05-27-2008, 08:07 PM
Quote:If certain classes are weighted so that they offer so much more when it comes to their class purpose than Blizzard needs to work on the class balance more.
I'm a little short of time, wrapping up a workday here, but just wanted to take a second to elaborate on this :)
I'm now going to proceed to pull arbitrary numbers out of a bodily orifice, so please don't eat me Pete!
Assume DPS class X can produce 1000 DPS as a baseline, and is a pure DPS class, meaning they don't bring anything else really relevant to the table (disarming traps in the suppression room aside:P)
Now take DPS class Y, which can produce 700 DPS as a baseline personally. However, Y also debuffs the target, generating, say, 40 extra DPS each for the entire raid.
Which class "offers so much more" to a raid?
In a 10-man, say with 5 or even 6 DPS, it would never be advantageous to take Y. In a 25-man, you would always take at least one, because with 15ish DPSers in the raid they bring more to the table than anyone. They also bring an extra blessing, letting you take one less holy Y, can DI for wipe recovery and refresh judgements.
:lol: OK thinly-veiled X and Y aside, this is a problem of scaling that IMHO you can't just pin down to class balance. If everything were balanced and there were no interesting ret paladin synergies, you'd have a game entirely populated with "pure" DPS classes - in my opinion, a step backwards if anything! And it's not just retadins... any DPSer with cool nonpersonal perks has scaling problems which discourage bringing them to 10-mans. Off the top of my head, essential 25-man classes such as survival hunters, affliction warlocks, PvE arms, heck even boomkin and elemental shamen (although now we're debating if they're essential or not:P They're still viable in 25s though!) would be written off for hard, progression-style 10-man content. Why gimp your raid's chances? Bring them when it's on farm.
OK, I'm not entirely against your argument of 10-man loot = 25-man loot, adjusted so neither is a clear runaway in terms of efficiency for obtaining said loot. Well, at least I'm less against it than before reading this thread. But some classes, by virtue of being, well frankly just bad in 10-man instances, will always be pidgeonholed to the 25-man scene. So here's hoping they don't get stranded on that figurative island while the so-called casualisation of the game sails off into the 10-man sunset.