#0 - May 25, 2009, 11:54 p.m.
First off, let me preface this acknowledgment of the daunting task that is balancing an MMORPG that has a gigantic playerbase. I’m sure many people appreciate your work, I know I do. This will be my attempt at constructively explaining to you why people are hollering “burst is broken!”
High level players have been predicting the predominance of burst damage in arena/PvP since beta, largely ignored or dismissed because of gear not having enough resilience at early stages of 80. Now after the shaky first season, people now have access to full hateful and deadly offpieces. Burst is still a problem.
I feel like parroting all the arguments the forums have been oozing with is like beating a dead horse, so I’ll touch upon the few points that you have brought up before, and “try to be precise” as you have put it.
Let’s examine Warrior/Ret/X. I feel more qualified to talk about this because personally I have played this setup more than others. The majority of the games won are executed with this strategy (Only listing offensive strategy since the other parts aren’t totally relevant):
Warrior and I start on a target, then hard swap to another in an attempt to gib them in 1-3 globals. If peeled off or unsuccessful, usually the healer is put so far behind in healing just from the frontloaded damage that one CC will result in the death of our victim, regardless of whether trinket is up for the healer or not.
I don’t believe that the problem in this scenario is that CC is too high or sustained damage is too high. CC isn’t the problem, because it’s not because the healer was stunned /repented for 6 seconds that the victim died. The very fact is that the healer had to spend one global getting out of CC, by then which the target was at 20-30% and close to execute range.
Sustained damage was not the problem; the healer wasn’t put behind over the course of a long time of constant damage/constant healing. This situation also is not something that happens once in a blue moon, somewhere between 70-90% of our wins are executed with this strategy. Sometimes even without the swap, a chain of unhealable crits will just result in our first victim dead, no swap needed.
So what is the problem in this case? Like we’ve been complaining about, we really believe it is the burst damage that we can output with a hard swap. Unless the healer can preemptively figure out who we’re swapping or predict the damage (read: almost impossible) the damage is just not healable with the breathing room of only 1-3 globals, especially if they have to concentrate on LOSing CC’s and offensive dispels . It’s funny and hilarious for me to execute this just because it’s funny and hilarious to kill someone so fast before they can really react, but ultimately I think this is bad for the game.
I do however, understand that the current state of affairs make the game more friendly for less-skilled players who do not coordinate the damage, so if the game is in fact balanced around the 1600-2000 bracket in order to make PvP more enjoyable for a wider audience, that’s an acceptable explanation. I wouldn’t stop playing or throw a fit if this was indeed the case.
I think it’s just frustrating for past gladiators/high level pvpers to expect this game to be balanced (at least somewhat, we realize that total pvp balance is not attainable) and more strategic. We expect a certain platform of gaming, and when we know what is blatantly broken at our level of playing, it makes us very upset that the problem is unacknowledged or dismissed.
Once again, I specifically only mentioned War/Ret/X due to my experience with this setup, but I’m fairly certain that this is a problem with many other combinations of classes at well, please don’t clutter this up with incessant class woes and whining. Damage is borked across the board, please leave this thread for constructive comments and analysis.
I’m sorry that I can’t offer a distinct or constructive solution to this problem, but I felt the need to make this post because of the lack of acknowledgment of the problem to begin with.
Thanks for your time and good luck.
