Abusing Ignore in Arenas, will they fix it?

Sniddie · 10/30/07, 9:18 AM

Basically, everyone i know in the top brackets is basically making macros with lots /ignore Randomplayer-Server, different for different classes. I have one for Warlock+DPS, and one for Warlock+Healer teams, so i know when to put on my shadow resistance gear. I certainly wish they would fix it, but at the moment i don't really have a solution for it.

I figured the best way to get something done is to spread the world, maby someone can come up with a solution, or just make blizzard aware enough that its really crushing the warlock teams in the top ranks (atleast on our battlegroup).

(You press the macros when you get into the arena, and it either says alot of "Player not found", and when one of those players are in there it says "Randomplayer-Server has been ignored/has been removed from ignore list")

♦ Praetorian · 10/30/07, 9:28 AM

Yeah I just crafted an SR set for a top player with a few particular nemeses in mind. If you're going to sufficient lengths, really, at the very top of brackets like 2v2 and 3v3, you probably know the other teams you might face. You could have a friend on vent make a level 1 alt on their server and track their queuing and when they enter a particular BG. That'd work regardless.

Is it all really just about SR? Personally I still think their change was heavy-handed. I miss gear-swapping in arenas, not for SR, but to be able to really customize my gear in other ways, such as adding a few non-visible regen pieces for a long 2v2 mana war where I'm being ignored but need to sustain mana to heal my partner. What I'd have done instead is just cap the effect of elemental resistance in PvP. Make it cap out at 140 or so, for no more than 30% reduction/resistance, and just keep it as a viable option if people want to mix that into their gear at the expense of resilience or other pure stats.

I think there's a lot of strategy in building multiple gearsets and choosing the right one for the right situation. Blizzard is never going to completely stop spying on other teams, whether it's via ignore or sending a tell if they're same-faction or, like I said, having someone log on to other servers in the BG to see what teams are doing. If the only abuse is resist gear, then fix that instead.

Juli · 10/30/07, 10:29 AM

The problem with allowing multiple gear sets like that is where you obtain it. If wearing 140 shadow resistance is optimal against many teams, and the only way to get good SR gear is from killing kael'thas, that goes directly against their itemization philosophy for arenas. Now personally I don't care, I have access to raiding gear, but a lot of people do care. If the gear was obtainable through honor grinding (oh god please no, not more honor grinding, wru 4k dailies), crafting, heroics or some more accessible method then sure.

I like playing the itemization/gear metagame, but I can also see how this could make balance more difficult and potentially result in some buffs for casters since we'd be under the assumption that their opponents are always going to have the imposed cap resistance. There's also the argument of 'well he can put on the 'plate equivalent' for shadow spells against me, where's my set that trades spell damage/resilience for plate mitigation to swap on against rogues/warriors/hunters? and I don't think that's too unreasonable a question.

nurf · 10/30/07, 10:49 AM

Originally Posted by Juli

(oh god please no, not more honor grinding, wru 4k dailies)

A bit of topic but that is not the accurate honor gain from dailies...It's 400 honor. It was off by 10 * in the formula they have on PTR.

Jitta · 10/30/07, 11:07 AM

I think about the gear swap change every time my 2v2 (me+warrior) go up against a SPriest/Warlock team. I was forming up some greens to get "some" SR in a few slots + trinket in hopes of repelling some of the imbalance in that match up but once the change went in I just give it the best go and hope one of them DCs or something while we try to force the SPriest to drop form.

I do miss swapping around a few trinkets/gear slots at the start of the battle based on the fight i see coming in 3v3 a ton as well. Mana war (regen) vs anti-gib trinkets (paladin BWL trinket), etc.

I think my overall dislike for arenas has been growing because paladins are just too defensive for an offensive favored game setup. That is a different topic though.

Tower · 10/30/07, 11:08 AM

I play with a shadowpriest and I'd use the neck and SR cloak in a heartbeat, if I had access to it. Clearly some classes get more out of non-resist swapping than others.

Covertghost · 10/30/07, 11:18 AM

It's a bit of a pain for me, I used to switch between full haste, arena, or T6/crit/+heal depending on the situation.

What I miss is the customizing gear for a certain situation. Now you just put on gear beforehand hoping that you'll play the same team you've played a couple times previously in the day. Really gets rid of a lot of the gear strategy and basically forces the identical character problem in higher end arena.

heel · 10/30/07, 11:35 AM

Like everyone else I know, I abuse this heavily. It would certainly be nice if it got fixed. It would be even nicer, though, if they did what Gurgthock said and created a new pvp ruleset in which resistance had a low cap. Such a change would be invisible to the vast majority of pvpers. There are situations in all brackets where I'll switch gear against a specific team, but wins due to shadow resistance are the only degenerate/unfair outcome of that. All other gear switching is very reasonable, and very much a part of the arena metagame.

Sniddie · 10/30/07, 11:38 AM

Originally Posted by Praetorian

Yeah I just crafted an SR set for a top player with a few particular nemeses in mind. If you're going to sufficient lengths, really, at the very top of brackets like 2v2 and 3v3, you probably know the other teams you might face. You could have a friend on vent make a level 1 alt on their server and track their queuing and when they enter a particular BG. That'd work regardless.

Is it all really just about SR? Personally I still think their change was heavy-handed. I miss gear-swapping in arenas, not for SR, but to be able to really customize my gear in other ways, such as adding a few non-visible regen pieces for a long 2v2 mana war where I'm being ignored but need to sustain mana to heal my partner. What I'd have done instead is just cap the effect of elemental resistance in PvP. Make it cap out at 140 or so, for no more than 30% reduction/resistance, and just keep it as a viable option if people want to mix that into their gear at the expense of resilience or other pure stats.

I think there's a lot of strategy in building multiple gearsets and choosing the right one for the right situation. Blizzard is never going to completely stop spying on other teams, whether it's via ignore or sending a tell if they're same-faction or, like I said, having someone log on to other servers in the BG to see what teams are doing. If the only abuse is resist gear, then fix that instead.

I for one would be very happy if the re-allowed us to change gear inside of arenas, but cap the resistance to something balanced, i do not think that this will happen though.

Creating a level 1 alt is noticably more painful then running ignore macros.

If they could turn off /ignore and /whisper commands while in an arena, it would help ALOT towards this current behavior. I must say i have it abit from both sides, since i play rogue/holypriest with my rogue. And Spriest/Warlock with my priest, but it feels so cheesy to run into the warlock/x team with 350 shadow resistance on our team.

Juli · 10/30/07, 11:47 AM

Originally Posted by nurf

A bit of topic but that is not the accurate honor gain from dailies...It's 400 honor. It was off by 10 * in the formula they have on PTR.

Yeah, I know, I was lamenting the fact that they removed them on the PTR and that it was a mistake.

Calantus · 10/30/07, 12:19 PM

If they took away the biggest advantages to knowing who your opponents are before the match they could just let us know who we were facing. Just make it so you can click the little arena icon on your mini-map for the team name and classes for your opponents. Let people switch out gear for different matchups, let people rush/hang back because of the combo they are fighting. I think that'd be the best method, just strip away any advantage to be had by spotting teams or /ignore macros and let loose with the information. The main thing stopping this from being a good idea is the resistance stacking that completely shuts down certain combos.

Reubarb · 10/30/07, 1:28 PM

The way I see it, the only way to fix this is to do the following:

1) For preventing exploitation of cross-server match-ups: Disable whispering/ignoring while in arenas.
2) For preventing exploitation of same-server match-ups: If you /who someone while they are in an arena it should display that they are simply in an arena (and not say which one), or that they are in the city that they queued from.

Yes, people could still use vent with alts on different servers, but honestly there is absolutely no way around that.

Vectivus · 10/30/07, 1:39 PM

Originally Posted by Reubarb

The way I see it, the only way to fix this is to do the following:

1) For preventing exploitation of cross-server match-ups: Disable whispering/ignoring while in arenas.
2) For preventing exploitation of same-server match-ups: If you /who someone while they are in an arena it should display that they are simply in an arena (and not say which one), or that they are in the city that they queued from.

Yes, people could still use vent with alts on different servers, but honestly there is absolutely no way around that.

Wouldn't your second solution (displaying the city that the team is queued in) remove the alt situation, too?

I'm not sure how easy/difficult it would be to implement, but it seems like it would 'solve' the problem. If you really want to avoid level 1 alts, make it so you can't queue for Arenas in Azeroth (this may be taking the top 0.5% bracket's metagame to something of an extreme...).

McInaction · 10/30/07, 2:15 PM

Even if you disabled the ignore macros there are other ways of finding out who your opponents are. I run very few mods when i arena and load quickly, first thing I do is flip humanoid tracking and run up against the door. I can see half their team before the anti-tracking blocker actually kicks in.

Then I have 50 seconds to look them up on the armory?

My main gripe with the change is not resistant gear (I just got my mother sharaz sr recently) it's not being able to rotate my trinkets with FD.

I use to open up with the zg trinket double multishot combo with the assist train, which pretty much is a sure kill without a bop, and then fd and swap to something more longterm like bloodlust brooch.

I think capping resistances in the arena would be a very nice solution.

glick · 10/30/07, 2:35 PM

The current state of gear swapping is actually worse off for shadow dps teams than it was before the change. They gimped alternate spell penetration sets so now the "answer" to the problem isn't even viable.

Loomax · 10/30/07, 2:57 PM

I actually used the "ignore trick" yesterday the first time, after running into the same SP/Lock combo four times out of around 15 games and have to admit that I would consider it quite close to cheating in some way. There is a huge difference between just equipping 2 pieces shadowresistance out of the blue or having 3xx resistance, because you know that you run into a full shadowteam.

Originally Posted by Juli

There's also the argument of 'well he can put on the 'plate equivalent' for shadow spells against me, where's my set that trades spell damage/resilience for plate mitigation to swap on against rogues/warriors/hunters? and I don't think that's too unreasonable a question.

Tho this leads me to something, which I was thinking about for quite some time.
Alot of times I hear casters complaining about the resistances etc., but if you look at the Merciless gladiator sets you can see that Priests/Warlocks/Druids all got extra armor on their sets. Compare this with not a single form of resistance on any set.

Maybe I'm just biased, because I mainly play melee classes in arenas (Warrior main/Rogue alt), but if the trend continues, we basically will see an increase in stats every season. Now thats not a problem at all, but while a caster gains pure damage from his increased damage stats, a rogue or warrior's increase in damage stats dimishes along the increased armor on said caster sets too.
[Merciless Gladiator's Dreadweave Hood] upgraded to [Vengeful Gladiator's Dreadweave Hood] is only a meaningless 14 armor, but still more mitigation against melee than anyone will gain against any form of spells.

I guess I am quite wrong with my assumptions, since I didn't do any form of maths to see how much any class gains from their sets. So if I am wrong please let me know!

Suesse · 10/30/07, 3:11 PM

Originally Posted by Loomax

I guess I am quite wrong with my assumptions

I think so.
Notice that if they were wearing pve gear instead, going from tier 5 to tier 6 would result in approximately the same armor increase. The slight armor increase tied to item level is very small compared to the stat gain they see.

Do you really want to see resists added to the warrior set? It will be at the cost of stats like stamina, crit/hit, strength, or armor penetration.

Aphyrax · 10/30/07, 3:55 PM

Originally Posted by Juli

The problem with allowing multiple gear sets like that is where you obtain it. If wearing 140 shadow resistance is optimal against many teams, and the only way to get good SR gear is from killing kael'thas, that goes directly against their itemization philosophy for arenas.

To be quite honest, I threw a fit when I learned that they make me grind 60 badges for a decent PvP healing cloak. If I quit this game it will be over stuff like that.

I like to PvP. Thats pretty much it. Other things are fun in small dosages, but those small dosages do not get you the top end gear that you need to compete. 12 heroic Mechanar runs is not a small dosage for me. And if I cannot compete, what is the point? If I have to invest heavily into PvE to stay competitive - see first paragraph.

The standard answer is that this is a mainly PvE game and that Blizzard wants you to be involved in the PvE aspect. Fine. But they also want my money. Or they should want it. How many customers do you gain by forcing PvPers to PvE? I don't know if you gain any. How many customers do you lose that way? At least one, me.

If they want to build up some sort of gear meta game then they better be handing me that gear on a silver platter.

Nerull · 10/30/07, 4:38 PM

Originally Posted by Loomax

I guess I am quite wrong with my assumptions, since I didn't do any form of maths to see how much any class gains from their sets. So if I am wrong please let me know!

Having both warlock and resto shaman I know both sides of the story. As warlock I cannot think of anything more terrible than a completely SR decked melee on me. It might take a bit longer to kill me, but with SR ticking in there is nothing I can do it against it.

I see you mention the armor upgrade for cloth and it being unfair, how would you call the armor penetration then, which in case a full set is used makes the actual armor of a clothie lower than season 2 gear ? What do casters get in return ? Its still being tweaked, but the answer was spell penetration, now this is removed on some pieces on PTR Im curious what the answer will be. Spell penetration is not really the answer imo since if you dont play top rated arena, people wont bother switching gear etc, meaning the cloth die significantly faster : Try killing a clothie with a sunder armor on it and without , you will see a great difference. People laugh at it often and calling it noob, but whenever I see a warrior using sunder armor on either of my chars, I know Im in trouble, they know how to play.

Playing on the shaman however , grouped with a warrior, nothing upsets me more than SP/Lock combo's , just dotting up my warrior then double silence and deathcoil / chain fear - Im not feared for long but enough to interrupt my heal even after doing watershield to trick the felhunter to eat it instead of the NS, the warrior often dies before I can get the 2nd heal in. I find this combination totally insane and borderline impossible to beat as warrior/healer combo unless you severely outgear them or they make stupid mistakes. Ive been crying a long time for the insignia to also remove silence effects, how do other ( healers mostly ) feel about this ? I can only see it as a bit overpowered for paladins who can then trinket + bubble and outlast 2 dps teams.

Sorry, on topic : Yes, make it impossible to ignore and whisper in arena's. Also make the location of the players by doing /who show something like : Arena Battleground and its almost full proof Id say.

Vectivus · 10/30/07, 4:46 PM

Originally Posted by Nerull

Ive been crying a long time for the insignia to also remove silence effects, how do other ( healers mostly ) feel about this ? I can only see it as a bit overpowered for paladins who can then trinket + bubble and outlast 2 dps teams.

Slight derail, but I think it makes perfect sense. The trinket could be reworked to remove silences and snap off the end of counterspells.

The only problem I see with this, though, is if it begins to snowball - why doesn't my PvP trinket remove MS or Wound Poison? Those debuffs limit the performance of my character too!

On-topic, I think instating some kind of prevention mechanic on adding/removing friends/ignores in Arenas, as well as keeping all tells in some kind of queue until the Arena match concludes, would be a good start. Showing characters as being in Arena, but not specifying which one, seems like a very obvious solution.

togge · 10/30/07, 7:31 PM

Originally Posted by Vectivus

If you really want to avoid level 1 alts, make it so you can't queue for Arenas in Azeroth (this may be taking the top 0.5% bracket's metagame to something of an extreme...).

I got a lvl 1 alt in shattrath on all other servers in our battlegroup. My partner used to have one on the other faction. Mostly used them for communicating but you can easily spy teams as well.

Just tell a mage that you're and IRL friend of his guildmate whom you just looked up on armory and he'll port you to shattrath.

• Mex · 10/30/07, 7:33 PM

Trinket shouldn't remove silence / spell school lock outs / disarm / non-snare poisons / curse of tongues, etc etc etc imo. I think it should remove JoJ though.

doogless · 10/30/07, 8:32 PM

Originally Posted by Loomax

Maybe I'm just biased, because I mainly play melee classes in arenas (Warrior main/Rogue alt), but if the trend continues, we basically will see an increase in stats every season. Now thats not a problem at all, but while a caster gains pure damage from his increased damage stats, a rogue or warrior's increase in damage stats dimishes along the increased armor on said caster sets too.
[Merciless Gladiator's Dreadweave Hood] upgraded to [Vengeful Gladiator's Dreadweave Hood] is only a meaningless 14 armor, but still more mitigation against melee than anyone will gain against any form of spells.

With armor penetration being added, you will hit clothies significantly harder next season than you do now. In the same slot that a caster gains 14 armor going from s2 to s3, a melee class is gaining 84 armor penetration.

Calantus · 10/30/07, 9:54 PM

Originally Posted by Aphyrax

To be quite honest, I threw a fit when I learned that they make me grind 60 badges for a decent PvP healing cloak. If I quit this game it will be over stuff like that.

I like to PvP. Thats pretty much it. Other things are fun in small dosages, but those small dosages do not get you the top end gear that you need to compete. 12 heroic Mechanar runs is not a small dosage for me. And if I cannot compete, what is the point? If I have to invest heavily into PvE to stay competitive - see first paragraph.

The standard answer is that this is a mainly PvE game and that Blizzard wants you to be involved in the PvE aspect. Fine. But they also want my money. Or they should want it. How many customers do you gain by forcing PvPers to PvE? I don't know if you gain any. How many customers do you lose that way? At least one, me.

If they want to build up some sort of gear meta game then they better be handing me that gear on a silver platter.

That's my thought exactly. I already pay for and play this game. I am paying you already Blizzard. I will also be reactivating my second account so I can fit in a deathnight character (and transfering a character off my main account). You don't need to hook me into anything. Every week I do my arenas and that will continue until I get tired of this game or you do something to piss me off. Arenas don't run out because you don't grind them and boom you're done. There's always improving yourself, figuring out matchups, climbing the ladder, FUN. All that good stuff. Making me grind a bunch of heroics at the start of the season isn't going to do anything but piss me the hell off. And I won't be pugging that either, it will be with friends so no PVEer will benefit from me doing them.

Maynard · 10/30/07, 10:15 PM

The SR issue naturally ties back to the prevalence of Warlocks at the high end, although I guess it's not inconcievable that in a (purely theoretical) balanced high-end 2v2 you could have an AC, FrR, FR, SR, NR, even AR sets in your bag... If there was more variety amongst teams at the high end, they could remove the ignore/whisper trick and players would have to hedge their bets not knowing what classes they're up against. Currently even if the trick was removed, you could probably still hedge your bets with SR rings/neck/cloak.

On the different pathways issue (likely a tangent), I enjoy heroics but not the gear that comes from them (since there's no real heroic 'progression'), so personally I'm going to enjoy a chance to log on and do something besides my <x> games a week and the co-occurant honour grind. In a similar vein I didn't mind grinding mats to get my Resolute Cape crafted for my Druid's PvP gear.

What I don't understand is why Blizzard applied the "multiple paths to the same gear" thinking with trinkets, but not the new cloaks? If they wanted PvPers to do Heroics, that's questionable, but at least it's consistent.

Originally Posted by Calantus

If they took away the biggest advantages to knowing who your opponents are before the match they could just let us know who we were facing.

I think you'd run in to a rock/paper/scissors issue here, though.

Druid/Warrior sees opponents are Warlock/Spriest, Dru/War equips +140 SR.

Next game, Warlock/Spriest puts on +140 Spell Penetration.

Next game, Druid/Warr ditch the SR and enjoy that their opponents are running around with useless spell pen. Lather, rinse, repeat.