#1 - March 28, 2012, 9:48 p.m.
[note: this is an 3v3 Arena thread, so keep that in mind when you make your posts and I request that if you want to talk about other forms of PvP than to make a new thread about it, I implore you to read the thread fully before making any posts/keep it constructive and no trolling please.]
Firstly a bit of background information on myself, without trying to sound egotistical or anything, I've been 2900+ before, which is probably in the top 20-30 world wide highest ratings, I've been Gladiator from S1 to S7 including 3 R1 titles (this isn't my only character), so I believe I'm capable of making a post which highlights major issues.
I think the vast majority of high rated (and I imagine a lot of lower rated players) would agree that the state of Arena has been in decline for some time now, certain changes by Blizzard have caused massive imbalances, both on purpose and by accident.
In the past Blizzard could ignore it, the PvP community is obviously smaller, the Arena scene even more so but in the light of recent subscription loses and upcoming release of major PvP-related games could see (and has seen) even more people leaving this game if Blizzard don't stop treating us like second-class citizens.
Now enough of that, I don't really want to go on any more about that, I want this to be a constructive thread about what we can do moving forward to improve the game, and make it into the game that it used to be.
Firstly the Arena system needs to evolve, or most other changes would be largely meaningless. I made a post about this a few weeks ago which highlights the changes I believe need to be made which a CM posted in and I felt we made good progress in it, so I'll just put it here if anyone else (including any Devs which are potentially going to read :|) to give it a read.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3483961360
Secondly, Blizzard needs to change it's philosophy on PvP balance. In the past Blizzard liked to mess around with the balance, it was a belief that by changing the game every couple of months it would make the game "feel fresh"/wouldn't go stale and people would continue playing longer. This however is starting to backfire. Most people have played the game longer enough now that this tactic no longer really works and instead are becoming more and more frustrated with their favourite classes going from being overpowered one moment and broken the next.
Me for example, i've played the Warrior class since 2005 for the past year I've genuinely started hating it (not only has a lot of changes Blizzard made in my humble opinion been incorrect and made the class horribly boring to play) but we went from being braindead faceroll (overpowered) in Season 9 to being still braindead (because the changes have made the ability to play the class well significantly reduced) but also extremely unrewarding to play.
If I want to play Arena, I want to play my favourite class, I don't want to have to roll a different class in order to be competitive, by competitive I mean for the top ladder spots, but that's me personally for other players competitive might be 2200 rating or 2000 rating or whatever their intended target it. A ret Paladin wants to play a ret Paladin, not having to change his class because Blizzard decided to roll the dice and they were unlucky for this next 5 months.
Thirdly certain abilities need to be greatly reduced in effectiveness. Specifically I'm talking about instant abilities. Instant CC, Instant damage and Instant healing have gotten out of control, and is making it more and more difficult for better players to seperate. It gives the lower rated player less people to "look up too" so to speak, I'm sure many people who do/love Arena watch a lot of PvP movies and most can agree that in TBC/WotLK they were at their most epic and inspired a lot of people to get better. Cataclysm has been a big disappointment in this regard because the ability to seperate yourself from a lesser skilled player was diminished.
Instant CC abilities should never last longer than 4-5 seconds, they should also have medium length CDs such as 35-45 seconds (or longer, up to 1 minute).
Instant Healing abilities should never be able to heal as much as caster abilities and the same goes for Instant Damage as well, they should at most be around 30-40% effective compared to casted abilities, abilities like a 3 holy power WoG crit Healing someone for over 100k is just plain absurd, it's a mechanic that most ret Paladins don't even like because it means they can't be given proper defensive abilities while they have mechanics like this, makes them very cheesy.
This is why there is a difference between Instant and Casting, Instant is easier and has very little risk. Casting has more risk (it takes longer, can be Line of Sighted and can be interrupted via interrupts/cc/stuns etc). An ability which poses more risk SHOULD have a bigger reward.
There are too many interrupts, too much CC, too many roots in the game right now. I'd almost go as far as saying the entire system for CC is wrong, DRs being at 15 seconds is not enough any more because of the sheer number of them, most teams will have at least 2 different classes with seperate DR CC.
This is also creating a balance problem as in some seasons classes without CC almost become meaningless, Season 8 is a good example, if you take away Shadowmourne than if you weren't a caster in Season 8 (because of their often spammable CC than you simply weren't a viable class, I don't have a perfect way to fix this yet, it requires some brainstorming by smarter people than me and extensive testing, my only real idea for this would be to somehow make DRs more intelligent, for example if you go through 2 CCs of 1 DR school (for example lets say Fear), and is then hit by a 2nd CC school (such as Polymorph) that Polymorph should start on the duration that a 2nd DR would be on.
Hypothetical example; 1st Fear lasts 8 seconds, 2nd lasts 4 seconds, Polymorph ontop of that lasts 8 seconds, 2nd 4 seconds = 24 seconds of not being able to do anything, add a Blanket Silence if it was on a Healer (which I'll get into later) another 4 seconds of being unable to control your character.
My change would be.
1 Fear lasts 8 seconds, 2nd lasts 4 seconds, Polymorph ontop of that lasts 4 seconds, next would be 2 seconds = at most 18 seconds (most good teams don't use their 3rd DR on CC (especially if they have a 2nd CC class with them) because it doesn't last long enough to have any significant advantage but also makes it longer til you can CC them properly), but now that player is immune to both sets of CC for 15 seconds, almost as long as he was CC'ed for.
This would have any effect in solo PvP, so it wouldn't require any rebalancing there, but would help with the issue of being too much CC, like I said this might be a bad example and maybe a smarter person than me can come up with a better idea; but I think the current system isn't working well any more, it was designed when far far less CC existed in the game, the 8 second dispel coming into MoP will only make this a bigger problem unless something is changed.
Onto blanket silences. These just plainly need to go, there isn't anyone playing the game (I can safely say I speak for like everyone) that likes blanket silences, they reduce the skill cap for everyone, they reduce for the person using it because it's an easy way to use your interrupts, it requires the skillcap for the person it's used on because they can't do anything to prevent it. This type of mechanic is just not good for the game, there is no risk in blanketing someone and a lot of reward you might even just accidentally get him when he casted.
A wishlist of mine; abilities having different effects in PvE and PvP. This one probably will never happen, it's a wish of mine but I find it unlikely that it's going to happen. You've done it before with Colossal Smash, which has a 50% effect in PvP and a 100% effect in PvE.
Why not do this for more abilities? Or make abilities do more damage in PvE so that they have the DPS to take down bosses with 100million HP but then don't have the same DPS vs players with 150k HP.
One thing about this, Blizzard said they didn't want to do this because it would be "confusing to the player base". Frankly I find this insulting, and a cop out. We've the most adaptive part of the community by far, we have to adapt to a lot of changes, we can adapt to this, and it would help make both communities happier.
PvE gear in Arena has to go. No IFs. No Buts. What's the point in balancing something only to ruin it with trinkets or weapons that are just insane? A good example is the Dragon Soul trinkets which you had to nerf because they were too good in PvP, you made both communities unhappy because you had to change this when nobody who does PvP wanted them in the first place, the nerf didn't make us happy because they shouldn't be there in the first place.
