Ghostcrawler made a post on this topic recently which I find very interesting, and he makes some very good points.
In respect to the Arena vs BG topic, it is certainly the case that to get decent PvP gear, you MUST do Arenas. This must put off a lot of people who like PvP for the solo-ability of it, getting to compete against other players but not relying on other people (team members) to be online. I'm one of those people, and I find BGs almost pointless now. Why bother if you can't get the best gear?
On the other hand, I see why it's set up this way. People just used to grind BGs to get the gear, often AFK etc. Areana players have to be highly skilled, which should enable them to the best gear. It's just a shame that BGs have suffered as a result. I hope, as Ghostcrawler says below, that they think of a way to make BGs more attractive to players again.
Blizzard Quote: (Source)
Hi. We're not removing Arena from the game. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but many players do. We don't ignore many comments on these boards, but "They should just remove Arena / PvP from the game" is not a helpful suggestion. Things that would make PvP more fun for you or things that would keep PvP balance from intruding into your PvE are more useful.
I'll be very brief, but here are the problems we see in PvP right now.
1) Too much emphasis on Arenas and not enough on BGs.
2) Too much emphasis on 2s and not enough on 3s and 5s.
3) Not enough class / spec representation in Arena. Warlock, hunter and shaman numbers in particular are too low, but they're not the only ones.
4) Too fast-paced.
Let me explain this last one in more detail. Some people in the community think that burst dps is too high. We disagree, and the reason we do is that healing is also very powerful in Arenas, to the point at which not having a Mortal Strike debuff may be a huge liability. If you can't burst someone down when wounded, they just aren't going to die unless the healer is mana-drained or chain crowd-controlled, neither of which are overly fun in the extreme case. You can have too much damage, too much healing or too much crowd control.
But when you consider specific matches, particularly of the highest rated teams, those guys are using their full toolbox. The problem is that the windows in which to use those tools can be very small. When you are injured, you might have a global cooldown in which to respond. If you make it, you might very well be fully healed in the next cooldown and "reset" the match. If you fail, you're dead and the match may be over. We'd like to add an extra GCD or two to many of these situations.
Now there still are extreme cases of burst in some specs that need to be chilled out. However, if we just lower burst damage across the board we're concerned people just wouldn't ever die and only specs with multiple forms of crowd-control would be considered viable.
Q u o t e:
My question is do you feel just as strongly, and as "completely" about arena rewards? Do you think that because arena represents what you are calling the 'best test of skill,' that means that it should always be the pvp endgame? I'm also curious exactly why a test of skill should be a basis for gear rewards? Why is 'time invested' not the basis of gear rewards? Is this a practical solution based on the difficulty in preventing /afking?
I think some players like Arenas because they are quick, easy to organize (relative to a BG), often have fast queues, and / or they just enjoy the �purity� (for want of a better word) of just trying to kill the other team without having to worry about flags, reinforcements, bad players not contributing to the war effort, etc. However, a lot of players who may not really like Arenas get drawn into them in order to procure the best PvP gear. This second issue is something we�d like to fix, but we need to develop a way to reward good gear through BGs that isn�t based on endless grinding.
Q u o t e:
Too fast-paced actually should coincide with too much burst. But GC goes on to say he disagrees there is too much burst. Totally confused by what "too fast-paced" meant in that reference.
Let�s assume for the sake of argument that burst is too high. Imagine we made changes such that getting an 8K crit was almost impossible and 3K or 4K hits were more common. Now consider what would happen. You hit someone. The healer heals them. You keep hitting. The healer heals them. Two strategies then rise to the top as the only way to win a match: keep the healer crowd-controlled forever or drain her mana. Yet not every class has the same amount of crowd control and very few have mana drains. We don�t want every class to have those abilities because then every class feels alike. Furthermore, playing a healer that never gets to, you know, actually play because you�re always sheeped / cyclone or OOM isn�t much fun either.
In the current game, imagine a mage getting beat on to the point where he is near Execute range. He decides to Blink. If he gets the Blink off, he might have just won the match because he can get healed to full before the melee close again. If he fails to get the Blink off, he�ll probably die in the very next GCD. He might have a window of 2 seconds max to win or lose the game. If you have those situations every now and then you end up with a nail-biter match. That�s cool. However, if every single encounter with the other team is like that, it�s just exhausting. Many fights will end in just a few GCDs. Others will go on and on, at least until the healer runs OOM, which is unlikely to happen with abilities like Innervate and Divine Plea. It�s just too extreme in both damage done and healing done.
Q u o t e:
what he is saying is that problem is not the burst, which does make things fast paced, the problem is the time given to players to react to said burst. In other words blizzard is shooting for a more elaborate solution to the problem than just simply nerfing damage across the board. Yes that would reduce burst and slow down the game but it would also have pve implications that would need more fixing. There are other ways to slow the pace down than just simply nerfing burst which is why he is saying burst isn't too high.
This too.
Q u o t e:
I'll be brief as well. You feel that burst isn't too high, because healing is too powerful? Burst can be too high AND healing can be too powerful.
Totally. I tend to say �Burst has to have a place in the game,� because it�s clear some players are looking for an environment in which nobody ever dies unless the healer is crowd-controlled. That�s not what we�re trying to offer either because then only specs with a lot of non-DR�d crowd control are attractive.
Q u o t e:
Allowing us to get furious without having to have the best comp would be a good start! I mean the weapons, only best players and good comps should get these? Because of imbalance issues?
I probably should have added an additional bullet, which is that in the previous season, starter resilience gear was either too hard to get or sacrificed too many stats. We want resilience to be attractive because of the survivability it brings (and I think that part is working), but we started players too low. You need like 500 before you start to notice its effect and 800 to 1000 before you actually live long enough to respond to attacks (though as I suggested above, perhaps not long enough).|||I hate Arena. I Arenaed to get S2 swords on my rogue and never went back. If anything has made me question whether Blizzard thinks things through it's been Arena (I got the S2 swords because they were better than anything shy of SSC and BT... what does that tell you about thinking things through?).
However, I spent much of the last 6 months of TBC in BGs on my rogue. Loved them. Haven't bothered in Wrath not because I can't get the BEST gear, but because the gear I get will leave me uncompetitive. Why get destroyed by people who Arena because of a gear disparity? What's the fun in that?
Everyone keeps saying Arena is so much about skill... then give everyone the same level of gear when they start. When WRath started highly skilled clothies were getting destroyed in Arena by mediocre rogues simply because they lacked high resilience. Skill didn't enter into it, you'd see people getting 2 and 3 shot. Again, where's the fun or skill in that?
Arenas and the Argent Tournament really have no place in the larger world of Warcraft. They're a little pocket universe off to the side, fun for some, but not tied to the rest of the world. Whereas the AT is just a fun distraction, though, they've let Arena affect the rest of the game and that's been a mistake that they refuse to correct.|||Quote:
However, I spent much of the last 6 months of TBC in BGs on my rogue. Loved them. Haven't bothered in Wrath not because I can't get the BEST gear, but because the gear I get will leave me uncompetitive. Why get destroyed by people who Arena because of a gear disparity? What's the fun in that? .
That's what I was trying to say, BGs are pointless because the rewards don't get you anywhere against players who do Arenas. And if you do Arenas, what's the point of doing BGs? Other than Pwning non-arena players of course :P
Perhaps make Arena gear only useable in Arenas and give some sort of other rewards for competing in them on top of titles and fancy mounts? (gonna get pounded on by Arena players now :P)|||Aside from restricting Arena gear to Arenas I don't think the issue is solvable. For a long time I've advocated that a different ruleset should load when you zone into Arena. Instead of having to address abilities in Arena and then address the impact of that in PvE, just separate them. Same with gear.
The thing is, in beta we mentioned this. There was significant outcry about BGs being devalued if you could only get top end gear for being good at Arena... and they went ahead anyway. Now they're seeing BG participation fall off. Um, no kidding.|||I personally started staying away from PvP completely because of resilience. I've played since the beginning and really miss the days when all we had to PvP in was our original gear. I'm aware that will most likely never change, but if I had to pick a reason why, that'd be it.
Of course I still do pre-made nights with the guildies because even though we don't wear any PvP gear, we're Ulduar25 geared, which does make up for that (Pretty hard to bring down a t8.5 tank carrying the flag in a WSG while he's being healed by a t7.5/8.5 raid-spec disc priest).
I just don't like resilience, but it's here to stay unfortunately for me.|||Quote:
I personally started staying away from PvP completely because of resilience. I've played since the beginning and really miss the days when all we had to PvP in was our original gear. I'm aware that will most likely never change, but if I had to pick a reason why, that'd be it.
Of course I still do pre-made nights with the guildies because even though we don't wear any PvP gear, we're Ulduar25 geared, which does make up for that (Pretty hard to bring down a t8.5 tank carrying the flag in a WSG while he's being healed by a t7.5/8.5 raid-spec disc priest).
I just don't like resilience, but it's here to stay unfortunately for me.
I agree, it's a shame there has to be completely different gear for PvP to PvE. Though I enjoy seeing PvE gear-wearing players trouncing PvPers sometimes
I suppose resilience was just brought in to make PvP last longer wasn't it.|||I really never saw a reason for resilience. If I were to do it properly by the standards now, I would have to have an entire raid set for both Shadow and Disc (I'm a raid disc priest), and then go and get a full PvP set for Shadow and/or Disc...which is why I choose to simply PvP in raid gear when my guildies go (they agree with the choice as well, since none of them have more than maybe a piece of PvP gear they randomly won).|||Quote:
I agree, it's a shame there has to be completely different gear for PvP to PvE. Though I enjoy seeing PvE gear-wearing players trouncing PvPers sometimes
I suppose resilience was just brought in to make PvP last longer wasn't it.
If I recall correctly, it was brought in to mitigate the "rogue one-shots mage from stealth" stuff that we were seeing. The problem is that if you increase damage and balance raids around that dps output you one-shot players who in TBC only have 7-10k hp (tanks aside). Crits, without resilience, would let me take away 50% of most players's hp now and I'm a shadow priest. If I got really lucky a Mind Blast would crit for 7k and the followup Mind Flay would see 2 crits for 3k each and a 1.5k regular tick. That's 14.5k damage in 2 spells.|||Quote:
I agree, it's a shame there has to be completely different gear for PvP to PvE. Though I enjoy seeing PvE gear-wearing players trouncing PvPers sometimes
I suppose resilience was just brought in to make PvP last longer wasn't it.
I pretty much only have PvE gear on my characters who participate in BGs, aside from the odd PvP lower level rewards that I was able to obtain outside of arena (never done arena; don't ever plan to).
Of course, I primarily play Wintergrasp for my PvP, which seems different to me than other BGs, and while I die quite frequently, I often get to take quite a few others down with me simply because of the rampant chaos surrounding things. Though I haven't played WG since the switch to weeklies, so that might not be the case anymore... I prefer solo play overall, so I know that in general I won't get a lot of the really good high PvE gear, let alone good PvP gear... but what I have is adequate for most of what I do...|||I feel that if they were to ever "fix" the Arena, they'd have to make either the rewards lesser, or increase the rewards of BG's.
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