You guys will probably enjoy this level of gaming autism because I've been quietly studying the meta maths of both RPGs and RTS' in the background to get a much more detailed understanding. Even though I enjoy RTS campaigns etc. pretty casually I'm not that great at RTS games in multiplayer and I've been studying professional matches and how they play as part of my learning process regarding the maths of that genre of game and how build orders work etc. Mainly studying their overall macro but it was interesting seeing how the micro/meta side of things worked too.
I've also been studying RPGs quite a bit since that's another favourite genre of mine and really been getting into how the maths for the classes work. One thing I've been quite confused by is how it seems that there definitely seems to be a strange bias I would argue towards fancy new classes and units when they get introduced in patches.
I think this also happens though to the point they kind of break the older content in the game making it rather imbalanced even in singleplayer. Obviously devs are going to want players playing the new stuff but I was unprepared for just how much of a buff this type of thing got.
Can you guys think of specific examples of what I'm thinking about? Like content updates and such? Warhammer 2 is a great one because I remember every faction introduction people would complain they were too OP then eventually CA would fix them slightly with a nerf. Thinking of the Vampire Coast and Wood Elves mainly on that one. It's one of those things where once you notice it you can't unsee it and sometimes they're often even quite sneaky about the crap they pull with stealth updates.
I bring this up because in RPGs I actually enjoy the classic fighter/mage/rogue archetypes. However it seems like more and more with 'modern RPGs' you almost get punished for picking them depending on the situation.
Using several past WoW expansions as an example, and probably the current one, the concept of OP "Ooo, shiny!" to market new features has been done in Wrath of the Lich King, Mists of Pandaria, Legion, and IIRC in Dragonflight where new classes were added in to the game.
Wrath was the first expansion to add in a new class, the Death Knight. It had 3 specs: Blood, Frost, and Unholy, and originally all 3 could Tank or Dps depending what abilities were picked because the talent trees weren't nerfed to shit back then. While nowadays Blood is the Tank spec in Wrath the best pick for a DK was 2h Frost tanking, something they don't get to do now because Frost is now the dual wield spec while Unholy is the 2h dps spec. DK tanks were next to impossible to kill. If you died it was probably because you fucked up something special, like falling off a mountain. Even later on a well played Blood DK could out last his entire raid group if done properly however that starts to require actual player skill and the issues here are more to do with the inherent class designs.
Then came Monks in MoP who were literally broken as fuck. The healing spec could outperfom dps in damage and was colloquially referred to as "Fistweaving" rather than 'Mistweaving' as it was actually called due to using water themes.
Legion added in Demonhunters which could both Tank and Dps. So they were amazing at both.
In these cases subsequent expansions toned/nerfed these classes down but in their original content they were that OP literal idiots could play them and still do exceedingly well. Much like Hunters and Warlocks in TBC who were so badly designed single button pressing was all you needed so groups filled with any idiot who decided to roll one 🙄 the term "huntard" existed for a reason.
The current expansion, Dragonflight, added in another new class, Dracthyr, who could either dps or heal. Because they are the new kids on the block they are both front and centre at ongoing events as well as class performance because the devs want people to play with the new toy.
Whatever happens next you can be sure the Dracthyr will be toned down to some degree to fit more in line with how other classes perform and if another class comes out eventually you can expect the pattern to repeat itself where the new shiny will be awesome for the duration of its expansion before being firmly resized and stuffed into a box of the devs choosing.