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Is instant-cast crowd control too ubiquitous?
First, no, Polymorph isn't an instant-cast spell. Second, onwards! Blizzard Community Manager Nakatoir has posted this morning about Blizzard's current thinking on instant cast CC. Nakatoir First things first, I want to make sure you're aware that the information below reflects both short and long-term design considerations on our end. This isn't all on the table for patch 5.2 for a number of reasons. To make this clear right off the bat: This shift of instant casts back to cast times is not just targeted at crowd control. We also wish to start moving some heals back to having a cast time rather than being instant. That said, we're not necessarily planning on overhauling many of the spells and abilities that have been instant for a long time now, such as Hand of Justice. We're looking at some of the big outliers that we see brought up a lot, which are instant-cast, area-of-effect abilities like Blinding Light, or Presence of Mind in combination with Ring of Frost. We think that there are too many of these AoE CC spells at this time, especially instant AoE CC, which can create some frustrating gameplay experiences. Some other particular crowd-control effects that are on our radar are abilities like Blood Fear, which we're considering redesigning altogether, and Predatory Swiftness in combination with Cyclone, which feels virtually impossible to counter. Posted by Inférnal While we are talking about cc what about having some more spells share DR with each other. A pala can repentance/blinding light/ hammer. No Dr at all. Why is it that fear and blind share a DR and polly/fear and cycone dont? and many more examples like this. We're looking at diminishing returns for CC right now as a possible way to help with CC in PvP combat, but it's the type of gameplay overhaul that can be risky to implement in the middle of an expansion cycle if the change is too drastic. We are, however, taking a look right now at the DRs within particular classes, as well as special snowflakes like Cyclone. Either way, the design discussion will undoubtedly continue! ^^ source
Patch 5.1: PvP trinkets hotfixed
Blizzard Community Manager Daxxarri posted yesterday about a hotfix Blizzard's team are implementing to PvP trinkets, to help address the current issues with burst damage. As we've reported, patch 5.1 is fraught with PvP problems, and this is hopefully the first in line of fixes Blizzard will make. While it's great that changes are being made, the question remains: will this be enough? Naturally, Blizzard's team have access to numbers that the rest of us don't ever see, but it seems like a tall order to repair the current issues by simply changing a few trinkets. Daxxarri does go on to say that there is a risk that this changes means players simply won't die, but this seems a little unlikely. A greater risk seems to be another point Daxxarri addresses, being the potential this offers for the use of PvE trinkets in PvP. Particularly for burst-reliant comps such as anything with 3 DPS players, resilience is not a huge consideration, as a lot of the time their plan is to end the match quickly with very high up-front damage, scoring repeated kills. It seems possible that PvE trinkets with very high on-use bonuses could reappear, but Daxxarri promises that Blizzard will continue to monitor the situation. Hit the break for Daxxarri's full post.
Blizzard takes a stand against pre-made battleground groups
Blizzard Community Manager Daxxarri has been very active in the past 24 hours in a topic on the patch 5.1 changes to battleground queues. He's been responding to criticism of these changes, and, at the same time, being characteristically forthright on the issue of pre-mades. Quote: if you break it down, what does a full oQueue premade bring to the table that is unfair? I'll try to break it down as clearly as I can: Any addon that enables a full, organized Battleground group to queue against a randomly assembled group is creating a scenario where that coordinated group has a huge advantage. That is not in the spirit of the experience we want to provide in the normal Battleground queue. Playing with friends is fun and important, but it shouldn't come at the expense of the spirit of the game nor the fun of others. The normal Battleground queue is for players to jump in and play against other players in a similar situation. We realize that it's not a perfect system, and we're still looking at ways to improve normal Battleground queues further. Regardless, it's not meant for organized groups to "pug stomp" and get quick Honor. We have built in outlets for players that want to organize--if a competitive, social experience was really the goal, then there are clear ways to achieve that. The ultimate effect that this kind of queuing has had is to drive players away from PvP. Perhaps it's been a long time since you've been in a random group, but a lot of players will see that they're up against a premade and simply quit. At best, they suffer through it. To an extent premade groups count on this. Heck, one of the popular addons announces opposing players that appear to have rage quit. Addons aren't really a viable solution for botting issues, but we do take those issues seriously and we'll continue our work on improvements to the Battleground system, including better ways to deal with botting and other exploitative gameplay. source
Has Patch 5.1 broken PvP?
If you read the forums, you may well think it is. There are several very vocal threads about the state of PvP right now, about the heavy burst coming from melee classes with the weapons upgrade, and the absence of a resilience upgrade to repair it. Those threads are always very vocal, always very convinced that PvP is worse now than it's ever been. While I try my best to be positive about the game, I'm not entirely sure that the forums are wrong, this time around at least. PvP Power and PvP Resilience Patch 5.1 brought about some changes to these two stats, introduced by Blizzard to help make PvP balance easier. They essentially provide a dial, which allows the increase and reduction of damage, healing and defense in PvP, without those changes impacting PvE. They're a great idea, but before Patch 5.1, as I spoke about months back, they weren't quite working as intended. One of the stated aims of PvP Power particularly was to remove the viability of PvE items in PvP. Blizzard's team have been very keen that PvE gear does not become viable in PvP, and up until recently, PvP weapons were, for melee classes in particular who are far more directly affected by weapon stats than casters, not the best choice for maximum damage output.
Countering heavy burst in PvP
The early part of the first Mists of Pandaria season features a lot of what Blizzard was trying to avoid -- heavy burst damage. This is particularly a problem when combined with a high level of crowd control, and as I've regularly said, heavy burst is one of the more frustrating things to counter. There is still heavy burst in the game, post the fixing of the hunter Stampede buff, so the question remains, what can you do about it? I won't be giving you a class-by-class guide on what exactly to do about burst damage. Unless you happen to play one of the classes I specialize in, chances are you know your class far better than I do, and even if you do play one of my classes there's still a possibility you know it better! This definitely isn't class-by-class advice, but a general guide about mentality, tactics and the like. And please, do add to it in the comments with class-specific advice if you have it! Everything helps. Prevention is better than cure This is me stealing something doctors and aunts and grandparents used to say when I was a kid, usually referring to illness rather than WoW PvP. But it applies for this, too. If you can stop someone unleashing their heavy burst on you or your team-mates, that's a far better solution than having to pick them up from extremely low health afterwards. I haven't seen something in an arena in a long old time that can genuinely take a player from 100% to dead in one global, but there are some really hard-hitting abilities out there.
Arena rating reset for players over 2200
After the release of last week's information from Blizzard Community Manager Daxxarri, more has been added to the list of action Blizzard is taking to rectify the problems caused by the recently discovered arena MMR exploit. Amongst other things, this exploit made win-trading far less onerous. Win-trading is a practice, completely against the terms of service, where players queue, particularly in 5v5 at the quietest times of day, to attempt to ensure they face the same team repeatedly. The two teams will then trade wins, allowing one team to advance to a high rating, then the winning team may switch to an alt team, allowing the losing team to do the same. This is, as we mentioned, completely against the terms of service, and will likely get you banned. With the exploit, win-trading could be carried out without the losing team suffering an MMR loss. Thanks to this, very high ratings were achievable, and in order to rectify this issue, Blizzard has decided to reset every team and player with an MMR or rating above 2200 to 2200. This would usually have an immediate effect on conquest point caps, but that will take effect next week and will be implemented as usual. Is this fair? It seems like it might not be for those who have legitimately gained 2200+ ratings, without using the exploits, and for those who benefited unwittingly from the exploit. Equally, why has Blizzard not gone further and completely reset MMR and rating? Do these things only matter at the top? Hit the break for Daxxarri's full post.
Blizzard will take decisive action against arena exploiters
Blizzard Community Manager Daxxarri has posted today regarding a recently discovered Arena exploit. While precise details are not known, it appears this relates the a method whereby players could escape from playing against comps they were struggling with, countercomps, or teams they had faced previously, without losing MMR by exiting the game. This, while not win-trading itself, led to win-trading, and, as Daxxarri says, both win-trading and the use of exploits are completely against the rules. Daxxarri Providing an environment where players can compete in the spirit of fair play is extremely important to us, particularly in rated Player versus Player combat. As part of that commitment we regularly monitor gameplay, and have discovered an issue where some Arena teams have exploited the queuing system to obtain high team ratings, "dodge" unfavorable team compositions, and engage in win trading. These, and all, exploitative activities are absolutely prohibited. We will investigate the situation carefully, and players that have been found to have participated in exploitation will be subject to the appropriate actions against their World of Warcraft accounts. In the meantime, we are currently working to resolve any remaining issues with the queue system to prevent this behavior in the future. source Players will have to wait and see just what Blizzard's investigation reveals, and what their actions will be as far as punishing the perpetrators. Many are already calling for ladder resets and MMR resets, but of course, these can punish the innocent as well as the guilty. The nature of this bug is such that it's possible some players benefiting from it may have been unaware they were doing so. Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
Arenajunkies interviews top Arena priests
With the Battle.net World Championships coming up in just a few days' time, ArenaJunkies has been very busy interviewing some of the top arena players who'll be battling it out in Shanghai. We've got interviews from two of what I can fairly confidently say are among the world's top priests, Zunniyaki and Talbadar. Zunniyaki is a member of Yaspresents, with Another on a death knight and Cara on a paladin. Yaspresents stormed to a decisive victory in the Battle.net European Invitationals in Cologne, comfortably dismissing most of their competition in an undefeated run of best of 3 matches. Talbadar is one third of Team Evil Geniuses, along with renowned shaman and warlock Cdew and Azael. Again, like Yaspresents, Evil Geniuses took a victory in the North American Invitationals, comfortably securing their place in Shanghai. Both these priests are at the top of their game, and bound to make a splash during the tournaments coming up between November 16 and 18. Hit the break for the second video interview with Talbadar!
Is crowd control out of control?
There has been an interesting discussion taking place over on the EU forums with Blizzard Community Manager Nakatoir about the state of crowd control in PvP. There seems, predictably, to be a focus on arenas in the discussion, which is logical, since they seems to be where crowd control is generally used most effectively. Nakatoir's contributions are largely in response to complaints from players about chain CC. Chain CC is where an opposing team manage to keep a player controlled for a long period of time by "chaining" together their crowd control abilities. This can be a hugely frustrating experience, as a good CC chain can keep a player out of action for a long period of time. Often, as is the CC-ing team's plan, long enough to land a kill on the CC'd player's team-mate. Nakatoir provides some great advice for countering CC, rightly saying that chaining together one 33-second chain of CC, as one poster describes, requires a great deal of focus and communication. A CCing team is playing offensively, if they're using the CC to land a kill rather than to turtle, and sometimes attack is the best form of defense.
Dissecting the Dev Watercooler on PvP
A few days ago, Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street released a very lengthy Dev Watercooler on Mists of Pandaria PvP. Now that the dust has had a chance to settle, we're going to take a look at the blog and its implications for PvP right now. Next time we might look at some of their zany ideas for future PvP! MMR MMR, or Match-Making Rating is how teams are matched in rated PvP. MMR is separate from rating, but both are altered when you win or lose against other rated teams. Explaining the difference between the two is a little tricky, but essentially, MMR is how your matches are found. MMR is linked to players and teams, so a player forming a new team will carry some of their MMR with them from previous PvP escapades, in order for them not to face far lower-rated players. Rating is also linked to both players and teams, but doesn't dictate who you face. Rating is won and lost via winning and losing against teams with better and worse MMRs. Say you're at 1500 MMR and 1500 rating, and you face a team at 1600 MMR and 1600 rating, and you lose. You will only lose a small amount of rating, let's say 5, and they will only gain a small amount, again let's say 5. Both your MMRs will adjust similarly. Now say you beat them. They will lose a big chunk of rating, but likely not such a big chunk of MMR. You, equally, will gain a big chunk of rating, and depending on how many matches you've played, likely gain a reasonable amount of MMR. The MMR is saying "hey these guys beat a 1600 team. They're better than a 1500 MMR".
More Conquest Point Changes: PvP to PvE?
Following the recent alteration to a so-called bug which had existed since the launch of Patch 4.2, conquest points are to undergo further alteration. In preparation for Patch 5.1's system, which will allow PvP and PvE players to upgrade their gear with all four types of point, Blizzard Community Manager Daxxarri has posted about an upcoming increase to the conquest point cap: Daxxarri To help everyone keep up with the upcoming system in 5.1 that will allow you to upgrade your Conquest gear with Conquest Points, a hotfix is being implemented very soon that will raise the Conquest Point caps: At 1500 rating, the Arena Conquest Cap will now be 1800 (up from 1350), while the Rated Battleground Conquest cap will be 2200 (up from 1650). As always, when your rating increases, so will your cap. Plan accordingly! source While this is a welcome change, the question remains: does this repair the earlier issue of players having to enter rated battlegrounds to complete the weekly cap? We aren't sure. And furthermore, it seems possible that Blizzard's team could be opening themselves up to a second issue. Since the stats on PvP gear were altered to all but match those on PvE gear, PvP gear is viable in PvE. But conquest gear has no reputation requirements, and conquest points can be earned far faster than valor, with one arena win awarding 180 points. With these increased caps, will PvP become the way to gear for PvE? Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
Beast mastery hunters may escape Stampede nerf
Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street posted a lengthy Dev Watercooler yesterday, focused on Mists of Pandaria PvP. Within that Dev Watercooler, one thing he mentioned was the extremely high burst being put out by Beast Mastery Hunters, saying: Ghostcrawler Beastmastery Hunters – We agree that stacking too many cooldowns to blow someone up is not interesting, skillful, or fair. (I also want to be clear that with all of these issues, we're not blaming players for using the tools that we gave them; we're blaming ourselves.) We're taking a hard look at the various Hunter cooldowns with the intention of reducing their burst. Hunters are receiving a buff in that they will no longer need to swap between Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Fox. We also hope these changes help result in higher representation of Survival and Marksman Hunters. source Very shortly after the Dev Watercooler was posted, Ghostcrawler took to twitter, announcing that a substantial bug had been discovered, which only affected beast mastery hunters in the arena: Good news. We found a bug with Stampede being too high only in Arenas. That accounts for why feedback can be so varied. More info later. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 31, 2012 Community Manager Zarhym emailed us late last night to inform us that the bug had been isolated and added to the beast mastery hunter-specific section of the blog. The bug is now detailed as follows:
The state of PvP: Current issues, balance and communication
First and foremost, before we get into the heavy stuff, I wanted to give a brief run-down of the Tol'viron Arena. As you can see from the header image, it's very similar to Nagrand Arena, the 4-pillar arena much beloved of caster teams and tree-huggers everywhere. Again, if you take a look at the header image you can see that there are 2 pillars on one side, and one on the other. The result of this from the games I've had so far is simply that most caster teams prefer the two-pillar side, while melee teams will try to draw casters out. It's much the same play experience as Nagrand Arena, only with slightly fewer options for pillar-humping. The three pillars seem to be equidistant apart, with the two pillars naturally closer to the doors, and quite a run to the single pillar at the start. The runs between the pillars are somewhat longer than in Nagrand, so be aware of your line of sight and distance to healers if you're both on different pillars. This arena seems to only rarely permit a healer to hug one pillar while healing a DPS who is hugging another, range-wise. Be aware! Also, I ran to the wrong side at the start several times. Get your bearings!
Getting started in PvP Season 12
PvP Season 12 has begun, as we informed you last week. First and foremost, where are the vendors with the PvP gear? They're a little hidden away in Mists, that's for sure, with the Alliance vendor on the Serpent's Spine, the huge wall, level with the border between Vale of Eternal Blossoms and Valley of the Four Winds. There is a flight point there, but you won't have it unless you happened to pick it up while looking for Bowmistress Li. The Horde vendor is also on the wall, but between Townlong Steppes and Kun Lai Summit, a short way west of the corner. Again, there's a flight point there, but you likely won't have it. For both vendors, you can reach them by getting up onto the wall at pretty much any point you can, and running along it. Of course, you'll likely be 90 before you're interested in hunting them down, so you can just fly on over! And do check out our guides to the Silvershard Mines and Temple of Kotmogu. Weapon Problems The PvP vendors sell both item level 458 honor gear, and item level 483 conquest gear, but there is currently a complete absence of honor weapons. Rather flying in the face of the so-called "you can play the game how you want to" Mists philosophy, PvPers are yet again required to get their early PvP weapons via PvE. While hardly new at the beginning of an expansion, it's rather frustrating.
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!
Blood Sport: Sitting down with a top arena team
I was lucky enough to attend the World of Warcraft European Invitational tournament in Cologne, it was a fantastic tournament, with some of the most exciting games I've watched in a while. If you want to check out the video coverage, you can do so by visiting ESL's twitch TV channel. Among the games, I was lucky enough to sit down for a chat with one of the eight competing teams, Eat Nerds Get Birds. This amusingly, if hastily named team comprised Jimos, playing a retribution paladin, Dreamz, on a restoration shaman, and Colarn, on an Arms warrior. While they weren't one of the top 2 teams who made it through to the World Championship finals in China, these guys are PvPing at the highest level, and it was great to sit down with them and get their tips on what makes a good arena team, and discuss various other elements of PvP right now. Q: Do you go into matches with a pre-defined strategy, or are you more going in to see what happens and react accordingly? A: We always, always have a pre-defined strategy for our comp against pretty much every other comp. We don't think you could play without that, it's pretty vital. You need to work out what strengths your comp has against the other comps you see a lot, and play to those strengths. To devise these strategies, though, you need to try out lots of different approaches, and see what works and what doesn't. When you're trying things out, you need to take a strategy and do just that. You might lose a few games if your strategy is bad, but if you don't give it a proper try you won't know!
PvP impressions in 5.0.4
So here we are. The patch has landed in both the United States and the EU, and we're all looking, bewildered, at our new talent screens. Alas, there are no arenas or rated battlegrounds available with which to really try out our talents, but we can take some small comfort in the continued availability of non-rated battlegrounds. (I do, by the way, find it rather frustrating that the main PvP content is absent from the game for an entire month. Imagine if raids were closed down! But anyway, that's a complaint for another time.) Of the things I am really excited about in 5.0.4, the top one has to be talent trees. A lot of these talents, while providing situational bonuses in PvE, are really going to be game-changers in PvP. It was promised to us by Tom Chilton that, before arenas, we would be able to see the class and spec of the opposing team and be able to modify our talents accordingly. We won't, however, see exactly how the opposition's talents are distributed. One important change for healers to note is that your dispel now has an 8-second (current beta build) cooldown but removes two effects rather than one. Gone are the days of spam dispels -- warlocks, rejoice! Warlocks are doing a lot of rejoicing right now. Also notable is that Spell Penetration has been turned into PvP Power, Resilience has become PvP resilience, and everyone is now running around with a base 40% damage mitigation. PvP resilience numbers seem to provide a little less mitigation than the old resilience did, in a full conquest point set, gemmed for resilience, damage mitigation is 68.32%. The tooltip indicates that what was 5,200 resilience has been altered to 3,058 PvP resilience. This translates to 28.32% of the 68.32% total mitigation figure.
Patch 5.0.4 ends arena season, closes arenas until Mists of Pandaria
In the middle of all the excitement about patch 5.0.4 and the many changes it brings, one change that absolutely needs to be highlighted for people who primarily PvP is that not only does the patch end the current arena season, it ends arenas themselves from the day it drops (Aug. 28) until the day Mists of Pandaria launches, Sept. 25. While so far we've heard nothing saying that battlegrounds will be affected, there will be no arenas at all for roughly a month starting next week. Rated battlegrounds will also be inaccessible. So if you're primarily an arena player, you should be aware that you won't have access to the arenas for that time. You should still be able to access battlegrounds, but not rated battlegrounds. Nothing will reward conquest points and you won't be running any arenas or rated BG's until we're all frolicking on the sandy beaches of Pandaria. 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!
New Mists of Pandaria Battlegrounds: Temple of Kotmogu
Welcome back, readers, to this second instalment of our run-down of the new Mists of Pandaria battlegrounds. There's no reason why the Temple of Kotmogu is second. It's not harder, and it's not available later. It's just the second one I wrote about. First, a word of warning. The information in this post is accurate in beta build 15961 and may change significantly before launch. Like Silvershard Mines, this battleground is only currently available at level 90. It is significantly more straightforward in construction than its mine-based sister battleground but equally as tactically interesting. I'm really excited about both these battlegrounds, and I think it's fantastic how Blizzard is introducing new styles of battleground rather than capture the flag, capture the node, and invade the keep. The in-game battleground finder screen describes the battleground as follows: The Horde and Alliance wage battle for the ancient Mogu artifact that is foretold to hold great powers. Temple of Kotmogu is a 10 vs 10 Powerball battleground where each side attempts to control the Mogu artifact for as long as possible in different scoring zones Let's take a closer look.
PvP season 11 ends Aug. 28
The title says it all -- it has been announced on Battle.net that season 11, the current PvP season, will end on Aug. 28 (Aug. 29 for the EU). That's about two weeks away (15 days if you're on EU servers), so if you want to grind out those last points of rating, you'd better get your skates on! As ever, at the end of the season, your conquest points will be converted to honor points. In the interim period between Aug. 28 (29 for EU) and Mists' arrival on Sept. 25, there will be no honor cap. Come Sept. 25, all your points over the 4,000 honor point cap will be converted to a ridiculously tiny amount of gold -- 35 copper silver per point, to be precise. So make sure you're not over the cap. Spend everything! On Aug. 28 (29 for EU), all the gear that was purchasable with conquest points becomes purchasable with honor points. Any items with rating requirements attached are no longer available for purchase. If you think you may be in the running for an achievement, it is very important not to do anything to the character you think might be eligible. Don't faction-change, don't realm-change; either of these things could wipe out your rating. Season 12 will begin approximately one week after the release of Mists of Pandaria, and in the interim period, there will be no arenas or rated battlegrounds available. Only normal battlegrounds will continue as usual.
