ceasefire

As a Warrior who is forced to spec Arms every time to arena, and switch to Fury or Prot for PvE, I find the notion that your class is hamstrung by "non-ideal specs" laughable. This excuse would have credence if the entire class (all specs) was bad at Arena, but Blizzard has done a generally fantastic job of making every class viable.

If you can't PvP as a Feral Druid or Holy Priest, respec and learn how to play your "PvP spec". I understand class loyalty, but castrating your play experience by refusing to be disloyal to some spec (like Shadow, or Fire, or Destruction) is ridiculous. We all have preferences for specs, but you just have to accept the fact that PvP requires certain commitments. When people point to the fact Blizzard included offset Arena items (Shadow sets, Feral sets, Enhancement sets) as a reason for those specs being made viable for Arena, it reeks of ungratefulness. I would love a Fury or Prot Arena set that I could use for PvE on my Warrior. Guess what? We get one set.

If you're playing an MMO, you should be prepared to socialize. Unless you're a farmer who wants to be guildless, with an unused friend list (which makes no sense and fits no rational profile of a non-Third World country player). And seriously, why cry about 1600/1700 personal requirements on gear. This is Elitist Jerks, not WoW General. Nobody comes on to this site to see carebears whine about not hitting 1550. It is easily, easily, easily doable. Yes, I realize it's a zero-summy game and some players have to lose to ensure others win. But as a general community, we're not the bottom feeders.

If I compare the percentage of people who will have S4 Helm/Chest/Legs/Weapons versus the people who have the Sunwell equivalents, I'm sure the Arena pieces will be more common by ten to even a hundredfold. This just seems ridiculous, and again I think the PR requirements should have been even higher for those items.

Let's stop the dumb devil's advocating (people want to just solo, people hate vent/social interaction, people will stop going to both bg's and arena's in droves). I learned this driving force behind WoW a long time ago:

Never underestimate the extent to which people will go to improve their gear.

 

Akka

I agree with your analysis, but I think it is, in the end, a very, very bad design concept.
It seriously damage the feeling, and desire, of progression. When you see that anyway, whatever you do, everything will gradually "decay", then you start to wonder "why bother ?".

Of course, everything will be outdated one day. Each expansion basically reset the whole game (though I'm not totally sure it's really a good idea either, at least the way it is handled, and it irritates a lot of people too). But to have such a "programmed decay" season by season, is even more, well, depressive I would say. It makes the world lacking the stability required to build something.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Calixtus

This indeed appears to be Blizzard's opinion as well, but still; Why?

Why would the playstyle alteration of respecc'ing at regular intervalls - or in the case of our hybrid brethren, regearing - to enjoy multiple aspects of the game be acceptable game design?

"Individual talents are better for PvP or PvE respectively". Yes, by design. Not random chance, or insurmountable facts. Shadowfury - Warlock Destruction 41 point talent - is inferior in a PvE setting to Demonic Sacrifice - Warlock Demonology 21 point talent - for PvE purposes because Shadowfury offers no significant bonus in PvE. If Shadowfury were to offer a bonus in PvE, as well it's PvP-centric effect, that would not neccesarily hold true. Individual talents are only centered around PvP or PvE because they were designed that way.

Talent trees are even easier to sort out. The more powerful it is, the higher into the tree you stick it. Put it high enough, and you will be able to buff feral druids without buffing resto druids, because resto druids won't be able to get that high anyway. If you feel a given ability has too much of an effect in PvP while your intent was to buff PvE, fiddle with the implementation the same way almost all crowd controls use different durations depending on whether the target is PvP or PvE. Heck, you could even reuse the mechanics behind "Increases spell damage against Demons" to further separate PvE and PvP usage.

My point is, the current disparaties between different spec's (and/or talents) do not represent a neccesary state of affairs, so why accept it as such? We as customer's don't benefit from it, and Blizzard certainly doesn't benefit from it because one of these days, someone is going to do a better job at implementing functioning balance - perhaps not a perfect job, but it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than what we have now - and Blizzard'll lose customers.

And even if were to accept the fact that one talent tree is meant to be the PvP talent tree then that implemention is in most classes quite poor.

• PvP talents are in some cases sprinkled throughout the trees in ways that hampers PvE builds by being forced prereqs, or vice versa, or they're just generally not used, at all, due to their positioning.
• The PvP talent trees, most notable for hybrids, require a completely different playstyle than the one you rolled the class for. I play a pure class myself so at least I keep reasonably close to what I rolled the class for, but if I weren't... Being locked out of meaningful PvP because what I rolled is not meant to perform in a meaningful fashion is not something I'd find acceptable.
• The PvP talent tree for some classes has changed due to various balance changes. If your going to use a single tree for meaningful PvP, pick one*. Leaving leftover PvP talents ê la warlock's Destruction tree does not add to the game experience.

*It should be noted that the official Death Knight preview features a line indicating that they have made that choice for Death Knight, and that the "single PvP talent tree" design decision is therefor likely to be implemented better than it currently is, but it is also likely to stay this way for the forseeable future. I still say it's poor design though =P



And more on the topic of the S4 changes;

In theory, it's nice to see Blizzard turning more of the PvP rewards into rewards for succesful PvP. In practice, I'm not sure I think basing it on arena ratings is the best approach possible, nor do I think the change is sweeping enough.

First of all, honour and marks are still gained through unsuccesful PvP. I don't mind the quality of the items being handed out from PvP if used in PvE, that's not a problem. What is a problem is that they've - to this point - still been entirely attainable without ever doing anything remotely useful in a battleground. Strictly speaking, you don't ever need to A) Kill another player B) Win a battleground. Most people manage both of these at least by accident, but the underlying design still does not make those demands of people in PvP.

And rating requirements does not change this. Yes, it's definitely a step in the right direction, but will this improve the quality of battleground PvP, i.e. actually improve the part of PvP where people spend most of their dedicated "PvP time"? No. We'll still see the same organized failing brought on not by inability (I refuse to believe people are that inept) but by the fact there is little reward in caring about the outcome. And while leeching is certainly less of a problem than it once was, it still exists.

Second of all, there's using the arena as a yardstick for "succesful PvP". Class balance in arena is an issue; Just look at the various metrics extracted from the armoury. Some classes are more suited to achieve higher ratings than others, in some cases due to class design, and in other cases due to arena design. As some poster - not sure if it was here or in the official forums - noted; No matter how balanced the classes are, deathmatch style PvP will always favour certain combinations that would not neccesarily be favoured in a capture the flag or zones-of-control environment, such environments presented in battlegrounds. In my personal opinion, the more areas in which performance is required, the better. While arena rating is the easiest available way to mesure PvP success, being only one currently available does not make it the best, or even a good way to do it.


Rating requirements on all PvP items is definitely a step in the right direction, but it's far from "fixing" the flaws of WoW PvP.

 

ceasefire

Well thought out post, and some great food for thought without being laced with poisonous salty tears.

I agree with you that the talents and specs do not *have to be that way.* But I think once you start trying to balance every tree to have utility in both PvE and PvP, the combinations become so staggering in number it becomes impossible to test/control every factor. We all know most trees have a bunch of crappy filler talents, but having all great talents that work well for both sides of the game means broken combinations and other problems can rise far too frequently. A good analogy might be a trading card game, where if you have too many broken cards or mechanics, it creates imbalance.

It would be nice if Blizzard had the time to reevaluate talent trees every patch, but based on their class evaluations pre-bc, I think the design is behind a slow and steady approach. Certain talents are clearly overpowered and have been for quite some time (Cheat Death, Intercept, Mortal Strike, among others). And I truly feel the company has done a good job of toning down a lot of the problem areas (spammable PoM, 40 second fears) with the DR system and adjustments.

The pertinent question with WOTLK is "can it be viable/sustainable for every class to have three talent trees that harmonize well for PvP and PvE?" I think the answer is it's a logistical nightmare and extremely difficult.

In regards to your salient points about battlegrounds, I think the reason behind BG's is basically the general human tendency to "get by with the least amount of effort possible." If you're getting respectable honor gain while losing every game and failing to achieve objectives, there really is no incentive to play hard (or in the case of EOTS, learn the rules). Maybe rated Battlegrounds would remedy that; I don't see very many alternatives.

And yes, adding PR to ilvl 159 epics but capping it out at 1600-1700 is just ridiculous. It's like the worst of both worlds, you displease the hardcore Arena players and the crybabies. Might as well have no cap or a cap starting at 1750 all the way through 2400. I think when you saw a Warrior with Ash'kandi, Dark Edge of Insanity, Might of Menethil, or even Rank 14 weapons you used to run in terror. When you saw/see a Warrior with Torch of the Damned or Cat's Edge or Apolyon, you would definitely show respect (before Hyjal/BT became mass market). That feeling of awe at the difficulty of obtaining an item should return in my opinion. Limiting all such items to a strict percentage (or rating) is a good idea but needs to be taken further.

 

Malakitoo

I guess we can only hope that the system in WotLK will do this by having 2-3 tiers of PvP progression, so that decent players get s5 equivalent while there's a heavy rating req on s6 gear, with s4 being available for everyone as honor/vendor gear. I wish they could have added this type of progression for s4, with s4 being low-no rating req and an s5 of high rating req, but they ran out of ilvl room through poor planning it seems.

I also hope they add some progression or at least different objectives to the honor grind. It's been said, but as a PvPer it's my number one issue with this game: the honor grind sucks, bgs are old and beyond stale, and we're still forced to farm them as one of the most time-consuming grinds in the game. Hopefully they mix it up with some of the new world pvp zones, it would make sense.

As to why PvP takes commitment, it really doesn't if you're just in it for fun, and it wotlk there will be a progression path for people that don't care enough to be in the top ranks, just one tier under the rating req stuff. It is a rated system though, inherently competitive as PvP should be, so if some people take it seriously you have to as well to compete. I'd love if everything was balanced perfectly for 27(30) classes, but at this point in the game it seems impossible for Blizzard to pull off. I would say they have ~15 specs in reasonable balance, and more that are somewhat viable in some situation, which is pretty solid variety. I'd go so far as to say that I have seen every non-tanking spec in the game at a 2k+ rating in some bracket, except for fury warrior.

The wotlk gear unification will also remedy this problem to an extent.

 

Mode

This is definitely deliberate. They recently added a +threat ability to tactical mastery in the warrior tree. This has NO EFFECT on PVP, yet a lot of PVP warriors suddenly got a little extra PVE viability. The new WOTLK arms tree has a talent that reduces the cooldown on Overpower and Revenge by 1/2/3 seconds. The PVP talents in the Prot tree are all getting changes that make taking them for PVE justifiable. It's pretty clear they LIKE things such as Enrage which give you that little extra bit of viability you need to go have fun in BGs, even if they're 'wasted points' in a PVE build. As long as everyone is forced to take some useless talents (Ask destro locks about their deep-tree talents), it balances out in the end.

I'm OK with the model of having a defined pvp tree and just giving the other trees a few pvp toys that they can take along with their pve build. If you want to do arenas, you adopt the PVP tree and buy arena/honor gear for that tree. If you just want to have fun in BGs, sure, you can stay true to your pve build and not feel useless.

 

ceasefire

I think this is the saddest and truest statement about the whole arena experiment. Like others have said, the PvP gear should have been one season behind in progression (so s3 should be coming out shortly, while we're currently in season 2 gear). Then they wouldn't have felt compelled to add a bunch of stupid cookie-cutter badge weapons to stop the crying masses from crying.

I think the team basically failed at planning. Much like a group of sweaty teenagers in the back of a van, the designers failed to use foresight. By rapidly buffing 13 item levels a season (ridiculous by any stretch of the imagination), they forced six to eight month seasons and now the whole murky status of season 4 (what happens if WoTLK is delayed like BC was?) might cause problems.

Most times through Black Temple and especially Hyjal, nearly 1/3rd of the loot is sharded. SSC/TK aren't even touched because of the arena/pvp gear. S4 will be best in slot for numerous roles for numerous players who haven't farmed BT yet. But most decent PvPers will amass a nearly full set on the first few weeks of release. Dumb.

Yet people have this odd idea that they're entitled to ilvl 159 gear just for showing up and failing.

 

Calixtus

Hehe, glad to hear I managed to keep the vitriol bottled up. To avoid quote stacking I'll pick up after "I think the answer is it's a logistical nightmare and extremely difficult."

I'm not entirely convinced it is so. For starters, there's the mumbled intentions of making the 51 point talents "gamebreakingly good". If they pull that off, so people actually want the 51 point talent of their tree of choice (ignoring the previously mentioned stated intentions of the design of the Unholy Death Knight talent tree) regardless of what they plan to do, they actually simplify balance immensely.

Right now, any talent - regardless of tree - that is "in reach" has to be considered for it's PvP/PvE viability. A 31 point talent does not exclude a 21 point talent. A 41 point talent does exclude a 21 point talent. We will therefor not encounter a warlock with Shadowfury and Soul Link, and there is no need to balance either of those two abilities around that contingency. Where as SL/SL is attainable, and at one point lead to two notable nerfs of life draining abilities 1) Soul Siphon toned down 2) Mortal Strike effects affecting leech effects. While both of these changes certainly served to adjust SL/SL, both of them hit affliction based builds harder, who relied more heavily on life returning effects for survival than a build with Soul Link. Affliction spells/talents rebalanced because of how they perform in a build drawing mostly from Demonology.

If you can actually rely on people taking the 51 point talents in any given tree, you have a cut off point in either of the other trees where an ability only has to be balanced after how it affects that particular talent tree (within reason obviously, as you could still screw things up by making something like one 31 pointers and one 21 pointer good enough to stack to overcome the 51 point awesomeness *cough* SL/SL*cough*). And thus, you can actually implement abilities that makes that particular tree worth pursuing for PvP or PvE without upsetting the overall class balance. Near enough as I can tell, Blizzard knows this, have learned from the total fiasco of many of their 41 point talents, and intends to make an effort to avoid that situation in WotlK.


And secondly, there's a reason that has to do a lot less with actual game design. I'm not saying the kind of balance I believe you can implement in this game is easy to implement. But I genuinely believe it's possible to implement. One of the reasons behind this belief is size of the game. Last time I saw a number cited, WoW had 11.5 million players. My old social studies teach used to say that numbers is nothing unless you have something to compare it to, so for the sake of comparison, let's use pre-WoW MMORPG sizes. Nicking the data from mmorpgcharts.com who's been tracking it for a fair few years now, at the time of WoW's launch, a big MMORPG had around 500 000 subscribers. Most, even the ones who were considered succesful, had less. WoW has 22 times as many customers. 22 times as much income as one of the older MMORPGs. I'll repeat that, just for effect; WoW has a monthly income of more than the twenty old-school MMORPGs, taken togheter. That's an order of magnitude difference, and while I actually respect Blizzard's customer service - unlike SOEs, which was just... Not. Proper. - that kind of income also means I have different expectations for what they can and can't do in terms of design that requires resources, compared to the standard in pre-WoW MMORPGs. But even so, as I said, I don't think it would be easy.

But then again, if it was easy, anyone could do it.


And I agree with you, the problem with battlegrounds really is human behaviour and in extension, design that allows that human behaviour. Rated battlegrounds is arguably the easiest way to do it; You wouldn't have to remove the pig's trough of regular battlegrounds, you'd cater to the organized PvP guilds - who seem to be have died a rather brutal death come 2.4 - and all actual "content" you'd need is already designed. Throw in some funky maths for the reward calculation (rated battlegrounds wouldn't even need to give arena points, in fact, it might even be better if they didn't), add a few NPCs, reuse some code from the arena system and you're good to go.

 

• Snowy

Just as a general notice, Season 4 starting date got announced today:

WoW Forums -> Arena Season 4 Coming Soon

 

Good

I'm a little worried after reading this thread, as I've just laid my raiding characters to rest until the expansion and have rolled a druid (for no reason other than the fact that it's the only class I haven't really played to any extent) to PvP with some real life friends. I suppose if I sink enough time into honour farming I'll eventually be able to sit around the lower rating brackets. I'm sorry if I've missed some details on the subject in this thread, but will it be at all realistic for me, as a reroll, to see a decent rating being 3 seasons behind and with a lot of the lower rated teams expected to be leaving the system?

 

Zaniel

Honestly, Good, there is no way for us to know the answer to that question. If you're a good enough player there is always a chance for you to rise in the arena system. You just have to put in the time, effort, and time. Oh, and lots of time.

 

Good

I've managed decent ratings in the past, but my focus has always been on PvE. I suppose it was a pretty silly question. I did sort of answer it myself. Cheers.

 

Oloo

Has there been any word on the prices of season 3 gear? There was a comment made way back when this thread was posted that the helm/legs/chest had dropped to 1500 points? Is there any confirmation of this? I've not seen any.

 

Vaeys

Presuming they didn't change things from the PTR, for s3 stuff head/legs/chest will go down to 1500, shoulders to 1200, and 900 for gloves. Weapons were 2100/900/3000 (main/off/2hand), and 2520 for caster weapons and 800 for wands.

 

ceasefire

An interesting side-effect of season 4 is that TK/SSC now go from "critical condition" to "life support." I remember pre-BC it seemed like Blackwing Lair, MC, and ZG were the most popular dungeons by far even with guilds farming AQ40 and getting halfway through Naxx. BWL in particular still had a lot of great drops to entice the hardcore raiders.

This design decision for BC on the other hand seems terrible. The mudflation of PvP gear and welfare badge gear has basically completely destroyed Mag, Gruul, Karazhan, SSC, TK, and even non-timed Zul'Aman as PvE progression hotspots. I know this is a year after the fact, but still! PvE raids should not be leapfrogged by honor and arena gear. And these raid instances would have been viable if the time frame of arena/honor gear wasn't so poorly implemented and overpowered. Can nullifying years of development and an entire two tier's worth of content really be good for the game? Hopefully they can learn some lessons about this whole fiasco in WOTLK. (I have 5/5 s3, so this isn't a whiny post about PvP gear I can't have).

E-sport objections aside (they made an entirely separate realm with no Stormherald, no s3 gear to balance), shouldn't farming Illidan and Sunwell be expected to give you an advantage in arena/pvp/world pvp? What's wrong with that? The alternative is to have everyone running around in at least 4/5 ilvl 159 gear (after they buy their personals). As an actual elitist jerk, it sickens me.

 

Akka

You don't have to be an actual elitist jerk to be sickened by it.
Even as a pro-casual player who strongly support to open the whole game to the core of the public (ie the average Joe), this seasonal obsolescence of content and overpowered arena/badge gear, is my number 1 gripe with the game by far.

In fact, there is a severe lack of players for most "upper average and above" guilds. Not a lot of motivation to continu to progress, when progression is made obsolete by insane rewards. There is non-stop publicity spam in trade channel from most of the 25-men guilds on my server, all looking for recruits. Even the great numbers of same 25-men guilds collapses didn't put enough raid player "on the market" to satisfy the requirements.
25-men raiding is becoming harder and harder, and the motivation is sinking.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

thorpac

The problem is the way resilience was implemented and itemized.

PvP gear should be primarily resilience and a little stamina, with a limited amount damage modifying stats. The key? Those damage modifying stats do not increase from season to season. Only the amount of resilience/stamina would increase as you progress.

To balance that and prevent PvP gear from becoming T6 tank gear, resilience should only reduce damage taken from other players, and not from PVE sources. Resilience should not cap, or if it does cap, it should be at a very high level.

As an example, Joe Casual wants the Season 1 two-hander to DPS in kara? Fine. It has some damage stats that would make it worthwhile. But if Joe Casual wants to get into SSC and beyond, he has to grab an actual gear upgrade from inside a raid, because the Season 2 weapon will only upgrade in terms of resilience and stamina.

I have no problem with allowing lower-level PvP epics to fill a slot here and there for some players. It opens the door for a lot more people to jump into the raiding pool. But at some point, raiding has to be the goal -- and allowing someone to simply upgrade via PvP isn't going to get you there.

Not everything i say is stupid.

 

Lanlaorn

I don't think you've thought that through Thorpac, it would completely eliminate many styles of play, effectively forcing everyone into an outlast/manadrain composition team. If you're still doing S1 DPS while everyone's survivability has upgraded to S4 status then you're certainly not going to burst anyone down.

In addition, a rogue with warglaives in an arena setting where most everyone else has Karazhan level weapons would be a god among men.

 

thorpac

You're right about not thinking it through entirely -- I was hoping smarter folks would pick it up and run with it.

As far as warglaives go -- if resilience reduced more damage, you would effectively turn those warglaives into S1 dps weapons...or however Blizzard wanted to balance that.

The point of what I was saying, or trying to say, is that maybe there should be a stat that affects only PvP combat and not PvE, in order to keep them separate.

For example, you could make resilience both a defensive AND offensive boost (again, only against other players). So maybe a resilience maxed player with a S4 weapon would have the same damage capability they do today, but the damage difference between the S1 player and the S4 player would be itemized in terms of "offensive" resilience, rather than standard raw stats -- making it useless for PvE advancement and ideal for PvP.

(edit) Under this system, S1 weapons would be great entry level gear for Karazhan, but S4 weapons would be sorely lacking in Black Temple.

Not everything i say is stupid.

 

Malakitoo

This has been suggested many a time in the form of increasingly scaling resilience and the addition of a resilience penetration stat.

Two problems with that: 1) catchup becomes much much harder. Right now, pvp progression is pretty stagnant, you're basically just upgrading the name of your armor every season. Each piece is about a +2 to all stats but resil upgrade. If they kept scaling resilience, you could get in a situation where you become uncrittable to those in lesser/pve gear. The honor grind already is horrible, making you do it twice or three times to catch up would be nearly insurmountable.

2) PvP gear loses all relevance to PvE and vice versa. The objective of the system as outlined by the devs (afaik) is to have being a top player in one area have some relevance to the other. Currently being a top PvEr has a lot of relevance to PvP, even at the highest end. Certainly it has more impact in the middle brackets. Being a top PvPer has no benefit to top end pve at all, currently (free epic gems next patch I guess .... except for healers). It gives you a decent advantage at mid-level pve where the gear is similar, and I think that's fair.

I think Blizzard is trying as hard as they possibly can to avoid anything with the "only works on players" or "only works in certain pvp enabled zones" tags, so as to keep the game consistent and unified as one WoW rather than separate spheres.

You can argue that PvP gear should be harder to get, and I will present to you a legion of people crying about how s4 pvp gear is now so hard to get that they are going to stop trying entirely.

 

Malakitoo