GC: Rumors

Q u o t e:
Is there any validity to the rumor that damage will be higher in WOTLK than in TBC, even with Resilience, to give more inexperienced players a chance to accidentally win sometimes against better players?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but no, this was not the intent.

It is hard to nail the sweet spot on Arena balance, and what that sweet spot is depends a lot on what role you play. At times players have felt that they couldn't prevent someone from healing, which turns the entire fight into mana draining, silence and crowd control, since nobody ever dies. Damage-dealers were frustrated because they felt like just beating on someone (which their entire spec may have been designed around) was ineffective. Currently, the opposite is true, where players can be beaten down very quickly and healers tend to wonder why they should even bother trying to heal.

Resilience will make a difference - remember that not only is PvP gear itemized for resilience, but it uses up points that would normally be spent on +dps. The defenses are not only higher, but the offenses are lower. Furthermore, once players can survive for a few seconds, it tends to force everyone to worry about defenses once again. Will resilience make enough of a difference? That is something we are discussing right now.

We hear and understand all of the concerns. I don't have any announcements to make of changes at this time, and honestly changes of the magnitude we're talking would not be the kind of thing I would just casually drop as an answer to a forum thread like this. But we do hear you.

Q u o t e:
Rogues in arena, even is S4 where for about any other class PvP gear was the best gear available for PvP, were using mostly PvE gear. This is back in the days of 2h+ matches, when survivability and outlasting was how arena was played....

While that was true to an extent, if you look at the Lich King PvP gear, you'll see that it pays a higher price for resilience. In previous seasons, you could get very high dps and resilience on the same set of gear. That is harder to do now. Rogues, like everyone else, will be risking being very fragile if they go with all PvE gear for the damage. That isn't happening now because very few people have much PvP gear. Once players can survive a few hits, then players without resilience are going to go down quickly.

(Weapons are an exception to this, at least for now.)

Again, I'm not saying that burst damage won't still be too high. That is something we're looking at.