Do the dev's actually play this game?

[DragonFlyy]

The test servers iron out alot of issues before live.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Thanks for the laugh, I needed that.

Seriously, Blizzard sucks when it comes to PTRs. They ignore 90% of what is being reported and all that crap goes live. As for listening to the top raids about balance, BS. When a nerf comes it's usually the top raid guilds that whine the hardest.

[MisterLucie]

As someone who raided hardcore progression in WoW for a number of years:

Never use WoW as an example of class balance. Balance in that game is and always has been an insane rollercoaster that throws you every direction possible at any random time.

[Kret]

They do! They post vids about 4 maning twintania and during that video someone posts a video of it being two maned.... They play. They just are not that good.

[Aegrus]

People are quick to attack anything that makes a reference to another MMO, especially on these forums. However, when you kid yourself thinking obvious imbalances are just player skill gaps (and not flawed design) such as astrologians straight up being second best to their attempt at scholar or whm, why bring one? You can just use WHM and SCH, and save yourself the headache. Better Hots, Better Shields, and they don't feel incomplete. This isn't an apples to oranges deal, AST clearly is supposed to be like sch, and like whm, but not quite, and they basically made a class that's worse at both roles.

Seriously, Blizzard sucks when it comes to PTRs. They ignore 90% of what is being reported and all that crap goes live. As for listening to the top raids about balance, BS. When a nerf comes it's usually the top raid guilds that whine the hardest.

And you know what? Even using your horrible anecdotal claim, that is still more than ffxiv catches with their lack of PTR servers. Clearly you don't read patchnotes during the ptr and see what all goes wrong and is adjusted before it goes live. You are too blinded by your fan-goggles to realize the value of a PTR and don't realize that the issues you say "plague" wow are relatively minor since the process is pretty polished and anything minor that's still there stands out.

[Krylo]

People are quick to attack anything that makes a reference to another MMO, especially on these forums. However, when you kid yourself thinking obvious imbalances are just player skill gaps (and not flawed design) such as astrologians straight up being second best to their attempt at scholar or whm, why bring one? You can just use WHM and SCH, and save yourself the headache. Better Hots, Better Shields, and they don't feel incomplete. This isn't an apples to oranges deal, AST clearly is supposed to be like sch, and like whm, but not quite, and they basically made a class that's worse at both roles.

Ast and Drk both have some issues. That's two classes out of 12 that are underperforming. And they're not underperforming enough to be incapable of savage. They're just a bit weaker than the alternatives--and with Drk, they can actually perform pretty well as OT if there's a ninja in the group to goad them and put up slashing debuffs.

Brd and Mch, the other two people complain about, are parsing pretty well now at the high end. They could maybe use a couple more tweaks here and there but there's nothing broken or keeping them out of end game. They're a little weaker than other DPS but that's by design because they're 'support'. I'm not sure I personally agree with that design choice as the TP and MP support roles are. . . considerably less valuable at 60 than they were at 50. But people still tend to want at least one of them for any hardcore content, so, I mean, pretty close to balanced.

All the other DPS are very close, SCH and WHM both do their thing very well, no one is accusing Plds or Wars of being too weak (some accuse War of being too strong, but that's due to big instant numbers, not over all parsing, Plds come pretty close thanks to good dots and higher potency basic combos and have better mitigation, and a Drk with slashing debuff up is about equal to War).

So you have very good, much closer than 5% balance on 10 out of 12 classes, and 2 classes that maaaaybe fall into that 5% you say WoW is great for maintaining--when they literally never have maintained that, every time I've tried playing there was a FoM that was much better than a 5% difference. Our weakest classes of the moment are capable of the hardest content, while in WoW that's very rarely been true. And WE have balance issues while WoW is much better at it?

Really?

Really, really?

[DragonFlyy]

And you know what? Even using your horrible anecdotal claim, that is still more than ffxiv catches with their lack of PTR servers. Clearly you don't read patchnotes during the ptr and see what all goes wrong and is adjusted before it goes live. You are too blinded by your fan-goggles to realize the value of a PTR and don't realize that the issues you say "plague" wow are relatively minor since the process is pretty polished and anything minor that's still there stands out.

I realize the value of a PTR. I played on it most any time I could. I was in all but the WoD beta thanks to being an addon programmer. When you find a game breaking bug, and report it and it gets so many replies on the forums that the thread nearly gets locked and that bug is still in live, you start to question what people are thinking. Then it happens over and over when there is a PTR. The problem is, from an observation, they rush the patches too fast, don't have time to fix things and then work on it after the live is pushed to the servers. I don't blame the devs, I don't blame the PTR. I blame the company, Blizzard.

[Havenae]

Honestly... I've never known many devs that play their own games. They'll tell you they do to make you feel more at ease, and surely they do to an extent but generally not in the capacity that a normal player does. This is why they have in-house testers. Although it depends on the area of development that the "dev" is in that usually determines whether or not they play./ More creative departments have a much higher frequency of playtime in my experience where as core systems and programmers don't spend too much time. Personally for me, it has always been knowing how everything works behind the scenes that usually kills it for me.