Give Undead same racial as human

Ban Review

#1 - April 2, 2015, 5:39 a.m.

Out of the top 500 3v3 players, only 3 are horde.
Reason?
Human racial.

In PvP, you need a remove CC trinket. Adding X seconds of combat, espicially when you're bursting and have cooldowns up, is HUGE. Human have a racial currently that makes it so that you have this at all times. This basically gives them a third trinket slot. Undead used to have this, but now Undead only affects some CC's.
Profession perks were removed, so why is it that racials have such a huge impact?

Excuses:

1) Won't work for RP
There is so much wrong with RP, balancing the factions won't affect RP that much. Regardless, racials don't have much to do with RP anyway.

2) Not all classes can be human, so it doesn't really matter.
Right, but it's impossible to have a viable 3s comp that doesn't have a human selectable class. If one person can take advantage of this OP racial, then it will make a huge difference, not only in your burst potential, but also in your overall damage, which at higher rank is very important to take advantage by any means.

3) Racials don't matter, top players make people crossover
-A third trinket slot is op no matter what. It should be balanced, regardless of the amount of alliance players. Noting this makes it seem silly to think that the ratio of alliance to horde players is 497:3 on average because of "streamers". Twitch isn't that popular, tbh

4) People WANT to be alliance, it has nothing to do with racials
Ok. Why don't we balance it for the spirit of the game, and then observe.

5) Why don't we just balance ALL racials then?
One step at a time. Balance factions first.

edit: My Reponse to Lore

Top end PvPers dont suddenly decide to change partners, and decide to all congregate to one faction in order to do that. They have set partners that they decide to push rating with, and maintain those partners until something drastic happens like one partner deciding to quit, or whatever. Most high rated players are consistent and dedicated to the game to want to push rating, as getting to the top 500 takes dedication in learning the game, understanding different mechanics, and instinctive knowledge of positioning. Arguably, getting gladiator title is one of the hardest things in the game.

The simple fact that is obvious is that Human racial is overpowered compared to all others. Can everyone agree on that? The second point is that over 99% of top 500 players are alliance. That's fact.

Now let's ignore the possibility that maybe those two points are linked, and just move on. Why don't we give a similarly OP racial to the Horde side, and see what happens? If you are right, and since so many of top players are already Alliance, then why would they waste their money and transfer for similar effect? In fact, the only 2 classes that can't become Human are Druid and Shaman. Shaman's "best" racial is Dwarf, and Druids "best" racial is Night Elf. If you're right, then there shouldn't really be any noticeable change to the top 500 roster.

It also wouldn't be that hard for Blizzard to do, and it would atleast generate some revenue in transfers. I only mention that since it might be motivating for devs to commit the man "hours" to it.

Lore

Community Manager

#27 - April 3, 2015, 1:06 a.m.

There's an interesting social phenomenon surrounding racial balance in highly rated PvP. I don't think that equal representation (or even close) is actually possible at the top end of the rankings.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not going to make the argument that racials are perfectly balanced. I honestly don't have much info to share in terms of actual racial balance other than it's something we talk about fairly regularly. So, don't take this as me saying "racials are fine," just providing a secondary viewpoint on racial distribution at the highest skill levels in PvP. Racial balance is something we constantly investigate and it's entirely possible we will make further adjustments in the future.

Now that we've got that out of the way: top-rated PvP'ers like to be able to play with each other. If we're looking at the top 500 PvP'ers, 500 people is a small enough community that, if I want to be sure I can always find a solid teammate, I'm going to want to pick whichever faction other people are playing.

Interestingly enough, in Mists of Pandaria, the vast majority of top-rated PvP'ers in the North American region were Horde, while the opposite was true in Europe, where most of the top-rated PvP'ers were Alliance. In NA, we saw a ton of feedback that Alliance racials (other than Human) were weak and needed buffs. In EU, we saw the same feedback, but for the Horde races. Both regions were playing the exact same game, but were giving opposing feedback -- and overwhelmingly so.

Then, Warlords released, and we made a few balance tweaks to racials that ended up being mostly buffs on the Alliance side (most notably to Stoneform), and nerfs for Horde (some of which were later reverted, e.g. Will of the Forsaken). In the wake of this, a ton of top-end North American PvP'ers faction changed to Alliance.

Now, you could make the argument that all of those players independently decided that Alliance racials were buffed so much that they should faction transfer. It's certainly possible. I think that at least some number of those players weren't faction transferring over racials, though. I think they were faction transferring because their friends and teammates were.

I guess the points I'm trying to make here are:

People want to play with their friends, which is pretty obvious but also has interesting social effects.
When you're looking at a sample size as small as 500, those social effects will amplify game balance issues, even if the actual difference is minor (or heavily influenced by perception, as the MoP example shows).

All that being said, I'll bring up racials to the design team again. Can't guarantee I'll have any info to share, just that I'll ask about it. I just think that the extreme top end is always going to skew towards one faction, even if racials are perfectly balanced.