Melee abilities are the highest dps, most efficient instant casts in the game by a huge margin. The fact that they're short range just makes them... even more suited to pillar hugging.

I think this is hyperbole. While shadow step isn't the burst potential of mute or the on demand pressure of say HARP it's probably one of the best damage specs for typical play because of the increased time on target, never mind the defensive power and increased "tricks".

Hmmm. My double melee team (MS warrior + feral druid) cannot beat dual caster teams. Lock/Mage and priest/lock are games where we just dance and let them kill us. Shaman/priest and shaman/lock are games we MIGHT win. However, double melee teams seem to go down fast and get completely destroyed. We also do really well against healer/melee teams. Mage/lock games go like this: With both of us focusing a mage, the lock has his dot's ticking and continually fears my druid friend, so we'll end up with the mage dead, but no chance of downing the lock (unless he's not sl/sl, in which case he's "easy mode" or whatever). Since focusing the mage first isn't an option, we try focusing the lock. Unfortunately, with resilience in the upper 400's, and 16000-17000 health, the mage will have one of us dead before the lock can die, and the odds are in the mage's favor when it comes to 1v1. Focusing both is the only option, but, again, locks and mages tend to beat warriors and druids 1v1.

If casters receive a buff when it comes to SPB, then at least nerf the channeled-spell bug that makes them impossible to LOS. EXAMPLE: In blade's edge. Let's say the lock is standing on one of the two pillars, and I just chased a mage off the bridge. If the lock casts any channeled spell right before I jump off the ledge, he can continue casting through the bridge. In another scenario, my partner had low health, and was about to be out of a priest's LOS to do a quick HOT when they began to cast mind flay. Nothing could be done, as he was slowed by the spell, and couldn't get around in time. We probably would have won if that hadn't happened.

EDIT: Also, shaman/warrior teams that know what they're doing can be a real pain, especially in ruins of lordaeron. My partner sticks on the warrior, who's attacking me, while I'm trying to take down the shaman, who switches to ghost wolf to break my hamsting/piercing howl and dashes away, gets off a heal or lightning bolt, then switches back to ghost wolf, etc. We can DPS through priest heals and pally heals just fine, but not shaman or druid heals.

Also: Yes, I know that we would be a much more viable team if the druid went resto. However, he won't even consider it. Which is understandable, since feral is a ton of fun to play.

I dont even know where to start. Everyone (yourself included, it seems) knows that feral druids currently arent very competitive in arenas, so that alone greatly diminishes the weight of your post.

Your theory crafting portrays your opponents as having gear with resilience in the "upper 400s", but from the makeup of your team and your own appraisal of your team's success, I highly doubt you are fighting anyone with a rating much higher than 1600.

Channeled spells are even more annoying than regular cast time spells to utilize in pvp, I hardly think they need to be looked at.

Unless the shaman is enhancement, his ghost wolf probably takes two seconds to cast. More to the point, ghost wolf does not currently, nor has it ever, broken any form of snare or crowd control. Enhancement shamans =/= druids.

Having spent a fair bit of time arena'ing as feral prior to a recent respec I'd actually expect a removal of spell push back to be at least as much of a buff to non healing specced hybrids as normally casters actually. One of the toughest things I found as feral was having to cyclone/root/heal with a single hit of anything adding significant time to non instant casts. As resto or balance by contrast this simply isn't much of an issue. I'd comment further on the feral side of things but this really isn't the thread.

Yes, after more deliberating today, we've decided to split. He's (the feral) going to run with a rogue, I'm (the warrior) going to work with a priest. And we also made a 3's team with a well geared holy paladin; we've done well. The reason my armory file only shows 1 game played is due to a bug; the "remaining members" counter read 0 for both teams on all but one of the games we played, and our rating did not change at the end of them, resulting in 9 wins in a row, with only a 1515 rating to show for it. Great for morale, not for gear.

Anyways though: yesterday, we did face quite a few teams containing members with high resilience. However, this is probably due to the fact that everyone's rating has been reset, and so people who normally run in the 2000's were playing at low ranks. This should clear up within the week, and thus will become a moot point.

I regularly see channeled spells being cast, at least 2-3 times per game containing a mage, so you can't toss that aside. Spells should not be cast through walls.

As for the shamans, I must have been lagging or something, making me think a hamstring was successful when I was really out of range. This is another inhibitor to our team's success. My campus' internet connection is...unreliable. <40 ms ping at times, >1200 at others.

Edited for better grammar/readability.

Actually for your mystery problem with shamans; a popular spec nowadays for resto is to dig deeper into enhancement to get Toughness and Improved Ghost Wolf. This means that if his partner (a warrior probably) Hamstrings you and you hamstring the Shaman, he can still get away because his hamstring only lasts half the duration. It's increasingly frustrating when you throw LoS into the mix and the shaman suddenly becomes very reminiscent of a druid except with more burst for his partner.

Combine that with earth grab totem, and there's not much chance of me catching the shaman, even with piercing howl, since he'll still be running faster.

I was trying to say that in my opinion "In a closed PVP environment where you can just step behind a pillar, spell pushback makes absolutely no sense." is oversimplifying the "stepping behind a pillar"-way of shutting down ranged DPS as a melee.

On my restoration shaman I regulary try to position myself as to take advantage of just that, stepping quickly out of sight if there's a cyclone or sheep incoming. Now I can imagine as a warrior or enh shaman that's just not that easy. You're being dragged around by your "prey" which means they have much more control over where you go. Of course you can always abort your assault and try to get away, which might or might not be easy, depending on CC /snares. But still its the melee that has to come to the caster, therefore giving the caster a certain amount of control of the melees movement / path and to an extend, cover.

Therefore in reverse getting back to the above quote: Since I (imho) can't "just step behind a pillar", maybe spell pushback does make sense.

Sorry if the wording in my previous post was somewhat unclear :-/

Well fortunately for melee there's not a single CC effect that casters can do to them that can't be removed by their team. Like I said before, CCing melee is not as easy as just CCing the melee. You've got to CC him AND his support squad before you take him out of the fight and give you the breathing room you need to cast a spell and inflict some damage. The volume of magical CC breaks, dispels, resists and immunities makes it one hell of a challenge to coordinate.

I might be entirely ignorant on the matter, but a) not every melee class runs with a dispel class and b) how does this only apply to melee? Warriors have reflect, rogues have CloS, shamans have tremor. On the other hand, SL/SL has the resistances, destro has netherprotection (I think?), mages have blink/block, etc. I wouldn't see the fact that you don't need dispels to function as a weakness, as a rogue I can know.

Actually, two classes can, but they aren't equally viable. Priests have Power Word: Shield which eliminates spell pushback for it's duration and Shamans have Earthshield which gives a 30% chance to ignore spell pushback. For the sake of completeness I'll mention Pallies Concentration Aura which reduces spell pushback by 35% and 50% respectively, depending on if it is talented.

Did you read what you replied too?

As you already can tell, obviously not well enough.

My apologies.

In regards to armor penetration, I'd like to see a "soft" cap in the sense that a caster can't be reduced all the way down to 0 armor.

I feel the best way to implement this is to simply make it so armor penetration (and sunder armor, expose armor, etc.) can reduce a character's armor from gear to 0, but can't reduce any "magical" armor, such as Demon Skin, Ice Armor, or Inner Fire. With the upcoming patch making these buffs undispellable, it'll give mages/locks some armor protection toward physical damage that cannot be removed. Would also make the +armor/Int talent for mages worthwhile.

Armour penetration needs to convert into a %-based mechanic before it gets completely out of hand, so that X armour penetration will reduce your target's total armour by X% of its current value. This will give physical damage classes a snowball's chance in hell of damaging a druid in Bear Form or a Paladin and stop bringing casters down to absolute zero mitigation.

I think he's saying that as it is physical damage have a snowball's chance in hell at damaging a Bear form druid or a Pally. Essentially what has been echoed quite a bit about Armor Pen.

And while Armor pen didn't increase on season 4 items you're still seeing a bump in resilience allowing people to swap out more pieces of resilience gear and stacking more pve pieces with armor pen.

I think a % based reduction is a good idea. The way things are going is backwards IMO... Intuitively speaking, lowering armor is supposed to be a way of compensating for high armor classes but in practice it's just become a way to turn low armor targets into pinatas.

Maybe I just suck, but even in near full S3 on my ud mage (only have s2 robe- I quit arenas because I hated them before full s3 geared), I have never taken an equally geared ANYTHING from full to dead in 4 seconds. It just is not the way the game is now. It just does not happen. Ever.

Yeah I probably didn't word that very well. What I mean is that physical damage classes SHOULD have the ability to deal damage to high AC classes like bear form druids, paladins etc while at the same time not be capable of bringing clothies down to 0% mitigation. In its current form Armour Penetration solidifies clothies into primary targets for physical damage classes. "You mean I can do 10% more damage to him from a static bonus while the same bonus only gives me 2% more damage to a Paladin or Bear Form Druid? Well let's keep humping that Warlock then!". In a %-based form it might allow physical damage trains to choose primary targets out of the other 7 classes in the game.

I get what you're saying. Obviously the multipliers would need to change, but if Armor Pen (at its current level) was balanced to reduce armor by 50% (with a full expose up), then survivability of locks and mages would increase, and druids in bear, and pallys would decrease. Interesting suggestion definately.

Running through the caster is still a perfectly working way to avoid direct damage spells. And if you remember that melee classes do stupid amounts of damage to caster classes, you can't exactly expect a warlock to be able to stand still and shadowbolt whatever is humping his leg because he will be dead before long. Also, melee classes stun. They stun and they reduce healing taken. Sometimes they also cripple your casting speed while stunning. And then they stun some more.

I mean, as restoration shaman you don't suffer pushback but you don't see yourself standing still and tanking rogues or MS warriors, do you? No, I bet you kite them.

I think there is more than enough reasons to not stay in melee nowadays and it's time to remove that antique mechanic.

I totally agree. Most classes already have tools to combat spell pushback with instants, snares and cc's and shields.Removing spell pushback would be the biggest caster buff in a long time(if not since release). I think pet pushback needs some reworking as it pretty much adds a melee class into the caster doubling any pushback he may receive.Many casters point out the flaws in the pushback system, yet never mention that they all have pets now, they all pretty much have a shield or two and just about all casters have an instant or two that do very well. Just icelance alone is fairly annoying (imo).Hunters have a pet, and really only have steady shot to worry about spellpushback.

All in all i think tis fine. All thought i do love rogues and playing them, i think they have too many crutches atm and i feel rogues are more of the issue to classes then sp. But, changes to pet spellpushback would be a change i can see that eeds addressing.