honestly, i've played WoW for ... hmh, 20-25~  active Months in the last 5 Years, and everytime they launched a new Patch that changed or fixed the mechanics, i didnt think of anything bad. balancing is great, and if they continue to improve player satisfaction by doing so, all should be happy. (tho' i of course had a moment or two where i was cursing about other classes.)

shortly before i stopped playing, i started wondering.. "why didnt they achieve equal class effectiveness by now?" but then i thought about how complex the mechanics actually are, and continued tolerating the issue(s)..

..but yeah, i thought they would have learned from the Mammoth that is WoW, and therefore make a greatly balanced game with Diablo, setting up mechanics accordingly and stuff. And in addition, 5 classes shouldnt be too hard to balance properly.

i didnt play the game yet,  i was honestly considering a purchase though.. but reading about how they didnt seem to get it right (once again), pushing numbers around to fix what they didn't manage to do properly, i start wondering,...  who the heck is testing that sheat while its still in development? i mean, seriously?

sorry, for some weird reason this topic was created twice. Oo

They needed to see how players reacted to the game content and what strategies/builds were powerful, which could only come after release same as WoW and SC1/SC2/Warcraft. Developers can't think of everything nor are they good enough to know the best builds immediately.

Remember SC1 is the most balanced competitive game of all time (objectively), Blizzard are the best at this.

This is a Blizzard game, there will be at LEAST a year of fine tuning before they get everything down. Starcraft 1 took like 3 years of major balance changes to get that right, and that is basically a sport, with real money on the line in tournaments. WoW will require balance changes as long as they are adding content. As everything they add subtly changes the balance.

For Diablo III they will also require a lot of balance changes like every Blizzard game, There are 7 million+ people trying to exploit the game and and there is no way to anticipate everything that they will try and every combination that is possible. It will take lots of time and fine tuning before it is right. Just be grateful that Blizzard take the time to actually do it, a lot of devs will just release a game and maybe fix the really game breaking stuff. Blizzard take the time to try and get it right and will spend an incredible amount of time watching how the game evolves and fine tuning which is why their games are so popular.

Eh...

I think best is a hard thing to qualify.

SC1 is the most balanced comeptitive game of all time....  It's also got 3 races.

That makes it WAY easier to balance.

Something like League of Legends would be super balanced to if you could only choose between 3 premade teams.

I think LoL is about as hard to balance, because it's really individual units (15-20 per race) that are balanced against each other. Changing "queen" (a defensive only unit not meant to be in an army) range from 4 to 5 last monthas changed the game so much that Zerg as a whole went from weakest by far to strongest by far race in under a week. Also LoL skills and heroes can be added and removed at will if they are completely broken or need a complete change, whereas removing or changing any of the units in SC1/2 COMPLETELY changes the game that it is. SC1 -> SC2 is 99% identical yet it will take the SC1 pros a year to catch up to the current scene's metagame, full time.

I say best because SC1 pros played for hundreds of thousands of dollars yet no one, not even a  fan, complained about unit balance for the last 5 years of it being played at the highest levels. That just isn't true for any other competitive game, there are outstanding valid balance concerns in SC2, LoL, HoN, Dota2, etc. Anyone familiar with the competitive scene says SC1 is close to perfect.