"We don't think burst is a problem...

Players complained about burst and DKs last season and had every right to. We think both are in a better place now.

There are definitely some situations where you can get into with a class and die too quickly. There are also situations where CC or healing or dispelling are too dominant. Arena balance isn't perfect and we'll continue to make changes as we go along. However, we don't feel like you can just summarize all of this season as being too bursty (which we do think happened last season before people got enough resilience). If you look at a lot of the complaints coming out of Arenas right now, they are about healing (Disc, Resto druids and various paladin specs at least) and melee (or at least Arms, Unholy, Ret and rogues) vs. casters.

This will probably come across as overly-sarcastic and I'll get flamed for it for a few weeks, but make sure you catch up on what the cool kids are actually talking about this season and not just parroting what everyone was saying about PvP a few months ago. ;)

Q u o t e:
#1 - Is it okay for a Ret Paladin to do 80% of a person total HP in just a couple GCD's while his target is stunned?

No, and we have said as such in many threads over the past few weeks. It's not the Rets' fault -- it's just the way the class is designed where lack of a real resource cost and cooldown-limited abilities means they can front-load the damage.

Q u o t e:
#2 - Do you honestly believe 8-11k Frost Strikes from Frost DK's is fair? Yea, the attack that cannot be dodged blocked or parried. What about 7-9k Scourge Strikes?

The DK has to have a lot of runic power to use that ability, so they can't unload with it right off the bat the way say a Ret can. Unholy is still far more dominant in PvP, which makes us think this problem is a little overblown. We might remove the dodge and parry prevention from it, which we added to make sure DKs didn't just Deathcoil instead. There are enough talents for Frost Strike now that it's going to be attractive regardless.

Q u o t e:
#3 - Why are the only people who value Resilience, well at least 900+, casters and healers(not paladins obviously)? Melee gets about 5-700 max and then is able to wear PvE gear and gem for straight dmg. Where is the balance here? Resilience does nothing besides lower healing and caster dmg basically while providing minimal (at best) survivability. Is this okay? If i wore PvE gear i would... well i am confident enough that people know what would happen if a Resto Shaman wore PvE gear into arena's what would happen.

We're not convinced melee stop improving their resilience. Typically that only works for a class with such high CC or defensive potential that they just aren't taking damage much (rogues typically have fallen into this category). Resilience doesn't lower damage -- it lowers burst damage. It means you have to whack at a guy a few times and can't just explode him on contact. It means you have to play smart -- blow cooldowns, use crowd control to minimize defenses, tie up the healer and otherwise cause damage at the right time instead of just causing damage. Remember as a caster, most melee have no inherent defense against you -- their armor does *nothing* versus magic damage.

Q u o t e:
That entire last paragraph is mind boggling. Are you completely @*%#ing retarded? Do you think any decent melee will have more than 700 resilience? If you can find me a high rated DK, Ret pally, Warrior, or Rogue that doesn't have at least a couple pieces of PvE gear on I'll be completely shocked. And you think resilience right now makes it so people have to actually CC a healer and coordinate burst to score kills in 3v3 or 5v5? I don't even know what to say.

Unfortunate, IMO, since that's the last thing you'll be saying on our forums.

Q u o t e:
I'm not sure which cool kids you are talking to, but the vast majority of these posts on this forum tend to disagree

I'm not sure how you measure "vast majority." A great many of the PvP complaints are about how people can't kill healing paladins, priests or druids. If you look at which comps are doing well in PvP, nearly all have healers.

Now there are a lot of concerns about how casters are struggling against melee, but we don't think that is a "burst too good" issue. For the players complaining about Arms and Juggernaut, the issue is not that they get Mortal Striked for 10,000 or whatever. Plenty of casters can get off big nukes, but they aren't the problem du jour according to the forums.

Q u o t e:
In all honesty if you played a game for 100(+/- lol) days of your life, and the people that ran the game were so far out of touch with their player base it's not even funny, wouldn't you be a little frustrated as well?

"He made me act bad," wasn't an acceptable defense in Kindergarten and it's not acceptable here.

Look, whatever your investment is in WoW, it literally pays my bills. I have far greater incentive to see it work than most of you. :)

Q u o t e:
GC. You really think getting off a Frostbolt Ice Lance shatter combo is equivalent to the sustained damage melee classes can put out? You have to be kidding me? lol

Sustained damage != burst. If your contention is that melee do too much damage to casters, then say that. Don't say "burst is out of control." When we hear "burst" we think early last season's Icy Touch and Arcane Barrage where someone could take you down in 1 or 2 GCDs with almost nothing you could do. If melee are able to stay on casters too effectively, that is a very different problem requiring very different solutions.

Q u o t e:
8k Frost Strikes and 6k Scourge Strikes are not too much burst because they have to use runes for them? How do the resources used have anything to do with the damage put out? Yes, it's limited how many times they can do it in a row (that makes sustained lower)- but the attacks are doing a crazy amount of damage in the period of time when they use all their runes (that's burst)

Yes, the resource has a ton to do with it. Nobody complains about PoM Pyro (much) because it can be done so infrequently. Frost Strike and Scourge Strike are essentially finishing moves. It's harder to use them as openers.

Now that's not to say finishing moves can never be unbalanced, but I must admit to being a little surprised at all the focus on DKs. They were without a doubt too good last season, but currently they are below rogues in the brackets that "matter" and far below healers across the board. If I wanted to stack the deck to be succesful in Arena, I would be rolling a Disc priest, not a DK.

Q u o t e:
I'm also questioning your statement that Unholy is much more prevalent. If you're going by just SK100 (which seems to be a distinct possibility given your statement about stacking the deck as a disc priest), then Frost is just as prevalent as Unholy.

If you're looking at the top 100 then you are literally looking at 100 players. Chances are good that you are not playing against any of them. It's a useful number to consider, no doubt. But if you look at decent DKs with a much larger sample size, Frost drops to 20% or less. Now those numbers change all the time and part of the voodoo of this business is to try and predict trends and not always just be reacting to yesterday's news. It's also possible for specs with low rep to be overpowered or at least really annoying to play against.

Q u o t e:
It seems that you guys continue to balance PvP issues around the top percentages of arena play, as if that's where most PvP in the game takes place. While I do read a lot of forum complaints about hard to kill healers and melee burst on casters, these all seem to be arena related issues. The large majority of the player base never sees these things in high end arena matches, so they're really irrelevant to most of us. Things we do see are DKs and Ret Palys, in large numbers of course because that's how things trend when a class is OP, running rampant in the battlegrounds. This is very indicative of the trend to balance the game around the small percentage of players at the cutting edge of either PvP or PvE.

This is a fair point, and we do spend effort on BG and world PvP balance. I don't tend to focus on it much in these forums because so many players here seem to be more concerned with the 2s and 3s Arena environment. I'll make an effort to talk about other aspects of PvP more. We don't just balance PvP around the top percentages of Arena play though.

Q u o t e:

Hunters are probably the only good example I can think of. They've always been very strong in bgs but then really bad in arena. A lot of caster specs experience this too.

Totally, but I don't think it would go over well to say "Cheer up, hunters. You're still awesome in BGs." The answer I'd get it "I don't care about BGs." That's a legit response but doesn't paint the whole picture, because BGs are very important to some players.

Q u o t e:
People focus on 2's only because it's the only playable bracket.

The damage level makes 3's and 5's totally stupid. And the supposed "overpowered healers" are referring to 2's only, and really resto druids only. Everything else is killable (or quickly OOM-able) by pretty much every class. Play a 3's or 5's match and then talk about "OP healers", what a joke. You can't heal crap, if you live 15 seconds, it was a long game, lol.

I think players focus on 2s because they are logistically easy to organize and tend to reward better. The balance (in terms of representation of various classes) is nearly always going to be more balanced in the larger brackets. It is too easy to lose to 2s as soon a the door opens and you see who you're facing. As I've said recently, the fixes for that mean pumping more and more abilities into every class so that you can respond to any situation even with only 2 players.