We’ll start off by reviving an old argument, and we’ll pick on the developers here, since they’ve been trying to mesh two contradicting ideas for a long time now. And whew, this is a long one! I’ll keep it shorter next time, I promise. And for the tl;dr crowd out there, here’s a summary: Pallies and druids are inherently and irrevocably more difficult, if not impossible, to balance to other classes.
Now, from the get-go, each class had between one and four roles that it could easily compete in, and in some cases, those with less than four had some they could, in certain circumstances, be competitive in. These roles are tanking, healing, melee damage, and ranged damage. Some would argue that there is also a “controller” role– Alright, I’ll give you that it exists. However, virtually every form of crowd control will only work against certain groups, or is too short of a duration to be true CC (stuns, for example). Given that, it’s nigh-impossible to consider a specific class a “controller.” Mages and rogues tend to be the most versatile for this, and even they run into plenty of situations where they can do nothing but damage.
Knowing all of this, there are two approaches I’ve noticed taken to balancing classes. The first is to give certain classes a priority, saying that they should be better at this role because it’s basically all they can do, and have “jack of all trades” classes be ever-so-slightly less effective. But, then, who would play the jacks when you could be playing the kings? Which leads to the other approach: If you are sufficiently specialize in the role, you will be as effective as others that are also specialized in that role, regardless of class. This means that a feral druid should be on par with a rogue for dealing melee damage.
But then what’s the incentive to play a rogue? With a rogue, you will always be melee damage, and if you want to do something else, well, you’ll just have to roll a new character. With a druid, you can switch whenever you feel like it, and you can even collect BoP items for use in your off-specs.
The closest solution I’ve seen to this problem is to make strict one-role classes on-par with multi-role classes in some situations, while in others, a one-role class will excel. Even this has problems, though. A paladin will typically excel fighting undead and demons, despite being a three-role class. And a rogue actually has a number of cases where they fall signicantly behind– Anything immune to poison will drop a rogue’s dps like a brick, especially if they’re in the assassination tree; That poison is there to make up for being forced to use lower dps and higher speed weapons, not to be a bonus on top of existing comparable damage (Something we’ll talk about later, bonuses being added to make up for being gimped by the system).
So, what can be done about this? It seems to be an inherent part of the system. As far as I can tell, nothing short of a complete overhaul could fix the contradiction. Sometimes, I think that wouldn’t be such a bad idea– In Dungeons and Dragons, roles were named and assigned when fourth edition came out. Every class has one and only one primary role, and sometimes one or two secondary roles. These secondary roles are rarely enough to get by without someone having it as their primary role, but help ease the other character’s burden in performing it. And I’ll hand it to WotC, it works.
But no. Personally, I’m rather fond of holy paladins, and I’m confident that that’d be shifted to secondary (or removed all together) if such an overhaul were to take place. Thankfully, Blizzard probably wouldn’t listen to a blog like this.
