The State Of PVP Class Balance In Late Mod 20 & Recommendations On How To Make It Better:

trgluestickz

As a class balance update, this is current order of class balance on PC in mod 20:

DPS class order from greatest to least overall is this:
Fighter > Wizard > Ranger & DPS Cleric > DPS Warlock > Rogue & Barbarian
For healers its: Cleric > Skilled Warlock > Most Healer warlocks & Paladin


Some important details about the dps classes:

Wizard is the most desirable PVP DPS class, its considered essential for tournaments. No other specific DPS class is considered essential.
Fighter was the strongest class at competing for the top 3 spots on the leaderboard in a solo que setting. It is also the strongest class in 1vs1s.
Wizard however had the easiest time reaching first page on the leaderboard and is probably the most broken class right now.
Both fighter and wizard have a disproportionately massive impact on winning games compared to other classes.
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Ranger and DPS cleric also are very powerful, easily the nastiest source of DPS you can put on a team.
For matchmaking purposes these 2 classes are interchangeable with eachother.
Ranger has really strong CC and DPS cleric makes up for its lack of CC with self healing.
Ranger does have some cons though still, it excels in environments where player average skill levels are low and most enemy player builds are bad. But when up against cheesy tanky builds, their damage is blunted a lot and they often aren't able to kill no matter how well they play.
Ranger is a lot more normal strength as a class when average player skill is higher.
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Warlock encounter dps is probably too low. But they are still really strong, they can heal themselves, rotate between nodes faster than anything else, and can just wear most players down from continuously doing damage to them.
They are quite strong in 1vs1s, especially vs rangers.
Warlock's daily power is also uniquely powerful, it hits harder than rogue shocking execution does and also has a really long undodgable stun attached to it.
However, you need a near perfect warlock build that is nearly maxed out for it to be good, otherwise its just kinda meh and not that useful. Its damage is too blunted or it will die too much if your build isn't maxed, one of the two.
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Rogue and barbarian for matchmaking purposes are interchangeable with eachother. They are both burst damage classes with a long wait time inbetween being able to dish out good damage.
These 2 classes are supposed to hit enemies last to finish them off. Pairing one of these 2 classes with a higher sustain dps class like wizard, ranger, fighter, dps cleric, warlock is the best way to utilize these classes. This is because these 2 classes can put out a lot of dps per rotation when their rotation is ready, which means they are really trustworthy for helping you ensure an enemy player your team targets dies.
One of the cons of rogue and barbarian is they aren't very good for personal glory, you have very little impact on whether or not a match wins compared to the high sustain classes. This means it is really hard to compete on a leaderboard if you play one of these classes. You simply won't win as much as something like wizard, ranger, or fighter will. Even warlock and dps cleric are hard to challenge.
At the very least these 2 classes are very useful and it is very desirable to have at least one of them on your team.
The difference between rogue and barbarian is this:
Rogue is squishy in exchange for slightly better dps, access to the smoke bomb CC power which is really nice for helping your team kill healers, and the ability to go into stealth.
Barbarian is tankyer than rogue and has slightly lower dps. They do better at winning matches against bad players than rogue does. They can sprint to rotate at a similar speed as warlocks too.


Recommendations on how to improve class balance:

- Wizard's prone power must be nerfed in PVP, the cooldown for it is way too short and it lasts 3 seconds. This alone is what made them go from being good to being broken OP. This is the biggest reason why there were 10 of them on the first page during the final PVP season. Wizard also has repel and combining the new prone power with repel was simply too much.

- Increase DPS warlock's encounter dps significantly in exchange for nerfing their daily power brood of hadar and reducing the strength of their self healing class powers.

- DPS Fighter has a lot of different things about it that contribute to it being OP, it is a jack of all trades class with basically no tradeoffs for having everything, it needs a rework/nerfs too but its harder to pinpoint an exact recommendation for that since there are several ways to do it. Either that, or the weaker classes need buffs that make it easier to kill fighters without the help of 3k damage mounts like tunnel vision and toad.

- Ranger damage output should probably be left really high like it is right now. Though should probably clean up some of the bugs that make some sources of ranger dps unavoidable. Their CCs constantly refreshing their duration is also problematic and may need a nerf.

- DPS cleric probably needs its healing hybrid powers nerfed or made only usable by the healer paragon, in exchange for buffing something else on it. Healer/DPS hybrid builds are banned from PVP tournaments for a reason.

- Warlock healers need to either be buffed or made easier to play in PVP, they have been getting weaker and weaker over time and the gap between them and cleric healer is too high right now.

- Paladin probably needs a lot of work done on it to make it good in PVP again without making it overpowered. Simply buffing it is risky since the times it has been good in the past resulted in it being pure cheese and usually overpowered. Right now paladin is the weakest PVP class by a large margin.

Late Edit: I realized I forgot to include my own class (rogue) and barbarian on this list. So adding that bit now:

- Rogue's issue right now is it is the lowest sustain class in a world where classes with high sustain are what actually wins games, WK has even worse sustain/consistency than assassin does but it does have really high dps per rotation. What both rogue paragons need is one of 2 options:
Option 1 would be to improve rogue's sustain/consistency, the best way to accomplish that would be to make it so rogue no longer loses stealth regeneration progress when taking damage, our stealth meter progress visibly jumps down when we get hit still, it isn't just slowed.
Option 2 would be to increase rogue's encounter and at will dps to point where they no longer are dependent on 3k damage mounts.

- Barbarian needs either more sustain/consistency or more dps as well. But I don't know exact areas on barbarian to mess with to best accomplish that.

trgluestickz

I realized I forgot to include my own class (rogue) and barbarian on the list of proposed class balance adjustments, I added that in just now.