Eskamo

Long-time reader, first-time poster, so be gentle, please.

Many lament the fact that gear is widely seen as the prevailant factor in determining the outcome of a PvP encounter, while 'skill' has been reduced to nothing after one player has successively hit 1-5 on their keyboard and then spammed 6 until the cooldowns are finished to allow the method to be repeated.

What if there was a way to bring 'skill' back to the fore?

My suggestion is this: decrease the global cooldown by 25%.

It would increase the number of actions per minute (APM) players can make (40 APM to 53.333 APM), often a measure of skill in real-time strategy games, and place more emphasis on the reaction times of players. Casters would even get to make use of haste rating for 1.5sec spells.

Of course, there are many potential balancing issues (other classes benefitting more than others), DPS increases and those with poor latency would be royally screwed.

In addition, the definition of 'skill' is open to question as some could argue that this would just lead to people laying out their sequence a bit faster and not emphasising the use of counters.

Thoughts?

 

◊ Shadowed

Energy would probably have to be reworked slightly for decreasing GCD to not hurt Rogues/Feral Druids, but not sure.

 

• Nite_Moogle

APM doesn't equate to skill any more than a stormstrike/windfury quad for 8K does.

 

Spades

APM has nothing to do with skill. It's just a representation of how fast you can press buttons, and it was the same in RTS. The guy who spammed his hotkeys wasn't any better at the game than the guy who only pressed the buttons he needed to press. Anyone who looked at a replay and saw, say, 600 APM (which some Korean SC players got up to) and thought "wow, he must be the best player ever" weren't thinking clearly. Did good players usually have high APM? Yes. Were they good players because they had high APM? No.

In response to the original question, I would put more emphasis on CC and less on straight-up damage.

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-Rorschach, Watchmen

 

Yaksha

As the game currently stands, I would say that skill is how well you and your team mates can work together to control your opponents, your knowledge of your class, and knowledge of other classes. How often do you gain tunnel vision and then forget to use that healthstone you had, trinket that was available, move out of LoS of that incoming PoM Pyro? How often do you find that you could've won a match if you had made better use of positioning?

Gear does play a factor, that I won't disagree with; but knowing how to effectively control an opponent(s) while staying aware of one's surrounding easily shows who the better player is. Gear really amounts to little more than play time and luck. Just my opinions.

 

drole

Saying that skill isn't an issue for PvP is a vast overstatement. Obviously gear matters, but so far i think that side of the game is balanced quite well.

As for your suggestion, i quite like it, but would like to take it way further. Why not remove it all together? Sure this would overpower classes with spamable instant casts (Moonfire SPAM?), but there are multiple ways to counter this like resource costs, adding cast times or small cooldowns.

That being said i don't ever think changes like this will go through. For a game to be reasonably succesfull (and profitable) you need to make it attractive for the majority. This includes, but is not limited to average players with average reactions and/or learning curves. Making the gap between those players and the good ones too big would make the game "boring" for the not-so-skilled players since they would loose every time. Adding stuff like luck factors, "i-win-buttons", gear dependency and "easy-to-maneuver"-classses helps this slightly as they generally defeat the purpose of skill.

My point is that you have to preserve some kind of balance when it comes to the impact of skill and i generally think wow is quite good off in this category,

 

Braids

This was answered a long time ago by a Dev or a forum rep (I forget), but the GCD in place prevents tons of issues with automatic botting and automatic ability use. IICR, the example that was given was the scripted ability to switch Paladin's auras from Devotion to Sanctity, back and forth to coincide with when the Pally would be hit by a mob (Devotion), and when he would strike back with the holy dmg bonus (Sanctity). GCD prevents things like this from happening.

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drole

That is true, but as i stated it really isn't hard to imagine ways of preventing this.

 

Liebestod

Changing the GCD would bring in a lot of balance issues.

Why not just speed the gameplay up by 25%? :P That'd achieve the same thing.

 

Andorien

There are at least two issues that I see with this proposal:

1) A decreased GCD puts more emphasis on things like a low ping, a better computer, smoother internet connection, etc. The GCD, I think, is in place for a technical reason in addition to its gameplay reasons.

2) The ability to play fast is only one kind of skill, not skill as a whole. What you suggest is akin to recommending playing speed chess over normal chess as a way to emphasize skill.

 

Tzan

Decreasing the GCD just makes players with higher latency easier targets, there's no increase in skill usage.

Increase it to 3 seconds. Making it much longer takes away the 'twitch' factor. Spamming abilities would be less effective because people would be more mobile and more able to use positioning and area features for tactical advantage. One would also have to make good choices regarding skill usage because the cost of making a poor action selection would be greater.

 

• Lanky

This is precisely where we stand and why arena PvP is so popular and enjoyed at this point. It often comes down to the following in order: Team play and dynamics, class knowledge and versitility, reaction time, then gear.

That being said, the "gear gap" problem can still exist, but honestly it would not be an RPG world worth mentioning if there was no real disparity between character power based on gear acquired.

Gear must matter.

Any GCD less than about a second is "Bloodlust territory" where insane things happen cumulatively and kill people in far too quickly of a time period. This can currently happen today and is one of the main reasons Shamans are popular on 5v5 teams.

 

Voljun

Both of those problems make this idea not even feasible.

I'd love for PvP to put more emphasis on true player ability, but I do think they have a pretty good system worked out with arena. There is definitely an emphasis on skill. The difference between ~1800 and 2.3k+ is unbelievable.

 

Eland

I think doubling (or tripling) HP and Mana for Arena would be interesting.

 

Aphyrax

It would be sad if twitch was the best they could do to determine skill in this game. Shooters are all about twitch because they are extremely simplistic. This game is not. Chess does not require any APM and yet is one of the best tests of skill out there.

Also, there was this top WC3 player (name escapes me, its been a while) who deliberately minimized his actions to what is actually neccessay. His APM was 60-80. Doing 200 things a minute is not helpful when 180 out of the 200 decisions are poor.

 

Ultramagnetic

Do people generally equate reaction time with skill? I didn't think reaction time could be learned or improved? Or at least, each person has a hard limit that's physiological, not a matter of laziness or inattention.

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hawkon

One thing they could do to make pvp more skill based is remove/reduce the random effects in pvp, such as resists. What they did to improved concentration aura was a huge leap in the right direction. Now if they'd do that for stun resists etc, pvp would be less random.

 

Wensleydale

I don't think there are enough attack-counterattack combinations to make WoW interesting if spells and attacks were guaranteed to land or deal consistent damage. Some skill is required to quickly change tactics when something random or unexpected occurs, such as a stun resist or frostbite proc, or a chain of critical attacks. World of Deterministic Warcraft would be pretty dull, seeing how there's no multi-level counter and reversal combat system like modern 1v1 fighting games can have--it would be possible to take complete control of the fight in many cases because all that theorycraft you see on the official WoW forums about "How to kill class X" could be repeated with absolute reliability.

 

Eskamo

I think some people read only half of my post here, thank you very much for reiterating what I said.

Chess is a turn-based strategy game and. thus, has really no implications for any real-time game such as WoW or Tetris for that matter, it's all about projection and prediction of the next 'X' number of moves. Some see the definition of skill in chess as knowing when to swap of which pieces.

However, what I am talking about with increasing the number of APM in WoW is that the player's brain would have to deal with information more quickly. The intensity of the game would increase as one has to identify the opponent's tactics, evaluate the danger posed by such plans and then respond correctly. Those who are 'better' at PvP would response more quickly and usually more appropriately.

The GCD is a method of limiting the number of APM, as such it levels the playing field for those who cannot think fast enough and, therefore, imposes a ceiling on the 'skill' of this game.

Subsequently, PvP encounters are determined by random factors e.g. crit, resists.

 

nfw

I always thought ranged class should have to aim their shots, but I'm biased.

 

◊ Kalman

APM isn't the same thing as skill. Timing and tactics are far more skillful than button mashing. Further, the GCD serves an important function by forcing you to commit to an action; reduce or eliminate it, and the whole tactical aspect of move-counter is significantly reduced, to the level of a twitch game, which WoW is not and shouldn't become.

Reducing GCD really wouldn't result in more actions being taken, either; casters still have to cast, which is generally an action at or greater than the GCD. The main result would really be increasing damage burst, since AP-PoM-Pyro-FiBl suddenly becomes a 1 second combo, not a 1.5, since ambush-BS is now 1s, etc. As Blizzard is trying to move the PvP game away from the rapid burst game it once was towards a more strategic/tactical game where players can survive burst for long enough for healing classes to react, this whole discussion is counter to the obvious trend of the game.

In short: it's a bad idea, since it would make PvP less interesting and more of a twitch game, and it's also directly counter to the observed intentions of the designers.

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Keline

Many people that claim this are usually people that have neither skill nor equipment and simply blame it on equipment.

 

Eskamo

I would agree with everything you said. Then I would ask you to (re-)read the sentence in my first post about balancing issues (I didn't go into any depth with in the hope that poeple would read a short statement rather than a wall of text).

The idea about multiplying all mana and health by a x once a player enters the arena/BG is a good one I think.

(World PvP... that still exist?)

 

Savos

Completely relying on a random number generator isn't going to help the case of skill based gameplay much either.

Warrior mantra of "I'd have won if I crit more" or whatever in 1v1 as applicible.

Though you can overcome bad rolls with team help it still doesn't help that in an even match you are gonna get rolled if a double crit mage PoM Pyro instantly removes your Paladin before he can shield or something.

Plus the base class disparity in usefulness in 5v5.

Plus horrible movement code by Blizzard choosing to use TCP. (potentially 5 seconds to register a movement command?!)

Some randomness is good, CS:S has a fair bit which is both good and bad depending on who you ask. But to the level of current WoW PvP? Not so much in my opinion.

 

DecimusGarona

Or your Paladin could be paying attention to the mages crackling with power and bubble before the Pyroblasts land. The only way a skilled Paladin is going to die with his bubble up is if his Holy school gets locked down.

Heck, I'm a resto druid and I can usually overcome the PoM pyro strategy by pre-hotting myself and mashing NS just as it lands. Very few teams have more than one AP mage and even fewer have the coordination to get both pyros to land at the exact same time.


Nicely put.