#1 - Feb. 29, 2012, 1:40 a.m.
This is to show that there is little (nothing is a better term) being done about PvPs current unbalancing issues. Recently (about a month ago?) the first blue poster since 2010 posted in the arena section of the forum commenting on how the current PvP situation was a "L2P issue" and that "watching videos will make you a better player". Sure that the current gladiator ranked players have watched videos of their fellow players to learn tactics and get better. Sure they learned to play their class and got better. The problem with that is this is not the issue. The issue is classes becoming too powerful with talents that were not nerfed to compensate for increasing gear levels and weapon damage while resilience provided little help to soften it. WoTLK should have been a good example that classes become very powerful when decked out in end game armor and weapons (mainly roflmourne wielding warriors). So what does Blizzard do? They slap two more zeroes to the back a players health and say that will soften kill times and should alleviate PvP anxiety.
Wrong: players do upwards of 20k damage against 4.6k resilience targets. Problem? Only when this game was once considered to have a competitive PvP environment that could be taken seriously. A class that brings an incapacitate, 2 stuns, a instant LoS, an instant peel, and blind should not also bring the best DPS to the table without counting the best DPS CD in the game on the shortest CD (without regarding shadowdance). It has happened before and has resulted in the lose of subscribers that usually don't comeback because it leaves the food poisoning taste in their mouths: why would they want to return to a game that could mess it up again? Why risk paying money monthly when they might screw up again?
And what have the developers done to fix this? So far it is "working as intended". Casterclysm is at a point where the developer team has basically said "just fix problems that rise up and wait until MoP since that will fix it." Why change more aspects of the game when there will be a massive change anyway and people will have to get used to that? Why bother nerfing rogues, mages, ferals, and other OP classes that get free rides and lose their subscriptions because they don't want to play this game anymore? It's kind of obvious that they don't want to change anything else when so much will be changed in another 6 months, so it seems like they will just sit on their cash and wait for another million subscribers to fan out before releasing MoP. Chances are that will crash too from the looks of it. Unless Blizzard solves the problem of PvP balancing right now, there won't be much of a reason to keep playing a poorly balanced game with the thought that the developers don't care.
What can be done to balance the game? For starters, lets look at the things that are broken:
Frost mage: shatter damage is far too high, and can halve the health of 5k resilience targets easily in a single deep freeze. Nerfing the overall damage to frostbolt and icelance while keeping frostfire bolt the same would require mages to be a lot smarter with their freezes. They are frost mages, and should do most of their damage on frozen target, but not to the extent that it globals them. Frost mages were nerfed earlier in the xpac, but that was because they were one shotting demolishers in SoTA, endlessly freezing people, and doing retarded amounts of damage. No wonder so many people left during the 2nd and 3rd quarters.
Rogue: the simplicity of their nerfs was so easy that it made people wonder why Blizzard even bothered nerfing vial in the first place; they might as well have buffed frost mages while they were at it in regards to their "PvE damage being too low". Find weakness has been the reason why one rogue spec dominates PvP and outnumbers nearly every class in all arenas 2 to 1, some by an even larger margin. Find weakness and a rogues up time on a target is the reason why they are so OP, and nerfing their damage is as simple as the same nerf warriors received. Why this has not been done is a mystery to me. Recuperate is also the best self heal in the game currently, and reduces the rogues damage by 6%. Since they have it up 90% of the time, they can swap out PvP pieces for PvE pieces for extra damage. Unfortunately those PvE pieces were Vial of Shadows and the free epic daggers. It is very disappointing on Blizzard's part to see something so powerful so easily obtained with the excuse "we want all players to see the content".
Feral druids: I know very little about them, but their damage is above significant. With a dodge chance that verges on near total avoidance to throw down at expertise cap for PvP, to instant undispellable cyclones gained through their normal DPS rotation, they have consistent damage and utility that makes them unbalancing. Their bleeds also tend to complicate things, hitting for more than a Gurthalak tentacle. Nerfing their bleeds and damage would put them in line.
These are just a few pointers to what needs to be done. These are the bare necessities that need to be done to this game that I have managed to accumulate over the 2 months of reading the arena section of the forum. Gladiator level players, average joes, scrubs, noobs, along with decent yet not pro level players have contributed to the collection of these assumptions. Now something can be done to fix this game and stop a increasing level of subscribers from leaving, or we can just look at the "hug above player" threads and contribute nothing to what seems the eventual end of the world...of warcraft.
