One Shotting Is Here!

[MongoJerry]

I see no solutions, partly with the 'competency' blizzard has for class balance.

Actually, I was quite happy with class balance overall when people were mostly wearing blues and greens. There wasn't a class that was completely overpowered that could mow down two or more people solo, and while some classes could consistently beat another class, they would at least receive a wounding. In addition, I liked the PvP group dynamics in WoW where groups made up of mixed classes were more powerful than any group made up of a single class.

mostly because this core game design is item based. The nature of wow and most  hack games before this is grow in power through various means, then face enemies that always diminish relative to your growing power. The world of competive games attempt to arrange enemies of equivalent power.

There are different forms of "power." There is also power that comes from defense. Back when people were wearing blues and greens, my mostly holy/disc priestess's power came not from her ability to dish out damage but from her ability to take a whopping load of damage by healing and shielding herself while her enemy's life slowly ticked away.

Guess which side Blizzard gets their money from? It isn't the balanced bits. If Blizzard is any good at making money, and it is, they'll dangle just enough 'balance' to keep new money coming.

You lost me here. If a game is fun, people will want to play. If fights devolve to being one-shotted so that you spend most of your time sitting at the graveyard waiting to respawn, that's not so fun.

Any diminishing returns, if implemented, will be negated through the process of future itemization. Your old characters will be obsolete, and the gap between man with stick, man with sword, and man with rifle at 100 yards away will only be widened. What good's being a knight in armor while being shot down by machine gun fire? Bullets out of a gun is still superior to throwing rocks.

Again, you're assuming that power merely means increasing the damage one can deal. It doesn't recognize also the innovations in defensive warfare. In WoW, items could come with more stamina, armor, defense, and resistances to compensate for the increased damage being dealt. You seem to be mistaking my argument to be something like "a purple geared player shouldn't be able to kill people with blues and greens so easily." It isn't. My argument is that a purple geared player shouldn't be able to kill another purple geared person so easily. New items ought to have more defensive statistics on them to compensate for the increase in offense. Or, if for PvE reasons Blizzard doesn't want to boost defensive statistics so much, then have damage use a diminishing returns formula in PvP.

In human history terms, for every offensive technology developed, defensive technologies soon arrived to attempt to mitigate the ability of the offensive force to inflict its damage. At times, offense is superior (like now with cruise missles, nuclear weapons, and eventual suitcase WMD's). At other times, defense is superior (like WWI). Right now, in WoW, offense is completely dominating. Defense needs to be boosted to bring the game more in balance.