Do the dev's actually play this game?

[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?

[Duelle]

At least from vanilla and tbc back when i played wow class balance was a mess. Don't know how it went after but back when i came in MoP and WoD it was also a mess so i doubt it was magically balanced in WoTLK and cata.

Wrath wasn't that bad, though that is forgotten in all the death knight hate. Not to mention the bulk of the issues were in PvP, if I recall (and even then, 2 and 3-man arena teams). You weren't having raids sit warriors or druids, despite being the less-represented classes (wrath was pretty much paladin & death knight time). If you did PvE it was a pretty good time to be a paladin or shaman or druid (since you could do something other than spam buffs or healbot in raids).

[Krylo]

Wrath wasn't that bad, though that is forgotten in all the death knight hate. Not to mention the bulk of the issues were in PvP, if I recall (and even then, 2 and 3-man arena teams). You weren't having raids sit warriors or druids, despite being the less-represented classes (wrath was pretty much paladin & death knight time). If you did PvE it was a pretty good time to be a paladin or shaman or druid (since you could do something other than spam buffs or healbot in raids).

Ret Paladin during WotLK was completely and ridiculously over powered compared to every other DPS. In PvP two paladins and a healer could take on an entire opposing team in war zones--we would literally stand at the opposing graveyard, wait for them to rez and then kill them all again--and in PvE they were killing things nearly twice as quickly as anyone else. And this came on the heels of ret paladins being so ridiculously under powered that no one played them. A rubber-band isn't good balance.

Not sure about death knights. Trying to play one is actually what led to me quitting WoW the third (and final) time as that I wanted to do engineering on it and had to go back and mine low level areas and that's just completely unimportant. Point is I never got far with Death Knight.

[Duelle]

Ret Paladin during WotLK was completely and ridiculously over powered compared to every other DPS.

Ret never topped DPS meters throughout the whole expansion, despite their guaranteed crits against undead/demons and most of the expansion content being undead/demons.

And this came on the heels of ret paladins being so ridiculously under powered that no one played them.

Not really underpowered. They were intentionally designed to be less effective because Blizzard wanted them to be that thing some people here clamor for without understanding why it's a bad thing: support. TBC ret was supposed to be brought in because of Judgment refresh (which was only useful if you had several paladins in a raid, but since you pretty much brought pallys as only healers that didn't work out), blessings and Sanctity Aura (+2% damage to the raid).

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Since someone mentioned Yoshida mains BLM, I wonder how he handles the whole Enochian+Astral Fire+Thundercloud procs thing BLMs have been talking about for a while.

[Sakei]

Yes even Yoshida him self a director playing his own game.

And if you have something that can help game use support section!

Anybody know what their mains are? I'm just curious as to who I need to butter up. :P

[TinyMonster]

Anybody know what their mains are? I'm just curious as to who I need to butter up. :P

I know Yoshi-P is a BLM and the translator director team (Howecer way you spell it.. English is not my main language) is a WHM.. Don't know what the others are playing though

[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.