Why Burning Crusade wasn't that bad for class balance

A lot of people liked to complain back in the day about how the not-pure-DPS classes still fell behind their counterparts in DPS. Feral and balance druids, ret paladins, and others were denied slots in raids because their damage, and thus their perceived contribution to the group, was low. Damage meters were a big part of this accusation, but they missed the bigger picture. DPS classes who couldn't do high DPS brought something even more valuable to their groups; group buffs.

Let's take, for example, Leader of the Pack, a feral druid talent. Back in the day before raid-wide buffs, it increased the melee and ranged critical strike chance of all group members by 5%. This was a pretty big deal, and it made feral druids a good addition to any melee-DPS group within a raid. However, because cats didn't perform well on the damage meters, they were generally not viewed as valuable group members beyond tier 5 content.

Like I said before, damage meters miss the point when it comes to measuring a DPS class's contribution to a raid, and I'll explain why. Let's say you put that cat druid in a group with four other melee DPS, none of which are cats. Not only is that cat contributing his own damage to the raid, but also the increase in damage that LotP is giving his group members. Let's assume that the four other group members all do 1000 DPS without the cat in their group. Now let's say you add that cat to the group and all their DPS goes up to 1050. That cat could be doing 800 DPS on his own, but because he is responsible for an increase of 50 DPS for his four other group members, he is contributing to the raid just as much as they are.

Paladins were really unappreciated in this manor. The could increase everyone's critical strike chance against the target by 3% with Improved Judgement of the Crusader (now Heart of the Crusader) and could increase everyone's damage by 2% with Improved Sanctity Aura (now simply Sanctified Retribution). They also allowed holy paladins to actually use their judgments, since they could use Crusader Strike to refresh the duration of judgements other than their own. This meant they had endless raid utility, but because their own damage was so low, they were overlooked.

I actually find the Burning Crusade system to be more fair than the current system of "bring the player, not the class" where everyone does the same amount of DPS and each group buff has multiple sources and now affects the whole raid. In the olden days, hybrid classes couldn't do as much damage as the pure-DPS classes, but their could fall back on their healing and/or tanking abilities to help them while solo-ing. This gave them more solo-ablity, while the pure-DPS classes (rogues, hunters, mages, warlocks) needed to rely on their high damage output to kill the mob before it could kill them. Hunters and warlocks could use their pets, but they still had no way to heal themselves reliably or take a lot of damage. Thus it was only fair that they should be able to do more damage than the hybrid classes.

Now all the classes can do the same amount of damage while they are out on their own, but the pure-DPS classes have no defensive or healing abilities to fall back on when things get desperate. As a druid who can fall back on both defensive and healing abilities, I feel bad for classes who can't get themselves out of a jam as well as us hybrids. We druids, as well as paladins, shaman, and priests, can heal ourselves when things get out of control, and while death knights and warriors can't heal themselves that well, they can still use their tanking abilities to get themselves out of a jam. The pure-DPS classes have no skills of that nature, and when things get out of control, their only options are to rely on their pet or flee.

So, should we go back to the old system? I think that the new system of everyone doing equal damage is too ingrained in the player psyche for Blizzard to change it without the hybrid classes feeling cheated. I do miss the days where every class brought something unique to the raid, but those days are long gone. BTPNTC is here to stay. I suppose this can only be expected; balancing the different group buffs around one another was probably just too difficult for Blizzard.