World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery phase two didn’t get off to a great start. Many players are complaining about the state of PvP in Stranglethorn Vale, as certain classes can easily one-shot their enemies. Fans think Season of Discovery is impossible to balance, and I’m afraid they’re right.
Reddit user u/frogvscrab aptly summarized why Season of Discovery can never be properly balanced in a post to the WoW Classic subreddit on Feb. 14. They explained that adding additional spells via Runes only made the game more unbalanced, and I totally agree.
Instead of fixing WoW Classic‘s current problems, Season of Discovery only added more features that need balancing. First and foremost, the devs didn’t address the issue of Warriors being beyond broken in the base game, and instead only created Runes to make other classes stronger. Runes even resulted in Warriors being stronger then they used to be, while other classes and specs were left in the dust. For example, Elemental Shamans are still far from being viable and fall well below other classes on the DPS meters.
Season of Discovery also has a rampant one-shot problem. Even though WoW Classic is, to an extent, packed with burst damage in PvP, Runes only exacerbated the issue. Priests and Druids (I’m looking at you, Boomkins) easily nuke any player in their sight, and many other specs are similar. On top of this, introducing Runes as a core mechanic resulted in most classes’ rotations being clunky and unintuitive, and far from what they looked like originally.
To make matters worse, talents offer little to no value compared to Runes. They mostly seem irrelevant, insignificant, and out of place. For instance, Shamans get Lava Burst, a powerful and build-defining Rune, whereas investing five levels worth of talent points into Lightning Mastery only reduces the cast time of two spells by a second. That’s a drop in the ocean compared to Lava Burst’s huge crits. My whole point is that Season of Discovery didn’t solve any of the existing issues—it only created new ones.
It’s impossible to balance because Blizzard won’t touch WoW Classic’s baseline spells and talents, choosing only to poke around with Runes instead. The devs should have focused on tweaking the original WoW mechanics while keeping to the spirit of Classic, rather than slapping on band-aid fixes that can only temporarily solve problems in the best case scenario. Blizzard can’t fix the game through regular balance patches, like Dragonflight, because WoW Classic is an old game with new parts that simply don’t mesh together.
