Arena is going to be horribly broken.

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I expect to see some huge changes in about 2-3 weeks when the shit really hits the fan from everyone who doesn't play a ret pally or rogue.

Expect people running around in PvE gear and Brutal or Vengeful gear to be killed pretty much instantly. If you look at the Deadly Gladiator gear it actually has more stamina increase from T7 then T6>S4, once people start gearing up, things will sort out by itself, healing has increased aswell you know.

20k damage in 1.25 seconds is not something that resilience will fix. Tone that down by 20% with resilience and you are still looking at 16k damage in 1.25 seconds........

You can have heals that hit for 100k, but if you are dying within the space of a HOJ or Strangulate then the size of the heal does nothing for you. I think they badly miscalculated the dps vs. stam/res equation at this point. Hell, I play a melee DPS class without mortal strike and I think its out of control.

Resilience actually caps at 33% less damage now, and also coun't in that people should have over 23k hp, and its a whole lot harder to kill someone. No need to cry wolf because some rogue releases a movie where he kills people.

So I'm hoping I'm missing something here, but based on mmo-champion's there is nothing that we're going to be able to buy tonight with honor unless we get enough rating for the offset epics? Has there been any word of raising the honor cap?

Hateful offsets and Savage sets are both available without arena points or rating on the PTR. I believe the Savage set at least lets you spend some arena points for a reduced honor cost, but I'm not sure.

I believe the savage gear no longer requires arena points, it just now costs a lot more honor. I'm planning to buy 4/5 with badges and the helm from wintergrasp marks, unless of course Archavon decides to show me some love when the servers first come up. I'm going to buy the hateful bracers so that I'm no longer honor capped, then just sit on my honor and wait until I have rating for the deadly off-set pieces.

There are two Savage sets, one that costs honor, another that costs honor/arena points.

The new wintergrasp items are not up yet, but should be in the 3.0.8 patch.

They're actually the same set; you can buy it discounted if you want to throw some arena points down.

Then of course there are the Deadly and Hateful sets. Deadly takes arena points, and Hateful takes a smaller amount of arena points as well as some honor (7200 for the gloves up to 12000 for the chest/helm/pants).

Now that the For Great Honor - Quest - World of Warcraft quest doesn't require AV tokens and none of the items have token requirements, what exactly are they used for?

I messed around a bit in rated matches as well as skirmishes as in a frost mage/mut rogue combo and it seemed like the game was seriously won in the first 10 seconds.

The general strategy was establish control and kill something in the duration of said CC. This worked incredibly well due to the huge amount of damage we could put out. The flaw in that plan was classes that could deal with our control, namely, Retadins, wiped the floor with us. Even something like Holy Paladin / Warrior were giving us issues (Although I think if we faced that combo a few more times, we could refine a strategy to beat them.) At the end of the day, those with either control or a hard counter to control cleaned house and those without it ate the floor.

It really got silly as it seemed like if I blinked at the wrong time or choose to sheep at the wrong time, I died. It was kinda interesting as it really exaggerated your mistakes, however, at the same time, I can't say I'm a huge fan of that kind of combat, mostly because I am simply not good enough to manage a fight without making mistakes.

As PvP gear gets more distributed, perhaps it will become more toned down and a HoJ will be survivable, but I also expected damage across the board to get nerfed.

You really would have thought Blizzard would have learned something over the last 2 years of pvp. It's all very well saying all the problems will be fixed when everyone is decked out in epic pvp gear, but that process alone looks like it's going to be miserable for healers/anyclassthatdoesntdoinsaneburst - let alone for alts in 6 months time.

Is increasing the difference between geared and ungeared people really a good thing for PvP?

I strongly believe it was a mistake to put rating requirements on stat based gear (excluding perhaps weapons). It's understandable in subsequent seasons when upgrades are more minor, but at the moment there is going to be huge gulfs in gear which is just no fun.

Yes, at least the Hateful set shouldn't have any requirements. At the moment Arena plays more like Mortal Kombat online then WoW.

It goes exactly against the point of them introducing resilience in the first place, and is in my opinion the stupidest thing Blizzard has ever done with this game. With the tuning to make PVE more attractive, PVP for me is something I do occasionally when I need a distraction, and then quit 20 minutes later when that distraction involves being killed in 5 seconds with absolutely no means to fight back.

Blizzard wants to get the PVE scale balanced first. That is their top priority. With the new season of PVP they have a window of a few months to get PVP dmg scaled to acceptable levels. By the time people are decked out in full deadly and arena is still blatantly absurd (and it will be) they will have PVE scaling at an acceptable level and will evaluation pvp changes.

The crummy part about this, as someone mentioned, is that classes like disc/holy priests will be lagging behind because of the insane burst, and they are the ones that need resilience the most.

I don't think it's the lack of resilience that's the problem but the mis-scaling of Stamina w/ our increased DPS. Hopefully our full PvP gear will resolve this issue. S1 and early BC had the same issue when players first rolled into arenas with 8-9k health at most. Once that buffer jumped to 12-13k, burst DPS fell to the wayside.

The same situation is happening here. Classes have nearly doubled (some tripled) in damage output, while in comparison, my lock only gained 4k health thus far from 70 to 80 and a few new PvP upgrades.

So I can understand if Blizzard wants to revisit balance when players actually have 22-25k health in PvP gear, but they really dropped the ball by not making at least the blue Savage set more accessible. Has anyone seen the honor cost on those? 40-50k honor for one piece of Savage...

Even in season 1 of TBC there were plenty of healer teams doing well (especially holy paladins), I think it's much worse right now.

I think one of the biggest problems is that they scaled weapons too drastically. There are already easily obtainable 2 handers that do 70 more dps than the very best TBC had to offer, which doesn't seem right. IMO level 80 blues should be on par with TBC sunwell level epics and the scaling starts from there.

I've been recently thinking that perhaps the resilience mechanic needs an offensive rebalancing. The stat should also how much damage you DEAL in Player vs Player combat.

Perhaps something along the lines of:

If two players have equal resilience, there is no adjustment.
If the target has higher resilience, 2% per 100 in difference.
If the target has lower resilience, 1% per 100 in difference. (To reduce the impact of gear discrepancy?)

Perhaps the same thing could apply to heals...

AoE would be a mess.

That wouldn't work out too well, having a stat do two things really well is not good design.


There are a lot of options the devs could do, but at this point "wait and see" is the best thing to do. Likely resilience will get a slight defensive bump. That doesn't help those that don't have resilience, but with time people will have it.

They need to just finally suck it up and accept they can't use the same rule set for both aspects of the game. PvP needs a global damage reduction. Once everyone has resilience, a -20% or more global reduction when you are attacking a player would probably help things. If they were savvy, they could even scale that with the number of people in the match if they wanted to, so maybe you can do more damage in 2v2 to avoid the 30min games but not leave 5v5 as a total gibfest. I doubt any of that will happen, though. Most likely they will just beef Stam or resilience values instead.

The main issue I see with this is that it would make resilience too desirable of a stat - if one stat has the potential to increase both your offense and your defense, why prioritize anything else (with the exception of classes for whom defense is not really a concern, and who have access to superior pve gear with offense in mind)? I suppose this wouldn't be the case so much if it were possible to reach the resilience cap, but who knows how long it will be until itemization allows for that.

I actually think this is a really neat idea, though. I just wonder if there's another way to achieve a similar effect that doesn't put so much power into a single stat.

On a side note, wouldn't something like this, which would urge everyone to stack resilience, be extremely undesirable for classes that rely heavily on crit (or more appropriately, classes who lack crit modifier talents)? 150% crit vs resilience cap is hilariously broken, for example.

This was their statement on PvP today. It is nice to get an acknowledgment, but their developers seem increasingly isolated about certain things in their game. They have had six months of feedback telling them that this would be a problem, and they certainly have people who can tell them the math on a T7 rogue against a 900 resilience target, yet nothing happened. Probably the most disappointing thing is that GC was sort of heralded as a sign they would be much more aggressive about PvP balancing (and PvE too, fwiw) this time around, rather than letting a classes dominate for seasons at a time.

I'm guessing realistically we won't see any significant changes for at least a month or more so they can let people get resilience. It might even be longer.