#1 - June 1, 2011, 4:25 p.m.
If anyone would be able to post this on US battle.net forums aswell, it would be appreciated (though I can imagine no one cba reading/reposting it).
Hello everyone, I’m making this post to shine some light on current problems that exist in arena, mainly caused by outdated mechanics, class homogenization and PvE balance interference. I write this post from the perspective of someone who has been 2300+ in 3v3 in TBC, 2800+ s7 and s8 and 2800+ in cataclysm.
The reason I’m making this post is because I’ve really liked playing arena since season 1, however it is currently getting more and more unattractive due to imbalance issues and class homogenization.
The point of this post is for blizzard to have a list of issues to think about when balancing PvP, namely arena. My post will focus around balance issues that exist in 3v3 arena combat. Blizzard has stated that they wanted to make World of Warcraft an E-sport, focusing around 3v3 arena. My post won’t concern rated battlegrounds, because battlegrounds are balanced around big groups, meaning that having class versatility is automatically encouraged (because more classes means more buffs and different crowd control effects so that diminishing returns won’t become an issue for your group).
I will say beforehand that I am a big fan of splitting the effect of abilities for PvE and PvP, the same goes for specializing PvP and PvE talent specializations.
To give a good example for what I mean by this I will take the warrior class. The warrior class has two different damage dealing specializations, Arms and Fury. Arms has always been the preferred talent specialization for PvP, while fury has been the preferred talent specialization for PvE. This setup has worked for 7 of the 8 past seasons (leaving out s5 where fury warriors were momentarily better in both PvP and PvE), and there have been little to no complains about fury warriors being less viable in PvP, or the other way around.
An example for splitting the effect of abilities is Collosus Smash, the effect of Collosus Smash in PvE gives a 100% armor ignoring effect for every class, while in PvP the effect is only a 50% armor ignore. Abilities having a different effect in PvP and PvE enviremonts is an incredibly good step towards balancing arena PvP.
The first thing I want to touch on are outdated mechanics, I will try to break down every subject in different sections:
- Why the mechanic is currently broken;
- Why the mechanic worked before;
- Possible fixes.
I will try to suggest easily implementable fixes, this mean fixes that have no big impact on the PvE section of the game. However not everything will always have a simple fix.
