RIP Rated PvP

[stickyjam]

The easiest way to boost pvp is to pull pve players over by offering comparable ilvl gear.

e.g. if last season 2400+ dropped 900+ ilvl gear, pve'ers would feel pulled to play.

it's a cheap fix, but certainly easy to implement.

[Caolela]

I learned my lesson. Done with WoW and buying anymore expansion.

Best response in the thread.

[Dragoncurry]

You guys do know that gear isn't why people don't play.

It's because everything is a fucking mongoloid comp. BM hunters are literally fucking damage trains that do less damage than all melee classes. I lost traps, masters calls, and I can't play Surv bc I miss the old Surv, and BM has been cut completely. It's so fucking boring.

My warrior is fun but I can't deny it's retarded right now.

[Theed]

The amount of effort and skill to be succesful differs far to much for many specs. While the game itself is balanced if you compare it to many other seasons skill and skillcaps are not. Melee has always been easier to play but right now an average Frost DK can get 2400+ without much effort while a medium Mage or Shadow Priest can't get above 2.2 without tryharding.

It is frustrating to play against melee cleaves and this is turning many players including healers off the game.


2200+ 5 melee specs 3 healers, 2 casters in top 10.

[Caolela]

You guys do know that gear isn't why people don't play.

It's because everything is a fucking mongoloid comp. BM hunters are literally fucking damage trains that do less damage than all melee classes. I lost traps, masters calls, and I can't play Surv bc I miss the old Surv, and BM has been cut completely. It's so fucking boring.

My warrior is fun but I can't deny it's retarded right now.

I think we've established that it isn't only because of no gear that people are fed up. It's the cumulative effect of a dozen other things, where fixing any one or two of which would not make nearly enough difference.

The problem is it will not be fixed - except for half-assed, phony attempts that will be spun as solutions. Blizz is too much wedded to the Legion system now. In fact, the likelihood is that they'll double down and make it even worse.

We've seen this movie before.

[loppy88]

The fact that gear shouldn't be an issue has been taken to such an extreme that now the PvP scene is as good as dead, or at least extremely unfun.

If story serves right, what taints high end arenas are unbalanced external effects that go beyond what classes can do on their bare bones.
This is partially done right by Legion's design: Legendaries don't work in arenas, gear gets scaled and trinkets don't work.

But here's the thing: the complete lack of customization capabilities really sunk deep in an already precarious state where classes got stripped of its historic buttons and utilities.

In Guild Wars 2, in structured PvP - which is basically a 5v5 rbg - gear is made so that it's not an issue. Players are able to choose between given stat templates, and all templates have the same budget.
Some classes are of course more viable with a certain template, and some other can vary their playstyle based on which template they pick.
Some other, on the other end of the spectrum, are completely unviable barring a very specific template.

This was a thing in WoW back in Wrath and to some extent in MoP: gearsets, specific trinkets, gems, enchants and reforging all created a game in which the player could fully customize his character in any endeavor.
As a Warrior, there were three different setups one could go for in Wrath depending on the PvP content of choice.
Now Spell Reflection is a talent, and Arms, a spec that's made to revolve around Mastery, simply doesn't have enough to perform at an acceptable levels after all the nerfs it went through.

And again, back then different gear setups allowed for classes to "power through" some glaring flaws they had, which is simply not possible today.

So as the current design model keeps being enforced where bads are not allowed to be bads, and those who want to improve get stuck in a big illusion of choice made out of a solid fotm board, the game gets grindy and players are alienated by incomplete classes.
WoD introduced a very, very toxic concept where endgame gear would change the way in which a class is played, but only in a specific portion of the game.
To unlock your full class you had to undergo that content, and then be lucky enough to get what you needed in order to compete.

Legion presents the exact same model as far as character progression goes: in PvP one gets gated behind artifact points and honor levels, with a strong illusion of choice because talents are not equal and templates can't be changed.

The changes to make this whole situation more bearable would simply be completely eradicate artifact points (but not artifact abilities given how some specs depend on those) and allow for templates to be customized via sliders.
PvP talents are a given this expansion, and there's not much that can be done about it. But classes should retain their utility in open world content at the very least.

This point is especially dear to me because, as I see it, it's not numbers that become the defining factor in how a class plays and ultimately feels, but the utility and mechanics it has. Numbers can be balanced afterwards.
The problem of classes losing their identity, a topic that could warrant a thread on its own, led to everyone having every imaginable tool, then to pruning, then to a heavy disparity in utility masked as balance.
Which is not, given that the ultimate offensive utility DpS, the Rogue, now can get wildly outclassed by a Ret Paladin. Utility should be part of a class, with options being given via talents. Not the other way around.

All in all, and most importantly, any big spectrum PvP game should be balanced around high levels and tailored around the mass that's going to play.
At the moment Legion fails to deliver on both.

People are arguing and not responding to constructive posts like these.

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I don't mind not having PvP gear and I was fully supporting the template idea, because PvP ilvl scaling in WoD was just annoying when comparing a PvP item to a PvE one. I don't remember if resilience solved that. However I do agree that buying PvP gear, gemming, etc. and "choosing" stats gives a feeling of progress and customization to your beloved character that no PvP talents or Prestige can even come close to.
Templates have made PvP more accessible, I always hated getting one shot when returning to the game after a while or with a fresh char, but came with the downside of losing the RPG feeling of progression and customization. PvP talents aren't as satisfying to unlock.


But the biggest reason why PvP sucks is that it no longer requires you to outplay someone, you either win by far or lose by far.
Pruning, although necessary to clean the action bars and leave room for new spells, started badly with WoD because there were good and bad classes in terms of utility; playing a bad class meant it was badly pruned and as a result didn't have tools other than damage, while the good class retained its utility and was more versatile.
Legion spec overhauls resulted in removing many "not needed" spells, most of them being utility and flavor, to leave room for new spells and more engaging PvE rotation.

Those "not needed" spells were indeed useless in raiding but very much important for PvP. Some were also hard to balance in PvE environments. PvP talents were supposed to solve this issue, giving a plethora of PvP specific utility spells that didn't have to be balanced for PvE, like AMZ, Void Shift, Earth Shield or Spirit Link (which got scrapped in Wrath beta and returned as a PvP talent), etc.
But instead of designing talents with that philosophy in mind, they made 2 mistakes:

• They kept the MoP talent tiers model, which resulted in A) having 2 useless and not fun rows for the sake of quantity; B) having weird spells to fill the gaps, like Counterstrike Totem or Luminescence(When healed, nearby allies are also healed -- cool idea but unnoticeable utility). Not all classes need exactly 18 talents.
• They tried to fix the classes to work for PvP using the Honor Talents instead of the templates, because we no longer have a different set of spells for PvP, resulting in talents like Jurisdiction (increases the range of HoJ by 10 yds), Cover of Darkness(Havoc's Darkness chance to ignore damage increased to 70%), Essence Drain (Drain Life reduces damage received) or Focused Chaos (Chaos Bolt damage is increased by 100%[...]), which buff our spells to make them more PvP competent instead of providing utility to outplay the opponent.
  I can't underline hard enough how stupid such talents are, simple defense or damage boost isn't utility, let alone passive effects that we can't use or play around with; they should just be baked into the spec to make it stronger, if anything.
  Regarding talents like Cover of Darkness specifically, 70% is apparently way too much for PvE, but 20% is way too less for PvP, so they made a talent since a PvP set of spells isn't a thing, but it is against the whole Honor Talents idea.

So here we are with classes having engaging PvE rotations, lacking utility for the sake of PvE balance and bar space and having PvP talents that don't actually restore the utility for PvP purposes but instead passively boost damage.

Honor Talents are a mess; they have boring damage and defense boosts, spec band-aids like the HoJ range increase and some particular shiny utility spells like Rain From Above or Grounding Totem. If they cleaned up this mess and focused only into those utility spells, PvP would be in a much better place.
Honor Talents are an amazing way to keep interesting spells like Grounding Totem or Tremor Totem, which also provide a healthy gameplay for PvP and are understandably removed from PvE, but they really need to be redesigned from scratch.

Or these.

Read.

Them.

[dacoolist]

@loppy88 - nobody is responding to those posts or talking about them because of two things: One, they are a large wall of text, face it - not everyone is going to read every single line from some rando on the internet. Two, They are super sound, and legit points that we obviously all agree on, so why talk / argue about them?

Overall, blizzard has been lacking HEAVILY in the pvp dept, almost to the point of not giving a damn, then add onto that - They basically screwed a TON of people out of a title they literally RIGHTFULLY earned based off of some new system they didn't tell anyone how the calculations where being drawn out. If you're going to literally kill pvp, You may want to tell the entire population that goes for RATED TITLES that not only have we adjusted that every single person must win 50+ games, they require around X number for said title instead of having people with 2700 CR getting duelist in arena, and 2100 people getting soldier in rbgs (That's top 35% btw...)

They screwed up, they made a post about it - but will they change anything: Doubtful.

[loppy88]

@loppy88 - nobody is responding to those posts or talking about them because of two things: One, they are a large wall of text, face it - not everyone is going to read every single line from some rando on the internet. Two, They are super sound, and legit points that we obviously all agree on, so why talk / argue about them?

Overall, blizzard has been lacking HEAVILY in the pvp dept, almost to the point of not giving a damn, then add onto that - They basically screwed a TON of people out of a title they literally RIGHTFULLY earned based off of some new system they didn't tell anyone how the calculations where being drawn out. If you're going to literally kill pvp, You may want to tell the entire population that goes for RATED TITLES that not only have we adjusted that every single person must win 50+ games, they require around X number for said title instead of having people with 2700 CR getting duelist in arena, and 2100 people getting soldier in rbgs (That's top 35% btw...)

They screwed up, they made a post about it - but will they change anything: Doubtful.

I thought this was a discussion, and if some people aren't willing to listen to a well constructed argument, then what's the point?

[Hashtronaut]

I thought this was a discussion, and if some people aren't willing to listen to a well constructed argument, then what's the point?

Welcome to the internet!

[loppy88]

Welcome to the internet!

Are you my guide?

[Deleted]

I know my reply was a wall of text, hence the use of some tricks to keep the reading process as easy as possible (such as highlights, the color scheme of this board and the use of this font doesn't really help).

But aside from that, yeah, those points are legit and are the result of discussions between me and a number of people who care about the state of the game, and cared enough to tryhard in it back when time was less of an issue.

Is it going to change?
Well, hopefully so. But at the moment no megathread can solve the issue if Blizzard doesn't get back to the craft. And given that their designers and devs are professionals, I'd say that no matter what I suggest, they know better, but the plan doesn't go in that direction or there's different reasons we simply are unaware of.

[Riistov]

It got so bad that i regretted pvp too long enough. It's not fun anymore.

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No offense, Stupid people actually eat this overwatch. Ok...

I have no idea what you're trying to communicate, sorry.

[Deleted]

to make my contribution to the thread, as a mostly pve er since mop(was casual pvp since vanilla-got 1934 2v2 last cata season b4 fkin hydra and other multi r1 players started popping up as enemies), my biggest problem in legion is i dont have time.
i wanna pvp aswell as pve but i have 3 chars and i cant find time to pvp with world quests raids mythic+ on 3 chars

[dacoolist]

I thought this was a discussion, and if some people aren't willing to listen to a well constructed argument, then what's the point?

Agreed 100%, I guess what I meant was that not everyone is going to read that wall of txt, and also - they were really constructed. Your post was resetting the thread with those huuuuge ass txt walls. I doubt anyone in the chat here that isn't trolling fully agrees with those posts.

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I know my reply was a wall of text, hence the use of some tricks to keep the reading process as easy as possible (such as highlights, the color scheme of this board and the use of this font doesn't really help).

But aside from that, yeah, those points are legit and are the result of discussions between me and a number of people who care about the state of the game, and cared enough to tryhard in it back when time was less of an issue.

Is it going to change?
Well, hopefully so. But at the moment no megathread can solve the issue if Blizzard doesn't get back to the craft. And given that their designers and devs are professionals, I'd say that no matter what I suggest, they know better, but the plan doesn't go in that direction or there's different reasons we simply are unaware of.

I just wanted to say I loved your post, and I was just pointing out the reason nobody was replying: Big amount of txt, and it's impossible to disagree with if you actually pvp and want things to get better. Some times I (Well I usually just post mean things on here, but when I'm not a badmon) post as little as possible to ATTEMPT to get people to read it. I at least THINK I try not to post bait or things that trigger people, I try to put my opinion/idea in as little words, and easily readable text as I can. I mean hell I don't even speak proper english - but I just try to cut down if I can so that people read my stuff (the people who haven't blocked me)

[xZerocidex]

Best response in the thread.

I didn't even get Legion and knew PvP was shit.

How ppl cling in to hope with Blizz I will never know.

[loppy88]

Agreed 100%, I guess what I meant was that not everyone is going to read that wall of txt, and also - they were really constructed. Your post was resetting the thread with those huuuuge ass txt walls. I doubt anyone in the chat here that isn't trolling fully agrees with those posts.

That was my intention. Discussions here were getting a bit heated and off the rails.

[Deleted]

A game where there's rated PvP only is dumb, as is a game tailored around raiding only: Wildstar did the latter, and failed miserably.

Past incarnations of WoW felt good because every instance of the game was more or less opened to anybody willing to put some time into it, and the quality of your gameplay increased as one put some work into it.

Have some casual aspects of the game remain as they are. Farming mats, world pvp/ regional objectives, all this jazz. Have some throwaway or catchup dungeons, and reasonable powerups for challenging content. That's fine.

[rda]

A game where there's rated PvP only is dumb, as is a game tailored around raiding only: Wildstar did the latter, and failed miserably.

If there is rated solo queue, it isn't dumb (nor will it fail).

[Nero Stormchester]

Lol yup,It turned into everyone having the same exact stats which is completely idiotic because clearly some classes benefit more from that then others. how do you play a boomkin in pvp when your full moon takes 9 years to fucking cast for example... They benefit from haste, when stats are normalized they are not only gimping classes, but they are handicapping them in such a way that they cannot be played the way they are *SUPPOSED* to be played. Playing instanced pvp feels like I'm doing MoP challenge modes where all of my gear is scaled down to beginning of the expansion cast times etc. Who the fuck thought that was good game play? I laugh at anyone who takes legion pvp seriously, it is by far the biggest embarrassment of the expansion and that's saying a lot considering other fuck ups like artifacts/legendaries etc.

Lol noob spotted - let me guess now that everyone is on a level playing field your sorry ass can't kill anyone , whilst before you could just farm pvp with a couple of noob buddies , over gear everyone though STUPID pvp stats that make you unkillable to someone who started recently and then roflstomp people , thinking you're great . Well guess what ? You clearly aren't , and seem to have a hard time accepting that so instead you come to cry on forums

[Deleted]

it's a massive shame, I really enjoy RBG's but because it's so dead now and class specific I don't play it anymore. every team wants 3 monks, 6 locks and 18 boomies at 950 + ilvl with 4k exp in a future expansion.