Blizzard Plans Big Warcraft PvP Changes

[Yuuki]

Gosh I haven't played WoW since Cataclysm, is there still a PvP gear grind? That's the single-biggest thing that put me off WoW (I played mainly for PvP), every season you would have to spend 1-2 weeks honor-grinding yourself silly to get yourself the latest flavor of armor/weapons/misc.
It was nothing more than pointless PADDING because every single player ended up with roughly the same set of PvP gear anyway (just how it should be), why make everyone grind for hours and hours? Gear grinding should be for PvE nuts who care all about what shiny piece of loot they'll get next...but PvP should never be about gear. Even the 2200+ rated stuff should be purely cosmetic.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Gosh I haven't played WoW since Cataclysm, is there still a PvP gear grind? That's the single-biggest thing that put me off WoW (I played mainly for PvP), every season you would have to spend 1-2 weeks honor-grinding yourself silly to get yourself the latest flavor of armor/weapons/misc.
It was nothing more than pointless PADDING because every single player ended up with roughly the same set of PvP gear anyway (just how it should be), why make everyone grind for hours and hours? Gear grinding should be for PvE nuts who care all about what shiny piece of loot they'll get next...but PvP should never be about gear. Even the 2200+ rated stuff should be purely cosmetic.

Because tying competitive advantage to grind is a cheap and very effective way to keep people playing for longer.
Just as tying anything to grind, really.

Random thought: Perhaps there is reason League of Legends rose in popularity as WoW fell.
MOBAs encapsulate the WoW PvP experience, and lop off most of the padding. It also places everyone on more even starting terms.

 

[sneakypenguin]

NOooooooooo, I mean i agree that it makes it better but I will miss lighting up pve'rs who tried to stop me. Nothing like seeing a guy in raid gear with 150k more health than you thinking he can take you then putting him in a graveyard before you even bother to blow CDs.

 

[greyfox115]

I swear the way they go about it its like trying to lure a badger out of a badger hole

 

[miketehmage]

I'm not opposed to PvE gear being *viable*. But it shouldn't be more powerful. The reason I say this is because when I last played arenas, I wasn't getting stomped too hard by people with superior PvP gear. No, the people that stomped me were the people who had legendary PvE weapons. Why the fuck are legendary PvE weapons allowed into arenas? Or has that been changed?

 

[sneakypenguin]

I'm not opposed to PvE gear being *viable*. But it shouldn't be more powerful. The reason I say this is because when I last played arenas, I wasn't getting stomped too hard by people with superior PvP gear. No, the people that stomped me were the people who had legendary PvE weapons. Why the fuck are legendary PvE weapons allowed into arenas? Or has that been changed?

PVP power kind of nullified pve weapons, cause most ofyour pvp power comes from weapons to not have it is to take a pretty big dps hit. ( like going from 30% increased damage to 50+% with a pvp weapon) and with gear now being locked at 496 when you enter even if you have some heroic weapon its not gonna be more than 496 in a bg/arena.

 

[rednose1]

All this is is more catering to PvE player.
WoW realized who their largest base is, and will do anything to make them happy. The funniest part is, as a whole, their base is a whiny idiot that doesn't know any better, and by giving them everything they want, they wind up losing their interest and shooting themselves in foot.

 

[nodlimax]

All this is is more catering to PvE player.
WoW realized who their largest base is, and will do anything to make them happy. The funniest part is, as a whole, their base is a whiny idiot that doesn't know any better, and by giving them everything they want, they wind up losing their interest and shooting themselves in foot.

So Pandas, Pokemon and Removal of skilltrees was to appease their "base"?

Seriously, WoW has changed its target audience more towards kids. And that is one of the reasons why it will lose more and more players in the coming months/years. They even lost players in q4 2012 and q4 is usually one of their strongest times because a lot of people are at home (cold, snow and stuff).

The changes for the PVP won't change anything. They playerbase will continue to bleed out because Blizzard pushed their most important customers away....

 

[Muspelheim]

I'm utterly shite as a PvP-er, and any skilled, geared and competitive PvP player is going to eat me for breakfast and make a bongodrum out of my undead arse. And that is, honestly, how I like it.

I like PvP, even if it doesn't go very well for me, but I don't like being shortbussed to things in general. If someone is better than me, it's probably for a reason, as much as people love to claim it's rampant imbalance at work.

Blizzard....what needs to happen to PvP for people to be more interested in it is to severely nerf the effectiveness of Crowd Control and Healing in PvP. Right now you spend most of your time not in control of your character due to all the stuns, snares and other CC, and it takes a ridiculous amount of people to down a healer or anyone being healed by one because healing is so effective.

True, I'd rather see that. You might as well not bother with a keyboard sometimes, it feels like.

All this is is more catering to PvE player.
WoW realized who their largest base is, and will do anything to make them happy. The funniest part is, as a whole, their base is a whiny idiot that doesn't know any better, and by giving them everything they want, they wind up losing their interest and shooting themselves in foot.

So Pandas, Pokemon and Removal of skilltrees was to appease their "base"?

Seriously, WoW has changed its target audience more towards kids. And that is one of the reasons why it will lose more and more players in the coming months/years. They even lost players in q4 2012 and q4 is usually one of their strongest times because a lot of people are at home (cold, snow and stuff).

The changes for the PVP won't change anything. They playerbase will continue to bleed out because Blizzard pushed their most important customers away....

Well to be fair, I don't think Pokemon or the Pandaren would be a very good way to attract kids, since they'd probably be the first to feel distanced by them. Kids in general would probably prefer a veneer of fake maturity, like more gore and swearing. Pandas and Pokemon would probably just stimulate their "Gayness, denounce it!"-instinct.

If they were deliberately targeting kids, they'd probably be trying to look more like Gears of War.

 

[BabyRaptor]

So they're buggering Resillience again. How many times is this now?

Eh, whatever. I have a Sargent Major from the original PvP title back in Vanilla, and you don't see many of the original titles anymore. I'll content myself with that until the hypothetical day 80 bazillion years in the future when they bring back 3 day Alterac valleys.

 

[Fluffythepoo]

Gosh I haven't played WoW since Cataclysm, is there still a PvP gear grind? That's the single-biggest thing that put me off WoW (I played mainly for PvP), every season you would have to spend 1-2 weeks honor-grinding yourself silly to get yourself the latest flavor of armor/weapons/misc.
It was nothing more than pointless PADDING because every single player ended up with roughly the same set of PvP gear anyway (just how it should be), why make everyone grind for hours and hours? Gear grinding should be for PvE nuts who care all about what shiny piece of loot they'll get next...but PvP should never be about gear. Even the 2200+ rated stuff should be purely cosmetic.

Actually there's a worse grind now (because its 100% mandetory and you need to have a complete pvp set instead of mix and matching).. before when you used to be able to run a somewhat competedative glass cannon build or at least have more throughput than the pvp geared people. Now you have less throughput (healing and dps) and less mitigation. Blizzard made pvp completely inaccessible to casuals or even pve'ers

I mean i remember doing a 2v2 double feral team in cata and we were north of 2400 in almost entirely pve gear (like trinks and 2 set was it), now i get owned in random bgs by keyboard turners because i have no pvp gear (maybe not quite that bad.. but pretty damn close)

All this is is more catering to PvE player.
WoW realized who their largest base is, and will do anything to make them happy. The funniest part is, as a whole, their base is a whiny idiot that doesn't know any better, and by giving them everything they want, they wind up losing their interest and shooting themselves in foot.

So Pandas, Pokemon and Removal of skilltrees was to appease their "base"?

Seriously, WoW has changed its target audience more towards kids. And that is one of the reasons why it will lose more and more players in the coming months/years. They even lost players in q4 2012 and q4 is usually one of their strongest times because a lot of people are at home (cold, snow and stuff).

The changes for the PVP won't change anything. They playerbase will continue to bleed out because Blizzard pushed their most important customers away....

The q4 subscription decline after a massive subscription surge in q2/q3 with the arrival of MoP was something that was expected and happens with every new iteration of every mmo. Net subscriptions for the year remained unchanged.

And the notion that theyre targeting children would only come from someone who hasn't actually played MoP. Or even an MMO for that matter. I mean what is the premise there? You're going to use pandas to lure in teenagers/preteens? The ones who only play console games and never RPGs? They're targeting even younger? Trying to get 8-9 year olds to switch from the MMOs they aren't playing (at all) to one of the most expensive MMOs? Or some kid is going to get a wow subscription just to play a worse version of pokemon?

WoW has dominated the MMO market since 2004, just dominated. It's going to decline eventually, but it's not going to be from alienating the playerbase it's going to be from an increasingly diverse MMO market and an aging video game.

 

[Yuuki]

Actually there's a worse grind now (because its 100% mandetory and you need to have a complete pvp set instead of mix and matching).. before when you used to be able to run a somewhat competedative glass cannon build or at least have more throughput than the pvp geared people. Now you have less throughput (healing and dps) and less mitigation. Blizzard made pvp completely inaccessible to casuals or even pve'ers

I mean i remember doing a 2v2 double feral team in cata and we were north of 2400 in almost entirely pve gear (like trinks and 2 set was it), now i get owned in random bgs by keyboard turners because i have no pvp gear (maybe not quite that bad.. but pretty damn close)

Err...a 2v2 double feral team making it to 2400 in mostly PvE gear was a huge problem. All skill aside, your primary tactic would've been basically destroying people in the first 5 seconds of opening and using instant cyclone to keep the other party CC'd. Worst comes to worst, switch targets/focus and repeat, hit bear form to delay/reset DR's (I believe bear form + survival instincts was near-impossible to kill at one point, PvP gear or not). Didn't Ferocious Bite also crit for eye-popping amounts of damage? You get the idea.
Despite it being very cheap, I don't look down on you for simply doing what the game allowed...at least it helped make the issue more obvious to Blizzard.

I PvP'd from Season 1 to Season 11 bouncing between a mage, lock and warrior...and became a firm believer that the only way to balance PvE and PvP once and for all was to completely separate them. Not only separate gear (i.e. resilience/PvP power) but also separate NUMBERS on individual abilities.
Over 11 seasons and 3 expansions I saw Blizzard hopelessly try to solve an un-solvable puzzle of repeatedly buffing/nerfing abilities in PvE only to have them have disastrous effects in PvP, and fixing stuff in PvP only to have it negatively impacting PvE. The same thing even ensued with gear, PvE set effects were tweaked and trinkets nerfed because they were too strong in PvP. You didn't need to be a genius to figure out that legendaries were flat-out broken in PvP fights (thunderfury, warglaives, mage staff, DS daggers, endless repeats of history) and that PvE trinkets were also huge culprits (hero charm, reign/deathbringer, DS trinkets, etc). We're talking gear that should've flat-out been BANNED from all forms of rated (and even un-rated) PvP.

The solution was so fucking obvious, it was staring Blizard in the face! But GhostCrawler kept saying the same things over and over again like "we don't want to resort to that, it's still one game"...all while wearing MASSIVE contradiction helmets, because they still ended up separating shit like PvP stats (resilience / PvP power), CC durations (different PvE/PvP durations), fucking absurd "shared-DR" systems that worked on moon-logic (not even going to bother explaining), Deep Freeze (different PvE/PvP effects), Colossal Smash (different Pve/PvP values), etc. What...a...mess!

Anyway I went off on a tangent there, my earlier point about grinding PvP gear as that everyone should be simply HANDED a basic PvP gear set without having to grind it. Look at Guild Wars 2, now that's how it's done. To start PvP, you first teleport to another zone where there are gear vendors, masters, etc (similar to the war/BG rooms in WoW). Except that the moment you zone into that area, EVERYONE is immediately dressed in a "standard issue" PvP gear set and you cannot equip any other gear from your inventory. There are vendors handing out free gems, free enchants, free respecs (yes, free respecs!) so you can pretty much go absolutely nuts with customizing to your heart's content...you can be a glass cannon if you want, but the standard-isue PvP set still keeps you in check and keeps you from stacking gear that would allow you to insta-kill someone. I don't know whether WoW simply lacks the technology to pull that off, or whether the idea simply didn't appeal to Blizzard or what.

ArenaNet understood that arena-style competitive PvP should ultimately boil down to SKILL and TEAMWORK, not who is waving the biggest sword and has spent the first 2 weeks of every season grinding themselves silly. You can get flashier-looking PvP pieces, but they are purely cosmetic and don't offer any advantage - just be sure that if you come across a rather fancily-dressed enemy in PvP, he will be highly skilled and difficult to bring down even though his gear is the same as yours. That's how it should be!! No grinding FFS, that is for PvE/story fans!

 

[miketehmage]

I'm not opposed to PvE gear being *viable*. But it shouldn't be more powerful. The reason I say this is because when I last played arenas, I wasn't getting stomped too hard by people with superior PvP gear. No, the people that stomped me were the people who had legendary PvE weapons. Why the fuck are legendary PvE weapons allowed into arenas? Or has that been changed?

PVP power kind of nullified pve weapons, cause most ofyour pvp power comes from weapons to not have it is to take a pretty big dps hit. ( like going from 30% increased damage to 50+% with a pvp weapon) and with gear now being locked at 496 when you enter even if you have some heroic weapon its not gonna be more than 496 in a bg/arena.

Ahh yeah that makes sense, cheers