So you would prefer the current situation in which it is possible to go 250-300 above your penetration level? I guess I'm just confused as to why you think a piece or 2 of gear + a resist buff is completely unfair to your class. The resilience change to DoTs was a nice bone to throw everyone else, but overall it was a large buff to warlocks vs anyone who wasn't wearing SR when the gates opened. I'm certainly not noticing a huge increase in survivability from my awesome 7% less DoT damage at 300 resil. Definitely not anywhere near the increase in my survivability vs a rogue, warrior, etc.

Well obviously there are itemization problems that come with this, since everything works off a formula. The more overarching solution would be to decrease the cost of resists/penetration in the budget, which would also have the benefit of spilling over into PvE, and I'm pretty sure no one is gonna complain about the need for less bank space for resist gear.

Of course not, only paladins should be allowed to bubble (and the paladin bubble is not permanent).

Maybe because 30% extra mitigation would mean an auto-loose for any shadow based 2v2 teams? In my battlegroup (Blackout) the first 20 2v2 teams contains 8 warriors, 8 druids, 6 locks and 5 priests. What do you think it would look like if shadow dps was reduced by 30%? Warlocks are good in 2v2, no question about that, but locks don't have monopoly on viable 2v2 team compositions.

You are mistaken if you think locks get significantly more out of resiliance. The melee damage reduction can be calculated as follows:

D_0 = D (1 + c)
D_r = D (1 + (c - r)(1 - 2r))

At c=0.28, r=0.10 one gets 1 - D_r/D_0 = 0.114 (i.e. 11.4% damage mitigation which should be compared to 10% dot damage reduction).

Resistance gear is already underpriced by an order of a magnitute - and you want to make it even cheaper?!

So you get 10% more out of resilience than non DOT classes get out of it against you and that's not a significant amount? Didn't you just say 30% was an auto lose? Now 10% is insiginificant? Seems like you've got some trouble making up your mind on what is statisticially significant sir.

Well, about 3 posts up here, I've got someone complaining that they don't want resists on their gear because it would be too expensive. Now I'll admit, I don't know, nor do I care where specific stats fall in the item budget, I'm just going off of what people say. Take it up with people who claim differently.

I'm speachless . 30% mitigation of incoming damage from shadow resist and 10% more effect from resiliance (i.e. 1% extra mitigation of incoming damage) are two completely different things...

If you want it expressed in a different way... equipping two pieces of shadow resistance gear corresponds to a boost of your resiliance by 270%. Obviously it isn't possible to balance the game when that kind of gear can be used in the arenas.

Unless they fixed it recently (which is possible, it's been a month since I tried), ignore doesn't work cross-server. You get the message but can still see what they say/get tells.

Yes.

I'd like to chime in a few bits that aren't necessarily related to one another..

1. How about the possibility of simply MORE arena and BG gear options at the same tier.. let's say that for a mage there's a high offense set (emphasis on damage stats with built-in spell penetration), balanced set (mix of stats, much like there is now), defensive set (still have damage and crit but also have a stronger emphasis on armor and built-in resists). Have one of each of these sets for each class of arena armor.. so have 3x the pieces of enhancement gear, 3x the pieces of elemental, and 3x the pieces of resto gear (in the case of a shaman). How this helps:

- Some PVPers are upset at the very limited selection of gear (and limited options overall). This gives them some more choice.. the item level is balanced without feeling like the mirror-match on the other side of the arena is geared exactly the same as they are.
- It gives high rating teams an advantage over medium rating teams since high rating teams can actually get multiple pieces per slot and even socket them differently. In the current system, everyone has a full set of the same Season X gear by the end of the season.
- People will always have something to complain about regarding single sets of pvp gear.. "my gear doesn't have enough armor/stam", "my gear doesn't have enough raw spell damage"... if you give people the choice I think they'll have much less reason to complain.

Of course, this change doesn't help too much if you can't swap gear in arenas anymore unless you showed the matchups before the fight starts. I guess it solves some tangential problems, but I like the idea of it in my ideal world. =)

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2. Regarding the usefulness of PVE gear in PVP. Something that I've always had a problem with is the arrangement of battlegroups and the mix of developed and undeveloped servers. This was a much bigger deal before TBC when our server, which started in Aug '06, was in the same battlegroup as servers that have been around since Dec '04. Our blue-equipped teams vs. full T3 teams in WSG and not being able to do a thing about it but keep queuing and taking the abuse.

TBC was a great equalizer for this kind of thing but we're back in the dumps.. the forgotten coast is such a small server and PVE advancement is incredibly hard since the number of available, raidable characters isn't enough to support more than a handful of guilds per side. Horde-side TFC has 1 guild halfway through SSC and a few more in Gruul/KZ. Getting BT gear just isn't an option for me on the server that I'm on.

It's a bit frustrating knowing that regardless of how much I do on my server and in my battlegroup in the PVP world, it's simply not possible (on this server) to match the PVE items that are available on higher population servers. On the other hand, I do have the option to transfer to another, more populous server to join a PVE guild and be able to acquire some of these items. Unfortunately, that's something that I have to pay for and it means leaving my roots on TFC. That seems like an excessive and unfair solution.

My logic may be flawed but at the moment it feels like I'm being punished in PVP because my server doesn't have the population to support end-game raiding. Is this okay?

The statement that resilience is too good to pass up is a gross generalization. Do you really think that Zhar'doom is worse than the MG War Staff because the latter has resilience?

For one, it's been mentioned several times in this post that high shadow resist gear is available to high-end raiders because of TK and BT, did I misread that? As one of the characters that's thoroughly hosed by ultra-high shadow resist gear, I guess I'm especially sensitive to it.

I can think of many examples where high-end PVE gear is substantially better than PVP acccessible gear.. particularly in regard to trinkets, ranged slot items, and weapons.

Trinket examples: madness of the betrayer for melee classes and voidstar talisman for demo locks.

Not if your team is using a combination of voice and chat messages for communication in the Arena. I have macros I press under certain circumstances as well as announce in Voice.

There's also trash talking in same-faction matches which is something you should be able to ignore.


You're looking at it the wrong way. Resists scale with levels. I'll show you with arbitrary numbers.

100 dodge rating increases your dodge chance against same level opponents by 20% at level 60 and 17% at level 70.

100 Resistance increases your chance to resist a binary spell by 20% at level 60 and by 17% at level 70.

See? It scales exactly like every other defensive stat. The only difference here is that we have a cap whereas you can raise dodge to 100%.

In all honesty making any shadow based 2v2 team an auto-lose isn't a problem worthy of being fixed by a change in fundamental game mechanics. At worst, all it means it the you join the many other class/spec combs that are unmitigated crap in the 2v2 bracket. Welcome to the land of the holy pally/holy priest or resto druid/enhance shammy or any other of a number of class and spec combos.

The BT resist gear would make being on a team that depends solely on shadow damage a bad idea if you could gear swap in arena. It certainly wouldn't make a shadow priest or lock a liability on a five vs five team.


What really gets me about not being able change gear in arena is that it seems like they made a fundamental change, which I don't like, to preserve a small subset of teams in 2v2 and 3v3 from joining the many other team types in irrelevance. If you didn’t need to change arena mechanics to make duel enhancement shaman viable why on earth did you need to do it to make shadow priest/lock combos viable?

But we are not talking about such a small subset in the 2v2 bracket. Any combination of warlock/healer or SP/healer would be completely unviable (as would the SP/lock combination). And the problem is by no means restricted to shadow casters. Competitive teams would get other kinds of resist sets too (balance druids and elemental shamans come to mind). The 2v2 bracket would end up being completely dominated by warrior/healer combinations (and those teams are already very strong).

It is true that there are unviable combinations in 2v2 and 3v3, but I fail to see why it is a good idea to intentionally add to that number and also alllow a mechanism which makes it near impossible to balance those brackets.

A much more productive way is to look at classes/specs that are underrepresented in the arena and buff them somewhat.