Is there actually any developer who has ever tried to balance player characters for PvP and then balance the PvE encounters around the then PvP-balanced player characters?

In my opinion the “We cannot balance characters around PvP, because of PvE” is an alibi! They just don’t get the PvP balance right. That’s all.

That said, and especially in WoW’s case, there’s such a constant struggle for balance that messes everything up because Blizzard tries to juggle how an ability functions whether it’s in PvP or PvE. They never get it right and either side resents the other for the failure; people who only want to do 10 and 25 man raids get upset when their abilities are nerfed because of a balance issue in the arenas or battlegrounds, while those who don’t raid get upset when an ability is changed to compensate for a raid mechanic. When they floated the idea of changing how drink and food worked because people would game it in arenas, the raiders pitched a fit about the unintended effect.

Obviously to me the common sense thing would be to just simply have one ability with dual roles that change whether or not you’re in a raid or in an arena. That way you only have to balance the PvP function against the other PvP functions, and the PvE ones against other PvE ones, instead of attempting to balance PvP against PvE when those players are largely segregated from one another and don’t like being tinkered with at the expense of a part of the game they don’t even play.

Thing is, WAR was designed with PvP in mind. WoW and many other games were (and are) PvE games with PvP just tacked on to appeal to other gamers.

It’s probably a lot easier to balance abilities in a game that’s designed for both from the ground up but as PvP is tacked onto WoW it’s very difficult. It’s almost like playing a sub-game…