The "top 100" and race for world firsts.

[From the WoW Europe forums.]

It's very sad to see what the raiding game has devolved into, and what it takes to be the most successful at it; stacking more powerful classes, and giving up the rest of your life. We have absolutely no idea who the best players in the world are, all we know is that certain guilds will lock themselves in the basement for 15 hours a day and aren't above bugging/exploiting encounters just so that they can be first. The frankly laughable excuse that none of them raided with their "Fraps man" for heroic Atramedes testifies to this. Let's be honest, it wasn't exactly hard to do it properly.

My girlfriend made a toon on Lightning's Blade to see what were doing and they had nine druids, with seven paladins - 64% of their raid made up from two classes, with three classes (warrior, rogue and mage) missing completely. If that doesn't tell Blizzard what a hash they've made of PvE class balance, nothing will. Baseline spells like Tranquility and Holy Radiance are simply too powerful cross-spec and other classes have nothing like them, excepting maybe Divine Hymn but priests are behind druids on raid healing.

Go on. Tell me to cry more and point out how bad I am, thus invalidating my opinion. Remind me that I'm not on heroic Ragnaros, therefore, I shouldn't care. But these no-life trend setters prompt others to follow in their wake, eventually causing classes that are not overpowered in and of themselves to get nerfed thanks to "intelligent exploitation" of game mechanics, while weaker classes just get left behind because they don't bring certain utility that:

a) Trumps everything else.
b) Encounter designers assume everyone has.

Unfortunately, the problem is exasperated when we're dealing with developers who think Innervate and Divine Guardian are roughly equivalent (see the tanking Q&A for this particular gem) as utility, who think it's perfectly fine for a Protection paladin to be better than a Protection warrior in just about every meaningful way, and believe that a one-button spec (Arcane) should be competitive in damage with far more complicated specs.

Don't be naive; this has an impact on everyone down the road. The haemorrhage of subscribers is going to continue whilst developers turn a blind eye to behaviour that they claim "has no impact on 99% of the playing population".

News flash.

It does.

Mind how you go.