So what's the GOOD NEWS with PvP in WoD?

There's a ton of awesome PvP-related stuff happening in Warlords. Just off the top of my head:

• CC Disarmament: there's a lot fewer CC spells, especially instant and auto cast CCs, and more shared DRs among the ones that remain.
• Health and scaling rebalance: means little to no Base Resilience or Battle Fatigue are needed, and classes that aren't as reliant on gear to perform. Also does wonders for PvP class balance.
• Ashran: our new open world PvP zone, which we're not quite ready to share details on yet (but what I've seen so far looks awesome!)
• Skirmishes: unrated Arenas that can be queued for either solo or in a group.
• Spectator invites & Tournament gear: additional tools to allow tournament organizers to run high-quality tournaments without needing direct intervention from Blizzard.
• Our new built-in Group Finder: much easier way to find party members for rated BGs or Arenas.

And that's just from the stuff we've already talked about. There's more to come as we continue development :)

03/19/2014 05:21 PMPosted by Tonìc

I know healer scaling was mentioned, but what about damage scaling? It has just gotten absurd how quickly damage scaled in MOP - we went from doing 60k dps to 400k+, which is why Battle Fatigue and PVP Resilience had to be set so high in the first place.

You need to hit the root of the problem NOW while you are doing the item squish - if you wait until after WOD then it will be too late and you'll have to do an item squish again for the next expansion.

So, there's actually a lot going on there:

Currently, in Mists, level 90 characters have a relatively high amount of base health, and a relatively low amount of base damage or healing on their abilities. As a result, your health from Stamina doesn't increase as quickly as your damage or healing from Attack or Spell Power. To use some made up numbers for perspective, your gear might account for 80-90% of your damage, but only 40-50% of your health. That's why, as the quality of your gear increases by hundreds of item levels over the course of an expansion, we see such a high swing in damage output compared to health pools.

For Warlords, we're simplifying that by making health and spell effectiveness scale a lot more linearly. Base health is being lowered dramatically (and the effectiveness of Stamina increased) to the point that as damage or healing goes up, health pools go up alongside them. That lets us ensure that PvP gameplay at low gear vs high gear feels relatively similar.

On top of that, we're increasing health pools in general -- they'll be much larger in comparison to the damage players are able to deal to each other than they are today. Resilience and Battle Fatigue were added because without them, an attack or heal would account for massive chunks of a player's health bar. With higher health, that same spell doesn't have as big of an impact.

(It's worth noting that all of this is after the item squish, so it's all relative. The actual numbers, including health pools, will end up much smaller compared to how things are today.)

03/19/2014 05:49 PMPosted by Taedas

03/19/2014 05:03 PMPosted by Lore

Our new built-in Group Finder: much easier way to find party members for rated BGs or Arenas

This addition will make EVERY aspect of wow much better if blizzard does it correctly.

make sure they don't flame it up Lore

I will do my best but please be aware that I am made entirely of fire.

(but seriously, it's gonna be awesome)

03/19/2014 06:13 PMPosted by Tonìc

It still doesn't solve the problem of an absolutely massive difference in power between people in greens being put up against people in honor/conquest gear... though there are other solutions to that particular problem.

Indeed there are, and we're discussing a few of them. ;)

03/20/2014 02:53 PMPosted by Kotre

There is one stat on gear which increases your character's health, while every single other stat increases your damage.

03/20/2014 02:53 PMPosted by Kotre

You guys halved the Stam budget when we moved from Vanilla to TBC to help combat a deteriorating damage to health pool ratio. Maybe it's simply time to do that again, possibly drop the budget even more than half.

That's exactly what I meant when I said we'd be increasing the effectiveness of Stamina. You will get significantly more health per point. I don't have the exact amount per point handy, but the jist of it is that the Stamina on your gear will be enough to increase your health pool at roughly the same rate that everything else increases your damage/healing output.

03/20/2014 02:08 PMPosted by Sigurdr

As well there should be massive differences between people in green and people in conquest. What the heck is the point, and what motivation would people have to actually get pvp gear when greens are just as good.

There are shades of grey here. Of course, someone who is fully kitted out in Conquest gear should have no issue taking out someone whose first action at level 100 was to queue for a battleground. Building up and improving your character is an important part of World of Warcraft gameplay, including in PvP, and we have no intention of changing that.

However, the player who immediately queues for a battleground at level 100 is probably pretty excited to get into PvP, and it's heartbreaking to suddenly find out that you're not just disadvantaged, you're completely ineffective. The level 100 shouldn't be on equal footing with players that have spent time and effort gearing up, but they also shouldn't feel like they can't contribute to their team's success -- and their teammates shouldn't feel like they're essentially down a player.

A fresh 100 should absolutely, categorically, 100% be completely aware that they're going to need better gear to go toe to toe with the big cats, but they shouldn't feel like litter in the meantime. Follow?