Class vs. damage in Arenas

Here is a request originally posted by Ghostcrawler:

Q u o t e:
In the interest of encouraging discussion, I am going to pose a question below.

Caveats: Please don't derail this thread. It it liable to get long. Also please do not take my comments out of context or attempt to read too much between the lines. I hate having to communicate like a politician. :(

The same classes keep coming up in Arena discussions: rogues, mages, death knights and paladins. In a world with low resilience, it is perhaps unsurprising that classes that combine burst damage with so many tools for avoiding damage would be powerful.

Let's set aside the discussion of these classes for a moment (and to be fair, it is probably specs, not classes). My question is this: In an Arena match in which none of those 4 are participating, do you feel that damage is too high *given* that it will only come down once players acquire more resilience?

If you can't tell, I am trying to get the community to explore whether it is those classes or damage in general that is causing so much consternation.

Q u o t e:
Slorkuz,

Pretty sad when you take so long to cross post something here, shows how important or more accurately unimportant Euro players are to Bliz.

Luckily Reptyl was about 3 DAYS ahead of you...

Ghostcrawler posted his post at 03:21:41 PM PST on 2nd Jan 2009; This equals 00:21 (12:21am) Saturday 3rd Jan Paris time. Rather than rambling about conspiracy theories and complaining about something that is inadvertently due to time-zone differences, please keep this thread on topic and continue with constructive replies.

After reading through the responses so far in this thread, we have attempted to consolidate the feedback and capture the general essence of what player concerns are. While there are some varying claims in the relative strength of certain classes and specs, a great many of these are not claims represented by the majority of the posters giving feedback.

With that, the general consensus of posters in this thread thus far feel that:

Damage intake (overall) is too high, even factoring high resilience amounts.

• This particularly becomes a problem when the damage intake (from 100% to dead) is within a few (2-3) global cooldowns, leaving the targeted players with little or no time to react before dieing.
• Damage dealt by classes with a strong ability to control their opponents or with immunity/complete-avoidance defensive abilities, (namely the four classes originally not requested feedback about), simply is an amplification of the problem that: damage is being dealt too quickly in too large amounts (burst). This is to say that even if given the opportunity to react and fight back - either 1) abilities will not hit immune targets and they are dead before immunity wears off or 2) they are under the effect of controlling abilities (such as stuns) while taking so much damage during their character-control lockout period that they are dead or very close to dead by the time they get a chance to actually do something.

There also appears to be some sort of general consensus that resilience is not effective enough compared to its intention, leaving the classes that can afford to drop resilience amounts in favor of PvE gear in order to rely on even higher burst damage, are doing so mainly due to defensive abilities which other classes lack.

That said, feel free to continue providing feedback and constructive comments in this thread.