Kaber

I said nothing about keeping the /ignore feature as it used to be, which is an important distinction that you missed when you quoted me out of context. Druid/Warrior and Druid/Hunter are not nearly as effective without the ability to swap in PvE gear against a number of combinations (whether it is SR or standard raid gear) and we should see SP/Lock dominating 2's again fairly soon. My point is that I have no problem with resistance sets assuming that you do not know who you are fighting ahead of time. That makes it a gamble, and if there were gear that could be gotten with PvP it would not be as imbalanced as requiring BT/Hyjal progression to compete.

Do you honestly believe that people used sets at high rankings featuring nothing but SR for no reason? It was because SP/Lock was so powerful you had to stack your team to counter them. The problem is that the counter just flipped it to where SP/Lock was fairly useless. Well without /ignore you do not have to worry quite as much about facing 350+ SR, but it would still be nice to tailor a suit to fit your needs whether you are trying to stack SR, armor, NR, or whatever else.

It's funny you should say that because the current teams on top are exactly what were the counter teams (with stacked SR) to the old flavor of the month: SP/Lock. Also, Priest/Rogue is far from bad against Warrior/Druid after the slew of buffs Rogues received. The idea behind allowing any type of resistance gear (without using the ignore feature) is that whatever the current "team of the month" happened to be, you could make a suit by spending arena or BG points to give your combo a boost in countering them. That would ultimately create a situation where no team could stay on top for too long before people begin using gear to counter it, and you would end up seeing much more diversity.

 

◊ Praetorian

Why do people constantly say SR gear requires BT progression? A full set of SR gear costs less than an epic mount on most servers. Much much less in some cases (less than 2k gold on Mal'Ganis, for example).

 

Kaber

Not all servers have guilds with BT on farm. Mine for example has zero guilds Horde side that have done a full clear of BT and none of the guilds currently working on the content are selling SR gear.

 

Lodekim

Well unfortunately, I've pretty much quit pvping in season 3, and even in season 2, I was only around the mid 1900's on my best teams, but there are still some interesting things this post brings up in my opinion.

For one, I do think it's a pretty safe bet to say this could have been expected for a while, it's definitely against what Blizzard has tried to do with Arenas, so it comes down to commenting on opinions on gear swapping.


Personally, I agree with Gurgthock that being able to swap gear adds additional strategy. I would like to allow gear swapping in the arena once it's started personally, just as you can outside of arenas (I'll comment on the negatives after). All shadow dps teams? Put on some resistance. All melee? Get more armor! Low dps survival team? Get some regen gear on. Got out of combat to res, the potential to item rack on a haste set to get it off first. The other team can then react by putting on a different set, resist penetration, armor penetration, or some regen of their own. I also think it would balance a lot of the overpowered setups. Druid/warrior can be countered by having both partners put on armor, maybe some more dodge on a rogue if he's there. Warlock/druid teams can have SR.

The problem is of course the ability to completely negate teams that capping SR did. At that point I think simple caps on resistance as was suggested is another good idea. Other than resistance, most gear changes don't negate teams (as far as I have seen) they just make them easier to fight, which arguably is counterable by the other teams changing gear. I don't know that 150 as was suggested is the best cap because of - resist, but I'm sure Blizzard could evaluate it reasonably.

This leaves the one problem that I see coming up that would most likely stop this, pve gear. There's already tremendous amounts of complaints that stemmed from when Naxx gear dominated pvp, to the point where any potential advantage from pveing seems to be considered a negative. I don't want to argue that point, I have my position that I believe both pvp and pve gear should be fine for pvping, and don't see an issue with people who spend time at both having some advantage from having access to more gear, but I don't see that being agreed with by anyone who pvps and doesn't raid, and I think that will keep Blizzard from making that change.

 

doogless

As has been brought up in many other threads regarding PvE gear in PvP, there isn't appropriate gear to counter some setups. Armor that would provide mitigation in the quantity given by BT SR gear simply doesn't exist if you're a cloth-wearer. If Warlock/Shadow Priest is really that overpowered, it needs to be toned down - SR gear is not the answer, unless you want to make gear that gives that sort of advantage for every type of setup (a heavy mp5 set for outlast, a extra-high armor set for melee mitigation, a resistance set for caster-heavy teams, etc). With regards to rating - before the change that you couldn't swap gear once the gates opened, I saw SR gear on a regular basis. I only play 10 games a week (or less, depending on the availability of my partner/our patiences for the queues), so I'm not currently in the rating bracket where people would have /ignore macros and SR gear, but that doesn't mean I'm not familiar with the result it has on games.

 

Aphyrax

I don't even have an epic flying mount. Just yesterday I saw a Gladiator on a 60% land mount. Some of us simply don't like to farm. You could make the argument that we are playing the wrong game, but I am sure Blizzard likes my money.

 

Lodekim

As SR was before, you're completely right, several people in this thread are advocating capped resists to add a gear strategy as an element of the game, and to somewhat allow people to balance out against certain fotm teams, Warlock teams aren't going to be completely invalidated by someone having a 25% resist on their dot damage and resisting some mana drains, and the warlock can put on armor gear against the melee to counter it out. Allowing a 75% miss set, or a 365 resist set yeah is pretty lame, allowing a team to go "hey we're facing 2 high dps shadow based classes, lets slightly reduce it at the cost of other stats" and then putting on up to like a 150 cap or something, not as bad.

 

Taja

I used it aswell but I'm happy its fixed. Obviously it was needed against shadow resist but having rogues in full tier 6 against you in RMP mirrors is just disgusting because you know what teams your getting. I would like to know who im playing in the arena before the doors open, but not with the option to swap gear.

 

Kahra

Just some comments regarding the lock/SP viability (since it has been suggested more than once in this thread that shadow teams might once again dominate the 2v2 bracket) and gear swapping in general. I have played lock/SP during the first two seasons and reached ~2k, but we switched to lock/disc-priest for this season despite a complete lack of PvP healing gear.

First, it should be noted that lock/SR isn't such a strong combination anymore - and this completely disregarding SR gear (take a look at the arena ladder; there are almost no lock/SP teams above 1800 - and at that rating swapping isn't possible).

I see several reasons for the reduced viability:

a) Overall survivability has increased. Damage has increased too - but not to the same extent. The SP/lock team depends on controlling the healer while bursting down the target - which is harder now. You only get one chance; if the burst target is healed up you have (usually) lost. It doesn't matter much that your own survivability has improved too.

b) Arena class balance. Druids are common - any team with a druid is a hard encounter for a shadow team: the ticking HOTs offset burst damage and the instant casts make the druid less vulnerable to CoT, spell lock and crowd control. Their powerful instant heal also makes it necessary to burst the target twice. The combinations that shadow teams can steamroll are not by far as popular as they used to be (paladin/warrior in particular).

c) Game mechanic changes. Since S1, there have been several changes that effect shadow teams negatively (reduced damage, reduced duration of CC, CoT and spell lock, self-healing affected by MS to mention some of them). There are also changes to other classes that have an overall negative impact (pain suppression comes to mind). I'm not saying that those changes weren't needed - but the balance has shifted.

As for allowing gear swapping (maybe with a resist cap) and the the effect it would have on a shadow team. Consider the following:

- burst target equips SR (say 25%)
- lock/SP equips damage gear to compensate (say +25%)
- opposing healer equips healing gear (say +25% healing)

The net effect would be that the opponents would gain 25% more healing - and this is under the (unrealistic) assumption that reduction of the lock/SP survivability matches the reduction of the opponents offensive capabilities, let alone the fact that it currently isn't possible to boost the damage by 25%.

Allowing gear swapping would arbitrarily shift the balance. Druids would become even stronger by being able to equip pure PvE healing gear against opponents who can't dps them effectively due to kiting while a disc priest can't swap out PvP gear since he risk being focused.

While I do miss the ability to be able to adjust my gear (e.g. selecting the optimal trinket), it rather arbitrarily upsets the balance making some combinations more powerful and other less so. The lower brackets do not need more arbitrariness.

 

Clockwise

Can you really call a team composition "flavor of the month" if that team setup has been around since day one of arena? Should we call every good team makeup "flavor of the month"? How about "flavor of the entire period in which arena exists"? Disparaging good team comps as a "fad" doesn't mean that you are somehow a morally superior person or a better player for doing something like Disc Priest/Ret Pally (or something equally uncommon and sub-optimal). Druid/warrior and druid/warlock have always been top ten caliber teams.

Furthermore, I'm also pretty sure that any of these setups can beat any of the others. I've beaten plenty of shadowpriest/warlock teams, from day one of season 1 through last night. All it takes is a healer thats aware of positioning and a shield, I never needed any SR.

 

◊ Praetorian

What sort of healer?

Maybe I'm missing something but against sham/war that matchup has felt like more of a hard counter than anything I've seen in any bracket.

With Tongues on me, even if there are no active damage casts going through, a full afflock + spriest DoT stack does more damage to a defensive stance warrior than I can heal through. And because I have to stand still to heal, I can't outrange Tongues if the warlock is trying to apply it. Add a felhunter on me to give me pushback and spell lock some of my heals (you can't really fake heals with CoT on), and it's completely crippling. I can avoid getting feared, I can shock (though that means getting closer than I'd like), I can keep the priest at a distance, but I don't even need to get CC'd for my partner to die without any SR. And in the meantime he has a shield on to reflect and is doing rather meager damage.

war/sham vs. spriest/afflock is the only matchup for which I've used SR in a long time. It was either that, give away a hundred points, or stop queuing. I'd welcome advice that doesn't rely on the other team making huge errors, though.

 

Caligula

The problem with gear swapping is, it affects certain classes negatively and others positively and the reverse isn't true. Fight a team with 2 warlocks and stack your SR gear, but those warlocks can't really don their "75% physical resist" gear to counter your 2 warriors. It does add another element of strategy but a very unbalanced one. A PvP resistance cap would probably be the best solution, but Blizzards line of thinking is probably more like "Hey we added dot resistance to resilience, there's your answer".

 

◊ Praetorian

Right, no one has really argued with that. I completely agree that in 2v2 it's unfair for me and my partner to have 350 SR vs. spriest/lock. They really can't win. But there's no reason whatsoever that they can't tweak the way resist works in PvP. 75% resist is necessary for PvE, the same way being able to sheep/fear/etc. a mob for 30sec and not have to reapply it constantly is necessary for PvE, but would be broken in PvP and thus was changed.

 

Caligula

Oh, I'm in agreement with you here. It seems like this "fix" is a bandage that doesn't really address the real issue.

 

Optimized

I think that the fact that blizzard took out gear swapping in the arena clearly shows that they don't want you to do it. I personally feel it's somewhat of an exploit that people found a loophole which allowed you to work around this. Now some people are saying "but my team composition can't beat Shadow Priest/Warlock without SR", but I don't think Blizzard has ever really had any pretense about trying to balance 2v2. SP/Warlock loses to priest/rogue just as hard as warrior/shaman loses to SP/Warlock.

 

Kahra

Even if Blizzard did scale down the effect of resistances in PvP to a reasonable level, you would still be left with several unbalancing factors due to gear swapping:

a) multi-role chars benefit less from gear swapping (e.g. a priest might not be able to swap in more healing gear instead of defensive gear since he risk being picked as the primary target while a druid might be able to do just that since he has the option to kite if focused).
b) PvE gear (*) would find its way back into the game (do you have BT on farm? no? tough luck...)
c) resistances are only affective against certain healer/dps teams and single-school double dps teams
d) there is no corresponding "extra armor" gear

I fail to see why it would be a good idea to make substantial changes to the relative balance in a rather random way. Yes, it might rectify the balance in certain setups, but it will _also_ make already strong teams even stronger. I don't think the decision to forbid gear swapping was only due to resistance abuse, but also an attempt to even the field. Shadow resistance is only the most glaring example of an imbalance allowed through gear swapping.

Yes, the added element of strategy would be fun - but at the cost of more unbalance?

Edit: (*) not only for the shadow resist, but for damage and healing gear as well. Consider for instance a healer/lock - healer/rogue match. The lock does minimal damage if the rogue stays on him (but the lock side might be able to win the mana war despite this due to drinking). The rogue team would get an incredible boost if the rogue could switch to pure damage gear in situations like that.

 

deadlights

The one thing I'm not getting in this thread is why several people are operating under the premise that more skill is involved when you know what's coming rather than having to assess what you're facing on the fly and make smart, quick adjustments.

Personally I don't think you were meant to be able to game plan who you were facing which is why they don't have scoreboards you can access like when you're in the pre-game for BGs that tell you all the classes. I think it's fairly obvious that you are supposed to show up in what you believe is your best all around gear and your best general game plan and see if you can pull it off (with any necessary adjustments made on the fly) against whatever you find yourself up against.

 

• Maels

150 resistance would be fair if cloth could get up to 10k armor.
Adjust spell penetration and armor penetration accordingly.

43%'s worth of avoidance (dodge, parry etc) too.

 

◊ Praetorian

Just reduce the PvP effectiveness of resists from gear by 2/3, with no cap. If someone wants to get 120 SR, they'll have to wear a full set of head-to-toe SR gear (i.e. what you'd current have to wear to get 360 SR), completely nerfing their +dam, +heal, AP/crit%, resil, etc., in the process. It wouldn't be a wise choice, any more than you'd wear a 10k armor set if it meant that you could only have +300 spell damage and minimal resil.

 

Rheyah

Yes, and vastly reduce the effectiveness of those classes who do have the ability to generate passive resists. Speaking as someone with access to around 70 resistance at any given time, it's not a huge amount of resist. Further decreasing that in all PvP environments is just ridiculous.

If you want to take care of the shadow resistance problem, you have to remove the problem that caused it in the first place. Why do you think that everyone stacked shadow resistance against warlocks/SPs in the first place? It wasn't out of pure heartwarming intent. Most people prefer to PvP in their PvP gear, it's what they earned and how they like to use it. Now no offense, but if I group with say a mage in 2v2, I don't come complaining that I don't have any healer to heal me. If I group with a rogue I don't complain that I don't have any ranged DPS.

One of the weaknesses of warlock/shadow priest is they were reliant on a single spell school against which using resist gear is a viable, and effective counter to what used to be an incredibly strong combination. It's not to strong now because of the rise of druids as the 2v2 queen of healing (compared to the old one, paladins, warlocks/spriests are at a disadvantage), but it's still no different than if I were to group with a healer as a Ret paladin. I have no MS, no ranged DPS, and I can be mana burned and consume my healers mana for my own at roughly the same rate it is spent.

The key thing is that they now have to take that chance in equipping SR gear, which is the right thing to do. It should still be a counter to warlocks, just more of a risk. The /ignore exploiting was ridiculous and should have resulted in bans from the start.

 

Kahra

I agree that it probably isn't a good idea to scale the effectiveness of class abilities related to resistances (dispelling the shadow buff or selecting the appropriate aura should have an effect). Whether the amount of resistance you can get from a single piece of armor is balanced for arenas is a different question. The amount of penetration you can get seems to be balanced with respect to class abilities rather than resistance gear.

But resistance gear (without gear swapping) can function as a balancing mechanism; if shadow teams would happen to dominate, then the trend would be to always have some equipped. On the other hand, it is important that there is a noticeable price associated with equipping resistance gear (in order to make it a bad gear choice if shadow teams are _not_ dominating).

 

Ashby

As someone who used Arenaignore (a /ignore based mod that worked on teams you have already faced) i can say that it was not as such a game winning help, it was handy to know who was squishy, who was in pve gear, what spec people were and what they did, but since we discussed what we would do if we came against that team again after each game, now we can just confirm that it is a repeat as soon as we see a member in their team.

On the other hand, i have never equipped shadow resist gear against lock / spriest or a variant, i haven't experienced that 'insta win' situation, and i can see that this will be a great 'buff' to lock or spriest based teams.

To the people who say 'cap resist', 'nerf resist' or the similar think of it like this, as a melee class, my opponents have a passive 'resist' rating, armour. For me, versing warrior druid or pally or any teams like that is like versing a team with passive shadow resist, and if i was playing kitty druid and rogue vs. pally warrior it is the equivilent of playing spriest/lock vs. high shadow resist moonkin/mage (*). While it is harder to 'stack' armour on gear, it is a similar scenario. Do you think making armour scale down in arenas fix things?

Doing massive mechanic changes to nerf or buff or what ever you see it as, resist and so forth won't fix the problem, maybe if you have issues as a lock/spriest team with shadow resist, try having a spell penetration set, both you and your opponent will be gimping other stats. Of course this is nulled out with recent ninja changes, but anyway.

 

Vanor

From another POV: end game PvE players have worked for their gear and should have the rights to use that if they like. Same as, for example:
A new team in any bracket, that consists of players that got glad title, s3 weapons and that lelve of gear and skills. I've played 5v5 at jsut under 1700, meet a team where several had s3 shoulders and weapons. Lost the game and lost 20rating. By same logic that you lost to SR gear, "loss by default", we did. Limiting SR gear useage should limit overgeared people from matching up aginst undergeared people, even a new team. We stopped playing for the night, but if we would have carried on we would have probably lost 20, 18, 16... rating, all "Loss by default"

But I do support the resistnace in pvp cap, at least in 2v2 and possibly aswell 3v3.

 

Kahra

Although only against things certain classes (the base damage output is balanced to take a certain amount of armor into account). Also, Blizzard has added armor to the cloth pvp gear - obviously an effort to make difference smaller (and melee arguably be too powerful against cloth classes without this extra armor).

And yes, a rogue does less damage versus high armor classes but there is nothing unique with that - all classes have opponents against which they are more or less effective.

The question is really whether it is reasonable *for all classes* to be able to get plate level armor by equipping 2 or 3 pieces of special "armor" gear. Lets assume a new PvE encounter is added where the entire raid needs a massive amount of armor and that high-armor cloth gear is added to the game somehow. Obviously, the balance in the arena would be destroyed by allowing cloth classes to obtain plate armor by equipping 2-3 gear pieces. But this is more or less where the situation is with resistances. Resistance gear is a bit too powerful; it never was balanced for PvP - it was designed for specific PvE encounters.

I would also argue that some class abilities related to resistances are a bit too strong - for instance, a SL/sl lock has 75 resistances to all schools of magic (~16%) which is a lot. Blizzard has, however, introduced spell penetration on caster gear which pretty much nullifies the effect of this innate resistance (which I believe, was the intention). However, the amount of penetration you can get is more or less fixed; it is not possible to counter powerful resistance gear pieces on top of a shadow aura.

 

Yaha

Creating a level playing field does not preclude customizing your character: Guild Wars PvP-only characters are a fine example.

As a druid, I felt like the gear-swapping change hurt me disproportionately. Hybrid classes are meant to fill multiple roles as needed; gearing for all possible circumstances tends to yield mediocre results, however. I certainly lost an advantage vs melee by not being able to swap in my armor rings + trinket while I scouted them in stealth.

But for the most part, it hasn't felt like a drawback. There are rough spots, say towards the end of S2 vs. Warriors with Skillherald and armor penetration gear, but that's a flaw in the overall gear system. The arena and honor pieces are the best overall choices for most players if they are ever a plausible target during the course of a match.

Trinkets seem like the exception-- the new BM ones are nice but the use effect is too one-dimensional to be equally useful to everyone. Would be nice if we could still swap them while out of combat.