MMO-Champion BlueTracker - GC: Why so much focus on resilience?

2009-01-14 00:11:48

I completely understand the hesitation on your part on tweaking classes for fear of affecting them in the long run. However the plan of "wait and see how things turn out with more resilience" does not bring confidence to the players that things will improve.

If resilience is such a large factor on "balancing" PvP now these days why not just make a aura in the areans/BGs that gives +resilience?

The simple fact is with my S5 gear I cannot compete in Areans or BGs effectively against players with PvE gear.

Honestly right now, PvP is a mess and I just want some reassurance that things will improve (sooner than later), are there numbers that you can give us with different resilience ratings? Otherwise I'll just re-spec into TG and forget about PvP. At this point PvP is no longer fun and I cannot see myself enduring this for one or more seasons.

[ Post edited by Nethaera ]

2009-01-14 00:28:08

Re: GC: Why so much focus on resilience?

I don't think I have ever said "wait and see" though it gets quoted a lot, so maybe I did. I have always said that everyone pretty much agrees that resilience will make things better and the question is by how much.

Resilience is our primary reward for PvP gear. It is what keeps PvP gear from being uber in PvP gear and also discourages players from using PvE gear to PvP (more on this in a sec). Part of the Arena design is basically that if you win it gives you access to gear that lets you win more (that is actually the PvE design too if you think about it). If we give away resilience too readily, then the Arena rewards don't feel as valuable.

We know a lot of players are wearing PvE gear right now in Arenas. That is happening for a couple of reasons:

First, they have that gear. We made the early raiding content very approachable, but we also gave players access to it long before the Arena season started. In early BC it felt like the PvP epic gear was far easier to get than the PvE epic gear, which sent a strange message to a lot of players from which not all have recovered. So in that respect it is nice to be able to say again that PvE is a valid path to epic gear. Unfortunately, we probably went too extreme in the other direction and now the "welfare epics" are from Naxx. (I also want to add that badges and Archavon are great sources for PvP gear without you having to PvP, and Strand and Wintergrasp give a lot of honor if you want to PvP but don't want to Arena. There is also a lot of good starter PvP gear out there but it is blue and some players hate the thought of taking off their purple gear from a few seasons ago. But I digress.)

Second, when nobody has resilience gear, it allows for a strategy where you can just burst players down in a couple of GCDs. Since the attacks never take much damage, resilience isn't highly valued. What will happen is that once some players start to get resilience, everyone will have to. Once the healer (to use an example) can't be destryoed in a couple of GCDs, the attackers are in a very weak position from the rest of the healer's team. It's an arms race in essence. Once one person putson their survival gear, everyone has to.

Now I do realize in the past this wasn't true of every spec, especially rogues, though we've tried to avoid that problem this time. I also realize that some players think they die too easily without resilience or will die too easily even with resilience. I'm not trying to wave away all of that feedback. The question was whether resilience was valuable (or perhaps even too valued) in PvP.