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Critical Strike
- The team wanted the difference between sustained damage and Critical Strike damage to not be as massive in Warlords.
- Classes that depend on Critical Strike and Multistrike can be helped by increased damage on those skills in PvP (when necessary).
- The game is better without having to rely on winning the Critical Strike lottery.
Nemesis quest
- They designed it to be a Warlords thing that is done out in the world, and they currently want to stick to this.
- This turned out to be harder than expected, so they will review the requirements again.
PvP vs PvE
- The team could use more knobs to adjust skills for PvP without affecting PvE, but having a separate PvP and PvE version of all skills may not be the right answer.
- The team has made a lot more PvP only changes to spells recently, but it would be a problem if every ability was this way.
- Hardcore players may be able to keep track of the extra complexity, but that isn't the direction they want to see the game go.
- The team is talking about other plans for the future to solve this and are excited about it.
Crowd Control
- The team wants variation in the crowd control that classes have to offer, not just everyone having the same CC.
- It may be okay if weaker specs have a slightly better CC, as they aren't doing as well as other classes or specs.
- The high level goal of CC changes going in to Warlords was allowing players to spend more time playing their characters and less time in CC.
- The team would rather take more CC out of the game before removing CC breaks.
- CC is one of the most important parts of the game. There are no plans to remove all CC from the game.
Tournaments
- Blizzard is very thankful for all the people hosting PvP tournaments.
- The team wants to continue to find ways to help those people hosting tournaments.
- There have already (by April) been six times as many tournaments this year as there were last year.
- There are big things coming in the future that they wish they could share today.
- Other organizations are even making commitments to World of Warcraft.
- Rated Battlegrounds are fun to watch and can actually be easier to watch than arenas.
- The community can use them to experiment with new rules that aren't built into the game.
Dampening Mechanic
- The team us happy with Dampening. It is unpopular with some people, but games need to end in a reasonable amount of time.
- Building comps around the Dampening mechanic is a strategic option that players can pick if they wish.
Alt Progression
- Gearing up characters is progression for many players. It isn't in the best interest of the game to remove that.
- There are even more opportunities now to gear up characters later in the season, especially with the recent Conquest cap change.
- If you want to gear up a character, you should have to play that character.
- The team is happy with where they are going with 6.2 with alt progression in PvP.
- There are no plans to bring back the 27,000 CP vendor.
Item Level in PvP
- The request to keep everyone at the same ilvl for PvP is fairly popular. However if they take away the gear progression from PvP, they need to figure out what players would do to progress. Not everyone is interested in rating, so there needs to be another type of progression.
- The item level gap is a big entry barrier for PvP and is a problem. They have made the gap between the highest and lowest geared players smaller in Warlords.
Racial Balance
- Part of the faction imbalance problem is the fact that there are no cross-faction arena teams. This means all of the high rated players that want to play with each other are all the same faction. Last expansion they were mostly Horde, this expansion they are mostly Alliance.
- The Human racial is the target of many complaints, but the Horde racials are still powerful.
- Going into the next expansion, looking at the racials again is a possibility.
- They want to make sure all of the racials are interesting and fun, and not boring.
Solo Queue
- A solo rated arena or battleground queue experience could be very toxic.
- When you have pre-made groups you will have a leader which will set the tone for the group. If you act out of line, they can kick you out.
- The group finder has been a very big success.
- The team expected there might be a dip in Rated Battleground participation in this expansion due to the Conquest Cap changes, but it is up by over 50 or 60%. The rewards got worse, but it is now so much easier to participate.
- There are no plans for Solo queue rated PvP at this time.
Ashran
- In Warlords, rather than adding yet another battleground, the team wanted to add a new type of PvP content. Everyone was excited when talking about Ashran, but after release it was clear it didn't hit the mark.
- Knowing how excited everyone was for Ashran and then not delivering something people were happy with is something the team us very unhappy with.
- Faction balance is an issue they are still working on.
- During beta everyone was fully geared, so they were just there to play and test things. Once it went live, many players were there to earn rewards in the most efficient way, which sometimes means not fighting.
- Many rewards have been removed from the events and bosses and moved to weekly and repeatable quests.
- The efficiency of rewards from Ashran vs other PvP features have to be balanced.
- The team may restrict Ashran queuing to just parties rather than raids, but is open to feedback.
Bots
- The team knows that bots do not make the game look good and put a lot of effort into stopping them.
- They are not transparent about their efforts for a few reasons. One key reason is they do not want to tip botters off. If they come up with a new method, they don’t want to inform botters of this while they are working on the system.
- The team doesn't want to publish the actions that are made to people's accounts, as dragging names through the mud is not appropriate.
Legendary Ring
- There is a wide variety of PvP activities with different rules to remove items that ruin competitive gameplay. Random battlegrounds have somewhat looser rules. World PvP doesn't have significant restrictions, so the ring proc will work in world PvP.
- The proc is disabled in instanced PvP, including Ashran.
Low Level PvP
- The team focuses on high level PvP for balance purposes, as that is what the vast majority of players are doing.
- If something is very unbalanced - such as a single spell, they want to hear about it and fix it.
- If you find that some classes are stronger at a certain level, that is not something they will spend a lot of time on balancing.
- There is a open bug that players with experience off can not queue for wargames. This is being fixed.
Misc
- Many more class changes are coming to the PTR. We have only seen part of the changes so far, and even some of those have already changed.
- The team wants to keep Alterac Valley up to date in terms of tuning when expansions come out, but there are no mechanic changes planned.
- Random battlegrounds are popular, but the progression you gain from them is pretty slow right now. There are some improvements that can be made there. Right now the battlegrounds that aren't as fun are the next target for changes.
- The team is happy with the ability pruning and may prune more abilities in the future.
- Disarms were removed with the CC reduction. Casters can be interrupted, but it doesn't mean that you should be able to disarm melee. Ranged players have the advantage of range over melee, and each has different advantages and disadvantages.
- Blizzard is happy, but not completely satisfied, with how PvP turned out in Warlords so far.
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