Some feedback from Blizzard on PvP?

The reason I don't personally comment frequently on PvP threads these days is that, historically, the discussions turned into nasty arguments very quickly. While you see players asking for nerfs to other classes in PvE , it's rare, and usually folks are content to ask for buffs for their character instead. In PvP, you see a lot more requests to nerf someone else, and when Blizzard comment on those, the targeted classes get defensive, things get personal, and the whole thing devolves quickly. In some ways, PvP doesn't stop in the game, but continues onto the forums. :)

Unfortunately, it's hard to even refer to relatively objective data like raid parses to make a point. Players do attempt to leverage various comp percentages at various MMR levels to prove their point, but the numbers often feel cherry picked; it's not difficult to find the statistic that seems to support the point you're trying to make, and the arguments never really get resolved. The awesome videos set up (sometimes painstakingly so) typically to show off someone's mad skill or perhaps to grind some axe tend to be more sensational than proof of a problem. All in all, it's just a really subjective area of the game to discuss and it's hard for many players to check their emotions at the door. That has just been my experience.

It's not that PvP isn't important to us. It is. But we haven't yet found a good way to engage the community in a public discussion on PvP issues.

I am much more likely to participate in discussions at a more philosophical level. For example, I mentioned recently that we thought healing with lots of PvP Power was too strong. We want PvP healers to wear PvP gear, but it's not fun (except perhaps for the healers) for them to be invulnerable either.

We think damage in PvP feels appropriate overall. There are some situations where someone can set up a huge burst window or drop all their cooldowns at once and we're evaluating when that feels fair ("hey, it took skill and timing to set all that up") or when it feels cheap ("how am I supposed to counter that?").

The thing I am most worried about are the huge number of variables now in terms of who has what ability. It used to be that you knew what cooldowns and escape tools and CC a Frost mage had and you knew what an Arms warrior had to counter them. With the new talent system, you have to be prepared for almost anything. When there are too many variables, you risk losing some of the predictive and reactive tactics that many players (including me) enjoy. If I have no idea what tools you have, I am more likely to just to tunnel on you, blow all my cooldowns, and hope for the best. Not a ton of depth there.

While the old days of rogue-mage-priest didn't feel fair to the non rogue-mage-priests, they did have the advantage that the system was much easier to learn, so participants could move on to mining the depths of the system (i.e. easy to learn, hard to master) instead of just trying to remember all of the hundreds of various combinatorial permutations (i.e. hard to learn).

Quick question, though irrelevant to class balance: have you ever considered implementing cross-realm arena teams, or perhaps implementing a rating system similar to rated battlegrounds where no actual team would be required for arenas?

A little off topic for a class discussion forum, but I'll answer it. Yes, we have discussed letting arenas work more like rated battlegrounds where the "team" is fluid. We haven't made a final decision on it yet, and I doubt any change would be before Mists launched.

I think overall, what the players are more looking for is just a reminder from Blizz every now and then that they are actually looking at PVP and observing carefully what's happening on that side of the game. Oftentimes the lack of feedback from the blue text, makes it easy for an impression to be made that PvP is a secondary side game that the developers don't spend a lot of time focusing on. I know that isn't true but it's easy to understand why people have that belief when you look at how frequently the devs give feedback on raiding and how silent they are in contrast with the PvP community.

Yep. Totally understandable. PvP design as a whole is tricky because what some PvP players want is new stuff while what some want is well-polished stability. I'll just give a few examples of this:

1) We could have a lot of BGs with different rules, with the expectation that some just won't work out as well. Or we could take those few that have years of iteration (say WSG and AB) and make new skins for them.

2) We could have every spec be reasonably viable in arenas and BGs, or we could focus on a spec per class (or even a reduced number of classes) and make sure the experience is really good for those few. This really comes down to a quantity vs. quality discussion, but there isn't a clear right answer.

Though the easy to learn part of blizzards philosophy probably takes a hit (especially for new pvp'ers), but I believe that's hard to avoid with a game this old. I would have to say my biggest concern is that we go back to the globaling game, where people die in a few globals or are healed to full in a few globals. I know you guys have been trying to avoid that as much as possible and I hope it continues.

Totally agree. The opposite risk (which is how beta has felt) is that nobody ever dies because healers (or sometimes even DPS specs with healing capabilities) can pop someone to full with just a cast or two. It's easy to reduce damage vs. players. It's much more challenging to reduce damage without also reducing healing.

Lots of words, but what are you really saying? Cause all I got out of this was, "We have no way of testing PvP on a mass scale in a meaningful way and therefore cannot provide meaningful feedback to our community."

I actually didn't say that, or didn't intend to. I was saying that it's hard to have a good discussion with players on forums about PvP balance because it's hard for many players to be objective about their experiences in PvP. Even the good discussions tend to get littered with personal attacks, hyperbole, questionable "proof," and a lot of unfettered emotion.

We test PvP all the time and we follow the discussions (on this and many other forums) even when we don't replay directly.

I think you guys have kind of got yourselves in a serious bind with respect to PvP healing.

Basically, the only way anyone (who's not a serious masochist) could ever possibly enjoy spending 90% of their time stunned, silenced, interrupted, frozen, feared, polymorphed, horrored, hexed, cycloned, pushed back, running, or juking is if the remaining ~10% of their time is sufficient for them to stand a fair chance of keeping themselves and their teammates alive.

Healers definitely are under a lot of pressure in PvP and they know they're going to be targeted a lot, but I don't think it's an intractable problem. When we get the tuning right, I think it feels fine. I do agree it can be shocking for a healer who is used to PvE where you tend to be mostly concerned about healing others to suddenly have to spend so much effort keeping yourself alive in PvP. But I believe there are plenty of healers who enjoy PvP.