PvE balance, in terms of the DPS of pures has been in a bit of a state of flux recently. As people are progressing through the harder content, raid makeup is starting to shift toward a more melee-heavy composition. To complete harder content, people don't stack casters, they stack rogues and death knights at the expense of casters. Mages in particular are having a hard time finding a consistent place in raids outside of gimmicks that favor them heavily (Hodir). While parses show classes like mages, shadow priests and elemental shaman being considerably behind their melee counterparts, Greg Street has stated that he sees casters as in a good spot. Some of the top theorycrafters in the world like Lhivera, Manly and others have shown that Casters are weak and are going to continue to lose ground to rogues and the like (Except: Warlocks). For the other pure caster, mages, this is a very large issues but addressing Fire specifically, the Systems design team seems to think they are in a good spot, yet they are 10%+ behind on competitive parses. ---
Enough background material, My question then is this: Where is the PvE balancing point for DPS? Do you balance based on the best players' performance or do you balance based on the average player performance. If you do infact balance against the best, do you take into account almost all the major top end guilds parses clearly pointing out that casters are struggling.
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PvE balance, in terms of the DPS of pures has been in a bit of a state of flux recently. As people are progressing through the harder content, raid makeup is starting to shift toward a more melee-heavy composition. To complete harder content, people don't stack casters, they stack rogues and death knights at the expense of casters. Mages in particular are having a hard time finding a consistent place in raids outside of gimmicks that favor them heavily (Hodir). While parses show classes like mages, shadow priests and elemental shaman being considerably behind their melee counterparts, Greg Street has stated that he sees casters as in a good spot. Some of the top theorycrafters in the world like Lhivera, Manly and others have shown that Casters are weak and are going to continue to lose ground to rogues and the like (Except: Warlocks). For the other pure caster, mages, this is a very large issues but addressing Fire specifically, the Systems design team seems to think they are in a good spot, yet they are 10%+ behind on competitive parses. --- Enough background material, My question then is this: Where is the PvE balancing point for DPS? Do you balance based on the best players' performance or do you balance based on the average player performance. If you do infact balance against the best, do you take into account almost all the major top end guilds parses clearly pointing out that casters are struggling.