Why Arena is bad for WoW.

#0 - Dec. 28, 2008, 3:56 a.m.

Arena is one of the worst things that ever happened to wow, and should cease to exist for the sake of the game.

1. Arena is totally focused on burst damage. PVE, as well as large-scale PVP, is reliant on both burst and sustained dps. Being able to blast out 10k hits for 3 or 4 seconds is good enough for arena. While that kind of burst can be useful for taking down boss adds and killing healers in BGs, without sustained dps, the boss is not going down or the zerg rush/enemy healers will overwhelm you.

As a result, arena skews damage, and people clamor for both burst and sustained dps, which makes dps very difficult to balance unless you want some classes to @#%% pve and suck at pvp and the opposite for others (see hunters, rogues. Also look at ret pallies right after 3.0).

2. Arena forces you to use only a few people in any given battle, reducing your potential for variety. Thus in order to compete, every class needs survivability, CC, ways to escape CC, burst damage, ways to get into/out of range, etc, which makes all classes the same.

3. Incredible tendency to favor melee. No other type of combat is so confined, and is in the end bad for everyone. For example, rogues were/are tremendously overpowered in their ability to stunlock people to death, leading to crappy sustained (read: pve) dps for "balance." That makes rogues QQ that they won't get invited to raids and everyone who doesn't wear plate QQ about just sort of dying to every rogue they encounter. If arena did not exist, rogues' sustained damage could be buffed and some of their tools removed, making them better at large-scale pvp and pve without screwing over other classes in arena.

To sum everything up, arena is so vastly different from other mediums of combat, requires every class to be the same in order for them to compete, and imbalances the whole game because its focus is radically different from BGs, World pvp, and PVE.

Ghostcrawler

#24 - Dec. 28, 2008, 8:02 p.m.

We like Arenas, and clearly a lot of players do too.

What we don't like about them is they really put class balance under a microscope. Ultimately we'd like to see the pendulum on PvP swing back a little closer to Battlegrounds and even world PvP. We think the BGs actually encompass the story of Warcraft (which is essentially Horde vs. Alliance) much better than do the Arenas.

Where the Arena currently beats the pants off the BG is that we can detect player skill much better in an Arena. That in turn allows us to offer the best loot to the best players. BG rewards by contrast have traditionally felt very grindy.

We do have some plans to change all of that. We don't have any intention of getting rid of Arenas for players that do enjoy that sort of gameplay. But we also want to give other players alternatives to still be able to get great rewards.

Ghostcrawler

#37 - Dec. 28, 2008, 8:29 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I believe these two quotes somewhat compete with one another, GC. With the severity of class imbalance we have seen since the introduction of the Arena system, it is difficult to use it as an accurate measure of player skill.

Class certainly has an effect on the outcome, which is why it is subject to such scrutiny. At the same time, I think there is something interesting to the whole comp strategy. I think we'd lose something if you could get any 3 random people together. I'm not saying certain classes should be doomed to failure. I'm saying who you get for your third should mean something.

Q u o t e:
You actually feel that you can determine "skill" in an unbalanced RNG based game?

Within the limitation of the tools, yes I think we can. You're talking down to an awful lot of gladiators out there if your argument is that they just picked the right class or got lucky with the RNG.

If I took say a rogue-mage-priest team at the height of its power and played a team with the same gear and comp, I don't think the outcome would be 50/50 every time. If I took my team and played the best team in the world, I would expect to get stomped. That's skill.