Why are so many class reworks needed so often in modern MMOs?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It seems that every single WoW or FF14 or GW2 patch every 4 or 5 months, they are overhauling a class for the umpteenth time and you have to relearn how to play your class. Of the classes that I main, Retribution Paladins got reworked yet again in Dragonflight 10.1 or something like that. Frost Death Knights are getting reworked in the upcoming 11.2 patch. Half of the FF14 classes have been massacred over the last two to three years by reworks (thankfully my main job of samurai has been mostly untouched), and the devs have said that they are going to rework them AGAIN in the upcoming 8.0 expansion next year. GW2 I think has revamped my current main of Untamed once or twice since its introduction in 2022. When is it going to end? How can these games have been running for 10 or 20+ years, and the company somehow hasn't figured out what they want the class to be, have gotten it there, and leave it finished like that? Is it a revolving door of devs coming in with different visions or something? What is going on?

[Tadeusz]

Is it a revolving door of devs coming in with different visions or something? What is going on?

It may be so as dev teams usually have high turnover. It also may be due to the difficulty of balancing classes and the constant desire to add something new to the gameplay.

[WhiteShark]

My first guess is that it's just change to keep things 'fresh' and keep players from getting bored. It could also conceivably stem from a loop in which other content changes make a class too weak or too strong, leading to changes, which in turn lead to unforeseen effects on other classes/content, leading to more changes, and so on.

[Tweed]

That's not a modern thing. Rangers in EQ needed numerous reworks because they were downright worthless when the game was released. Monks also underwent numerous changes. Paladins received their special stun line as I recall to help them stand out.

Wizards were underpowered and second fiddle to almost every other int caster until Luclin or PoP, I can't remember. It took SoE to give them their role of low cost/fast cast dps and slower casting/unresistable nukes.

In UO tank mages won everything forever until Origin finally came up with channeling and meditation to put an end to the unbalance plate mages were causing. Suggestions made by several of us to the developers made anatomy useful in melee combat instead of just being for healing. There's always something that needs fixing or balancing in a game that big.

[logincrash]

It also stems from the fact that the devs have to justify getting paid, so they have to constantly fiddle with something to make it seem like they're actually doing work.

[Nooneatall]

It seems that every single WoW or FF14 or GW2 patch every 4 or 5 months, they are overhauling a class for the umpteenth time and you have to relearn how to play your class. Of the classes that I main, Retribution Paladins got reworked yet again in Dragonflight 10.1 or something like that. Frost Death Knights are getting reworked in the upcoming 11.2 patch. Half of the FF14 classes have been massacred over the last two to three years by reworks (thankfully my main job of samurai has been mostly untouched), and the devs have said that they are going to rework them AGAIN in the upcoming 8.0 expansion next year. GW2 I think has revamped my current main of Untamed once or twice since its introduction in 2022. When is it going to end? How can these games have been running for 10 or 20+ years, and the company somehow hasn't figured out what they want the class to be, have gotten it there, and leave it finished like that? Is it a revolving door of devs coming in with different visions or something? What is going on?

Developers are all autistic trannys and hate it when players have fun. They want players to suffer and not have fun while playing the game. That's why it's better to play older offline games because you can just play and enjoy the game. Broken classes are easy mode, ****** classes are hard mode.

[rusty_shackleford]

HONEY IT'S TIME FOR A NEW WOW EXPANSION, EVERY CLASS PLAYS COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY NOW

[logincrash]

It seems that every single WoW or FF14 or GW2 patch every 4 or 5 months, they are overhauling a class for the umpteenth time and you have to relearn how to play your class. Of the classes that I main, Retribution Paladins got reworked yet again in Dragonflight 10.1 or something like that. Frost Death Knights are getting reworked in the upcoming 11.2 patch. Half of the FF14 classes have been massacred over the last two to three years by reworks (thankfully my main job of samurai has been mostly untouched), and the devs have said that they are going to rework them AGAIN in the upcoming 8.0 expansion next year. GW2 I think has revamped my current main of Untamed once or twice since its introduction in 2022. When is it going to end? How can these games have been running for 10 or 20+ years, and the company somehow hasn't figured out what they want the class to be, have gotten it there, and leave it finished like that? Is it a revolving door of devs coming in with different visions or something? What is going on?

Developers are all autistic trannys and hate it when players have fun. They want players to suffer and not have fun while playing the game. That's why it's better to play older offline games because you can just play and enjoy the game. Broken classes are easy mode, ****** classes are hard mode.

Nothing is balanced IRL, so balancing things in a game is a lame and gay endeavor.
"Nooo, you can't be OP and broken! That's not fair! Nerf it, nerf it, nerf it!!!"
******* hate these *******.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It seems that every single WoW or FF14 or GW2 patch every 4 or 5 months, they are overhauling a class for the umpteenth time and you have to relearn how to play your class. Of the classes that I main, Retribution Paladins got reworked yet again in Dragonflight 10.1 or something like that. Frost Death Knights are getting reworked in the upcoming 11.2 patch. Half of the FF14 classes have been massacred over the last two to three years by reworks (thankfully my main job of samurai has been mostly untouched), and the devs have said that they are going to rework them AGAIN in the upcoming 8.0 expansion next year. GW2 I think has revamped my current main of Untamed once or twice since its introduction in 2022. When is it going to end? How can these games have been running for 10 or 20+ years, and the company somehow hasn't figured out what they want the class to be, have gotten it there, and leave it finished like that? Is it a revolving door of devs coming in with different visions or something? What is going on?

Developers are all autistic trannys and hate it when players have fun. They want players to suffer and not have fun while playing the game. That's why it's better to play older offline games because you can just play and enjoy the game. Broken classes are easy mode, ****** classes are hard mode.

Nothing is balanced IRL, so balancing things in a game is a lame and gay endeavor.
"Nooo, you can't be OP and broken! That's not fair! Nerf it, nerf it, nerf it!!!"
******* hate these *******.

Is it because the devs are catering to the 1% of mythic raiders who livestream the race to world first competition on twitch, or the sweaty tryhards who try to push the highest M+ tiers and write guides on Icy Veins?

[Vaako]

It also stems from the fact that the devs have to justify getting paid, so they have to constantly fiddle with something to make it seem like they're actually doing work.

Freeshard devs arent much better and they dont get paid. One day they introduce a new class and a few months later they figure out the class is too op or too much played then they nerf it into the ground that its not really playable. Then people stop playing or jump to the second most op class until that one get nerfed aswell. Add to that gear or pvp rank grind and its no surprise that these games bleed players then. Who wants to invest so much free time in a game just to get his character nerfed.

[TKVNC]

Mostly it's PvP.

Losers who can't, or won't learn how to play PvP **** and **** themselves until the Devs nerf things.

It is a downward spiral where eventually everything becomes ****, and they have to rework it all.

[J1M]

It seems that every single WoW or FF14 or GW2 patch every 4 or 5 months, they are overhauling a class for the umpteenth time and you have to relearn how to play your class. Of the classes that I main, Retribution Paladins got reworked yet again in Dragonflight 10.1 or something like that. Frost Death Knights are getting reworked in the upcoming 11.2 patch. Half of the FF14 classes have been massacred over the last two to three years by reworks (thankfully my main job of samurai has been mostly untouched), and the devs have said that they are going to rework them AGAIN in the upcoming 8.0 expansion next year. GW2 I think has revamped my current main of Untamed once or twice since its introduction in 2022. When is it going to end? How can these games have been running for 10 or 20+ years, and the company somehow hasn't figured out what they want the class to be, have gotten it there, and leave it finished like that? Is it a revolving door of devs coming in with different visions or something? What is going on?

1. Developers do not publish a clear vision for each class that the community can hold them to. For example, "durable lumbering melee combatant: moderate APM, slows targets to close distance, weak movement abilities, massive critical hits"

2. Developers are reactive, and would rather give everyone a self-heal than state "your class will never get a self-heal, it is the class' intended weakness".

3. A failure to accept and understand that you can't make everyone equally interested in playing every class. And that the game would be better with some high APM classes and some low APM classes. The real problem is players not knowing what they are getting until they have dozens of hours invested.

4. Overstaffed developer teams with conflicting opinions about 1-3 justifying their jobs by finding/creating the need for continual reworking.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If the class designers have finished fixing all of the classes and need to find new work to do, they why don't they start working on new classes instead of redesigning old classes over and over?

[J1M]

If the class designers have finished fixing all of the classes and need to find new work to do, they why don't they start working on new classes instead of redesigning old classes over and over?

Last time they tried to do this they invented *****-dragons.

[UltraFan123]

If the class designers have finished fixing all of the classes and need to find new work to do, they why don't they start working on new classes instead of redesigning old classes over and over?

In the particular case of "new classes", I think there's always the risk of said new classes simply not being interesting enough for new nor old players.

Like imagine that a whole team of programmers makes a new "cosmomancer" class that has flashy star magic based on celestial bodies and things like that, yet the amount of players that pick that class is always only a small fraction of the amount of players that pick the typical baseline wizard instead.

All that effort might have been better spent just adding space magic stuff to the wizard class instead.

[WhiteShark]

If the class designers have finished fixing all of the classes and need to find new work to do, they why don't they start working on new classes instead of redesigning old classes over and over?

In the particular case of "new classes", I think there's always the risk of said new classes simply not being interesting enough for new nor old players.

Like imagine that a whole team of programmers makes a new "cosmomancer" class that has flashy star magic based on celestial bodies and things like that, yet the amount of players that pick that class is always only a small fraction of the amount of players that pick the typical baseline wizard instead.

All that effort might have been better spent just adding space magic stuff to the wizard class instead.

It also creates more overhead for future updates and rebalancings.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If the class designers have finished fixing all of the classes and need to find new work to do, they why don't they start working on new classes instead of redesigning old classes over and over?

In the particular case of "new classes", I think there's always the risk of said new classes simply not being interesting enough for new nor old players.

Like imagine that a whole team of programmers makes a new "cosmomancer" class that has flashy star magic based on celestial bodies and things like that, yet the amount of players that pick that class is always only a small fraction of the amount of players that pick the typical baseline wizard instead.

All that effort might have been better spent just adding space magic stuff to the wizard class instead.

No class is going to appeal to everybody. That's why FF keeps adding more of them every 2 years hoping to satisfy players who previously were not very satisfied, or why GW2 kept adding 9 new elite specs with every expac until their budget got slashed and they started pumping out mini expacs (though now they are adding new elite specs again for the upcoming expansion).

You can't keep piling stuff onto the same class forever, or else you end up in a situation like WoD/Legion era WoW or Endwalker/Dawntrail era FF14 where the classes are very, very full of too many abilities, and either you have to start pruning them and redesigning the class like what WoW did, or you are having to convert the new stuff into passives/upgrade old abilities so that there isn't even more stuff going onto player's bars like what FF14 is trying to do. At that point you get into redesign hell and it would be better to instead focus on adding new classes or systems that do not stack on top of your already bloated bars.

[J1M]

If the class designers have finished fixing all of the classes and need to find new work to do, they why don't they start working on new classes instead of redesigning old classes over and over?

In the particular case of "new classes", I think there's always the risk of said new classes simply not being interesting enough for new nor old players.

Like imagine that a whole team of programmers makes a new "cosmomancer" class that has flashy star magic based on celestial bodies and things like that, yet the amount of players that pick that class is always only a small fraction of the amount of players that pick the typical baseline wizard instead.

All that effort might have been better spent just adding space magic stuff to the wizard class instead.

Still worth it if it gets a million people to buy the next expansion pack and never play it again.

[Classix]

Mostly it's PvP.

Losers who can't, or won't learn how to play PvP **** and **** themselves until the Devs nerf things.

It is a downward spiral where eventually everything becomes ****, and they have to rework it all.

Bingo. Thank you sir. Had to deal with this for years. People ***** and whine about PvP/class balance **** when on a PVE server on the forums.....?

"You consent to any and all attacks made against you the moment you make a character on a PvP server." - Me.

Come get some or get the **** off this server type. Why should class/ability changes happen across the board for open PvP servers along with everyone else who might sometimes dip into a PvP queue? All in or get the **** out. Illidan server OG baby.

[Tangerine]

Mixing up class balance also gets dorks to talk about the meta, which is 'engagement.'

[Norfleet]

In the particular case of "new classes", I think there's always the risk of said new classes simply not being interesting enough for new nor old players.

Because this will literally never happen unless the new class is OP. Let us assume for the moment that the new class is perfectly balanced, with no exploits (really!). Therefore, there is no compelling reason to choose it beyond novelty. Let us assume that the new class is equally appealing (it probably isn't, but let's pretend). That means, if a given player creates a new character, he has an equal chance of choosing to creating a new character of this class as he does of any other class he hasn't played.

Catch? A large number of players will create ONE character...and most of those have already done so in a different class (because this class didn't even exist at the time). Therefore, they will simply not create a new character of this class. This is the Existing Normie Majority. We'll call this group "E". The other group treats characters as Pokeymen. They'll create one for certain, but they've also got one of every OTHER class, because you have to catch all your escaped Pokeymen. We'll call them "P". Finally, we have group N: Newbs. They'll MAYBE create one, evenly distributed, having no reason to do so. The result: 0% of group E creates a character of this class, because they already have their existing character. The class distribution of groups N and P are then evenly distributed, leaving your new class a minority forever.

The alternative is that you make the new class OP, so everyone must play it to remain competitive, thus rapidly boosting its distribution, leaving a few holdouts who don't and struggle until the class is nerfed or the other classes are buffed in a rework.

[Norfleet]

Is it a revolving door of devs coming in with different visions or something? What is going on?

I'd say this is the dominant cause, because in my experience, these reworks tend to come when someone gets sacked and replaced by their talentless understudy. Naturally, the new guy cannot perform at the level of his predecessors, otherwise he would have been in charge in the first place, so the situation gets worse.

[J1M]

The idea that every class should have an equal player base is misguided.

There should be classes that are more prestigious to play (well). Some people get off on the idea that they are special because they like a band other people don't know about. There should be classes that reward APM. Others that reward patience. Etc

It is okay if Warrior is 40% of the population as long as you are building content that aligns with your population.

[Manny V]

cause modern mmos suck

[Norfleet]

It is okay if Warrior is 40% of the population as long as you are building content that aligns with your population.

That's a bit of a problem as well. Let's suppose that, because of poor class balancing, Warrior is 40% of your population. Because this now represents a plurality of the population, you build "content that aligns with your population", meaning, "caters to warriors". The result is that there is now an increasing bias towards warriors. Now 50% of your population is warriors, as those who are not warriors are marginalized, lose interest, and start quitting. Seeing that warriors are the majority of your population, you cater to warriors more. Eventually the game is just warriors and little else. But hey, you build more warrior-centric content, because this is your majority playerbase. Also, most warriors are using swords, only a minority of warriors focus on non-swords. We should cater to that. Make more cool swords, that content sells the best!

[UltraFan123]

Also, most warriors are using swords, only a minority of warriors focus on non-swords. We should cater to that. Make more cool swords, that content sells the best!

Yeah, the sidelining of polearms in games both old and new is tragic if you ask me.

Not that swords aren't cool, but other weapons are awesome too.

[Norfleet]

Yeah, the sidelining of polearms in games both old and new is tragic if you ask me.

The sidelining of polearms in favor of swords in a medieval combat game honestly makes about as much sense as a shooter that sidelines rifles in favor of pistols.

[WaterMage]

Yes, but imagine if in future, people only focused on SMGs and ignored rifles, shotguns and other weapons...That is what people do with medieval themed games with swords. Swords are cool, but we need more Dane Axes, warhammers, maces, axes, pikes, spears, halberds, etc.

[Norfleet]

Yes, but imagine if in future, people only focused on SMGs and ignored rifles, shotguns and other weapons...That is what people do with medieval themed games with swords. Swords are cool, but we need more Dane Axes, warhammers, maces, axes, pikes, spears, halberds, etc.

This is what I mean by sidelining rifles in favor of pistols, yes: Swords aren't a primary weapon in medieval combat, they're a sidearm that is carried when NOT engaged in active warfare or as a backup weapon if something happens to your primary weapon.

[J1M]

It is okay if Warrior is 40% of the population as long as you are building content that aligns with your population.

That's a bit of a problem as well. Let's suppose that, because of poor class balancing, Warrior is 40% of your population. Because this now represents a plurality of the population, you build "content that aligns with your population", meaning, "caters to warriors". The result is that there is now an increasing bias towards warriors. Now 50% of your population is warriors, as those who are not warriors are marginalized, lose interest, and start quitting. Seeing that warriors are the majority of your population, you cater to warriors more. Eventually the game is just warriors and little else. But hey, you build more warrior-centric content, because this is your majority playerbase. Also, most warriors are using swords, only a minority of warriors focus on non-swords. We should cater to that. Make more cool swords, that content sells the best!

Any good plan can be sabotaged by incompetence or malice. You don't build "warrior content". Using a WoW example, you just build content that doesn't actively punish groups for bringing more melee damage than ranged damage.