In my many years of playing World of Warcraft, I have spent a considerable amount of time as part of the theorycrafting community, especially related to druid class design. However, I turned my attention to the mage class for the first time in Mists of Pandaria and put my druid into hybernation from serious raiding (though I still do play my druid from time to time). In switching to a mage as my raiding main, I thought I would finally have the wonderful damage superiority that “pure” classes promised from their much greener hill on the other side of the hybrid vs. pure divide.
What I found, however, was just simply another class with the same problems, related to a lack of movement DPS, talent issues, outdated mechanics, and ability bloat. In my many years of being envious of the mage class, I quickly found that everything wasn’t all that I thought it would be. While I am still raiding on my mage, and haven’t dedicated much time to the druid this expansion, broadening my expertise to understanding the mechanics of two classes gave me a much better sense of perspective about the fact that every class in WOW has design limitations that can make it difficult or frustrating to live with on a day-to-day basis.
While I needed the change in perspective, and I don’t regret my class switch, I have overall been more selective in terms of what minor problems I’ve come to live with, versus understanding what major problems I think should still be addressed (such as healing mushroom’s development in early MOP for resto druids, and the continuing problem of the mage level 90 talents).
As we start to ramp up for another round of beta testing and feedback, I think it is still important to remember that a side-effect of theorycrafting and class balance is that other classes likely have just as many serious problems in this type of game. In addition, while classes all have strengths, and the game as a whole is substantially better than it used to be, it turns out that the class we play isn’t the only one that is potentially in need of fixing.
With that said, I really do look forward to picking apart both mage and druid weaknesses as we ramp up into the next expansion over the next many months. Just remember – that other classes don’t necessarily have things all that much better at the end of the day. The game balance as a whole, however, is still much better than it used to be in the dark days of Vanilla and Burning Crusade.
