Long post about Arena, read at your own peril: This is written from the point of view of a holy/disc priest who hit 1900 in 2 vs 2 and 1930 in 3 vs 3 in the first week of season 5 on the EU-rampage battlegroup.
This represents the number of classes in the top 100 SK gaming teams - they are not normalized. If you normalize them by representation, warriors/priests fall down even further as they are among the more popular classes.
Right now, the issue that is on everybody's mind is out of control burst is. This is absolutely problematic, and burst IS utterly out of control. The mantra that is often repeated is 'resilience makes burst healable, you just need to l2p' which is of course a crock of shit. Resilience HELPS, but it doesn't make burst healable in any meaningful fashion. I don't think any amount of resilience will save you from a muti rogue/arcane or ret/arcane or ret/rogue just zerging you down.
The best pvp strategy for priests right now is to take the 'lightwell spec'. Basically, spec 37 disc/34 holy - pick up lightwell, sor, and both blesssed resilience/focused will. Partner up with a PvE geared overpowered DPS classes (ret paladin, mutilate rogue, BM hunter) and have your own DPS murder one of theirs while they are killing you. After, abuse the spirit of redemption glyph and spam heal the hell out of your partner, and leave him with a ticking renew/prayer of mending and he should be easily able to one versus one any other DPS class.
If you get CC'd instead and they try gibbing your partner, have him use lightwell and play defensively, then win once the initial CC train wears off.
The problem with this strategy is that as priest/DPS you can never hope to score a win against any other healer/dps combination. Your heals are horribly mana inefficient. Mana-burn scaled like crap and by far the main issue, keeping yourself alive is incredibly resource intensive. The glaring inability of priests to outlast any other healer will manifest itself a lot more heavily in the next few weeks, and a few people will notice this when ghostcrawler finally nerfs damage.
Paladin with divine plea are orders of magnitude stronger in terms of throughput, longevity, and ability to survive a melee train. With holy shock+IoL, they are also absolutely amazing at pushing out heals without getting locked out.
Do you remember in season 3 and 4 when every healer wished they were a resto druid? Holy paladins currently are a lot more powerful than resto druids ever were. Their weaknesses got completely patched up (lack of instant heals) and they now have far more in-combat regen than any other PvP class. People are not really bitching about holy paladins more because they haven't had any long pvp matches, but nerfing damage will just make holy paladins even more dominant.
Finally, the other ' bitch ' classes. Shamans, warlocks, and priests - what do they have in common? They don't have any way to get away from melee trains. Shamans at least have chain armor, but if melees start pile-driving you, you are not really getting away. Right now, the problem is melee gib - if they lower burst but maintain sustained damage the same, all that will change is that those classes will end up dying in every single atrition game, as the amount of mana expended to keep up a warlock or to keep yourself alive is insane. You are also playing arena in a completely unfun way that isn't enjoyable at all. Sitting there being a punching bag, trying to stagger all defensive cooldowns while you get your shit pushed in isn't just weak, it is also deeply unfun - classes are enjoyable when they can use their abilities, not when they struggle every moment to barely stay alive while other people use their ability on you.
I am very deeply skeptical of the future of arena right now - people are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, which is the completely imbalanced burst. The complete inability of some classes to compete in atritition based match ups, the vulnerability to melee trains are all going to rear their ugly head soon. I am quite sure a nerf to burst is coming soon, but that won't really fix anything.
I want to adress two arguments that people will bring up: Resilience will make classes that are based around tanking damage better compared to classes based around avoiding it, and that once the healing required is decreased, the lack of holy paladin utility will show up. This is not the case - you cannot 'rage starve' a ret paladin or a DK piledriving a cloth class. Holy paladins were penalized because they were extremly easy to control and shut down - and in order to heal they had to expose themselves to dangerous CC/mana drains. With IoL, fast casting holy lights - paladins can easily outheal and just stay on top of mana for as long as is required. Holy priests/warlocks will always be vulnerable to melee trains, and even though they might 'survive them' more easily, they still won't be able to do anything except spend all their resources frantically trying to stay alive. Fear needs to be completely changed, right now nearly 1/3 of the horde races are immune to the first one, and 2 or 3 classes have direct counters to it on short cooldowns. Un-nerfing fear (or removing most of the immunities against it) would go a long way towards helping priests and warlocks.
It is completely unrealistic that the classes that suffer most from melee trains have the single worst crowd control spell against melees. Will of the forsaken breaks it. Berserker rage breaks it. Tremor totem breaks it. Lichborn grants you immunity, but I don't think it breaks it?
The obvious answer is to make a yogscast about it.
I was tempted to make a PvP video of our 2 vs 2 matches with a robbie williams ' angel ' soundtrack since I spent more time in angel form healing than alive.
From my experience (playing one week as rogue in all brackets, not too hardcore at medium ranking)
Burst is too high, but not only from rogues. It's also ret paladins, arcane mages, hunters, balance and feral druids. I could possibly list up more but that's from personal experience (Haven't seen insane burst from DKs yet but they are hated mostly because they are impossible to kill and if you actually manage to you have to do it twice). Most people seem to whine about rogues tho, and i guess it's because of the low health vs high damage values favor two things: Getting the jump and burst damage.
I don't think that nerfing single abilities/skills/talents is the way to go atm, unless they have the manpower to do it for 6+ specs within an acceptable timeframe. To me it seems more like a global solution is necessary, for example reducing damage in PvP by flat 30% (Even tho i would really dislike different rulesets for PvP/PvE).
So what broke the game? Did they add too many damage increasing talents while adding none to avoid damage? Did the base damage of abilities go up too much? Did they go up too many item levels on the new gear? Not enough resilience/stamina on the PvP sets? It is possibly a combination of all of them. I'm curious how Blizzard is going to fix it.
I was tempted to make a PvP video of our 2 vs 2 matches with a robbie williams ' angel ' soundtrack since I spent more time in angel form healing than alive.
I like to call it "Healing Form".
It's actually sort of funny that in the 5s at least it's *wrong* to kill a priest first, because you give them a large stretch of uninterruptable healing.
So what broke the game? Did they add too many damage increasing talents while adding none to avoid damage? Did the base damage of abilities go up too much? Did they go up too many item levels on the new gear? Not enough resilience/stamina on the PvP sets? It is possibly a combination of all of them. I'm curious how Blizzard is going to fix it.
Burst rode up in 3.0 so it's mostly/completely because of new talents and whatever skill/talent tweaks were in that patch. Ret paladins, Moonkins, Feral druids, mut rogues, and arcane mages all got a lot of chages in that patch from memory. I don't think that is a coincidence.
I do feel quite sorry for warlocks at the moment. From being the most feared class in vanilla, they are a complete joke in the current burst filled metagame. Whereas the other "bitch" classes have at least some sort of way to mitigate or survive damage without getting insta-gibbed, warlocks really do have nothing. I've been doing 2s with my frost mage partner in the mid-ratings and whenever we see a lock there is only one tactic: zerg. The new mage armor and berserk pretty much negates their only defence in fear. As much as I hate to admit (locks have been my bane since vanilla) they really do need alot of help.
@Mearis:
1. Lichborne does in fact retroactively break fear and makes you immune to it for the duration, but you can be affected by all abilities that affect undead.
2. Changing fear to be much more difficult to resist / get rid of will almost instantly make affliction / Demo Warlocks with instant howl into 2v2 Gods. There must be some way that is less over the top. Personally I am hoping to see some combination of additional or buffed defensive tools for warlocks and priests, outside of fear changes, alongside a flat reduction in burst where necessary: Rogues, Ret, Arcane, and Moonkin. Feral is fine except for Ferocious Bite, given that Infected Wounds is changing.
a. Such tools could be things like a flat buff to Pain Suppression, an actually useful scaling talent for PW:S in Holy, a buff to Blessed Resilience similar to Natural Perfection for Druids, and for warlocks, Base ability demonic sacrifices which give additional defenses. Sacrifice your pet, any pet, for a short Shield Wall effect, 2 minute Cooldown.
3. Burst does need to go, I just hope that in so doing, they don't go too far and smite every class too hard. Some classes already are borderline unable to kill a non-priest healer solo, DKs included. I think Blizzard needs to be very careful what they nerf and how they nerf it, I don't think flat % damage reductions in arena are a good idea, because that effect would massively benefit healing classes over non-healing, and we would see the return of long drain games. I think tweaks need to happen at an individual class level first.
My beef: I think this whole situation boils down to a misunderstanding of what it is to 'pressure' in pvp on the part of Blizzard, or what pressure can be. Case in point, in beta DKs had an ability called Degeneration, which corrupted a HoT on the target and dealt periodic damage to the healer, while also shutting down all other Hots from healing while it was ticking. Regardless of how much that corrupted hot did, that was a pressure ability (especially on Druids, ovbiously). Why, no really, WHY, are we not seeing abilities like that placed into the game and balanced? Why does pressure have to be about high burst? Mid-to-Hi sustained, over a long period, fine. But high burst is an awful way to create pressure on a healer, and lets face it, the role of Healer is critical to far more arena comps than the role of DPS is.
Why is burst so bad for pressure? Simple, the healer either survives it and therefore is likely to win the match, assuming the burst cant be repeated, or the healer dies and it is over. That is too simple, and really does not call for any kind of skill.
I think we need to see a fundamental re-evaluation of pressure in arenas. I want to see abilities like Degeneration get a second look, because stuff like that can be very good pressure even if it does no damage at all. Silences too, can be great pressure, they are short, you don't lose control of your character entirely, and they don't do damage. Damage normalized abilities would also work, stuff that can use %max-health to maintain a constant rate of pressure.
Fear needs to be completely changed, right now nearly 1/3 of the horde races are immune to the first one, and 2 or 3 classes have direct counters to it on short cooldowns. Un-nerfing fear (or removing most of the immunities against it) would go a long way towards helping priests and warlocks.
I'd like to expand a bit on that particular part of your (excellent) analysis - though my PvP experience in WotlK is so far more battlegrounds/WG than straight up arena.
The best way to illustrate what happend to fear is really via something Ghostcrawler* said in regards to a version of the warlock 51-point talent Chaos Bolt. Chaos Bolt was, in it's original design, meant to pierce "all immunities" making it the only spell except mass dispell to affect Iceblock/Bubble. This design was pulled, because "it would create a vicious cycle" with immunities not being "real immunities". They took fear down that path, being affected by fear is no longer being affected by a "real crowd control" because of all the abilities that ignores it. By now everyone and their dog (bestial wrath pun intended) has a way to get out of or prevent fear effects entirely. I realize that the versatile nature of fear where it can be used as an offensive weapon is a problem, but as Mearis said, it is now also completely useless as a defensive tool. Sadly, the easiest solution - easier than unnerfing fear, or removing immunities - is to start playing with a wider range of horror effects - like the Psychic Scream (talent?) that floated around beta for a while. That's really continuing the vicious cycle, but we're going down that road anyway, so let's do it in a way that at least puts warlocks as a class with an actual % representation in PvP.
Secondly, there's the more recent comment by GC about where they want to take warlocks, which would seem to apply somewhat to priests as well due to their design. In relation to metagame design, I think it ties in quite neatly with what Mearis said above.
I appreciate and agree that they don't want warlocks to be another mage, the entire melee vs ranged metagame appears to be designed under the notion that melee's can be kited, and therefor being in melee range should be punishing for anyone who sould normally operate at range. The most telling fact that this approach, while good in theory, is failing in practice is the ineffective nerf to spell pushback. Between stuns, immunities, interrupts and the remaining spell pushback, we're still not getting casts of in melee range. In a theoretical situation in which melee's are kitable, this isn't neccesarily a problem. In a practical application where you design one or two "ranged" classes to not move to a range situation beyond the initial seconds of the fight, it's a serious problem.
If all the melee specs are designed to have goodies - immunities, interrupts, slows, range-closers, CCs, straight up DPS when in range - because "they can be kited", designing a non-melee class that can't kite is going to be problematic far beyond providing the class with adequate defenses. They appear oddly aware of this in theory, but the practical implementations are lacking.
*The link to said post is broken ("Forum down for maintaince" which seems odd since they appear to be working okay for everything else), but narrated from WoWInsider here.
(I'd also like to add Lanky's comment about pressure was very well formulated, but the quality of my response there would be "I agree" til I've thought about it some more)
Last edited by Calixtus : 12/24/08 at 4:12 PM.
Reason: I made it somewhat prettier.
Some classes already are borderline unable to kill a non-priest healer solo, DKs included.
A single DPS class shouldn't be able to kill an equal geared healer without interrupt or DPS help from another source. That's basically the entire point of spike damage. If you can just sit someone on a healer and kill them it really devalues healing as a whole.
An outlasting pressure approach like you describe would be fine. Guild Wars actually did that very well with Mesmers.
Originally Posted by Mearis
Holy paladins currently are a lot more powerful than resto druids ever were.
I nominate myself for the idiocy award in not leveling my paladin(s) and doing druid/dk instead.
The opening disclaimer: Balancing ten distinct classes while trying to keep them distinct instead of truly homogenizing them for both a PvE game that places value on certain things but is not in the LITERAL sense 'balanced' for an arena game with different stresses is no small feat with an everchanging meta-game of clever players intent on exploiting any and every mechanic to get ahead is no small feat, and will probably always be a work in progress. I recognize this, freely admit I'm the last person to try and CODE such, and I damn well admire the devs for even trying as well as they have.
That said.
There are certain things that fall into the categories of 'blinding obvious', 'unforseen consequences', and 'subtle lesson'. Amazingly, most of the subtle-lesson category has been covered...we DO have a reisilience stat balanced around crit, PvP gear is meant to be unique to the demands of PvP, and plenty of mistakes have been avoided. And, let's face it, unforseen consequences happen to everyone. So why is there so much in the blindingly obvious category that makes it look like players see in the ultra-violet/normal light specturm while the devs see in normal/infra-red? There are certain changes, clearly meant to buff a class or close holes for it, that ANY [okay, not ANY-any, but any reasonably intelligent player that even tries to PvP] player could tell you upon hearing such an idea that it is unbalancing without some kind of change in the opposite direction?
One of the top contenders for this category at the moment is paladins...namely retribution and holy. For simplicity, I'll phrase it the way SOMEONE apparantly should have during a meeting: "So, we're going to give powerful regeneration to a high-HP, high-mana plate wearing class, while also giving them access to Heal over Time effects and incredibly fast heals? We're going to give their DPS spec incredible burst power with CC that is comprable to or above other DPS classes that aren't rogues? We're just going to slap something onto each and EVERY one of the balancing factors that keeps them undesirable to play in arena right now and not question for a second that this might make them overpowered, the class that already has that bubble everyone hates?" Clearly, no one said this, because this level of change is comprable to suddenly allowing priests to wear Paladin plate healing gear and Shaman caster-DPS gear as a 'for the hell of it' move. And obviously, I have an existing deep-seated loathing of Paladins in PvP, but the point stands...
Mages are [again] in the spotlight, this time with Arcane specs coming to the fore. Clearly, no one said "Hey, guys, remember how unbalanced it was when Mages had stupidly powerful nuking ability in PvP compared to most other classes, and could reliably stay at range? Let's address half their survival issues, give them a damage buff simply for surviving, and raise their burst again so they can spam instant casts and get masive chain crits. People will love it to death!" Clearly I'm trying not to make all the 'no we so aren't!' arguments here, but those are usually just excuses for imbalance anyway.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Priest scaling and survivability. "hey, guys, people hated priests last season, that lovely outlast season, so CLEARLY no-one will mind if we underscale their critical PvP talents based on the excuse we gave them more rocking abilities. I mean, it's not like anyone plays the class and expects to be able to at least have an average performance at all levels of PvP, and without giving them survival more like Druids we're totally in the clear."
For all the progress that HAS been made in the PvP world of balance [and let's face it, leaps and bounds have been made], there just seem to be some things that, despite being blindingly obvious before testing (much less implementation after said testing) the devs seem to keep stumbling into and then using the 'wait and see' approach...to find out exactly what should have been clear from square zero. Yeah, plenty of mistakes have been avoided and side-stepped, but why do we keep having someone push the lever four notches one way when it's clearly only one, or at most two, are needed at the time? The fact that they insist on pushing it that far and then not scalaing back on a different lever doesn't help this at all.
Part of my frustration with priest survival stems from the broken assumption that melee classes can be balanced around the idea that sometimes they are at range and sometimes they are close, therefore their on target dps time is less than 100%, and that as a consequence casters should be able to function at peak efficiency in those intervening periods when melee are not in melee range. This assumption is obviously broken most of the time given how fear mechanics are implemented and can be neutralized. Thus, melee uptime especially on priests is near 100%, and priests REQUIRE a peel in order to lower that percentage.
It is further broken for all those ranged interrupt spells that don't require melee range, either while a melee is targeting a secondary target and has you on focus, or is simply trying to reenter melee range after trinketing fear (read, strangulate, HoJ, repentance, throw w/ pvp gloves, death grip, etc etc). This doesn't include all casting interrupts at melee range, which have extremely short cooldowns, that may or may not be off GCD (rogues). Thus, even though casting time interruptions got "fixed" nothing changed appreciably because a halfway decent pvp-er doesn't need more than 2 seconds to interrupt a flash heal, hasted or otherwise.
My real frustration is how healing under pressure requires more than skill. It requires either a peel (either a backup healer or a distracting dps-er) OR a completely untalented opponent. Sure if someone isn't paying attention, i can get off flash heals and stay alive against wound poison until my cooldowns come up, but these kinds of opponents are few and far between (read: BGs, not arenas). Against someone with even moderate skill, I'm near helpless outside of my shield-pom-renew-desperate prayer cooldown. Against an opponent of equal skill, I will eventually lose without help.
My frustration isn't that they can do this. Its that there is no affirmative action I can take on my own to initiate healing that actually gets me above water rather than slowing decaying in health until I either run out of mana or get a peel. In contrast to the long list of spell interrupts, there very few melee interrupts, and most are concerned with creating distance (ie fear) rather than actually preventing melee attacks. I don't like to suggest wish-I-had spells because they'll obviously never get implemented, but I would LOVE something that simply prevented one melee from attacking me for 10 seconds (you could limit to situations where they were auto attacking you as a target, otherwise it would do nothing). I'd really like to be able to affirmatively disarm an incoming opponent, so that I can manage them, rather than endlessly preventing myself from getting handled.
Traditionally, I don't think this was a problem at 60 or even really at 70. In earlier iterations of the game not one class had every single ability in the grab bag of spells that are now necessary for arena, ie a CC (such as hex), a ranged cast interrupt, invulnerability, shields, a melee interrupt, a stun, an incapacitate, a healing debuff etc. With new skills and talents, in any given bg or arena, you're more likely to run into abilities you wouldn't necessarily have had to deal with when fighting a given class previously. This homogenization of abilities isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just feels like certain classes (priests in particular) got left out of the skill handouts came around.
A final comment, would penance really be so overpowered as a self cast? It can still be interrupted, and when you've got MS on you, you still need a peel.
@Mearis:
1. Lichborne does in fact retroactively break fear and makes you immune to it for the duration, but you can be affected by all abilities that affect undead.
However you can remove the effect once you break fear to prevent yourself from being vulnerable to such abilities, can you not?
One major problem I have with pvp right now is that they went overboard with abilities/talents that jack the crit% of certain abilities through the roof. Some of the ones that immediately jump to mind: Arcane Potency(+30% crit to the next damaging spell after gaining clearcasting or presence of mind), Rend and Tear(+50% crit to ferocious bite on a bleeding target), sanctified wrath (+50% hammer of wrath crit), recklessness(next 3 specials will crit) and the guaranteed judgement of command crit on stunned/incapacitated targets. Resilience has 2 components that make it useful, the -% to be crit, and the damage reduction on crits. The types of abilities I listed above go a long way towards marginalizing or even bypassing the first benefit of resilience. I'm fairly sure most if not all of them were 3.0 additions that were also complained about at the time, but those complaints were stonewalled by "Wait until 80 when hp pools have scaled up and it will be fine." Here we are at 80, and I don't see it being fine. Damage has scaled up far, far more than HP pools.
I'd really like to see resilience buffed to have an additional flat damage reduction component, and/or give the PvP sets an additional set bonus that has some kind of damage reducing component to it, preferably in a manner such that it cannot be double dipped in the same vein as 4piece season4, 4piece tier6 was. Not only to address the immediate burst damage control problem, but to also serve as a sort of futureproofing for when we are in T9 content with resil that has stopped increasing but PvE dps continues increasing.
I could use some advice.
I'm currently frost and teaming up with a moonkin.
Since I specced frost we basically have a 50/50 winchance at low rating ( 1450 ).
But I'm basically playing alone with treants against two others. The moonkin gets bursted so fast and basically can't do anything and I almost always end up in a 1vs2 situation.
So my question is how do we best start a fight?
Druid stealthed so they can focus on me, both stealthed and try and surprise them, or just pop everything and try to burst one down before they burst the druid down?
Is it worth using mirror images because they tend to fuck up all crowd control, polymorph focused targets, do relatively low dmg?
I could use some advice.
I'm currently frost and teaming up with a moonkin.
Since I specced frost we basically have a 50/50 winchance at low rating ( 1450 ).
But I'm basically playing alone with treants against two others. The moonkin gets bursted so fast and basically can't do anything and I almost always end up in a 1vs2 situation.
So my question is how do we best start a fight?
Druid stealthed so they can focus on me, both stealthed and try and surprise them, or just pop everything and try to burst one down before they burst the druid down?
Is it worth using mirror images because they tend to fuck up all crowd control, polymorph focused targets, do relatively low dmg?
Since you have 2 classes with some of the best CC in the game how are you co-ordinating them? I was helping a frost mage friend get 1660 (I am a resto shaman) and with all the abilities he has to peel people off of me I never felt in danger except when we played mage/rogue teams. Are you using deep freezes defensively? If they trinket that deep freeze are you sheeping right after if the DR isn't up? Is your partner running away when you nova people that are on him? If you defend the openers for long enough he can start using his globals for cycloning and rooting instead of shifting into to travel form and running away and once you get to that point, you control the fight.
There isn't really a "right way" to do things this early in the season, and especially at the lower brackets where you may run into weird things like double prot warrior that may throw you off guard.
However you can remove the effect once you break fear to prevent yourself from being vulnerable to such abilities, can you not?
Yes, through the standard method of unbuffing yourself. The catch is that you lose the fear immunity granted, so you effectively just have access to a [second, depending] nerfed WotF (ah, how I miss when it lasted for that precious few seconds) to avoid the undead treatment. Granted, this is potentially very powerful, especially as a Forsaken DK [basically, two WotFs plus your trinket], but the benefit of being immune to followups is gone.
Yes, through the standard method of unbuffing yourself. The catch is that you lose the fear immunity granted, so you effectively just have access to a [second, depending] nerfed WotF (ah, how I miss when it lasted for that precious few seconds) to avoid the undead treatment. Granted, this is potentially very powerful, especially as a Forsaken DK [basically, two WotFs plus your trinket], but the benefit of being immune to followups is gone.
Certainly in keeping buff active for the the immunities you might make yourself vulnerable to other crowd control, but against how many possible class combinations would this become an issue either way? Against a priest and a warlock you'll have to choose between making yourself vulnerable to (a second) fear or to shackle, likewise against a warlock and a paladin. Perhaps you might be worried about mind control against a priest, but it's difficult for me to think of a situation in which such an opportunity would become available on demand, discounting very rare circumstances.
Against the two classes with anti-undead powah, sure. And that's just in 2s, where an opponent is likely to notice you've suddenly become undead and capitilize on it. What about odd setups like Warrior/Warlock in 2s, or 5s where you are facing one priest OR paladin, backed up by a mix of classes involving, for instance, the aforementioned Warlock and Warrior? It's really dependant upon how much the priests or paladins you're facing are aware that they even CAN affect you that way while you are Lichborne [so any of them serious about PvP], and even then you're looking for a situation where they are actively watching for Lichborne to become active to utilize turn or shackle. I freely admit to being PvP mediocre, but I would imagine that until very high-ranked play the benefits of keeping LB up typically outweigh the potential for being CCed in response.
What 'negative' bonuses are there? You can cancel buffs instantly and not on the GCD, if you see somebody cast a shackle or a fear undead, you can immediately trinket it - shackle is also a 1.5 second cast spell with zero pushback resist, do you really think a priest is going to try to sit there casting it?
Worst to worst, it is an extra WOTF: Fear right now is countered by:
Tremor totem
WOTF
Lichborn
Berserker Rage
Fear ward
Sheep is countered by:
Shapeshift
In particular, WOTF/Berserker rage are exceedingly prevalent. The idea that priest/warlocks rely on a spell to which half of the players have some sort of immunity to on a short cooldown is retarded.
Read the last 3 pages of this thread and noticed many of the concerns about burst damage, which to be honest nobody should be surprised at. Low HP pools and low resilience by its very nature makes burst more impactful. The argument made is that more resilience and higher hp pools aren't going to fix anything, many even suggest that it will have zero real impact which I find doubtful.
The question I have is whether anyone else has noticed that crit damage reduction is scaling faster then crit chance reduction from resilience. This is based off of simple armory investigation and may just be a misrepresentation of numbers from armory but right now it appears that 82 resil is 1% crit chance reduction and 37 resil is 1% crit damage reduction (as opposed to 41 as would be expected). This coupled with the person who said crit damage reduction cap is 33% instead of 25% leads me to believe that resilience when it approaches cap will go alot farther then many are lead to believe in diminishing burst damage. Basically I want to know if this is in fact reality with resilience and if it perhaps changes the opinions of anyone?
I also dont find it to be a valid complaint for people to say they have "pvp" gear and get bursted down fast when they are just over 400 resil. That is equivalent to 200 resil before and if you only had that in arena you were taking a beating in s2-4 as well(esp. priests that didn't truly shine til 450+ when they could tank dps effectively).
However you can remove the effect once you break fear to prevent yourself from being vulnerable to such abilities, can you not?
As far as I know, it does not work this way. If you cast Shackle Undead on a Lichborne'd DK, the Shackle is not removed when the DK clicks off his Lichborne buff, the same way that a Druid will retain his Scare Beast even after shifting to caster form.
Although well thought out and valid, there's one very important catch: availability and actual level of said gear. It's the same argument as past seasons 'well, if you're well geared enough, PvP becomes balanced'. *very-loud-and-obnoxious-wrong-answer-buzzer-noise-here* You get an E for effort following this line of logic, because there is one very improtant thing here: it should be balanced BEFORE everyone is wearing gear beyond introductory PvP. If you're wearning what is literally next to no resilience, complaining about burst is stupid, but if you're wearing a full set of intro-80-PvP gear with resilience enchants, PvP trinks and jewlerly, getting bursted down within a ludicriously short amount of time IS a concern, especially when the 'answer' is 'go accquire a full set of Hateful' (which you can only do by not PvPing and hoping for lucky Wintergrasp drops, Emblems, or slogging through the painfully painful PvP for inordinate amounts of time). 'To stand a chance at PvP, you must be good at PvP' is a mantra that should apply to behavior and strategy, not gear. One of those circular logic holes: getting gear that allows you to BE good and play balanced PvP requires you to be good or exploit unbalanced mechanics. And people wonder why win-swapping occurred (I suppose I should say 'rampantly' as an additional qualifier)? Wearing better gear should give you an edge, not be the difference between "Geez, this is about the unfunest and most unbalanced thing I could do other than blue-walling lowbies every waking moment" and "Hey, cool, this PvP is fun and balanced!"
There have been examples in gaming history where to get to the fun/good game, you had to slog through things varying from minor irritance for long periods of time to pure torture...the lesson is that these games 1) died unbought and unplayed or 2) were modified or exploited to skip the suck to get to the part people wanted to play. Can we at least try and pretend we understand the definition of balance instead of saying suck if fine and acceptable to reach balance?
I don't think that nerfing single abilities/skills/talents is the way to go atm, unless they have the manpower to do it for 6+ specs within an acceptable timeframe. To me it seems more like a global solution is necessary, for example reducing damage in PvP by flat 30% (Even tho i would really dislike different rulesets for PvP/PvE).
Naaa that sux imo...
If they want to change something it could be empower the effect of resilience, both giving a "nerf" to pve gear and reducing the dmg overall, but first id like to see some match between top fully geared pvp ppl...
12/24/08, 5:45 AM
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