An entire class of damage spells was exempt from the premiere PvP mitigation stat, and people are surprised that’s getting changed? Seriously?
Yeah I am trying to figure that one out my self. I have a warlock and I really dont see what the big deal is.
I think the people who are surprised are the ones who didn’t realize/consider the interaction between dot-heavy classes and resilience. No one here has said the change is a bad idea, have they?
Fair enough. I’ve just been expecting this change for a long time.
I don’t do PvP, so I’m guessing this won’t really affect my Warlock?
Not til they add resilience to mobs :)
Preventing changing gear in the arena before the match starts is just such baloney.
I only played a few arena games over a month ago, but how are you able to tell who’s playing against you and what to wear vs. them before a match starts? I guess the scoreboard has team names and you recognize everyone near your rating by name?
You can see the other team as soon as the gate opens. They’re too far away to force you into combat. You hit your “LoL, Shadow Priests” ItemRack macro.
Pretty simple.
So by “before the match starts” you mean “after the match starts, before you enter combat”?
Yes. Correct.
Why? That is such a cheese tactic, and it favors the kind of catasser that Arena isn’t designed for. If you want your super-gear (or collection of specialized suits) to give you an advantage in PvP, play the BGs. That’s what they’re for.
What? My impression is that Arena attacts the the hardcore PVP’ers and BGs are much more casual.
Nah, there are plenty of casual people playing arenas, it only requires 10 games a week to rank, which takes all of about an hour to do.
The arena is supposed to do a couple of things (how well it actually achieves them is open to debate). It’s supposed to be a viable PvP option for casual players, first of all. Unlike the BGs, there is no benefit to playing the arena for hours on end. (Well, there’s a benefit in that it’s fun, but you don’t gain anything extra for your character.) As Athryn said, once you play ten games – usually less than an hour, depending on the queue – you’re essentially done for the week. Any games after the first 10 don’t really add anything. That’s obviously great for casuals. It allows people like me to make reasonable progress towards PvP gear without having to dedicate the immense time that it takes to earn the BG gear.
The second thing the arenas are supposed to do, and this is the part relevant to ranulf’s comment, is that they’re supposed to be more of a test of skill than the BGs are. In the BGs, like in world PvP or the PvE game, people who have spent a lot of time playing the game have a big advantage. They have much better gear (particularly the people who are in a hardcore raiding guild). The arenas are supposed to even that out somewhat, through things like the rating-matching system, which tends to pit ubergeared players against other ubergeared players, and casual-geared players against other casual-geared players. Allowing people to swap gear in combat undercuts that goal, because it gives an advantage to catassing players who have had the time to amass multiple sets of specialized gear.
It’s also sort of against the “spirit” of the arena, at least as I see it. Part of the fun of the arena is that you have to be ready for anything – you don’t know who’s coming out of the chute as each match begins, so there are interesting tactical choices to be made when you’re getting ready for the match. For example, as a warlock, I have to decide which pet to use. I would love to be able to instantly switch pets on the fly in there, but that would take away one of the interesting tactical aspects of the arena. Choice of gear is the same way.
True enough. But the biggest problem with WoW is that they are trying to balance PvP and PvE with one ruleset, from everything from 2v2 PvP to 25 man PVE. The scope is too big, they need separate PvP and PvE rulesets. Maybe a separate Arena ruleset. Something.
It sucks when you see top arena players wielding the tier 3 blacksmithing weapons - the ones that require mats from 25-man raids to create. Hell, half of his gear is from raid bosses, and he has a few pieces from faction grinds too.
Yeah, ideally the arena matching system would be based around gear-matching rather than rank-matching. That would make the contests really contests of skill, which would be great. As it stands, hardcore players still get a significant boost in the arena.
The saving grace, though, is that a casual player can still make decent progress, and eventually a casual arena player can get kitted out in arena epics so that the catassers don’t have as much of an advantage.
Why? WoW is an MMORPG, it’s not intended to be a skill based competitive player vs player game. If that’s the sort of gameplay you’re looking for I think you’re looking in the wrong place. WoW is about characters and character development. Characters aren’t intended to be equal, those who spend more time developing their character will have a stronger one than someone who spends less time. The PvP pits characters, not players (though that’s obviously a factor), against each other. Evening the playing field in some way breaks the defining aspect of the game.
The Arenas do a great job of giving players with less time commitment a chance to improve their character and to keep pace (or even out pace if they do well) their competition. I think it does a great job of this while staying true to the character centric nature of the game. I would hate it if my character was gimped or somehow changed when I went into an arena, it’s no longer my Troll Rogue at that point.
I think it would be interesting if there was a new server type, say an “Arena” server which had nothing but Arenas (maybe BGs) and when you logged in you could choose a premade, max level character with specific gear, spec him how you want and play in the Arenas. There would be no gear to win or collect, all characters of the same class would always have identical gear. All you would gain is satisfaction and some sort of in game proof of your victories (trophies or something) that you could somehow show off and, of course, be ranked. This would give people like yourself somewhere to go when you want a balanced PvP experience without the game mucking with your character or drastically changing rules when you enter an arena.
What I am looking for is PVP nerfs that do not affect PVE, and vice-versa.
The game is intended to be balanced. I am not sure what you are talking about.