pvp-defense
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PvP Power, PvP Resilience and PvE gear
For any readers who don't know, Mists of Pandaria brought about a fairly substantial change in PvP gear. Resilience and Spell Penetration were removed, and replaced with two shiny new stats: PvP Power and PvP Resilience. PvP Resilience is essentially the same as the old Resilience stat, reducing your damage taken from other players. It's active all the time, whenever you're wearing your PvP gear. PvP Power is not, as many believe, a direct 1 for 1 counter to PvP Resilience. PvP Power increases your damage against other players. So, if you're a player who has 0 PvP power, hitting a player who has 50% damage mitigation from PvP Resilience, and your hit does 100 damage, it will only hit them for 50 damage. Say you are that same player, only now you have a 100% damage increase against other players from PvP Power. Your 100 damage hit now hits another player for 200 damage. But, the player with 50% damage mitigation is still resisting 50% of that damage, so it hits them for 100 damage. Of course, these values are not correct in-game, but we're getting to that. They're just for illustration!
Ghostcrawler briefly discusses PvP power and PvP healing
Just a short while ago, everyone's favorite blue crab, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, posted briefly on the U.S. forums in response to a thread regarding the function of PvP power and PvP healing. This certainly makes for interesting reading and may allay some fears of the PvE community regarding the use of PvP gear in dungeons and raids. Is this testing or speculation? Because PvP Power and PvP Resilience should work anywhere with regard to DPS, but of course only when you are attacking or being attacked by other players. The only thing that doesn't work is PvP Power-fueled healing. At the moment, you only gain the healing benefit when in BGs and Arenas. The reason is because that we don't want PvP gear to be super effective for PvE content (useful is fine, but super effective is not). That design goal is easily met for damage dealers, because they won't benefit from PvP Power when damaging creatures. Unfortunately, there isn't a simple check for us to determine if a healer is healing damage done by PvP or PvE. In an Arena or BG you can make that assumption, but in the outdoor world you may be engaging in world PvP, or you may just be questing. We are considering just letting PvP Power affect healing everywhere but dungeons and raids. That would solve world PvP and only risk unbalancing group questing and world bosses. Even the world bosses probably don't represent a huge game balance risk, given that the option always exists to get tons of players together to zerg them. source So to sum up, PvP power is easily developed to work exclusively in PvP scenarios for DPS and tank specs, as the game can easily tell what you're hitting. Healing is far harder, as you're always healing people wherever you are, so the game has to test for PvP scenarios before employing the PvP power. To me, as a PvPer, the second option that GC mentions sounds far more appealing. For the PvP healing buff were to only apply in Arenas and Battlegrounds seems quite contrary to Blizzard's desire to reignite world PvP. It would also leave PvP-geared healers rather defenseless outside of the Arena and Battlegrounds, were they to be attacked on PvP servers or similar while out farming, etc. I don't think that unbalancing world bosses is a huge price to pay, particularly considering Blizzard's earlier comments regarding the likelihood of world PvP taking place around world bosses. However, I'm sure PvEers will take comfort in the knowledge that Blizzard is taking steps to keep PvP gear from becoming too powerful in PvE scenarios. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
Lichborne: The effect of the new stat changes on death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. We're still a couple of weeks away from the dam burst that is the Mists of Pandaria press event, but in the meantime, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted a new Dev Watercooler. He listed some stat changes coming in Mists that, while ostensibly not as complicated as those in Wrath, still hold some interesting and possibly major implications for class balance in the coming expansion. Let's dive right in and see what they mean for death knights. Blocking takes a week While it doesn't directly affect us, the blocking changes will certainly shake up the tanking hierarchy that we're a part of, so it's worth pointing out that the usual single roll combat table for dodging, parrying, or blocking a hit is gone. Instead, the chance to block will be calculated only after the dodge and parry chance is calculated. This essentially means that being unhittable is gone. You can't just stack to 102.4%. Of course, death knights and druids have never been able to do this, but they will now be joined by the shield tanks.
Breakfast Topic: Why do we hate playing defense?
After a bad run of battlegrounds recently, I began wondering why so many players are so reluctant to play defensively. I myself generally prefer offensive maneuvers, but I see the value in having a solid defensive base. I personally have neglected to play defense, because every time I do, I feel like everyone else thought "oh good! now I don't have to". Then my character gets zerged, and spanked. Hard. Sometimes there is laughing.Of course, this sort of begs the question doesn't it? If we're all not playing defense because we feel we'd end up alone, then we are ensuring any defense will indeed go it alone (and fail). Are we suffering from poor leadership, or are there other reasons why so many of us are so genuinely reluctant?When speaking with some of my guildmates on the issue, they mentioned that you don't feel very useful when you are run over by a group from the other side. It's hardly how one wants to spend an evening. Offense also sees more continuous action, as defensive positions sometimes have long periods of time where there is no one to kill. Failing that, you may also spend a great portion of the match being killed. We have previously talked about how you might go about designing a new battleground. Would there be any merit to designing one where defense is more important, to force players to learn its value and its technique? Or, on the other hand, would it be beneficial and interesting if we had a battleground based solely on offensive maneuvers? Do you prefer defense, or offense, and why? Why do you think the defensive seems to be the least popular choice? What do you think, if anything, could be done about it?
