PvP gear vs. PvE gear

The problem with that approach is that whenever there is an alternative way to get the same or similar gear, players will generally always choose the easiest/fastest route, even if that goes against their own personal enjoyment of the game; obviously that is something we would like to avoid and should be able to avoid with good design.

If you’re a serious raider and you dislike doing PvP, you’ll probably feel left behind if the rest of your guildmates go into arena to complement their PvE gear, and vice versa in case you’re into PvP and dislike PvE.

I think these two groups are different enough to warrant a gear distinction, I believe that is good design. Can the current system be improved? Certainly, there are many things that are far from ideal, we’ve tried quite a lot of new ideas for PvP in MoP, some of those ideas were quite radical and we know that there’s always some risk attached to anything that’s drastically different and new. We made some mistakes, and we learned a lot from them, we’ve reverted some changes and we’ve tried a few new approaches and as time goes on the system will keep on maturing.

It’s also important to remember that new expansions will always give us much more leeway when it comes to design shifts. It’s very important to keep a certain level of consistency during the course of an expansion, even when you have a great new idea, if that idea is too radical, sometimes it will be better to wait for a new expansion before deploying it in order to avoid alienating and confusing the players.
There are certainly some things that we would do differently if MoP were to launch today. But frankly, I think MoP had (and will have) some of the most drastic changes I’ve seen during the course of any expansion, and 5.4 is really really packed!
I must say I’m quite excited and curious to see how 5.4 will play out on live and see how players will take some of the new features.

18/07/2013 16:17Posted by Phalhunt

simple fixes like even ilevel balance?

Fixing ilvls is super simple, fixing everything that depends on those ilvls however is not. That’s where the complexity begins, the whole game is like an intrinsic vast web of connections, every change that you apply will send out a wave of repercussions that we have to “fix” somehow. Some of these will be easy, others hard, and some we won’t even be expecting.

18/07/2013 18:07Posted by Jæ

One of the devs tweeted that they would change the new trinkets for PvP.

Yes, we will nerf all new 5.4 PvE trinkets and also disable PvE set bonuses for PvP.

We do understand and share your concerns about PvE trinkets being too good in PvP, they’re a very particular type of item, and are supposed to be very powerful in PvE. That concept is basically the root of all these issues, but we like that they are this powerful as it makes them particularly exciting and coveted items for PvE.

I've found that the fastest way to earn Honor points is by doing Heroics and change your Justice points to Honor

Bit sad that it is this way.

We have made the conversion ratio of justice-to-honor = 3:2 but if this happens consistently to most players then it’s not ideal; do you find that earning honor through dungeons is still faster than doing Bgs even when you’re in a good semi-fixed group?

This is one of those cases where PvP and PvE differ a lot, you know what to expect from a 5man dungeon, and you know on average how long it will take, especially when you have a friend or two speeding things up with top gear. When doing Bgs however, you never really know what you’re going to get, even with a semi-fixed group; the other team might put up a good fight and the game will last longer, or you might even lose; but in the end, isn’t that what PvP is all about, enjoying a good fight?
I mean, while the design concept that I talked about is still what we aim for, this might be one of those situations where on average, players still get more points through Bgs even if that isn’t true for everyone (example: if you have friends willing to go with you into 5mans but not into PvP), but we can look into the ratio it if the difference reveals to be significant.

On the other hand, I’d like to point out that currently, Conquest Points are exclusive to PvP and Valor to PvE, Justice and Honor are a sort of catch-up currencies, and while these latter are still important and should still respect some design boundaries, Conquest and Valor are the currencies where those boundaries have to be applied much more strictly and rigorously.
So for example, in case we ever allow Valor-to-Conquest again like we did in Cata or possibly even the opposite (Uh oh! ;), we would need to be very careful with the conversion ratio and maybe even impose a weekly cap. (we have no plans to do this atm, it’s just an example to better illustrate this argument)