◊ Praetorian

(Edit: Hello WoW forums readers, welcome to the thread. Please note that this was an old post and my thoughts have evolved a fair bit since my OP here. You should read through the thread -- it has some good ideas from a lot of smart people from different perspectives. I'm just trying to think of ways to balance arena weapons for PvP so that they don't have to be tied to a point requirement in Season 3, because right now they are an anomaly -- they are the only arena item that performs at or above the level of the best raid gear in PvE. Every other item is made for PvP, but weapons short-circuit PvE progression. Read on.)

I know this is a bit of a tired topic by this point, but I'm still confused by one thing and I wonder if Blizzard has ever commented on this and perhaps I've just missed it.

Why are PvP weapons roughly as powerful in terms of pure offense as their PvE equivalents, given comparable item levels?

I understand the point of adding a rating restriction to PvP weapons in Season 3 if they remain the way they are, and that's been discussed to death. And of course there are issues with every raiding sword rogue who isn't deep in t6 content sporting a Merciless Glad offhand, casters with the Spellblade, etc.

Everyone always says, in response to the above, "but weapons are different..." Well, why? It's not because of some inherent and unalterable property of weapons. It's because of a simple decision made by Blizzard regarding how they itemized their weapons.

Every other piece of Gladiator's gear has less AP, or +crit, or +dam/heal, or +mp5, than its PvE equivalents. In exchange for giving up damage, heal volume, or regen, you get more stamina and resilience. You become sturdier but less effective in your primary role. And the tradeoff is large.

The rogue S2 BP gives 37 agi, 13 crit, and 40 AP, along with 3 sockets. The t5 BP gives 33 agi (37 if you socket it for the bonus), 17 crit, and 94 AP, along with 3 sockets. Basically you lose 54 AP in order to get the resilience from the arena piece. That's a large chunk of the offensive power of the piece. A rogue who can value their stats better than I could probably give you an exact number for how much of a reduction it is, but eyeballing it, I'd say that the arena gear is 2/3 as offensively powerful as the PvE equivalent.

In fact, the t4 rogue BP gives 35 agi (39 with socket bonus), 11 hit, and 74 AP, with 3 sockets. Again, this is offensively superior to the season 2 gladiator piece, despite being 16 ilvls lower. But of course it lacks the stamina and resilience of the arena gear.

Now let's look at Merciless Gladiator's Crossbow and compare it with a t5 endboss drop from Vashj. Both are 3.0 speed. The Serpent Spine bow from Vashj is 1.0 DPS higher due to item level. The Crossbow gives 26 AP and 15 crit. The Longbow 38 AP and 15 crit. In exchange for a total of 12 AP and 3 base white damage per shot, you get more stamina and resil using the PvP alternative. I could do a similar analysis with the caster staff vs. Kael's, or any of the other weapons really.

This doesn't surprise anyone. But why is this the case, exactly? Why does every other piece of gear force you to sacrifice a large amount of core stats for that extra stam/resil, but weapons offer little extra stam/resil and preserve core stats almost intact? Why not trade off offensive stats for stam/resil on weapons too? Would people complain if the Merciless Gladiator's Shanker were 91.9 DPS, just like Malchazeen from one tier below, but instead used that extra item budget to add another 20+ stam and 20+ resil? Would people complain if the Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade was +203 dam/heal just like Prince's dagger, but instead had extra stam/resil over it's current values?

Wouldn't doing this be simpler than implementing ratings requirements for arena gear, and wouldn't it be much more consistent with every other existing piece of PvP itemization already in place? Am I missing something here? The problem with arena weapons is not some magical property of weapons that makes them so different. It's Blizzard's conscious decision to itemize weapons the way they do for PvE, where a fixed ilvl translates to a fixed DPS, +dam/heal, or +feral AP, instead of allowing the trade-off that occurs on every other piece of arena gear.

 

• Shifft

Are you taking into account the massive buffs to PvE weapons just announced in 2.2?

World of Raids :: Index

It doesn't solve some stuff like the rogue offhands, but at least it shows they're aware of the problem.

 

◊ Praetorian

Those aren't really "massive buffs," just an increase by a few ilvls. It also doesn't change the fact that if you have a Merciless Gladiator's X, you still aren't upgrading it for PvE until Kael or Vashj at the earliest, with only a couple of exceptions, whereas almost every other piece of arena gear is something you wouldn't even consider using over anything from Karazhan when doing PvE.

The ilvl fix to SSC/TK weapons is a bandaid. I believe that what I outline above is the underlying problem.

 

• Playered

That doesn't change the issue, those items simply got ilvl buffs and got a small global gain to their stats.

The point was that weapons have very small amounts of 'PvP stats' and keep or maintain high levels of 'PvE' stats which caused one of the problems (the other being drop-rate...) of the majority of PvE dps'ers needing to go PvP to get weapons to PvE with.

Considering the small amount of budget used on PvP stats on these items theres next to no downside to getting and using them.

They could quite easily reduce the DPS of the physical weapons by lowering the minimum damage by a small amount (the chance for big numbers is still there), and putting the the extra points in stamina.

 

Calgar

The buff is probably why he brought this up in the first place.

I think a lot of the reason it was done this way was to get players to use them.

When looking for res/stamina/armor, the last place people will look is a weapon. They will generally (or i will at least) look at chest/pants/rings/trinkets...etc. And in my experience, the opposite is true, when looking for a DPS boost, a weapon is usually the easiest and most direct way to do that. If they were to use lower dps on weapons and boost their defense, then people would look elsewhere if they felt their defense was fine, but needed more offense, kind of like how 99% of warriors use stormherald over a PvP weapon, no one takes a weapon for the defense it offers.

 

• Shifft

If they did what you're suggesting though and removed DPS on arena weapons for defensive stats then every rogue/warrior would be forced to PvE to PvP effectively instead of the other way around. Adding a few extra DPS on a weapon is such a massive buff to melee classes and stamina/resilience are so readily available in the other gear slots, especially with the newfound cap on resilience, that it would in no way be worth it to give up weapon DPS for extra survivability.

Edit: What Calgar said.

 

Daenerys

I agree with you. Constantly buffing PvE weapons will always be a band-aid move, and it's pretty obvious that another round of buffs is just around the corner for T6 weapons. PvP weapons should be itemized the same way as the gear (high survivability, lower DPS), but they have their silly 'ilvl = DPS' formulas that they have stuck with even though it doesn't work in practice.

On the other hand, PvPers will complain that if you lower the DPS of PvP weapons, "you will have to PvE to PvP." Which of course is false since the survivability makes up for the lower DPS, but weapons (and the DPS they do) are just one of those special pieces of gear that people are extremely emotional about, so there will always be tons of whining to get the best weapon as easily as possible.

 

Mearis

Probably because the weapon slot is one of the few slots where you are more willing to give up defensive ability due to how huge the gains are for offensive potential versus defensive potential in that particular slot, expecially for melees.

If arena weapons were not as good as they currently are a lot of people who only do arenas would be at a huge disadvantage in arenas versus people who use a mixture of PvP armor and PvE weapons.

That's my theory at least.

 

◊ Praetorian

But that's just players behaving irrationally then. For casters in particular, there's no difference whatsoever between a weapon and a necklace or a pair of gloves except for the budget involved. Warlocks and mages and so forth constantly decide to forego 20 or 30 +dam/heal in order to get more stam and resil in any other slot. Why does the weapon have to be the exception to this rule? People don't use weapons for their resil/stam because they hardly offer any to begin with. If you could get 40+resil from a good 1h arena weapon, people might be more hesitant to just give that up.

 

Sapp

I suspect the weapons upgrade for PvE items was done in response to the arena weapons being too good, Shifft. The fix will only hold until the next season anyway, since arena gearing moves so much faster than PvE gearing.


Another solution would be to massively cut the flat damage of arena weapons, and have that damage converted into bonus AP/spellpower that only works versus players and player owned entities. The net change is zero versus players, but removes certain arena weapons from PvE (offhands and the like).

 

Ralask

Have you been spoiled by the BT loot that you have already forgotten the item woes that we had at the start of TBC? =D Its probably another itemization issue they didnt expect and have not got to fix yet. As far as a reason why? I would say to get people interested in arena that would not be otherwise. Being able to pick up great weapons that usually cost huge amounts of dkp and are in short spply in a few weeks of arena is a nice attraction.

 

Mearis

For casters, yes, for melees, I don't think so.

I think for melees it is more advantageous to stack offensive power in weapons since I believe a gain in iilevel in weapons is a biggest boost to offensive power than a gain in iilevels in a different slot due to the scaling because of weapon damage.

I mean, assume the weapons were itemized as you suggested, if someone had the choice wouldn't they then just wear full arena defensive epics and a weapon with purely pve stats? You give up a significant amount of survival for a huge boost to your damage output.

 

Ralask

At least they are not balancing encounters for everyone having arena weapons =D

 

Suesse

Some of the pvp weapons split their stats in a pretty decent manner for pve. Without doing extensive maths, I suspect that the physical weapons which split ap, crit, and hit end up being much better than just using item budget on one or two offensive stats. This may mask the investment in high stamina and resilience. Also, the spell blade's investment in hit, makes it a little too good, perhaps.

I have found it strange that some pve weapons offer much more stamina than the pvp equivalents. The stat you're missing, of course, is resilience, but still it seems that a greater investment in stamina would be reasonable on the arena rewards.

I think the concept of sacrificial dps for rogue/warrior/hunter weapons (in exchange for defensive stats) is an interesting concept. However, I think it would cause many top pvpers to switch to their pve weapons for competitive combat -- which I *think* is not something blizzard wants. The concept for sacrificial dps for stats would be neat for tanking weapons, I think... I'd love to pick up a 71 dps one handed weapon from SSC/TK which had 120 stamina and 500 armor or something insane like that.

 

◊ Praetorian

I'm skeptical of this. You forget that when you lower the DPS of a weapon below its ilvl default, you free up massive item budget for use in other stats. I don't have the time/spreadsheets right now to calculate actual numbers, but if someone could do so, I'd love to see exactly what a Merciless Gladiator's Shanker would look like if you lowered its DPS to equal Prince dagger and then split all the extra budget between stam and resil (or if you did the same with caster weapons). It's certainly possible to put enough of them on weapons that wearing PvP armor with a PvE weapon is equally as viable as using a PvP weapon and a couple of pieces of PvE armor.

There's a lot of math to be done in general in this area (e.g., keeping all else equal, how much DPS does a rogue lose going from a 98 DPS mainhand to a 91 DPS mainhand; and then how much AP is that equivalent to, and then compare that to the tradeoffs on armor slots).

 

◊ Vectivus

Part of it would appear to be the lack of PvP 'stats' - the only things that you could give to someone on a PvP weapon to take away from its PvE utilty are:
a) load up on Stamina
b) Resilience
c) Spell Penetration

If there were additional effects that could be offered to PvP itemization that had little (or no) effect in PvE, you might see this issue less. If PvP weapons lost 10 DPS (should probably speak in ilvl's, but regardless), and got a snare/slow proc in exchange, every decent PvPer would scramble like a madman to pick one of the new weapons up in a heartbeat.

And, really, let's be honest - Blizzard does want some crossover. If PvE and PvP were mutually exclusive, the lifespan of the average subscription would probably drop considerably over time. If a raider can't put in the time to keep up with his guild's schedule any more, and none of his items have any value in a PvP setting (they do, just not the same value PvP items have), what incentive is there for him to continue? His time investment becomes irrelevant, in a way that cannot be rationalized (e.g. epics replaced by greens in the WoW -> TBC transition).

 

Legedi

As a few have said, if you reduce the actually DPS of weapons classes will just use PvE weapons. You already see warriors using BS and PvE weapons much more than BS/PvE armor in PvP. This is because the main reason to use a weapon is for it's DPS, not the stats it gives.

The only way I can ever see making PvP weapons mainly for PvP, and a tier or two bellow their equivalent for PvE is to devise some new stat. Take a warrior for example. The season two 2H weapons are in the 126.9 DPS range, as good as any T5 weapon for warriors. If they reduced it down to to 119.9 DPS (like a Gorehowl or other T4 weapons) it would be balanced for PvE.

Now add a stat with extra items points from lowering the DPS, but they have to be offensive stats or they will be inferior to PvE items, and they have to only work for PvP. No current item does this. They need something like "+AP vs PvP opponents." Add 98 AP that only works in PvP and you know have a 2H weapon that is 119.9 DPS for PvE, reasonably balanced for PvE. And 126.9 DPS for PvP, again reasonably balanced.

Do this for every type of weapon that classes use so they are not such great upgrades for PvE (just like all the PvP armor is not great for PvE).

Would this offend anyone if they did this?

 

• Shifft

The issue really isn't with the arena weapons here at all, the issue is with how melee classes rely so much on their weapons for their damage. The way it works now, for you to add "a snare/slow proc in exchange" for 10 weapon DPS, it would have to be so broken to the point of being overpowered for most decent PvPers to even consider it due to the massive amount of damage lost (mostly because rogues/warriors already have readily available snares). Enough defensive stats that I would trade them for 10 weapon DPS would pretty much make me unfocusable in any practical sense, or it wouldn't be worth it. If Blizzard doesn't want to see melee using PvP weapons for PvE or vice versa, they really need to rework the entire way melee scales to be more gear-based rather than weapon-based.

 

berg

I think this is an unplanned consequene of the itemization mechanics.

Item Level alone determines the Armor, mean weapon damage, +damage, +healing or +feral AP. So an item that is itemized terribly can still excel in these areas and in many cases be the best choice aside from Archi/Illidan drops.

I think your post also applies to how high plate armor has scaled. There is such an enormous gap between the armor types now. MS arena warriors get 10k armor more or less for free. When the new arena gear comes out it will be 11k.

So there are diminishing returns applied to all of the item mods due to the exponential component of the itemization formula. The values derived directly from ilvl are spiraling out of control though, atleast in my opinion.

 

Vandermonde

As people are saying, the bigger issue here is ilvl=base dps and base dps=a gigantic percentage of the damage several specs do. That said, i do think they could use some more variety in pvp-friendly stats.

Unique procs on weapons is an interesting possible fix, as long as it's not another high duration, low rate stun (or other total loss of control).

Another stat i think could be implemented to further differentiate pvp/pve gear is a passive avoidance stat (like the miss component of defense skill) budgeted to be notably more expensive than dodge. They already have stats that address the fact that you will be attacked in pvp regardless of your role, and that you will be crit regardless of your role/stats, so 'you will be hit from behind/while stunned' seems like a decent avenue to explore.

I'm not sure if it would be better to have separate spell/physical stats, or if you want a significantly more expensive combined one.

 

• Wodin

I can at least tell you the DPS change, thanks to Aldriana's spreadsheet.

In a set that mostly resembles my pvp gear and using the Gladiator's Shanker/Shiv, I get 1026DPS. Switching to the Merciless Shanker/Shiv increases my overall DPS to 1111 - this is obviously with an optimal PvE spec. I'm not quite sure how you'd value the sacrifice of 6DPS in terms of stats returned, but it's a fairly hefty ROI.

 

LiteSabre

The thing is, the reason people use those arena offhands is because there's simply 0 itemization for it. To make a (admittedly extreme) example, there are absolutely no offhand swords from the end of Black Morass (Latro's Shifting Sword) until Mother Shahraz, the 7th boss in the last raid instance currently in the game. If the arena weapons were changed like you propose, 95% of raiding sword rogues would be offhanding Latro's. Even with Illidan down, if Shahraz decides not to give the sword, then what? There're no offhand swords through the entirety of the T4 and T5 raiding content. The advantage of a sword spec rogue having a sword in the offhand is good enough that an epic dagger offhand (of which there are also 0 in T5 content, arguably 1 in T4 and 2 in T6) probably wouldn't make up for the defecit.

Now if they changed itemization to make up for this, then I'm all for it. :P

 

Allev

Are we trying to decipher Blizzard's intent when itemizing? Because from a feral druid's perspective, making sense of the itemization team's decisions is kind of fruitless. See endgame feral weapons.

It's a fact that weapon damage is more closely tied to iLvl than damage granted by stats, it was a decision made at the very beginning of the game. The only fixes would be to lower the iLvl of the items or introduce a new mechanic particularly for PVP weapons. I don't think they'd drop iLvl on one particular PVP slot, so it comes down to a question of why Blizzard hasn't designed a PVP mechanic that isn't applicable to PVE.

 

Furion

I wondered about the arena weapons as well... I think lowering the DPS of the weapon is not a good solution since it would make people dislike the pvp weapons and it would set new itemisation precedents which blizzard might not have in mind. I don't think they want to fiddle with their itemisation system unless absolutely necessary.

But why they put lots of AP, hit and Crit on these Weapons instead of more resilience is quite a mistery to me. Not having an abudance of stamina is probably related to PvE tanking (although a little more stamina on arena weapons would make sense).

 

◊ Lord BEEF

I think DPS should be the same on items of the same level regardless of origin, but the stats themselves should be further changed. The PvP daggers for example could have a bit less ap, hit and crit, but trade that for some bonus armor, higher resilience, and maybe a special effect like 3% snare/root resistance.

Healer weapons could have silence/interrupt duration reduction or stun resist. You get the idea, pvp effects.

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