What IS a problem in PvP right now?

Hi. We're not removing Arena from the game. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but many players do. We don't ignore many comments on these boards, but "They should just remove Arena / PvP from the game" is not a helpful suggestion. Things that would make PvP more fun for you or things that would keep PvP balance from intruding into your PvE are more useful.

I'll be very brief, but here are the problems we see in PvP right now.

1) Too much emphasis on Arenas and not enough on BGs.
2) Too much emphasis on 2s and not enough on 3s and 5s.
3) Not enough class / spec representation in Arena. Warlock, hunter and shaman numbers in particular are too low, but they're not the only ones.
4) Too fast-paced.

Let me explain this last one in more detail. Some people in the community think that burst dps is too high. We disagree, and the reason we do is that healing is also very powerful in Arenas, to the point at which not having a Mortal Strike debuff may be a huge liability. If you can't burst someone down when wounded, they just aren't going to die unless the healer is mana-drained or chain crowd-controlled, neither of which are overly fun in the extreme case. You can have too much damage, too much healing or too much crowd control.

But when you consider specific matches, particularly of the highest rated teams, those guys are using their full toolbox. The problem is that the windows in which to use those tools can be very small. When you are injured, you might have a global cooldown in which to respond. If you make it, you might very well be fully healed in the next cooldown and "reset" the match. If you fail, you're dead and the match may be over. We'd like to add an extra GCD or two to many of these situations.

Now there still are extreme cases of burst in some specs that need to be chilled out. However, if we just lower burst damage across the board we're concerned people just wouldn't ever die and only specs with multiple forms of crowd-control would be considered viable.

Q u o t e:
My question is do you feel just as strongly, and as "completely" about arena rewards? Do you think that because arena represents what you are calling the 'best test of skill,' that means that it should always be the pvp endgame? I'm also curious exactly why a test of skill should be a basis for gear rewards? Why is 'time invested' not the basis of gear rewards? Is this a practical solution based on the difficulty in preventing /afking?

I think some players like Arenas because they are quick, easy to organize (relative to a BG), often have fast queues, and / or they just enjoy the “purity” (for want of a better word) of just trying to kill the other team without having to worry about flags, reinforcements, bad players not contributing to the war effort, etc. However, a lot of players who may not really like Arenas get drawn into them in order to procure the best PvP gear. This second issue is something we’d like to fix, but we need to develop a way to reward good gear through BGs that isn’t based on endless grinding.

Q u o t e:
Too fast-paced actually should coincide with too much burst. But GC goes on to say he disagrees there is too much burst. Totally confused by what "too fast-paced" meant in that reference.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that burst is too high. Imagine we made changes such that getting an 8K crit was almost impossible and 3K or 4K hits were more common. Now consider what would happen. You hit someone. The healer heals them. You keep hitting. The healer heals them. Two strategies then rise to the top as the only way to win a match: keep the healer crowd-controlled forever or drain her mana. Yet not every class has the same amount of crowd control and very few have mana drains. We don’t want every class to have those abilities because then every class feels alike. Furthermore, playing a healer that never gets to, you know, actually play because you’re always sheeped / cyclone or OOM isn’t much fun either.

In the current game, imagine a mage getting beat on to the point where he is near Execute range. He decides to Blink. If he gets the Blink off, he might have just won the match because he can get healed to full before the melee close again. If he fails to get the Blink off, he’ll probably die in the very next GCD. He might have a window of 2 seconds max to win or lose the game. If you have those situations every now and then you end up with a nail-biter match. That’s cool. However, if every single encounter with the other team is like that, it’s just exhausting. Many fights will end in just a few GCDs. Others will go on and on, at least until the healer runs OOM, which is unlikely to happen with abilities like Innervate and Divine Plea. It’s just too extreme in both damage done and healing done.

Q u o t e:
what he is saying is that problem is not the burst, which does make things fast paced, the problem is the time given to players to react to said burst. In other words blizzard is shooting for a more elaborate solution to the problem than just simply nerfing damage across the board. Yes that would reduce burst and slow down the game but it would also have pve implications that would need more fixing. There are other ways to slow the pace down than just simply nerfing burst which is why he is saying burst isn't too high.

This too.

Q u o t e:
I'll be brief as well. You feel that burst isn't too high, because healing is too powerful? Burst can be too high AND healing can be too powerful.

Totally. I tend to say “Burst has to have a place in the game,” because it’s clear some players are looking for an environment in which nobody ever dies unless the healer is crowd-controlled. That’s not what we’re trying to offer either because then only specs with a lot of non-DR’d crowd control are attractive.

Q u o t e:
Allowing us to get furious without having to have the best comp would be a good start! I mean the weapons, only best players and good comps should get these? Because of imbalance issues?

I probably should have added an additional bullet, which is that in the previous season, starter resilience gear was either too hard to get or sacrificed too many stats. We want resilience to be attractive because of the survivability it brings (and I think that part is working), but we started players too low. You need like 500 before you start to notice its effect and 800 to 1000 before you actually live long enough to respond to attacks (though as I suggested above, perhaps not long enough).

Q u o t e:
Blizzard doesn't believe burst damage is a problem
because without burst damage, burst healing would be overpowered

as though they weren't responsible for BOTH conditions!

This line of argument always confuses me. Of course we are responsible for the conditions in the game. Whose fault it is doesn't seem up for debate. It's our fault.

Q u o t e:
I still don't fully understand what was wrong with BC PVP.....I saw every spec of every class in arenas then

Wow. No offense, but them's some rose-colored glasses.

Q u o t e:
It's still not very clear to me what Ghostcrawler is thinking of when he sees/writes the word "burst." It's hard to tell whether he is just being defensive and trying to spin things a certain way, rather than admit being wrong, or whether there is really some distinction that is too subtle or logically obscure for me to understand.

I mean just what Kaikou said above you, which was:

Q u o t e:
You have no idea how happy I am that the devs are well aware that it isn't burst that is out of control, it is just the pace at which PvP happens that is a bit too fast. Someone can get healed just as quickly as they can be burst down. People tend to not notice this, and just say "BURST IS TOO HIGH CUZ I DIED REALLY FAST". It's a lot easier to notice your health bar go from 100%-0% than it is to notice it go from 1% to 100%, which happens just as often, and contributes just as much to the problems in PvP.

Both damage *and* healing are too high, but to nerf one would completely swing the balance of PvP in the direction of whichever one wasn't nerfed.

That crazy burst is necessary to counteract the crazy healing. But the burst alone isn't even enough. The healer has to be perma-CC'd to even stand a chance at killing their teammate.

Burst is probably one of those words which has now become so imprecise, since people mold it to their own definition, as to be of little use. Just reading this thread I see that some players define it as dying so quickly that CC is pointless. Others say it is dying while CC'd. Still others define it as dying while the healer is CC'd. Some are using it to mean damage + healing. Some say RMP survives despite burst teams and some say RMP is a burst team. It's all a little muddy, which is why I am trying to describe it as "Stuff (damage and healing) both happen to fast. The numbers are too big."

The way burst was first described, as far as I can recall, was that too much damage came so fast that you couldn't react, and that the attackers didn't need to demonstrate much skill in order to kill you.

Q u o t e:
GC, you didn't address HP, which many brought up. Do you agree or disagree that HP might be a good way lengthen the GCDs before someone is completely burst to pieces. I'm not sure how this would work with PVP healing mechanics, but it seems to make sense that larger health pools would require smarter use of heals, since always topping people off won't nesicarily be the best strat.

I don't typically announce major changes deep in forum threads. If we had an announcement you wouldn't miss it. It would probably be made by the CMs and released simultaneously in all of the languages we support.

I post things like this so that you can get an idea of our design intent, maybe start to guess at the upcoming changes, and perhaps not be surprised by them. If I said "We're nerfing damage and healing," a few people would get it, but a lot of others would say "Nerf healing? LOL! But burst is so high!" Perhaps after reading this entire post (if people make it this far), some of the discussion herein will start to convince them. I know some of you get it already.

Q u o t e:
It wasn't quite 50%, base HP was a constant, all in all it was probably more like a 30% jump.

This expansion they actually altered the base HP formula during beta, so people did get a health boost this xpac, but it ended up being about 10% (I think) more than the "expected" value.

Possibly an even greater effect came in how much greater damage and healing could grow than health. We got better at making talents (which meant more of them scaled and were less situational), glyphs added a lot of power (most of it offensive), and buffs became easier to acquire. (The latter won't affect 2s nearly as much though.)

Q u o t e:
The 2 melee engage and take the Rogue to 20% in a Hammer of Justice in <2 seconds. The rogue will probably die, actually, more than likely die. So with this unhealable damage the Priest somehow manages to keep the rogue alive with a Pain Suppression and a Power Infused Shield / Penance. Then the Priest gets cycloned and the Rogue dies instantly and probably would have died instantly regardless if the Priest was cycloned or not.

I'm not disagreeing with any of that. What I am disagreeing with is that just lowering burst damage fixes anything. It leads us directly to chain CC on the healer being the only way to win. All the tools are there -- they are getting used. If your priest could literally do nothing, then you wouldn't bring them -- you would just add more dps to the team.

The problem is the 2 seconds you mentioned -- that's a very short window and why I said things were too fast-paced. Note however that if we balance around one dps being able to survive two other dps in the absence of healing (you said the damage was unhealable) it's going to be hard for anyone to ever die.

I know you know this since you say you have a lot of experience. But I feel the need to remind a lot of the players in this thread that you will still lose 50% of your Arena matches under almost any condition. Chilling out high damage and healing does not mean you suddenly start winning a lot. You are still going to die. A lot. Hopefully it will take 3-4 GCDs or whatever instead of 2-3.

We have a couple of pretty big changes in mind that will address some of the issues mentioned in this thread, particularly the bullets I laid out earlier. Because of the nature of the changes (they're not just class tweaks), we need to make sure and release the information to all of the regions at once. So I can't just dump the info on you here as much as I would like. :( But keep your eyes open. Should be this week, barring things unforeseen.