WLD being over the top in S4 as it's more meta-game related and none of these things were that ridiculous other than glaives in S3, funny how the last season of every expac is ruined by PVE gear.

One of the biggest ways to balance things is via assumptions. In TBC you could fairly accurately assume some things for the high tier comps -

1) It will have a hunter/warrior/rogue for MS debuff

2) It will have either a shaman+paladin of some spec or solo priest/druid or double healer of some kind

3) Every class has 1, maybe 2 viable specs so there's little variation here to be taken into account for (arms/sub/affl/frost/mm/resto/resto/holy/disc/shadow/muti/demo/ele and maybe enh, anything else was rare).

Now how did these contribute to the balancing?

1) Allowed blizzard to balance healing around the presence of the 50% MS debuff and balance caster damage around this, this is a key factor in why wizard cleaves were not half as bad to deal with as while people did run MLD, it was more of a pressure comp than a 'lol u globaled m8' comp. This also made CC'ing the MS user far more effective as it would allow the debuff to drop off and then big heals could land.

2) I don't remember any top tier comp that had a solo paladin healing, many were either double healer or with an ele/enh shaman because of how much warlocks would destroy them if they didn't run some kind of cleave with tremor totem (curse of tongues being 60% contributed a lot to this). What this allowed the balance team to do was to assume a high end comp would have either a druid or a priest as the solo healer with both classes having very different roles/playstyles within the teams.

3) Simple one here, less variables and synergy means less possible comps, having more possibility with 30 classes/specs makes balancing a nightmare, could anyone see a 30 race RTS working?

Because of the ability to work off of assumptions it made balancing the viable stuff far easier and with a few changes it could of been very close to balanced. Now in WOTLK we had the first taste of 'everything must be viable'. This spawned abominations such as prot healing paladins and even DKs of which were far less fun to play against than the immortal druids of S4. The MS assumption still remained though but damage started to be looked at as if there was no MS, giving birth to the ridiculous caster cleaves of late WOTLK.

Now entering Cataclysm, none of these assumptions apply anymore. MS makes so little a difference that not only is it not required, CCing the MS user is practically pointless. This leaves healing in a bursty state and means that every class has now been balanced around having stupid damage rather than a 50% healing debuff that can be negated with good play. Looking at it like this I'm fairly sure that removing MS was not exactly the best of ideas as it was also one of the biggest mana drainers when it was 50% (and good teams played around the 50% debuff to conserve mana, this isn't possible now). I don't know about you but I'd rather see healing doubled in effectiveness in arena and the MS changes reverted, yes people won't be able to run random comps like feral/ret/priest but being able to run random comps like that and do ok is part of the problem because it's nearly impossible to balance when you have the best part of 200+ semi-viable comps to take into account for with very little assumptions being able to be made other than 'they have a healer'.

Just a little finishing point, many games with large amounts of characters (e.g Street Fighter, Smash Brothers, MVC etc.) opperate by a tier system. The tier system pretty much puts those 'feral druids' (i.e. Sakura in SF4) http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2008/oct/17/street-fighter-4-tiers-character-rankings/ into a lower band of characters and leaves it at that, not to say that they don't get used because they do by the people that like them, just not often in high end competitive play which is far from a bad thing. As long as every class has at least one viable PVP spec not only would it be better for the game, it would be far better for balancing the game and putting it back in the realms of being competitive again.