Do the dev's actually play this game?

[Aegrus]

WoW is a really bad example. Hell we even had one of their devs say recently in an interview that it was a particular specs turn to be underpowered. There balance has often been a mess, let alone most of their class design.

I'm turned off of WoW. But if they do anything right, they balance out all their classes. Keep in mind this "under-performance"is usually a 5% difference in damage. That is a pretty tight margin. If you want to see imbalance on the extreme side, look at ffxi, aion, EQ, even newer games.

Balance is always a struggle in an mmo, but to think that you can do it inhouse, and force a live server to function as your initial open beta for every major patch is very shortsighted, and turns off alot of players. Hotfixes are one thing, implementing new zones, content, and game systems are a huge undertaking to troubleshoot and test. Unloading those on a live server constantly is not a good or efficient system as you open up the possibilities of rollbacks, or game breaking bugs that cannot be contained. At the very least, you leave certain classes sitting out content due to unforeseen shortcomings.

I'm just going to make a short snipe at this point.

The developers have better track of this game than you do. People who are saying that Bard and MCH under-preform are not paying attention to the 'Top FCs' who were actually outputting good damage with them. At 60, MCH and BRD's rotation and strenght were not lacking, as they were pulling as high as 800-900 parses on Ravana Ex when utilized right.

This is also the same damage that a WAR dps could output, roughly 85% of what other dps classes were outputting (1k~1.1k). This was acknowledged by the drastic buff to Wanderer's Minuet