SubscribeCharting WoW Balance Changes
September 10, 2007 11:46 am
I’m home with a cold. Thanks a lot, fellow AGDC attendees, for getting me sick. I’m home drinking Nyquil on this fine Monday morning. Maybe too much Nyquil.
I got up this morning to email my boss and send out a few mails I had planned to take care of at work this week, one of which was to mail out a link to an interesting website a World of Warcraft player put together: Changes from Live Patches to World of Warcraft Classes, via the Elitist Jerks forums. He’s listed every class change made since the beginning of recorded history (i.e. early beta), and he’s categorized it by buffs, nerfs, bug fixes, changes, new features, and overhauls. (If you read the Elitist Jerks link, you’ll see that he’s been revising the classifications with their feedback.)
As I reviewed the list, I realized that if I sat back and squinted, I could see patterns in the category colors, and it occurred to me that I could write a Perl script to parse the data and chart it. (Thanks, Nyquil!) But I’m home, and I don’t have Office on my new desktop, and my laptop’s screen is broken. Enter Google Docs and their (new-to-me) charting feature.
Class-specific charts after the jump.
These are crappy charts. Google Docs doesn’t give the sick-at-home wanna-be statistician a lot of tools to work with. Most distressingly, the count and time scales are different on each chart. This is terrible chart design. Be sure to pay attention and not directly compare the bars between charts.
On the bright side, publishing this stuff with Google Docs means that you can go straight to my spreadsheet and copy the data to the professional-grade spreadsheet, database, or charting application of your choice. It’s all open source and Web 2.0 and stuff, and [sarcasm]if I learned anything at AGDC, it’s that that’s cool[/sarcasm].
I charted “buffs” and “nerfs” alone because it was easier to read. (Also, I like to make community managers cry.) Again, the classifications are by this guy and these guys, and I didn’t change anything. There could be parser errors too. And don’t forget the Nyquil. Really, take all this with a big grain of salt.
I still think the results are pretty neat.
What do you see in the data?
Darius K. wrote:
Hey, it was great seeing you, and it looks like my evil plot to make you sick worked out.
Nice work on the charts, too. I didn’t know about the charting feature for Google Docs, although maybe I’m not sure I *want* to know right now. I shudder at the thought of not having complete and total control over my axis properties!
Posted on 10-Sep-07 at 1:21 pm | Permalink
Scott wrote:
That warlocks need to be nerfed, of course.
So, the biggest problem is that there’s no relative weight to the buffs/nerfs, so the nerf to Dire Bear armor in 2.0 is assigned the same weight as no longer being able to teleport to Moonglade while in tree form. Of course then you start having to assign subjective weight.
The real interesting data points you’re missing are of course class population overlaid on these figures. Unfortunately that’s not easy to get; I just popped over to warcraftrealms.com and they don’t have historical class data broken out that I could tell.
Posted on 10-Sep-07 at 9:17 pm | Permalink
Psychochild wrote:
Yeah, the issue with metrics like this is that you always want more information. Class populations would be interesting, to see how popularity of a class affected balance decisions and vice versa. Also, how do the changes affect different builds, or even different talent trees?
After not playing for a bit, I’ve noticed that a feral Druid is much more viable now; I can even contribute to a small group in cat form, which was nearly impossible when I played a while ago. Healing, on the other hand, seems to work pretty much as it did before, so those changes are smaller.
The one thing to notice is that a lot of changes seem to be grouped together. Most classes have buff/nerf bars that tower above the rest. This is usually a bad sign, because it means that you get a pendulum-like result from balancing.
Very interesting to look over all the changes, though.
Posted on 11-Sep-07 at 3:41 pm | Permalink
The Big Bad Wolf wrote:
I think what’s most interesting in these charts is that they’re constantly making changes to the classes. Every class continues to undergo tweaking years after the game’s release. I agree with Psychochild, though, I expect that quite a bit of the issue here is, in effect, a pendulum swinging.
Posted on 13-Sep-07 at 6:46 pm | Permalink
Morghanna wrote:
I haven’t played lately. What the hell are they doing to Hunters in the nerf category?
Can I say how much it is cracking me up that you are sitting home doing charts on Google while you are soused on Nyquil?
Posted on 15-Sep-07 at 10:30 pm | Permalink
GGL Wire » Nerf Warlocks! WoW balance changes mapped wrote:
[…] Read: Charting WoW balance changes News | Mahmood Ali | | Share this via: […]
Posted on 19-Sep-07 at 11:41 am | Permalink
beetlefeet wrote:
Yeah, as has already been mentioned, you can’t (by a LONG shot) weight all buffs the same and the same as all debuffs and hope to get much of any useful information out.
It’s amusing to see the charts, but you really can’t pull any information about class balance out of it. (Try looking at the class make up of the top x hundred arena teams in all 3 categories to see that…)
Posted on 19-Sep-07 at 7:34 pm | Permalink
druagamaniac wrote:
your shaman graph as far as 1.11 goes is hilarious, a lot of 1.11 was fixes not buffs although i suppose you’re counting fixes as buffs
Posted on 23-Sep-07 at 9:59 pm | Permalink
fiercediety wrote:
You should really have had people familiar with the class from launch go over these before you published them. For instance, many of the Hunter ‘changes’ you listed were really nerfed.
Whoever marked them clearly didn’t understand the mechanics behind the patch notes.
Posted on 24-Sep-07 at 6:03 pm | Permalink
Gauldar wrote:
Wow, you really did a great job with flushing out the information. The charts may need some “bug fixes” of their own, but nice tracking of all the changes from beta to present.
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WOW WOW » Blog Archive » Charting World Of Warcraft’s Balance Changes wrote:
[…] Over at game metrics blog We Can Fix That With Data, Sara Jensen has been doing some fascinating World Of Warcraft balance analysis, examining which player classes have been fixed, buffed, nerfed, and various other odd MMO-specific titles. […]
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thanks for the graphs
Posted on 14-Jan-08 at 3:55 am | Permalink
PABB wrote:
Meh, we’ll probably never get balance anyway, way too much variables. I see my friend struggling with his shaman. Once, for fun, he tried using a searing (it’s searing, right? The fireball one) totem lvl 70 on Gamon, and Gamon two-shotted the totem with like 1/4 of his life left. The dude’s lvl 12
And they nerfed earthshock, too, while we mages still get our 100% counterspell.
My guess is that this game would have been perfectly balanced 1-2 years ago if there was only PVE. Now they have to work with both very different modes. And whiny “Lawl you nerf we quit” kids, who provide much of the financial support.
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Posted on 31-Jan-08 at 10:47 pm | Permalink
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Posted on 01-Feb-08 at 3:41 am | Permalink
aaron wrote:
You should point out overall mechanic changes. Diminishing returns on fear were a warlock nerf, a pretty big one. Also fear breaking for damage. Not a change to the lock class, but certainly nerfing them more than anyone else
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