Aphyrax

The difference is, the Gladiator 5s team was probably better than you anyway. Yes, the weapons rubbed it in even harder, but they earned them by being better at PvP. On the other hand people who win via resist gear earned it by being better at PvE (or by buying gold). I have no problem losing to people who are better at PvP than me. But I did have a problem back in S2 losing to warlock/pally on the sole ground of the pally having BT gear. Or how Shadowborne put it once, "When I play with a pally in PvP gear we lose to a lot of warrior/druid teams. When I play with a pally in BT gear we only lose to one."

Am I the only one who has a problem with that statement? Nowhere does it mention player skill. It is all about the gear. Granted, pallies are the extreme case, but that does not make it any less disturbing.

 

• sadris

Sorry to derail but the armor that Blizzard added is essentially negligible because with EA or SA (which all teams use in high brackets) casters have a net armor of zero. So one would have to wonder if Blizzard is intentionally balancing melee attack damage in arena around the existence of the extra armor, why would they allow it to be erased completely in a matter of seconds for indefinite amount of time?

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

Opioid

Some servers being able to use PVE acquired BT resist gear while potentially in a battlegroup where they will encounter people on a server with very little access to the same gear is not an acceptable situation. In comparison, anyone can earn the number of points and rating necessary for the s3 shoulders and weapons even on the fruitiest RP-PVE server if they wish.

 

Xavias

As far as i've seen, resist gear has only played a game-altering role in 2v2.

Wearing full SR in 3v3 / 5v5 is a good way of giving your opponents free points - even if your against a Warlock + Spriest or whatever.

 

Kahra

Well, a priest has ~4k armor with the inner fire up. EA and SA removes 2k and SA 2.6k respectively, which means there is 1.4-2k armor left. In this case, every single point of the extra armor is effective (11%-19% total mitigation). Besides, forcing the rogue to spend five combo points on EA or the warrior to sunder five times, slows down the DPS (very important if you play double dps) and makes fast target switches less effective.

A warlock has less armor and will indeed hit just about 0 armor (unless he pops demon armor, which seldom is a good option).

 

• Argium

Any target being focussed wont have inner fire, fel armor, or any other buffs up on them so they're definately on 0 armor.

 

Kahra

That is highly dependent upon which bracket we are talking about. In 2v2, this is definitely not the case. And in all brackets, it still hinders fast target switching (melee has quite enough burst as it is). But this is somewhat out-of-topic.

 

Zure

I've always found the SR question to be a curious sidetrack.

First, with symmetric gear swapping, you can have 203 spell pen on your gear, with zero PvE gear. That's 99 from neck/ring/ring/cloak enchant/offhand and 104 from 8x Stormy Empyrean Sapphire. Now add 88 more from curse.

This means a warlock can negate ~291 SR at a relatively minor item budget cost (8 gem slots). The 250 SR folk basically destroy all of their stats but STA to get that high.

Second, single school specs are *supposed* to be vulnerable to resists. It's the height of irony that they demand protection from damage mitigation because they only have one school, yet the main reason for the team's synergy is that all dmg is shadow-based.

 

Celnathor

Others have said it, but I think it's really only a true balance issue in 2v2. Particularly when 1 healer/1 DPS teams are so dominant here, if your only DPS has virtually all of their damage as shadow, it makes resist gear a dominant, excessively-strong counter. Once you get into 3's, there's the opportunity to balance out the team with a physical damage dealer or mage, and in 5's, even moreso.

In the larger arenas, I'd view vulnerability to resist gear as the result of not balancing a team - if you're going to stack one type of damage instead of balancing things out, I'm not sure the problem is entirely with resist gear in those cases. On the other hand, in situations like a healer/warlock 2v2, resist gear makes things utterly silly. Put on 300 SR, and there's no way you're dying, assuming your healer has a pulse. And it's pretty clear that this situation is not "intended".

 

Zure

Ah but why isn't warlock/shadow priest or lock/lock an example of not balancing your team -- just like playing 2x healers would be.

The destruction tree heavily buffs warlock fire damage; 41 point demonology significantly reduces your reliance on shadow damage, replacing it with physical damage. Basically it is the affliction or affliction-hybrid specs that find almost all of their damage coming from the shadow school.

And warlock CC (Fear, CoEx, Deathcoil) is *designed* to be vulnerable to resistances. That is what sets apart, for example, fear and polymorph -- no class can buff arcane resist, for example.

I know I sound like a troll, but that is just because the focus of the debate has shifted so far in favor of removing resists. Step back and think about it though: single school reliance is a means of differentiating classes. In some context, they receive "free" damage from being able to collect single school +dmg gear/buff (in TBC we saw this at the T4 level in PvE, and with Lock/Spriest in PvP). The cost is that you have to gear for spell pen -- which again nets 203 spell pen *before* curse of shadows, at the cost of about 120 spell damage.

 

Talgog

SK Gaming | World of Warcraft Arena Ranking
SK Gaming | World of Warcraft Arena Ranking

Deep Destruction does not exist in competitive 5v5 or 2v2 and shows up only occasionally in 3v3, presumably on splat teams.

Destruction does not have mobility and it does not have survivability, and the core warlock survivability talent is incompatably placed with the core Firelock talent and many of the damage boosters. See, for example, this build:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warlock -> Talent Calculator

That destruction lock will live a while (soul linked to double Voidwalkers that will be sacced), but he still doesn't have most of the big Destro guns and has to give up instant Corruption to get the damage boosts that he does get. He could shift the extra anti-crit over into Demonic Knowledge for more damage, or leave it at 31 flat in Demo, but none of that really makes him a super hardhitting flamethrower.

 

Kahra

And why on earth would it be desirable to restrict the ways you can compose your team? Ideally, all combinations should be viable. In practice, it doesn't work out that way, but the goal should be to increase the number of possible combinations, not limit it.

And warlocks would love to be able to use that tree effectively in the arena. The problem is that without SL, rogues tend to obliterate you (and locks have no way to avoid ending up being rogue tanks). There is a reason why destruction is currently an all but extinct spec in the arena (and UA seems to be going the same way). Of course, it would be possible to make destruction more viable for PvP... but why exclude other specs from the arena?

Vulnerable to spell interrupts maybe, but I'm fairly sure Blizzard never intended - nor wants - resistance stacking as a pvp mechanism.

Having to use CoS is not a minor sacrifice. If you play disc-priest/SL-lock, almost all of the damage comes from CoA and corruption (and you need CoT and CoEx frequently, even CoW has some use). You would be virtually harmless (not to mention completely neutralized by _either_ a dispeller or decurser) if you had to reserve the curse slot for CoS.

Resistance gear does not add anything to the game. The only thing it does is adding randomness and unbalance. Does your team have penetration gear equipped? Too bad, your opponents choose to come with full PvE damage gear. Did you omit it? You loose again - your opponents have heavy shadow resist.

And mind you, allowing gear swapping is far from symmetrical even if everyone is informed in advance about all gear choices (which is hard to achieve in practice). For example, the rogue in a rogue/healer team would get a huge advantage by equipping pure damage gear when facing a lock/healer team; the lock side would not have a counter against that gear swap. Which is why resistance gear and gear swapping don't belong in the arena.

 

Zure

I think you miss my point. In order to protect warlock/spriest and warlock/healer in 2s, Blizzard has:

Added a large amount of spell pen to gear, gutting the utility of shadow protection, resistance auras, MotW, pet resistances, resist enchants, etc.;
Removed gear swapping inside arenas, greatly limiting the strategic value of building multiple gearsets (higher dps gear, mana regen gear, etc.) -- this is an MMO, it has as its premise the idea that one should be rewarded for growing and customizing one's character through gear; and most recently
Removed the ability to scout recently-played opponents, cutting down on pre-match strategizing (undermining options such as rushing certain comps only, or pre-summoning a different pet, or, again, swapping in different gear).

I think the game would be better if we instead simply limited the use of resist gear either directly or indirectly. Failing that, I think the game would still be better if we just let the warlock/spriest team have this vulnerability, for some of the reasons I outlined above:

First, the shadow team has a counter strategy of building a spell pen set, which takes less of their item budge than does gearing for shadow resist;
Second, the vulnerability makes logical sense given that the team synergy is largely based upon both classes relying on a single school of magic, the inter-class enhancement of which is primarily designed to offer a pve synergy.
Third, the shadow team doesn't have to play that spec at all ratings (disc priest/felguard lock for example is probably a better team than every single (or perhaps all but one) mage, shaman or paladin comp);
Fourth, the shadow teams don't need to exist at all -- warlocks are a top three partner for every non-warrior class in the game. I am definitely not anti-warlock, but I am certainly not going to cry over the most versatile twos class losing a small bit of flexibility when weighed against the benefit of everyone else's ability to play the bracket unfettered.

 

Talgog

Blizzard is not "protecting" spriest/warlock. They do not particularly care about the balance of 2v2. They are instead eliminating certain tactics that most people would honestly admit are cheap if not cheating. If they were truly the only way to beat spriest/warlock, then spriest/warlock and warlocks in general will return to their previously dominant position.

This is what spell penetration is supposed to be for. It is a gearing choice for casters to cut through normal passive resists.


These are team-specific cheese based entirely around gear that is not acquired or acquirable through the PvP system. It is acquired through Black Temple, which goes directly against Blizzard's stance that raid gear should not be effective in PvP. How true that is for certain classes is debatable, but the crafted SR gear is available only to BT guilds and, at their discretion, to other players who pay large amounts of gold.

This gear is also not consistent across server in a given battlegroup, as it is dependant on significant BT progression. Some servers have little if any of it. Other servers are drowning in it.

Do you honestly think it was ever intended that the /ignore function could be written into a mod so that people with very specific gear sets based on their server's PvE progression could, with no risk of gambling wrong, all but eliminate the damage of otherwise elite and naturally strong PvP teams that have no remotely equivalent counter?

 

Zure

A "cheap" tactic has been limited, but at the expense of being able to sub in different gear sets beyond just SR. A lot more has been lost beyond the cheese. most gear swaps are no cheaper than being able to equip an offhand with a weapon chain against warriors or riposte rogues.

"Blizzard's stance that raid gear should not be effective in PvP" is just something you made up. Blizzard has stated that you should not have to PvE to be successful in PvP, not the opposite of that (that PvE should never help in PvP). I'm sure they realize that high end pve trinkets are often better than battlemaster's, for example. I'm sure they haven't forgotten that badges of justice don't drop in arenas. I'm sure they know that Stormherald's proc is far more useful against a druid in travel form than it is against Kael.

No one thinks /ignore is ideal. It was a way to revive gear swapping that many people thought was an enjoyable part of the arena experience as part of a broader game. You want arena to be hermetically sealed from all other aspects of the game. I (and many others) think this denies the reality that arena is a relatively new, and possibly transient, sub-game within the most popular MMO ever created.

 

Talgog

Right. Resilience doesn't exist and there's no difference between fighting someone in T6 optimal PvE gear and S3/Vindicator's. And there is not an alternate, more relevant use for that shadow resist armor in Black Temple itself. It is clearly meant to be anti-warlock armor in Arena.

If you really believe you can't infer Blizzard's intent from their rather dramatic meta design decisions, I don't know what to tell you.

 

• Argium

A paladin in T6 makes the fight significantly more difficult for my team (2k+ rated) than one in PvP gear, simply because he can heal forever without having to stop and drink.

 

panny

It isn't black or white, and you should know this. This is why you get things like [Band of Vile Aggression] dropping from Hydross, and PvP cloaks which require Badges of Justice and the Warglaives. Blizzard wants to reduce the effect of PvE on PvP and vice-versa, not remove it entirely. Otherwise they would have two games: World of Warcraft and World of Arena instead of just one.

However, I believe SR does go beyond how much Blizzard intends the two worlds to cross over. Still, there are better solutions that removing the ability to see who you face at the begining of the match. It's most likely that the ignore method reeks of an exploit and so they've fixed it the simplest way they know how.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

• Maels

1 or 2 items like [Band of Vile Aggression] are meant as a small reward to people that do both PvE and PvP, in that they don't have to farm 15k more honor for the PvP ring.
They're obviously trying to suppress players form using full PvE gearsets like T6 and SR.

Let's not use full T6 to justify logical loopholes in our arguments.

 

panny

Read my post again.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Shinanigans17

DOWN WITH SR!... now wtb permission to create new posts so i can post my warlock guide =(

 

Sumie

Quoting this because it seems people skimmed past it. Shadowpriest/warlock dominated S1. They were decent S2, but have since fallen off the map in S3. Most of this had little to do with SR gear swapping.
- Players gained more survivability (making it easier to overcome their burst potential)
- Rogues and disc priests got buffed heavily
- Druids became more prevalent and paladins/shaman became endangered species
- Warriors learned to take out a shield immediately and outlast the spriest's mana, instead of charging in zerker stance with their 2H blazing
- Buffs became visible and opponents soon realized locks without SL were the squishiest class in the game.

While SR gear swapping was certainly an abuse of poor arena mechanics, I can assure the doomsayers -- spriest/warlock won't be returning to dominance any time soon because of this.

 

cmecu

Exactly .. People who want to know before who their against so they can swap armors, or know to ffa, takes the fun away from pvping. Its good to have to use fast tactics, and be able to change and adapt on the moment. Im glad they made these changes.

 

AriasImmortal

It doesn't take the fun away from PvPing. It adds another dimension. Knowing who you are fighting and having a basic strategy in place before the game starts doesn't mean that you have to stick to that plan. It just means that instead of that long period after a match starts when both teams are just staring at each other across the bridge or from opposite pillars or whatever every team will charge in.

Most matches already have a grace period in which you see who you're fighting and you get a basic idea of what your plan is, the difference being that the match has already started so gear switching is obviously not an option.

 

laserhulken

I just had to make an account and post here about all this >.<

First of, what came in mind is that majority of everyone here seams too be PvP'ers. And there for support the PvP > PvE gear difference in PvP. But me on the other hand, i would like too see it as it was back before TBC. It's no fun at all to raid 6-7 days per week, playing 5-6 hours in instance everyday and 3-5 (if not more) farming money and getting other stuff for instance progression. And on my way home from instance or whatever i get raped by some tard who plays 2 hours every other day and got merciless gear. (Yes, my guild has cleared whole game atm so not 7 days raiding now but 4-5 days everyweek now that all game is on farm status).

My point is, i think people who do endgame PvE progression puts down much more time in this game then most other people who just play some PvP occasionaly. I don't know how much time the high ranked teams put in too Arena but i don't have a problem with it if the best of the best get something extra out of arena. But as it is now, you could train a monkey to play wow and get full Merciless etc. Can't train a monkey too clear Hyjal/BT (And pain in the ass Keal'Thas ofc).