Pig & Whistle Tales - A World of Warcraft Podcast

Balancing an MMO: The Impossible Dream (rerun)

• Gabriel

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The beautiful complexity of MMO class balance emerges from WoW's inherent design, where perfect equilibrium isn't just unattainable but actually undesirable for maintaining the game's essence.
 
• Tips for making gold in Classic and retail WoW
• Why perfect balance would eliminate class diversity and identity
• The difference between static meta and retail's evolving balance
• How certain compositions like Warlock/Druid dominate different versions of WoW
• Why class strengths and weaknesses create engaging gameplay
• Understanding the mathematical impossibility of perfect class balance
• Celebrating imbalance as a feature rather than a flaw in MMO design

Thank you all very much for this year. It has been amazing seeing the numbers and downloads go up each and every week. Be sure to check out all of the social medias - YouTube and Twitch where I stream regularly, and Patreon for extra weekly podcast content.

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Speaker 1:

Thank you, hello and welcome to the Pig and Whistle Tales from Azeroth. As always here at the Pig and Whistle Inn in Stormwind, I go for a variety of subjects with regards to World of Warcraft, so grab a bottle or a pint, sit back and enjoy Today's subject. We're going to be going over balancing WoW. Now, this can be a variety of things. This can be content balance, class balance, variety. Why did I put variety? I'm so confused. Oh, I'll get it. Variety in terms of different segments of the game, variety in terms of different segments of the game. So PvP and stuff like that PvE, pvp. But obviously we will start off with the weekly stuff for retail and that is the world. Bosses this week are Valinor and Morgeth, as always. So make sure you grab your anima, grab your conduits and get going with them. Get them nice done early.

Speaker 1:

The brawl for this week is Pact House. This is just everyone's thrown into a small arena, the arenas that you'd queue into in a 2v2 or 3v3 situation, and it's about 15 versus 15, I believe, and it's just chaos. You want to be a caster for this? You don't want to be a melee? I will tell you that right now, melee is not fun unless you have an immunity in there. So definitely look to be a caster if you're going to do this brawl. The weekly event for this week is burning crusade Time Walking, so you can do Burning Crusade Dungeons while gearing up some alts. As well as it being the last week for the Legion Time Walking, so you have one more week to do your Legion Mage Tower. If you want a certain transmog for a certain class, or if you want the Werebear for the druid stuff like that. If you just want bragging rights for the uh book, the spell tome, after doing all seven of the challenges, that also is available still, but you've got one more week to do it and it won't be back until, I think, around halfway through 2022, so you'd be waiting quite a while in order to do this again.

Speaker 1:

Now we've had a question through. It's a lot more of a simpler question, but I'm more than happy to answer it. It reads as follows I'm struggling to make gold in TBC and retail. Make gold in tbc and retail retail for the legendaries that I cannot purchase, and tbc for consumes for raiding. I play warrior and don't really know what to do. Any thoughts, so making gold is always a big priority in any type of wow, whether it be season of mastery, uh, tbc, classic or retail. Now they all have their own different uses for gold. Retail, like it says in the question, has its use for legendaries and stuff like that. Um, tbc has more consumes for raiding and season of mastery is also very consume heavy when it comes to raiding.

Speaker 1:

So, the way to go about making gold, there's many different ways that you can make gold. You can passively earn it through just killing mobs. If there's a high uh density of mobs that drop some very good trash loot that you can just vendor, that is very nice to do. If you just want to, uh, mind numbingly kill something for an hour, it will, like, over that time, generate you quite a fair amount of gold. This is obviously if you've just got time to kill. You might maybe watch uh youtube on another monitor or on your phone in the meantime, something like that.

Speaker 1:

Uh, depending on professions, you can certainly make a lot of gold with your professions. So, depending on if you have a gathering profession or not, gatherers will obviously make more gold. So, herbalism, mining, skinning definitely mining and herbalism if you can get lucky with it and find the right herbs at the right time. You can definitely get a very good uh gold per hour sort of income from that, and you're generally looking to do around the dead hours of the game. So when people have gone to sleep or before they even wake up, something like that you can maybe spend half an hour, just, you know, flying around a zone picking up herbs and you can do that once or twice a day and it will earn you a couple hundred gold. So it can be very simple as that.

Speaker 1:

Or it can be something as simple as you know, selling your services. So if you're an enchanter with, say, mongoose enchant, or if you're an enchanter with, you know, one of the soul frost I think it's called one of the karazhan enchants uh, that's a lot more niche. You can certainly make a nicer profit doing that because you can ask for tips from people so you can provide the service. But it will be a 50 gold tip on top of it or something like that, 25 gold etc. And that goes the same for classes, that or professions that you can sell stuff. So golden spell thread for tailors you can definitely put that up on the auction for several hundred gold and you can just passively farm these, um, these materials to make it. So all of these professions you should be looking at a lot more if you can.

Speaker 1:

But raw gold is also not to be underestimated in tbc, as the obviously inflation goes up each and each expansion because more gold is being generated within the world and this is just passive gold. It all comes from somewhere and that somewhere is from mobs out in the open world, because the mobs drop trash items that you vendor and then suddenly you've got five gold from that trash item and another hundred thousand people have sold five golds worth of items and you know. So on, so forth. So definitely don't underestimate the uh trash mobs and how much their stuff actually vendors for, because a lot of people overlook it and it's definitely not to be so. This is how to do it in TBC. Obviously, if you're a mage or something, you can AoE, farm and stuff like that. You could do a lot of other things as a mage. You can boost paladins, can boost as well stuff like that In retail. It's very much a similar sort of scenario. So you can make the legendaries and sell them on the auction house. You can make potions, sell them stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

But really what I said for tbc about underestimating uh trash drops. Definitely do not underestimate uh shadowlands, trash drops. You get so much raw gold from just vendoring, from questing, from daily quests. You get about 300 gold gold per daily quest. Sometimes if you're doing like the moor quests or like the assault quests in the moor, they give you about 255, I think. So definitely do not underestimate them. It's very easy to get gold in terms of raw gold. It takes a couple hours of just, you know, questing, having fun, maybe level an ult or something, because the bonus objectives do give gold as well. So it's very easy. It's a lot easier to get gold on retail at the moment than it is tbc, but tbc is also very much there. So I really hope that helped with the question and let's get into the, the episode.

Speaker 1:

So balancing wow, how would you measure? How would you measure balance in an mmo? You can't. That that's the uh, that's my take on it. You can't measure balance in an mmo. If you want it to be fun and engaging, you need different classes that can do different things, because if everyone did the exact same thing, it wouldn't be fun. Why? Why would you pick a warrior over a mage? If they did the exact same thing. What? What would be the point? There is no point, exactly.

Speaker 1:

So it's the class diversity that makes these games what they are. You will never get balance in the game. You will never get class balance in the game, I'll say, because every class has its own strengths and its own weaknesses and they have their own different matchups when they go against each other, when they're in raiding and stuff like that. So an example if you look at TBC and retail TBC, pvp is tough. It's very simple, but it's tough when you don't get the RNG on your side or it makes it a lot tougher.

Speaker 1:

So Warlock Druid is currently what is running rampant in 2v2 in TBC. It is one of the best class compositions in the game for TBC and that won't change. That will never change the game for TBC and that won't change. That will never change. That's mainly because TBC will not be looked at in terms of a balancing perspective, because this is how it was balanced at the end. This isn't constantly changing. This is how it was balanced at the end of TBC. All of the classes and stuff. The raids are changing after each phase, sure, but the classes will not change. So all throughout tbc, every single season, one, two and three. Some classes might change. Some classes might get better because of the better gear and stuff like that the stats.

Speaker 1:

But warlock druid is a staple point of tbc arena. It's insane to think about because it's an absolutely ridiculous composition and it's infuriating to play against. But if you look at it and compare it to, say, retail Warlock Druid, it's a good composition. It's not bad. But if you look at something like a Melee Cleave in 3v3, a Retribution Paladin and a arms warrior, they can absolutely devastate people. It's kind of the meta right now. You're looking at warrior mage druid as a very strong composition. You're looking at god comp, which is shadow priest, fire mage druid. You're looking at so many different variations and it constantly switches.

Speaker 1:

The meta of what composition is good constantly switches due to the game being vibrant and getting, I was going to say, frequent patch updates. It gets patch updates. That's the best way to go about it. But it gets patch updates that try to the best way to go about it. But it gets patch updates that try to um, nerf and tweak classes to bring them in line if they're over performing or under performing or anything like that. So it's a constant um fight for the top, uh, in retail, whereas that won't be the case in tbc. It's very much just a stale.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, warlock, druid's the best, or one of the best. I'm pretty sure it will be the best, because warlocks don't die, druids don't die. Tanky as hell like, yeah, you're just, you're not gonna beat it, are you? Um, the same can be said for raids. So, in terms of raiding, in tbc you're obviously going to be looking at five shamans, because you want one shaman for each group for heroism. If you're looking to play it perfectly, you're looking at multiple hunters, multiple mages, multiple warlocks. You're looking at a very caster heavy group, mainly compared to, say, uh, season of mastery, where it might switch up. It might switch up. I will say that because you'd usually go for the melee cleave, not melee cleave, I'm talking pvp right now. Um, you're going to be looking at a lot more melee heavy composition in the 40 man raids, just because rogues and warriors do a lot more damage instant damage than casters, than hunters and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

In that specific era of world of warcraft. This could change because they are implementing some changes. They're trying to tweak things, which is really good because, again, it's trying to tweak that balance and have it constantly flowing, constantly changing. That's what, you know, I enjoy personally in the game and that's what I think a lot of other people enjoy in the game personally. So it's very tough to get a raiding composition that's perfect. But there are always going to be those classes that are better than others there's always going to be, you know that are better than others. There's always going to be. You know, the warlocks just outperforming the warrior by two times its damage. Why don't we just bring in, you know, five extra warlocks instead of five extra warriors? It's just double the damage then, like we don't even need to deal with some mechanics and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

So during WoW you're always going to have a struggle for balance and I think this is why it is fun, because you're constantly going up against different matchups. So I'm going back to a point that I said earlier but I didn't really elaborate on. The matchups aren't in favor of you. In TBC, warlock Druid, it will be a mage priest, or should be a mage priest, very easily, because the druid just doesn't get cc'd by the mage at all. The warlock beats the mage outright in damage and survivability and everything. The priest can't do much because he'll get mana drained, he'll get cloned, he, he'll get whatever. It's not fun.

Speaker 1:

So if you go up against this in, say, shadowlands PvP, a 2v2 in the exact same situation, you probably have more chance to win as a mage priest than you do a warlock, druid, or it's a lot more fair, and even grounds, I would say, because you know everything's been tweaked to try and incorporate everyone's getting an interrupt, everyone's getting a form of cc, everyone has a form of heal or absorb or survivability, defensive cooldowns. Defensive cooldowns have always been in the game, but they're making it more streamlined so that you know it's every minute that you've got a defensive cooldown instead of, say, ice block, there's a five minute cooldown, or say something like divine shield for a paladin, that's a five minute cooldown. You know warlocks have like death pack now which gives them a 50k shield and it's like insane. It's insane and that's on a minute cooldown. So it's absolutely nuts. So you have more of a chance.

Speaker 1:

But again, there's always going to be a favorite in these matchups. You're not going to get the perfect, uh, the balance imperfect. But like I said at the very, why would you pick a warrior over a mage if everything's the exact same and balanced like perfectly. You wouldn't, because you've got different play styles. You might like the charge in zug zug, kill everything and, you know, hit anything that you see moving. Or you might like the yeah, I'll just spam them out with frost bolts and, you know, frozen. Or blizzard, I'll just blizzard on the pillar. They can't go back, they're slow as hell, they can't even move and slowly but surely kill them. That's my favorite, by the way. Well, they're actually both very fun.

Speaker 1:

I do have a warrior and it's very fun. I'm not going to lie to you, I have yeah, I have, and prefer casters a lot more so than melee, and the reason for this is just mainly because I prefer the play style, I prefer what they have, the utility, I prefer mobile classes. I'll say that because I don't like having my character be slowed. I feel as if it's a form of CC that I don't necessarily want to deal with most of the time. And that's why I main Druid, because I can shapeshift out of them and stuff like that. So I can just sort of ignore them in a way. But it's all of these different things. Like a druid can shapeshift out of slows, a warrior just has to trudge through them. But at the same time, I prefer or I like playing my warrior over my druid sometimes because I like just how consistent the damage is on a warrior compared to a druid, and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

So you've got all these ups and downs of different classes and it incentivizes. You've got all these ups and downs of different classes and it incentivizes you to actually play these classes and enjoy them and learn them. Not just sit on your one character and, you know, be content with it and just complain about every other class because it's unbalanced. No, you play the other classes to learn why they're hitting you so much, to learn why they're so good in a raiding environment at the moment and you can benefit off of their strengths in a raiding environment and you can take advantage of their weaknesses in a PvP environment and stuff like that. So you can constantly learn and you're constantly updating your brain to register.

Speaker 1:

Okay, he's pressed this. This is when he's actually scary. So this is where I will be. You know, on the uh, receiving end of balance, being on his side because he's hitting me for 30 more damage or something like that it's. You know you get so much information because the game isn't balanced that it helps you play the game to a better level, and that's what's really fun about it.

Speaker 1:

Well, to me anyway. Some people hate it. Some people absolutely despise having, um like, different classes have loads of different things. But I don't understand it. You're in, you're playing an mmo to. You know, have different classes, experience the world differently on different like characters, and you know it's, it's just part of the mmo genre. You will never find perfect balance in mmos. It's. It's impossible. It is impossible in terms of the numbers will need to be exact for whatever reason. You don't know how they measure it. It's very much okay, this has got okay.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to give you an example here wind walker monks they have an ability called spinning crane kick. It hits for nothing until you apply a talent to that, until you apply multiple stacks of your tiger's palm to that as well, until you apply procs of the talent that you've picked, whatever. And then suddenly it's hitting for 240 odd percent more damage, or god knows how much, and it's one-shotting you. It goes from doing about five percent of your hp to one-shotting you. Imagine trying to balance that. Imagine trying to balance the numbers that go with all of the damage increases by percent, damage, increases by number. Imagine trying to balance all of these numbers, for how many classes are there? Oh, this is going to be quick. 12? 10? I feel like 12 is way too much Around 10. I feel like that's an over. I'm going with 10. I'm going with 10, just from my heart. But imagine trying to balance all of that.

Speaker 1:

You've got so many things that you just need to juggle about and make sure that something isn't too op or too underwhelming or anything like that, because people might not enjoy the class, the class that they liked and they loved. They might not enjoy anymore because it's not hitting like it did or it's, you know, not as fun to play because they've taken out a system that was in play but no longer is, because it was too overpowered, something like that. So there's many different things that you can look at when it comes to balancing. Well and, like I said, it goes both ways. In terms of raiding and in terms of pvp. It's very, um, tough to ever find balance, but it's something that needs to be looked at fondly in the MMO genre rather than looked down upon, mainly, because it's what makes the MMO genre. You know, the imbalance, the different classes, the how you play them, all the different numbers, for it being impossible. I think they do a very good job at balancing the game.

Speaker 1:

Now you could tell me monks and warriors and melee and all of that are ridiculous, which is true. I mean, I've got my warrior I've never played a warrior before and I'll just start slapping people. Like it's ridiculous. I'll just full zug-zug their ass and just not even care. I would honestly cleave them down. It would be so stupid. And then I'll go on my warlock and I'm having to do like 20 setups. You know, fear 20 people at the exact same time while my mage gets a polymorph and then we might have a chance to kill. But it's a different type of play style and that's enjoyable. But again, melee have their like time to shine and at the moment they are very powerful melee.

Speaker 1:

If you look at melee, in the previous expansions they kind of a very lackluster. It's very much been casters. If you look at mage, mage has always been one of the top picks in like pvp. In pve they've been very decent, but pvp mage has been a staple point throughout the entirety of the game since classic launch, or like vanilla. I should say it's insane. They will never get the balance right, but it's something that should be admired in the game rather than looked down upon, and that's all I had to say.

Speaker 1:

It was. It came across my mind, this one when I was just I've been doing loads of arenas. It was it came across my mind, this one, when I was just I've been doing loads of arenas lately and it came across my mind and thinking, wow, it's insane how much I just get one shot randomly by like the same classes, compared to, like, how much it takes for me to set up my damage on a warlock or a druid and stuff like that. So it was something that I wanted to address, because you can just laugh it off if you uh get one shot. It might be infuriating, but it's pretty funny when you one shot someone. So you just gotta laugh when, uh, you get one shot as well, because it is very entertaining. But I'll leave it there. There's not really much I can say more about the balancing. Well, it is uh, it's a very weird subject and I will just leave you with uh, that it will never be balanced, and that's what a staple point of the mmo genre is all about.

Speaker 1:

But I do want to say thank you all very much for this year. It has has been amazing. Thank you all for supporting the podcast and stuff like that. It's been amazing seeing the numbers and downloads go up each and every week. Seeing constant downloads every day, you make my day. Whenever you do click on the download and listen to one of the podcasts, be sure to check out all of the social medias, of course. Check out the YouTube. Youtube twitch stream on there regularly. Videos are going up regularly on youtube. Check out patreon and everything like that. There are, I think, about the same amount of patreon podcasts now as there are normal podcasts. They are weekly and they are just, you know, 10 to 15 minute snippets extra content for you guys to enjoy if you sign up to that patreon podcast. So definitely don't miss out. They are good and I do put a lot of effort into them. Thank you all very much for listening as always, and go with valor friend. Goodbye, thank you.