How did burst get so high?

#0 - Jan. 13, 2010, 2:56 a.m.

This is just a question I've been wondering about and that is how has burst gotten to be so high? I've been watching some of the BC pvp vids and the damage seemed significant but never this crazy "global or be globaled" stuff we see currently. Were there any reasons or factors that contributed to Burst getting so high or is it just the natural trend of things?

Blue Post from PvP Forums: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22739754001&sid=1&pageNo=1

EDIT: Take from a post I made later on in the thread:

A few minor fixes that I think may remedy the situation is:

Resilience:

- Lower the "reduce the chance to be critically hit" multiplier some, but tack onto it "Reduces Critical damage Bonus" by a much higher amount. The reason I think this may help is that it will allow players to crit a little more often, but their crits won't be so gigantic and spiky.

- Add a new effect that increases your total health by a certain percentage.

PvP Set bonuses:

- 5 piece set bonus gives the players maybe 200-300 Stamina. The individual set pieces maybe increase your total health by 2% each, outside of Resilience.

I think that this may help a decent bit by rewarding players who choose to go for more resilience than they are currently and will increase health in a way that won't total inflate everything. It will also discourage PvE gear usage some, or at least the tier pieces, because their burst damage won't be as high because of the crit damage bonus reduction, all the while their targets have a significant increase in health as well as damage reduction. PvE gear won't have this blown em up value to it (to the extent it does now) and Players who don't spec as much into resilience will find they are at more of a disadvantage because Burst is pretty much the same.

Zarhym

#21 - Jan. 13, 2010, 11:25 p.m.

Q u o t e:
This is just a question I've been wondering about and that is how has burst gotten to be so high? I've been watching some of the BC pvp vids and the damage seemed significant but never this crazy "global or be globaled" stuff we see currently. Were there any reasons or factors that contributed to Burst getting so high or is it just the natural trend of things?

We think everything is a little too intense right now, almost like playing the game on fast forward. Yes, damage can come in too quickly, but that is partially because healing is also so huge that without some amount of burst, it would seem as though nobody would ever die. It's as if players are either at 100% health or 0% health, and very infrequently effective in between. If we just drastically toned down PvP damage across the board -- say, by inflating resilience or health pools -- then healers would dominate, much as was the case in The Burning Crusade. In return, the only way to win a match would be to chain crowd control or possibly mana drain the healer. We certainly want to make sure these abilities have their place in PvP, but the game can also be frustrating when excessive healing gives players the feeling that fights are just being reset consistently until healers are completely out of mana (which in most cases can take a very long time).

On the flip side, we could tone down damage and healing, but that has huge PvE ramifications and we're not ready to re-balance the entire game -- though this is the intent for Cataclysm. What we'll likely do for the next expansion is ramp damage up a little as players advance, but have health pools increase greatly and healing increase by marginal amounts. The same change would have benefits for PvE too because mana then becomes a consideration for healers -- they must make a more determined choice between an efficient strategy and a spamming strategy -- and tanks won't constantly face dying by two unfortunate strikes. In PvP, you'll ideally see more players in a wounded state, and they can eventually be worn down rather than blown up in a couple of global cooldowns.

Zarhym

#68 - Jan. 14, 2010, 1:08 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Couldn't you just increase resilience modifiers, but also let it also affect healing (in arenas only of course). That way both damage and healing will decrease without having PvE ramifications.

We are discussing the idea of increasing the benefits of resilience for the next Arena season. We will have to see what effect this has on healing and whether or not weapon inflation from the newest items can adequately offset any of those effects.

Zarhym

#186 - Jan. 15, 2010, 2:04 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Can anyone explain to me why we are always having to wait til the future to enjoy the game? Why can't you guys at blizzard just fix the problems you acknowledge quickly?

There is a certain type of integrity that is lacking when you tell your customers "yea it's a problem, yea it makes the game less fun, and yea you won't see a fix for a good while." Which is basically what you guys at blizzard are doing.

It’s irresponsible for us to implement changes that haven’t been fully designed or tested. Furthermore, while you may be itching for constant adjustments to the game, we also hear loud and clear from some players that get frustrated with the rules constantly changing on them. What we’re doing in a thread like this is attempting to give you some insight into what we’re thinking and what might be coming down the pike. The desire for change today isn’t reasonable, so you are left with the choice of knowing when we think something is a problem and our long-term plans to fix it, or just being left in the dark until the fixes show up in patch notes.

Q u o t e:
In addition to this utterly wrecking the DPS specs that rely heavily on crit, whether to key off abilities (Mages to varying extents), a tree built around crits (Ret Paladins), or somewhere in between, there's also the issue that this hurts the pure-PvP player substantially more than it hurts the raider.

As far as the resilience change I mentioned yesterday we're considering making goes, we only plan to adjust the way it affects damage done by players, not increase the critical hit reduction component.

Just to reiterate for those expressing concerns about healing becoming too dominant if a buff to resilience goes live, we share this same concern. We do not want to drastically increase the length of fights or make them too healer dominant if damage is toned down. We've been saying this all along.