Six things ruining this game...

#0 - April 6, 2009, 5:27 p.m.

1) Massively Unbalanced classes.

Its absolutely amazing how long the current imbalances are allowed to last. DK/HPally trumps just about everything in the arena and dK's are getting by mostly unscathed in 3.1. Ret and Arcane were allowed MONTHS to run around 2-shotting everything with the promise that level 80, then resilience, would fix the problem. Months.

Look at something like Rogue vs Warlock...how long has that imbalance lasted? And no, I am not asking for 1 v 1 balance, but for God's sake, why are Warlocks allowed to be a free kill for so long? It just doesnt make sense.

2) The BG's.

The BG's starting imbalanced (game actually starting 40 v 12, 15 v 6, etc, etc) are nothing more than a huge demoralizing waste of time. Horde on my old Battlegroup dont even do AV anymore because we get ~20 honor while they get 2k, simply because even by the end of the game, its 40 v 18 *maybe*.

And yes, I know that AV is being added to the Honor turn ins, but this still doesnt fix the starting gate imbalances in the other BG's.

3) The devs being too slow to balance.

We keep hearing GC say "If we over nerf something, we will buff it", and we can assume the opposite. Really? And how long will that take? Until everyone playing certain classes already have Gladiator titles and Frost wyrms, then you can be like "ahhh, ok, we were jk, gonna nerf everyone now"?

4) PVP gear (specifically weapons).

Thats terrific, I can spend months fully PVP gearing my character to finally hit the rating I need for a weapon, and its worse than the weapon I could have spent 4 hours pugging a 25 man Naxx.

Makes perfect sense.

5) Burst.

Burst.
Is.
Killing.
This.
Game.
Plz.
Fix.
It.

Seriously, PVP has been retarded ever since the patch before Wrath and not enough is being done to tone it down quickly enough. The problem is that as burst goes up and people die faster and faster, CC becomes much, much more powerful. PVP now consists of being chain CC'd, unable to control your character AT ALL while being killed. Great Fun!

6) Resilience.

The mere fact that as a non plate wearing class, or especially healer, you need 800-1000 resilience to NOT DIE IN A POUNCE, CHEAP SHOT, GHOUL STUN, CS, SHATTER COMBO OR EXPLOSIVE SHOT is completely ridiculous.

Thats like saying "well, for you to be able to even contribute to your Ulduar raid, you need to be completely Ulduar geared out".

PVP is in a sad state when some classes need to run around the BG's for MONTHS getting 2-3 shotted before they can actually begin ENJOYING this game. MONTHS of "Oh, Cheap Shotted" *click to reserrect at the nearest graveyard". Months.

Ghostcrawler

#131 - April 7, 2009, 5:54 p.m.

I'll address these since there seems to be a lot of support for them among other players. However, I do think you can find most of our answers to these issues in previous responses we have made.

Q u o t e:
1) Massively Unbalanced classes.

Its absolutely amazing how long the current imbalances are allowed to last. DK/HPally trumps just about everything in the arena and dK's are getting by mostly unscathed in 3.1. Ret and Arcane were allowed MONTHS to run around 2-shotting everything with the promise that level 80, then resilience, would fix the problem. Months.

We think DKs and Holy paladins are too dominant in Arenas. Beyond those two there are some imbalances, but you are going to find a lot of debate among the community about who it is, and I think that might come to dominate the rest of the thread. The "two-shotting" is a little exaggerated in most cases.

Q u o t e:
3) The devs being too slow to balance.

We keep hearing GC say "If we over nerf something, we will buff it", and we can assume the opposite. Really? And how long will that take? Until everyone playing certain classes already have Gladiator titles and Frost wyrms, then you can be like "ahhh, ok, we were jk, gonna nerf everyone now"?

We are more quick to balance in LK than we were in BC. However, as a counterpoint, you can find plenty of posts by players who feel that they have whiplash from too many changes. We need to evalaute carefully when we think a change is warranted and keep both extremes in mind.

Q u o t e:
4) PVP gear (specifically weapons).

Thats terrific, I can spend months fully PVP gearing my character to finally hit the rating I need for a weapon, and its worse than the weapon I could have spent 4 hours pugging a 25 man Naxx.

This was a problem with 25-player Naxx being too easy to pug. I don't think you will find the same number of players rocking Yogg hard mode weapons. The best weapons from PvE or PvP should ideally require the same amount of investment.

Q u o t e:
5) Burst.

Burst.
Is.
Killing.
This.
Game.
Plz.
Fix.
It.

We think this was a bigger problem when season 5 started than it is now. We managed to address some of the worst burst (Bubbled Ret pallies, Arcane Barrage, Mutilate+stun+stealth, Explosive Shot, Impurity + Howling Blast, and now finally Shadowfrost Icy Touch). At the same time, being able to call upon your burst when needed (blowing cooldowns etc.) is pretty important for being able to finish someone off before they can escape or get a heal. We won't have a very fun Arena if everyone is always hitting for 2000 damage (they just can't be hitting for 20,000 either).

We have seen many fights now that won't wind down because the healers can just keep going and going forever. While we don't want fights to last for 6 seconds, we also don't want to see the only way a fight can end to be through mana drains (the spell effect itself, or just slowly, painfully watching someone's blue bar exhaust itself). Ideally both situations would sometimes occur, but there would also be more fights somewhere in the middle.

Ghostcrawler

#132 - April 7, 2009, 5:55 p.m.

Q u o t e:
6) Resilience.

The mere fact that as a non plate wearing class, or especially healer, you need 800-1000 resilience to NOT DIE IN A POUNCE, CHEAP SHOT, GHOUL STUN, CS, SHATTER COMBO OR EXPLOSIVE SHOT is completely ridiculous.

Thats like saying "well, for you to be able to even contribute to your Ulduar raid, you need to be completely Ulduar geared out".

PVP is in a sad state when some classes need to run around the BG's for MONTHS getting 2-3 shotted before they can actually begin ENJOYING this game. MONTHS of "Oh, Cheap Shotted" *click to reserrect at the nearest graveyard". Months.

You don't need 800-1000 resilience to survive a Shatter combo. The game is designed around the notion that you will escape or prevent CC. You aren't going to survive long CC'd with players beating on you no matter how high your resilience is.

I think what we might do differently next time is make higher resilience values available earlier. You start to notice resilience having an effect at say 500 or so and you start living long enough to counter attacks at 800 or so. A lot of players going into the season with 100 or so resilience did get blown up. This felt particularly weird because:

1) For the last few seasons, their resilience had pretty much just gone up. Season 5 was a reset that had a lot more in common with Season 1.
2) In addition, this was complicated by the issue above -- that players were combining the weak resilience with very potent PvE weapons that they had already looted from KT. If the Arena season had started around the same time Naxx had opened (combined with slightly better tuning on Naxx) then there would not have been such a discrepancy.
3) Some classes had overly powerful built in resistances that made up for the lack of resilience. Specifically, DKs had a lot of cooldowns and passive defenses built in for tanking and paladins had their shields, which could be used offensively at the start of the season.

To drag out a tired cliche, the combination of these 3 (low resilience, KT weapons and baked-in defenses) plus the high burst at the start of the season created a perfect storm for fast Arena deaths.

Perhaps a better solution is to have relatively high resilience on the starter gear (like 500) but at the cost of offensive stats. We do want PvP gear to be a progression though. We don't want you to start the first season of an expansion with amazing resilience and offenses.

Ghostcrawler

#342 - April 7, 2009, 11:06 p.m.

Q u o t e:
________________________________________
Q u o t e:

We don't want you to start the first season of an expansion with amazing resilience and offenses.
________________________________________

Why not -- it's the only way to make sure that the burst classes actually USE the resil gear at the beginning. Otherwise you get classes with active defenses just using PvE gear and dominating... and that's not even restricted to the first season of an expansion, as evidenced by the great rogue cullings of S3 and S4.

The Arena game is designed with gear being a big reward that in turn makes you more powerful in Arenas. If you don’t notice an improvement when you get better gear, then the reward structure is a lot less meaningful. The trick is to make the starting gear good enough to get you going. If this was a racing game, we couldn’t start you with the rusting old jalopy, but we can’t start you with the Ferrari either.

BTW, if that isn’t your style, we expressly made the tournament realms where you can skip over the whole gearing up side of the game. But we don’t want that to be the main way players experience WoW with their “real” characters.

Q u o t e:
Am I not designed for a 6 second fight? As far as I can tell, I made to burst down an opponent. The problem is, if I fail to burst hard enough, I lose. If I DO burst hard enough, they die in 6 seconds and I'm deemed OP. Is it the design itself thats my enemy? I dont have tools to deal with a longer bout, if the enemy can heal or CC, its down in 6 or I'm finished. (*There is of course the BG exception where I can prey on unsuspecting players and drop 18K on thier head before they knew where it came from).

We definitely designed a few classes originally in a way where all they bring is big burst. We have realized now that this doesn’t work. It ends up being not fun for the burster or the burstee. We are trying to redirect Ret, Arcane, and PvP rogues of all types away from the proverbial “two shot” and more towards having different answers for different situations.

Q u o t e:
The difference between a burst environment and a "long drawn our environment" is that in past seasons where healing was fairly dominant, you actually *gasp* got to play your character.

Some players think that realistically nobody should ever die until everyone is out of mana. That isn’t what we’re going for. Describing what we are going for is sometimes a little delicate because players are quick to say “Oh great, so Arena is all about two shots,” or “Oh great, Arena is all about drain teams.” The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Q u o t e:
Are you seriously going to use this response a to why Paladins do not wear as much resil as the 3 other healing classes? Shields? Are you kidding me?

I meant the bubbles, not the metal things you hold in your hand.

Q u o t e:
Good. Indeed, this might be the first time I have seen you explicitly say that about holy pallies as well as DKs.

I have said it many times. I’m not picking on you personally, but there is an awful lot of “Why haven’t you addressed X” when you can often find out we have addressed it before, even if it isn’t still on the first page of the forums.

Q u o t e:
S2 should be your model. Everyone I know loved arena back then, but you all thought gear was too easy to get.

A lot of players gave up raiding to do Arenas because the gear was readily attainable and they assumed, incorrectly but understandably, that that’s what they were “supposed to do.” This season things almost flipped where everyone went to KT for gear. When one part of the game over rewards, players flock to it. That’s totally understandable and almost always our fault.

Q u o t e:
Wow, again GC, you manage to ignore the greatest factor that is different from BC to LK. 10 more talent points, and no health or mitigation to counterbalance the dps increase.

It wasn’t mentioned in the original questions (or I missed it) but I actually agree, and several of the talents have a synergistic effect where together they provide more benefit than either would alone. Glyphs piled on the damage too. Next time we increase the level cap, I predict health will increase a lot more than it did this time around (and bosses will just hit harder).

Ghostcrawler

#343 - April 7, 2009, 11:06 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The fact that any of the plate wearing classes can wear almost full PvE gear and literally faceroll to a 2k rating (except MAYBE not warriors) is just astounding.

I don’t think it is a plate problem, to be honest. DKs (esp. Unholy) and paladins do a lot of non-physical damage yet wear plate, which grants them resistance to physical attacks. The strongest classes in S5 seemed to be those that were resistant to physical damage, but did a lot of magical damage. They were in essence one of the strongest counters for themselves. Many classes or specs don’t do any physical damage, and a lot of classes without plate make up for it with self buff that give them mitigation of some kind anyway. I think the two dominant classes just happened to be plate wearers.

Q u o t e:
All of this was predicted a long long time ago by good players on the PTR.

It’s easy to pick out those arguments and ignore all of the DKs who thought they were going to be useless in PvP without MS and intercept, and all of the hunters who thought they were doomed in S5. The community is right a lot and the communit y is wrong sometimes too. Our solution is never going to be to throw up our hands and let the community balance the game, so these comments don’t really give us much to work with. If there are specific concerns you have, then bring them up.

Couple of extra things I’ll add in response to a couple of the comments. While we have acknowledged wanting to do a lot more with BGs, if the only solution you are offering is “Cut Arena it suxks” then most likely you are wasting your time. A lot of players do like it (and so do we). We do need to make sure it doesn’t intrude too much on the rest of the game if it isn’t for you though.

I also feel the need to state yet again that remember even when Arenas are working perfectly, you are going to lose about half your matches and possibly more. Arena balance does not mean that you win a lot. This is a very different experience from PvE where you do win almost every fight. We’ll take our share of the blame for class imbalance problems, but don’t look at every single PvP loss as being all because of us. :)

Ghostcrawler

#577 - April 8, 2009, 8:15 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Stop saying HEALERS when you mean PALADINS. You must not understand how angry that makes us feel. As a Priest, i will go OOM and it's inevitable. After I'm OOM I'm dead because I won't survive long enough because my Mana-Ability is on a 5 minute cooldown -while Paladins have theirs on a 1 min cooldown. Gee, I wonder who is going to last longer!

In this case, I don’t mean paladins. There is a priest / shaman / paladin comp doing pretty well right now, and the paladin is there for dps. Nobody ever dies and nobody runs out of mana. It may not be a very exciting way to play, but it seems effective so far.

Q u o t e:
I think most people when referring to "balance" refer to class representation in the top brackets and in the top teams in the Tourney.

That is a better definition of what balance is (though in general the forums tend to over-interpret comps at the top of the Arena lists, usually in a way that best suits their argument). My original comment was more speaking to the posters who say something like “I still die a lot, therefore Arenas aren’t balanced.” Not every smart player is saying that.

Q u o t e:
You listened to the uneducated idiots spouting that ABr was hitting for 9k without even realizing it takes 7 seconds to ramp up to that having to chain cast Arcane Blast.

Q u o t e:
I made posts on the beta forums every day about how OP DK's would be. Not are, not might be, WOULD be.

Just quoting these because they are classic “You listened to that guy over there when clearly you should have listened to me.” Hindsight is 20/20 and players are often reluctant to bring up those examples where they were certain the sky was falling but it ended up staying up there.

Q u o t e:
To design a game where in contest, a person will win or lose a game 50% of the time is what everyone hates.

But that is a principle at the heart of virtually every kind of competition among humans. The Olympics and professional sports are filled with people who are probably in the one percentile for skill at their game, yet they still lose. In a basketball game, one team wins and one team loses. In WoW, that losing team would sometimes come post in the forums that their class is weak because they lost. Now as I said, there are legit balance problems and plenty of players don’t do that. But some do.

Q u o t e:
Does cloth armor mitigate spell damage?
Casters do face casters btw.

Plate does not mitigate spell damage.

Q u o t e:
1. GC, you're failing to acknowledge that many people are pointing to S2 as an idealized arena system not because of the easy gear rewards but because of the perception of well balanced classes during that time.

The quote I was referring to said something to the effect of “I enjoyed S2 because everyone got loot.” I realize that’s not the case for everyone, but that was the quote I was referring to. Many players read our blue text out of context.

EDIT: It was pointed out the 1 percentile is at the bottom and I should have correctly referenced the 99th percentile. :)

Ghostcrawler

#578 - April 8, 2009, 8:15 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I think GC is missing the point regarding cloth requiring high Res to survive and Plate not. It comes down to time to kill.

Imagine a world where every class put out exactly the same damage over a defined period of time, say 20k over 10 seconds. Let’s also imagine that every class has exactly 20k health. Every class can therefore kill another class in 10 seconds in the absence of any CC, interrupt or slowing mechanism.

Add in armour at 10% melee damage mitigation for clothies, 50% for plate and 0% protection from magic damage for either. It’s now going to take 11% longer (11 secs) for melee damage to kill a clothy and 100% longer (20 secs) for melee to kill plate while magical damage will still kill in 10 secs on anything.

In this scenario clothies would have a marginal preference to go for plate wearers and plate wearers would have a strong preference to go for the clothies as they can kill them in half the time they can kill another plate wearer. This is what will happen, period. People take the fastest route to get a kill whenever possible.

So, if plate were compensated with 11% more health, clothies would have no specific target preference, but plate would still heavily favour going for clothies. So clothies would be copping it big time and would naturally feel the need to stack Res to survive.

Thing is, WotLK added gear homogenisation which de-emphasised Stam on clothy gear and re-emphasised it on plate gear plus talents. So there’s significantly more than an 11% difference in health. The time to kill even more heavily favours plate going for clothies AND clothies going for clothies.

Sure I am hugely oversimplifying things here, but time to kill is a fundamental problem.

I am going to quote all of this, because it is well said. Still, there are a lot of classes who do little or no physical damage. The plate health does help a little there, but so do defensive buffs, etc.

Q u o t e:
Holy pally /DK hardly got touched while they nerfed feral to the ground.

If you mean Holy / DK didn’t get touched for 3.1, we just disagree. If you mean they didn’t get touched enough (this is starting to sound dirty) in 3.0, we did make changes along the way that just ended up not being sweeping enough. It is harder to get PTR testing on those smaller patches, and for some it wasn’t even available. While we have good testing resources, PvP balance is always the hardest because you basically need to play out the entire season quickly to predict what is going to happen.

Q u o t e:
GC please understand this, we as a collective whole are not lying to you when we say PvP is a gibfest with too much burst. There is no reason for us to lie to you.

Of course there is. You want to be more powerful. At least 90% of the forum posts in here are thinly veiled or overt requests for buffs. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and I’m not accusing all forum posters of being devious (though some are). You think PvP has too much burst. I get that. Not everyone agrees with you. Some players are very fearful of long matches where only drain comps can prosper. We think burst was too high earlier in the season. It is better now and will be even better in 3.1. Over-compensating for a problem is always a risk, and the community will be quick to point out the number of cases where we have managed to do just that. :)

Q u o t e:
PVP sucks and should be eliminated from this game.

You are entitled to your opinion, but it should be obvious that thousands, probably millions of players disagree with you, as do we. If you wanted to offer what you don’t like about it or how WoW would benefit from letting players PvP without it affecting your PvE game, then maybe your post would have contributed something. Alas.

There are also a lot of posts asking “Okay, well what about my spec and my problems?” I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn one thread into a discussion of all things PvP. I am trying to stick with the higher level design in the spirit of the original questions.

Ghostcrawler

#714 - April 9, 2009, 6:28 p.m.

Dear players who keep replying to this thread with "Let's talk about my class" or "They should remove Arena." It is clear you aren't actually reading the previous posts in this thread where I said I didn't find those topics relevant to this discussion. The conversations would flow a lot better here if you didn't try to change the subject of existing threads so much. :(

Ghostcrawler

#756 - April 10, 2009, 4:48 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC, with all due respect man, there were 6 points in the original post, FIVE of them were PVP specifically Arena concerns. I really dont see how PVP discussion is not relevant to the topic.

PvP is absolutely a relevant topic. What I was trying to discourage were all of the replies that say “Hey let’s talk about shaman / warlocks / warriors / druids etc. for a minute.” This thread is over 700 posts long. If we inflate the topic at hand (which currently seems to have just become “WoW”) it is going to grow even more out of control. More than likely new players won’t bother reading what has been said before and we end up with a bunch of peeps shouting instead of a conversation.

Q u o t e:
As constructive criticism: Your feedback on why you change talents, and what you're thinking of doing for particular classes/abilities is GREAT. Your complaints about posters being irrational or illogical or bringing up things that you've already commented on don't really serve a useful purpose.

If it directs players to make more useful posts, then it does serve a useful purpose. If making one of those posts now saves us from having to make ten in the future, that’s great. We can also hope that players eventually take the hint and think “Hmmm, maybe we’d rather spend our blue time discussing the classes themselves and not Blizzard design, testing or forum policy.” I know you can’t delete irrelevant posts. But you can reply with “This isn’t relevant” or just ignore them. Peer pressure is a powerful thing and players tend not to post if they think the rest of the community thinks they’re dumb.

Ghostcrawler

#761 - April 10, 2009, 6:15 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Ok, this is a terrible point. You've already admitted that DK/Pally is the most dominant in the Arena, and many posters are trying to get your attention that non-plate non-pally healers are doing terribly. Which they are!

You mean except for the priests in RMP? Many players think Resto shamans are fine, and will be better once DKs and paladins are brought down a little. That leaves Resto druids. We didn't give them many buffs, but we gave them some, and losing JoJ's range and Blood Plague's hot removal is a huge net buff to them.

Ghostcrawler

#788 - April 10, 2009, 9:44 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Just happened? Just happened, eh?

I don't think it just happened, I think it's working exactly as designed.

My point was that if DKs and Holy paladins wore cloth, I don't think the outcome would have been very different. Plate isn't the problem here, it's just a characteristic the two had in common. (And the other plate wearer ended up being under-represented.)