Class Balance - What Does It Mean To You?

To me class balance means every class should be roughly as desirable to play as any other when you look across the server population.

Sadly a couple classes have not seen much love lately and on the open raid tonight we had:

0 - Monk
1 - Wizard
1 - Berserker

at the other end of the spectrum we had

7 - Necro
7 - Rogue

To me that says that the people who like to play DPS have dropped their monk, wizards, and berserkers to reroll as necro and rogues.

Huh? They did and they were and then they nerfed em after TDS raids were beaten into the ground with those abilities.

That was over 8 years ago. Doing and then undoing it just put them in a spot where everyone is basically single target dps with not much variability between classes.

That would kind of make sense IF they fixed wizards first before starting on class balance. But if they are going to work on both at the same time then it just makes sense that they are worked together. Wizard broken dps is just the most outrageous line item in class balance.

Actually i think Paladins can out heal Druids...lol

Rogues may be the best of melee DPS but they're still only good on some events because of assassinate. So, I wouldn't say they're in a great spot either. Wizards can at least do respectable AE damage so overall they should be doing more.

I'd have to respectfully disagree. There are plenty of events that don't have mobs that can be assassinated and rogues still pull in top 10, if not top 5, on our parses. But I suppose it depends on the guild makeup as well. If you are sporting 5 necros that know what they are doing, as well as some mages, we drop down a bit, but compared to monks and zerkers, we usually are up there as far as melee are concerned. A rogue that knows his burn cycle can stay up there. That isn't to say there aren't monks or zerkers that definitely know what they are doing, I have run into a few that give me a good run for my money.
But, I also agree that Wizards need love badly.

Rogues are ahead of Monks and Zerkers for sure but there's no competing with necro, mage, druid, shaman, or even wizard on any event with plenty to AE if you can't assassinate. Not to mention events where there's things to headshot or if you have tanks in dps groups, etc. Even beasts/encs can do pretty well with some work. Rogues should be near the top and not just barely making it into the conversation.

Unretire my wizard??

There is a problem if necros and rogues are doing equal damage because the necro is also a tank and a pet healer (the holy trinity in one class) while the rogue is ~75% DPS, 25% tank, 0% healer. That does mean that a rogue should deal about double as much damage than a necro in an hour when including mana and endurance regen.

When taking the DPS from Windance's theory,... not sure how good the necro pet does tank but let's say its 65% of a warrior. Further assume that the necro does heal half as good as a cleric but is limited to it's pet. When cutting down the necro long time DPS by 50% the class would be in total still far above the rogue. It is a big balance mistake that the necro became a DPS class.

During PoP they were just mana pumps for other classes during raids and the class had a good overall balance because they were one of the stongest solo classes, but since then the class balance had focused to much on raids or was just being ignored and they became an OPed monster. As the necro has to share its mana between DPS and heals my example is far away from being perfect but it should show that the necro has a much better survivability, a lot more options and all in all much more power than a rogue.

Rogue:
~75% DPS, 25% tank, 0% healer = 100%

Necro:
~75% DPS, 65% tank, 50% healer = 190%
37,5% DPS, 65% tank, 50% healer = 152.5%

One DPS class doing twice the damage of the other is practically the dictionary definition of an unbalanced meta that should always be avoided.

That is one reason I said "But I suppose it depends on the guild makeup as well." Or I should qualify it as "it depends on the raid makeup" and "group makeup in the raid." Plus you have to take into account if you are mezzing/charming mobs, which will hamper AEs, and taking down the adds one at a time. Our guild is heavy on the rogues, but certainly light in the other departments, so my experience is different than a hard-core raid guild that has all it needs class-wise to balance everything out. Because of our melee-heavy DPS, we also probably do raids a bit differently as well.

Necros shoudn't be a DPS class because they can also tank and heal. A cleric is often low DPS but that does not mean that they are weak because they have the most powerfull heals which is reversed (anti) DPS. For balance I do see necros DPS wise in the middle field of all classes.

It’s pretty obvious dpg disagrees with you. They’ve turned off pet tanking in the content most consider important, so if you want for it to be considered in class balancing you should be arguing to get pet tanking turned back on for that mission/eaid content where it’s currently not viable for grouping with any melees.

Pet classes will also need aoe pet agro tools and much better pet discs if they’re going to be held to the same tanking balance as player tanks. Pet tanks are trash at quickly locking agro on several mobs at once and surviving, which is a part of many recent scripts in missions and raids, especially in Shar Vahl Divided mission and raid content, as well as in the shiknar raid.

Part of the disconnect between what you think and what dpg implements in game might be your fairly radical free to play stance which is probably keeping you from seeing the recently designed content and activities dpg is balancing around. You’re basically by personal choice too far out of the loop to be relevant unless you’ve subscribed and bought up the most recentl expansions, and played through them as well.

The better way to add equivalence to this scenario would be to give Rogues (and Clerics) tools needed to solo effectively without disrupting balance in other class's core mechanics. Tools like Assassinate and Vow/Ward were a good start but these have not carried forward well in empowering these classes to solo in later expansions.

A player tank class must be much stronger in tanking and getting aggro than a pet tank because one class is a pure tank (WAR) or a tank hybrid (PAL SHD) while MAG NEC BST are each a holy trinity (tank, DPS, healer) which is a mini group on its own. Maybe pet classes got already balanced in NoS by nerfing their pets. I am definetly out of touch with newer expansions. But if a necro is still doing the same DPS than a rogue there is still much balance to do.

I think that should be done with mercenaries because else it would align the classes even further. Basically every class should be able to roll the holy trinity just like the pet classes. Currently most players do solve that problem by boxing but many players do not like that. DPS classes can use the healer merc as a heal aggro tank (healer+tank) but it is cumbersome. Players already made suggestions how that could be solved:

• One idea was to add another merc type that could tank and heal which would be similar to the paladin but leaned more towards healing. A Cleradin or Palric .
• Another idea was to let players roll two mercenaries at once. That could be limited to moloing.

We already went down this road, but it missed the mark - improving performance of the strong solo classes more than enabling the weaker ones.