#1 - Oct. 11, 2012, 9:36 a.m.
I decided to create a new post because of the lack of constructive posts on this forum. I sincerely hope a blue poster could notify this one and hand it over to the developers. You guys asked for feedback, here you go.
Every single one of us must have realized by now that there was something terribly wrong when the season started. Here are my two cents.
The lack of MMR RESET
For some reason it was decided that mmr won't reset. Blizzard stated this was a last minute decision but I never saw any reasoning why. When MMR is not reseted, the teams that were high rated last season will easily get there again. Low rated teams, new characters (especially monks) and players who are trying arenas for the first time find it very difficult to raise their rating. The current system requires you to have win streaks in order to get a high MMR which is required for a high rating. When MMR did not reset it ruined the competition in which the whole system is based. In order to keep arenas meaningful, MMR should reset in the start of EVERY single season. Imagine if a football season started and the top teams could carry some points from the previous season.
I do realize that MMR can not be reseted anymore, but I hope that the developers learn now. This wasn't the first time MMR did not reset. This wasn't the first time the whole pvp community let out an outrageous cry about it. I truly hope it was the last time.
Dispels
Adding a cooldown to defensive dispels lowers the skill required in arenas a lot. At the same time offensive dispels don't have a cooldown. The reason for defensive dispel cooldown was something like this: "We don't want players to mindlessly spam dispel.". Nobody was spamming dispel mindlessly but EVERYONE was spamming offensive dispels mindlessly.
A good healer had to decide whether he heals or dispels. You had to be extremely fast with dispels to get a little gap in your favour and therefore win the games. Nowadays you basicly mindlessly spam your dispel whenever it's not on cooldown. This was one of the worst decision I've ever seen. The fast paced dispel mechanic is ruined.
My fix for this is that you should put the offensive dispels to a cooldown to stop their mindless spamming. I get the idea of making defensive dispels feel inferior compared to healing when you have to choose one. The cooldown-solution doesn't do that, it removes the whole decision which once again reduces the gap between an average and good healer. This is the development we have followed a long time now. A better solution for defensive dispels is to remove the cooldown and increase the mana cost significantly.
Healers and mana
Back in TBC as a healer you had to manage your mana. During the last two expansion every healer either has an infinite mana pool or can heal without mana. It's very alarming that healers can manage to keep their team up for the whole 45 minutes while being under pressure all the time, not being able to drink at all, wearing the first set of pvp gear. Mana fights no longer exist.
Hunters
A little example to start with. Yesterday I played ten 2v2 games on a roughly 1900 MMR facing ten teams with a hunter. After that we played 18 3v3 games on 2200ish MMR facing 14 hunter teams.
Beast Mastery hunters are broken. I don't know if there is a bug concerning pets and resilience or is the damage simply too high but there is something wrong with the burst. If one player is able to burst down a whole enemy team in seconds, there is something wrong. I saw a blue poster note this issue and state that it is too early in the season to do any definite conclusions. That's true but there is nothing definite needed to see that such a burst is not intended. There is a lot of video footage and screenshots all over the forums to prove this ridiculousness. This is a video in which you can clearly see how the BM hunters work nowadays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPXakquU9js&list=PLF81321ADBF32CF08&index=1&feature=plcp
My fix is to reduce the damage done by stampede and lynx rush. Then buff the overall damage of BM hunters since out of their cooldowns they are just a joke with a little kitten. Also to make hunter community happy, you should try to make the 2 other speccs viable. Many hunters I've talked to have said they don't like playing BM but there is simply no reason to play marksmanship or survival since those speccs are so much worse in terms of damage and the CC ability is now the same for every specc.
Warriors
Warriors have an insane burst capability also. All cooldowns combined with Avatar make them an unstoppable colossus hitting for hundreds of thousands. In my opinion there are two abilities which need a tweak. Dragon's roar. Guaranteed 130k crits every minute are insane. Warriors' overall damage isn't the problem, just the burst.Therefore my opinion is that Dragon's roar shouldn't have a 100% chance to crit. It lowers the burst to survivable numbers. Second wind. Not all classes can even outdps this passive self-heal. There are two solutions. Either nerf the heal a bit or make it have a cooldown.
Conclusion
Those are my main concerns at the moment. As said before I truly hope these points get all the way to developers. I love arenas and the nature of competition but during the last 2-3 season the development has been negative. More and more issues come up and they go unfixed until it is too late. Now we have very minor problems compared to MMR exploiting, lag macros and Shadowmourne. The kind of problems a wednesday morning can fix. I'm looking forward to that wednesday.
Yours
-Ewyn
