Balancing Level 80s

Aelobin

DK Twink (80 / 85 / 101)
There's a thread that's been started specifically for feedback on balancing lower levels. If we can compile a list of issues that need to be fixed for the 80 bracket, I'll see if I can get a US friend to post them for us.
- 409 MoP items that have a level 80 requirement
- Resillience levels too high (healers invincible) - Need some example numbers/screenshots here
- Possibly open up higher level dungeons/raids
- Mana regen on Vezax

We should also include a list of any classes who are broken due to missing core abilities at 80.
- Warrior - Arms - Colossus Smash
- Warrior - Prot - Challenging Shout
- Warrior - Prot - Shield Barrier?
- Paladin - Blessing of Might
- Paladin - Ret - Inquisition
- Paladin - Prot - 4t10 (don't have Divine Plea)
- Mage - Fire - 2t10
- DK - Blood - 4t10 (procs on every BT)
 
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Definitely the Blues thing. I'm not sure how professions will affect it since everyone can get them (whereas for example; spell power 409s, paladins are going to be useless as healers if they're available since they cannot use staves.

PvP power on gear, could be useful just to balance the horrendous damage vs healing that we have (although, dps vs dps isn't so bad currently, at least from my duels)

List of abilities:

Warrior:
Shield barrier (maybe, but we didn't have it before)
Challenging shout
Colossus smash (core part of dps, but was always a level 81 skill)

Paladin
Blessing of Might
Inquisition (has always been a level 81 skill)
4pc t10 protection
 
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There is so much to do to balance this bracket.

First of all, i'd remove mastery from the bracket, some masterys are really "OP" and some are clearly weaker, for example, arms warriors and MM hunters have a weaker mastery then mages do in this bracket

second (this will never happen) they have to look at all classes and improve their damage for this bracket (example; buff warrior damage, nerf mage damage and so on, no i do not play a warrior at 80)

third is to make all those cataclysm blues level 81+ or make them weaker then ICC gear and add pvp power to pvp gear.

This would make a nice start
 
I'm not convinced mastery is the issue. Some classes are naturally stronger than others (see cataclysm's mage vs warrior, using your example). The 5.0.4 patch has alleviated a few issues, as mages now do less damage, and other classes do more damage which feels somewhat compensated. Fact is, there are just some classes that entire rotations change from not being level 81+, which isn't particularly helpful (especially when some classes got given some 81-85 skills as low as level 38 for example)

Cataclysm blues aren't particularly strong compared to ICC counterparts. Weapons are the exception, just because of the itemlevel, but ICC gear is particularly well-itemised and has competing numbers of main and secondary stats. If anything the 308 blues give us more gearing options, which is nice.

The resilience change actually helped DPS (glass cannoning isn't as good, and it kinda encourages everyone to be in PvP gear), but I'll agree PvP power is needed on the lower gear, as it's somewhat relied on (70s are hard-gemming the stat just to cope with healers now). The biggest problem is how SP/AP scales for heals, as atm it's clearly too strong (my record as retribution at 80 is a 65k Word of Glory, and for protection it's a 154k crit from the same spell, but that's a result of how protection mastery works)

Admittedly, there are some necessary changes, but I don't think (having played the bracket for almost two years) that it's nearly as bad as you might think.
 
The 5.0.4 patch has alleviated a few issues, as mages now do less damage

THE 5.0.4 PATCH HAS ALLEVIATED A FEW ISSUES, AS MAGES NOW DO LESS DAMAGE

Hate to be a bubble burster, but I'm consistently doing MORE dps on everything. From basic dummy testing to awesome ICC combustion spreading "testing" Wink wink.

Of course if you're talking about Arcane then fair enough, but all round if you have the gear fire is performing better mainly because of the way the new proc system works and because we get our already high crit multiplied by 1.5


Oh and I submitted a bug report this morning about the fire 2pc being broken for fire.
 
to be honest, (as a graduate student in mathematics) i don't understand why they don't just make abilities do percentage-wise damage/healing in PvP. then they no longer need to worry so much about scaling at lower levels.

of course they need to completely overhaul the gear-system. now x intelligence would, instead of boosting your spells by x spell power at any level, boost your spell by f(x,y) percent, where f is a two variable function that depends on your intelligence x and level y, so basically f is something that is like this spell Flashing Steel, except the output of f is a percentage number.

this way they would still need to worry about some scaling (i.e., the scaling function f), but things become A LOT easier to balance.
 
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I'm failing to understand why percentage values would help anything. Twinks are already overgeared, which is the entire point. All having (for example) X int at Y level do % damage, is that in high end gear you'd near 1-shot everything.

Int, SP, Ap, Agi, Str, etc are all static values. 1 point of str will give you the same damage no matter how much str you have. A percentage value would make this worse because of how they stack together. If you have an ability that does 10% damage for example, and you have some percent crit (or a guaranteed crit mechanic like Killing Machine), if you add meta gem, cooldowns (often 20%), special buffs (berserking), you'd end up with extreme multipliers that makes your 10% end up at something like 50%.

I'm not seeing how that would be easier to balance in any way, shape or form. How does the % scalar affect stamina? It looks like it'd be a reduntant stat in PvP (FC's wouldn't like that too much), and in PvE a level 80 would end up doing more than a level 85 or 90 just because of how the % scalars work.

So again, how would this fix things?
 
Meh, I haven't exactly tried a lot on my mage, although arcane isn't totally lost.

Is the set bonus broken because hot streak no longer exists? I thought it was changed to a "you have X seconds to get a crit to proc an instant" or some crap.

Sorta, it's broken because neither proc is called Hot Streak anymore.
 
Paladin:
2pc t9 holy has no function, we no longer have any judgement buffs/debuffs with a duration.
2pc t9 prot - Hand of Reckoning is now called Reckoning, so assumed not functioning.

Warrior:
4pc t10 tank - half redundant as commanding shout no longer exists.
4pc t9 tank - there is no cooldown on shield block (other than the 8 sec recharge time, so perhaps it removes that?)

Druid:
2pc t10 Bear - Swipe no longer has the (Bear) tag, so might not function.
2pc t10 Balance - Omen of Clarity no longer exists.

Shaman
2pc t7 Elemental - 2pc still does things, but is useless due to current mana talents.

General

Having level 81s and level 82s (maybe more, I don't know) in the level 80 heroic dungeons makes it almost pointless for an ilevel 232 (less for the older ones, but still applies) to run these. I can't reliably farm jp, so I'm basically only going to cataclysm dungeons to get my justice points, which is extremely annoying (and also impossible as most of my new twinks are on a wotlk account, which has no access to cataclysm dungeons).

The last point in particular needs fixing, unless I'm going to form premade groups to run heroics.
 
80 fire mages atm is very broken since we have 100 % crit all the time and we can get combustions of that do insanly high dmg.

They need to nerf dmg at lower lvls and healing + nerf how much ressi scale at 80 and 70.

Atm no 70 dps in the game can kill a 70 healer with max ressi, it IS IMPOSSIBLE very fun "not"

And yeh they should make ret inqusion or what it is called for lvl 80 requirment and CS for warriors also 80.
And ye 80 pvp is super broken btw.
 
I'm failing to understand why percentage values would help anything. Twinks are already overgeared, which is the entire point. All having (for example) X int at Y level do % damage, is that in high end gear you'd near 1-shot everything.

Int, SP, Ap, Agi, Str, etc are all static values. 1 point of str will give you the same damage no matter how much str you have. A percentage value would make this worse because of how they stack together. If you have an ability that does 10% damage for example, and you have some percent crit (or a guaranteed crit mechanic like Killing Machine), if you add meta gem, cooldowns (often 20%), special buffs (berserking), you'd end up with extreme multipliers that makes your 10% end up at something like 50%.

I'm not seeing how that would be easier to balance in any way, shape or form. How does the % scalar affect stamina? It looks like it'd be a reduntant stat in PvP (FC's wouldn't like that too much), and in PvE a level 80 would end up doing more than a level 85 or 90 just because of how the % scalars work.

So again, how would this fix things?

basically, if things are percentage based, a stacked 19 will most likely do as much damage to another 19 per holy shock as a stacked 49 to another 49. so when they feel that holy shock does too much damage at lower levels, all they need to do is change the way holy shock scales (for lower levels) once.

things get tricky with resilience and pvp power, but those can also be easily fixed now because they are percentage based to begin with :)
 
and what about a stacked 19 or 49, or 60, or 70, or 80, or 85 hitting a not-stacked char for the same level.

The scaling has been there for ages, it's just at least twice as strong as it should be currently. All having a holy shock crit for say...50% with BiS gear at all levels is that people cease going for damage, or even worse stack classes for 2-3x the damage (tazik is an example at 70).

I'm still not seeing how it would fix anything at all.
 
and what about a stacked 19 or 49, or 60, or 70, or 80, or 85 hitting a not-stacked char for the same level.

The scaling has been there for ages, it's just at least twice as strong as it should be currently. All having a holy shock crit for say...50% with BiS gear at all levels is that people cease going for damage, or even worse stack classes for 2-3x the damage (tazik is an example at 70).

I'm still not seeing how it would fix anything at all.

a simple fix would be diminishing returns on percentage based on level. this can be implemented so easily if abilities become percentage based.

for example, let's say a 19 in quest items + some BoA with lowbie enchants has 80 agility, but a decked out twink has 160 agility. all they need to do is implement diminishing returns that starts at 80.

so we could have something like this: random noob with 80 agility does 20% extra damage per ambush (4 agility for 1%), but decked out twink with 160 agility does 35% extra damage per ambush (average out to be 4.6 agility for 1%)

so let's say ambush takes away like 20% of one's health if the opponent is wearing leather, then this translates into noob does 24% of damage in one ambush, but twink does 27%.

don't mind the made-up numbers, this is just a silly example to get my point across.
 
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Assuming damage done (via agility, str etc) has a DR, how is this going to affect PvE at these levels? Heirlooms are supposed to be good, I'd hate to have spent all my time on a twink to barely do 3% more damage per skill than it (especially if I had over double the AP)

Also, why would you get a DR on a linear-scaling stat? The stats that exist with DRs have them because they get better the more you have (dodge, parry, resilience, armor), so applying a DR to make agility get worse the more you have (point for point), so there'd be no point in stacking it. Everyone would just switch to stacking haste and crit, since those stats have no DR.

Half of the reason people make twinks is the gear. If you're barely out-damaging random leveling chars, why even bother? (3%, even at chars with ~2k hp isn't going to make a lot of difference in a BG).
 
If you're barely out-damaging random leveling chars, why even bother?

you can only choose one

1, twinks do somewhat more damage than leveling chars.

or

2, twinks do significantly more damage than leveling chars.

i proposed 1 because the title of this thread has the word "Balancing" in it.

and i was talking about PvP.

also, i was just using agility to get my point across. they can also implement diminishing returns with haste/crit etc.

eidt: my initial point was that, they need to implement a percentage based system that is consistent. right now, their stats/scaling system has so many flaws, fixed mana pool is a step in the right direction, they need to do more.

agility should increases your ambush damage by a certain percent, just like PvP power, however, PvP power should outweigh agility point for point because it only works in PvP.
 
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Twinks don't really come into contact with standard leveling chars anymore, not since the exp-on bg exploit was (mostly) fixed. I don't have an issue with a more geared character doing more damage than a leveling one. That's kinda the point.

Also, balance is around getting all classes to deal similar damage and healing. burst doesn't really play a part, and if people are calling high burst imbalance, they're wrong.

Agility increasing your ambush damage by a certain percent already exists, because ambush's damage is based on % AP. unfortunately, the double-scalar is there because it also works off weapon damage.

I'm still not seeing how re-working the entire stat system for low level pvp would benefit us. PvP power is there, that's a % damage stat, why not use that?
 
if you don't see my point, just look at what they have been doing:

for example

Power Word: Fortitude

it had ranks in vanilla WoW, then they made it scale with level, then they made it percentage based.

everything is better when it's percentage based, you never get abilities that are too overpowered or underpowered, and if some ability is overpowered or underpowered, it is easily fixed by adjusting the percentage accordingly.
 

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