My name is Zarhym. Hi there.

I know many of you have been feeling neglected as of late and have several concerns with the current state of PvP. To that end, I've punched those who would generally assign me with tasks, kicked them while they were down and shouted, "I'm going to take some friggin' time to talk to the PvP community! Go away! (But please don't let the injuries you've just suffered reflect on my next performance review.)"

So, my schedule's open for a bit. What's up?

08/18/2011 06:19 PMPosted by Hoobler

first

Cool, so this tauren's good. Next!

:p

I hope you're not reserving space on the front page. I'm going to follow the flow of the thread, not return to the first page to read the books people have placed in their reserved spaces.

08/18/2011 06:20 PMPosted by Fëlguk

would really love to know why there was no mmr reset after the problem was "fixed"

That would essentially be a reset of Season 10. That'd be a rather massive logistical undertaking (season rolls are more complicated than I even know), and we felt the fix was fast enough to normalize this season over time. One thing's certain though, it wasn't an ideal situation, and we know it had a demoralizing effect on those actually dedicated to fair competition.

Lowbie pvp is still borked.

JUST SAYIN

We talked to Ghostcrawler about this yesterday. He's well aware of this, but more importantly, he's not very happy about it either. The class design team's first priority is obviously balance around the end game, but absolute neglect of low-level balance isn't okay. This is something that isn't going to improve much in patch 4.3, but we hope to have more sound solutions coming.

Hi Zar,

Quick question,
Why are shadow priests a free kill in arena or bgs? Seriously, in 2s, or 3s if they get focused they are done. Sure they have a few fears, but those can get trinketed or easily gotten out of. Our dots aren't even worth applying... Woo, 3.2k dmg, 6k crit... Our mind spike is interuptable, and basically we're bad warlocks with flash heal. Will this be fixed or should I just roll a lock?

Granted, Shadow priests might be a little tricky in PvP. That said, there are some absolutely ridiculous Shadow priests out there in Arenas right now. If you watched the NA Battle.net Invitational VoDs (we finally got the remaining matches posted today: http://us.battle.net/blizzcon/en/blog/3348315), there is a crazy-good Shadow comp 3's team (EG): Spriest, Aff lock, Resto shaman.

Zarhym - really appreciate you lending ear to us PvP enthusiasts. I have two questions:
1) Given that you are now implementing raid finder tool would you please please implementing similar tool for rated battlegrounds? Some of us have weird play timings and this make it extremely difficult to find rated teams :(

We can bring this up with the developers. It'd probably have to fundamentally function a bit differently from the Dungeon Finder and proposed Raid Finder though, otherwise a cross-realm random RBG Finder wouldn't differ that much from randomly queuing for a normal Battleground, aside from the fact your team can persist after a battle concludes.

2) This has been asked many times but is there any status update BoA realm transfer? It really sucks having to pay money to transfer character when all we want to do is transfer BoA items to new realm because friend/family don't want to roll on PvP realm :(

Once again thank you very much.

We also spoke to GC about this again yesterday (we ping him about it a lot). He made it clear that there are no design issues or qualms about allowing this functionality. Instead, it's an issue of programmer bandwidth. Because of the way WoW was originally structured around accounts, followed by the introduction of Battle.net accounts, there's a technical limitation to allowing cross-realm BoAs which has to be overcome by our Battle.net team, not the WoW development team. At the moment that team is incredibly busy building out the Battle.net platform to expand its functionality for World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, and get Diablo III going.

We're adamant about making this happen. Unfortunately, I can't really give you a timeline and I know it's already felt too long.

08/18/2011 06:37 PMPosted by Kaelthalos

about that aff locks and shamans are the main classes doing well in high end and even low end pvp these classes have far to much synergy and because of this any class combined with them does well, do you have guys have any intention to fix this?

Based on my recent conversation with GC, he did mention in particular that a Resto shaman tweak needs to be made. In particular, he's prepared to get his nasty claws on Windshear.

He's gone for the day and I don't want to try and paraphrase our conversation, at the risk of sounding incredibly naive. ;p Besides, I don't want this thread to be dictated by class balance.

08/18/2011 06:41 PMPosted by Qqpremades

Any chances of bringing back old AV? Seems like most PVPers support this idea.

I even ranted to Tom Chilton and Greg Street about this recently. For all the reasons it was wrong, I still loved losing all track of time while involved in an endless -- quite literally -- battle for AV. I loved doing constant suicide runs from SF graveyard on my gnome 'lock just to try and interrupt the Horde summons.

We haven't stopped talking about it. Part of the problem is Battlegrounds are incredibly scripted, to the point they're actually worked on quite a bit by our encounter design team. We need to keep working on new ways of developing Battlegrounds to improve their design.

But, to your point, it's doubtful AV 1.0 will be resurrected, and there's only so much tweaking we can do to try and improve the current one -- we'd be working on very old framework with AV. At this point, it'd probably be easier and produce better results if we started from scratch.

08/18/2011 06:52 PMPosted by Vultures

Skirmishes, sir?

Skirmishes are a weird phenomenon. When designing Cataclysm, we looked at the data and saw an extremely fractional percentage of the entire playerbase actively using Skirmishes. So with all of the other changes happening, along with BG War Games, we decided not to polish up Skirmishes and keep them in.

The last time we talked to the developers about it, they mentioned the possibility of these going back in to compliment War Games. But given they saw very little evidence to suggest coding for Skirmishes paid off for players, it seems a low priority.

08/18/2011 06:57 PMPosted by Kologarn

1. I've been hearing that the new gear swapping feature won't work for pvp gear. That isn't true, right? :)

That isn't true. Mogging will work with PvP gear. You can even swap the look of PvP gear to PvE and vice versa.

Sorry, I know I didn't address the rest of your concerns. I just don't have good or quick answers for them right now. <3

08/18/2011 07:00 PMPosted by Gerente

PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU FOR THIS FIX WORLD PVP WITH GILNEAS CITY http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2973008845?page=1

There's not really much I can say on content suggestions, Gerente. I see your posts though!

08/18/2011 07:01 PMPosted by Asogklangag

What's the point of the lock portal if you have to be in LoS of it... lmao all it does is become a crappy blink then.

Oh man. When used well, that thing can actually decide matches. Watch the Battle.net Invitational VoDs. Some of the portal placements in these matches are crucial: http://us.battle.net/blizzcon/en/tournaments/us-regionals/matches/wow/video-archive

08/18/2011 07:03 PMPosted by Rabiesplz

Now that you answered this, I just want to know what your thoughts are on the "Halaa" type zone suggested by other players, Logistically speaking or ever your opinion of it.

Speaking personally, I think they have a good place in WoW and should come back. A place like Halaa doesn't take nearly as much design time as a place like Tol Barad or Wintergrasp, yet the payoff is relatively high. The Tol Barad style is a quite massive undertaking, and ultimately becomes a very contentious PvP content topic, especially when daily quests and raid bosses are at stake.

08/18/2011 07:09 PMPosted by Prosauce

Bring back world PvP. I want to see people fighting at the crossroads again. There is no world anymore, Azeroth is dead. In classic, you could find hundreds of people leveling them and start a huge pvp battle, killing the gold farmers in tyre's hand, tarren mill pvp battles, etc. Everyone just sits in major cities and clicks 2 buttons for bg's.

All I can say for now is that we've driven people to SW/Org in this expansion too much and that's not cool. We want to fix that in the next go.

Zarhym, answer some of the real problems please! :(

Not questions about transmogging/bgs/rbgs/world PvP etc.

If someone has a question in this thread, I consider it legit. If it's not the info you're seeking, I apologize. I'm but one skull.

Also, there are some questions that are much easier for me to field on the fly than others. That doesn't mean I'm going to ignore and forget some of the bigger topics people are posting about.

08/18/2011 07:17 PMPosted by Purohita

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2504845332 this is what needs to be read.

It has been.

08/18/2011 07:18 PMPosted by Aristaos

Poor Zarhym getting totally swamped XD

I know I haven't covered nearly as much as you folks would like me to, but I'll be using this thread beyond today for taking feedback to the developers!

Zarhym,

Will we see an ask the Devs class version so people will be able to ask and have answered their questions on class issues? While I do appreciate your time and I know you are trying to give us some attention here, these are not the questions that the majority of the pvp community wants answered.

We're still working on a revamp for the Ask the Devs series. But, what you're likely to see before then is more of a feedback gathering session for each class. We'd like to ask several fairly general questions of each class soon and get player feedback on what works/what doesn't.

08/18/2011 07:58 PMPosted by Zetox

I have a question, why do you continue to ignore questions such as the ladder, mmr, and "no balance class questions" when atleast 75% of the people in this thread have said atleast 1 of 3?

WHY DO YOU CONTINUE TO IGNORE MY RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS LIKE THIS?

:p

Works both ways. I'm not armed with all of the knowledge to take all of you on by myself. It's after 8 p.m. here, so I'm just spittin' and flowin' based on what I know and can share at this moment.

08/18/2011 08:07 PMPosted by Tripleturbo

no hunter questions answered yet ):

I need to talk to the devs about the balance feedback I'm seeing echoed in here. That still doesn't guarantee I'll get right back to you tomorrow on this stuff, but it's on my radar. I'm sure it's on theirs too, as they regularly read our forums and AJ. I just need to discuss it with them.

08/18/2011 08:29 PMPosted by Malastart

Any plans to make warlocks not useless in battlegrounds?

We might remove warlocks. Or Battlegrounds.

Sorry. I think I've exhausted the information I can actively provide for the night. Please keep the conversation going folks. Thank you for keeping it mostly constructive too.

<3