1. #1

    Racials and the PvP faction shuffle

    As a player being around since the inception of the game, I've seen all the changes happen from Shaman wrecking people with Hand of Rag windfury to the current problems with Legendary weapons and imbalanced trinkets in game. That being said, we've seen a shift in the pvp population from being skewed in the favour of horde in the past, to now being majority alliance. For example, take a gander at the 3v3 ladders, starting with bloodlust: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/pvp/arena/bloodlust/3v3 - try browsing through the other realms and you will see that majority of teams are alliance with some battlegroups, such as Nightfall, being so bad that ALL the teams from 1 through 74 are alliance.

    This trend has been the obvious result of the effect of racials in pvp. The undead Wotf was considered one of the prime pvp racials in its time and many serious pvp'ers joined horde as a result. I'm sure the inability to faction transfer back then kept the horde numbers from swelling as drastically as alliance have now. With the introduction of the blood elf race to horde we did see a shift where people who liked the 'alliance look' had an excuse to join the horde and not be - is 'ugly' the word i'm looking for?

    Anyway, fast forward to now, the human racial EMFH is quite undeniably the most powerful pvp racial in the game. Yes this is mostly due to the ability equip extremely powerful PVE trinkets. Now, the new changes to MoP with Pvp power and defense is said to mostly solve this problem and not make PVE items too strong in pvp. This is a step in the right direction, though the pvp power/defense system in itself deserves another thread. My concern is that even with this change I see compelling reasons to stay human. As a pvp'er i'd still much rather have that trinket slot free to equip the on-use trinket and the health-boost one, for e.g. Plus, it's not like pve trinkets will be completely useless either.

    I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on how this could be more balanced. My first choice would be to make racials not affect gameplay mechanics and only have flavour racials. The reality is that this probably won't happen. Blood elves will cry up a storm at not having Arcane Torrent, for e.g. because we're just too used to having these toys. More realistically, what if EMFH was a baseline ability with humans given something to compensate? I'd like to see some balance, closer to 50/50 in the Alliance vs Horde spread, not only on arena ladders, but Rated Battlegrounds, random battlegrounds as well as servers.

    Note: I'd love to see some actual discussion here instead of derailing this thread into a bitch-fest.

  2. #2
    Stood in the Fire Arthur-the-exalted's Avatar
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    They already took my perception.....what more do you want!!!!!

  3. #3
    I'd rather see statistics done on the alliance heavy arena rankings then assume that your brief look is accurate, you didn't even say how many of these teams had humans.

    If that is correct I would say that is definitely a problem but there are also other reasons to consider the imbalance instead of just racials. You assumed racials are not balanced and then found evidence to support it when the evidence could be supporting many other conclusions. Last night I was trying to decide what race to make my new warrior and was browsing through all of the racials, I found alliance to only have one I wanted being the human racial, while the horde had many I wanted.

    I do agree that freeing up a trinket slot is always going to be OP for humans though.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Pugbot View Post
    I'd rather see statistics done on the alliance heavy arena rankings then assume that your brief look is accurate, you didn't even say how many of these teams had humans.

    If that is correct I would say that is definitely a problem but there are also other reasons to consider the imbalance instead of just racials. You assumed racials are not balanced and then found evidence to support it when the evidence could be supporting many other conclusions. Last night I was trying to decide what race to make my new warrior and was browsing through all of the racials, I found alliance to only have one I wanted being the human racial, while the horde had many I wanted.

    I do agree that freeing up a trinket slot is always going to be OP for humans though.

    I make no claim of accuracy at any points, these are merely personal opinions and observations. From what I can see, briefly going through page one of each of the battlegroups, i find that humans are the most prevalent. I believe this would be even more so if certain classes like shaman had the option of being human. I also believe that it's more a case of the human racial being so good for pvp, than the non-human alliance racials being bad. Not to say that certain alliance and horde racials don't need improving.

    If I were more than semi-serious about pvp, I would definitely switch to human, however, my enjoyment of the game involves liking the races i play, from a lore and faction perspective to pure visuals. Now, even if alliance racials were buffed to compensate for EMFH, there's still a problem with alliance being a more attractive choice for a pvp'er - perpetuating the faction imbalance.

    I think if EMFH were simply baseline, and humans being given an appropriate replacement, allowing every race to have 2 trinkets is the best solution. Alternatively EMFH could be scrapped and replaced but the many pvpers would cry havoc.

  5. #5
    Bloodsail Admiral Zapgreen's Avatar
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    I like to PvP, but I've never played the racial shuffle.

    I agree that the pvp trinket should just be a baseline ability like they did in SWTOR. I thought that was a brilliant idea. honestly, people put too much emphisis on racials imo. They're not THAT great that I would play a race I don't like just so I could have them, and definitely not important enough to keep changing my race.

    Blizz should simply give a EMFH ability to everyone, then disable racials in rated pvp if its that big of an issue. Then it would be more about the players skill than other things like race. ( I also think they should just make everyone have equal stats in arena, so it would really be about skill more than gear, but I get that some people need the advantage)

    just my thoughts though.

  6. #6
    Having combat racials is a fun mechanic imo. Most of the racials give such a little performance boost, it doesn't matter what race you role. The only problem is when their is an obvious choice for the best race, which is far above the others in terms of PvP.

    But even with racials as they are, it's not like any given person that race changes will instantly bump up 100+ rating. If you are a good player, you'll do fine regardless of race. It's only when players play near perfection when race starts to play a factor. Anything less than that, it's bluntly a "l2p issue".
    Last edited by Xista; 2012-07-03 at 07:34 PM.

  7. #7
    I agree with everything you said original poster, and you phrased it very well that while Every Man For Himself is powerful, it's especially problematic right now because PVE trinkets in general are causing problems in PVP, exponentially making things problematic when you give a Human a powerful PVE trinket.

    I don't really care about there being a tilt toward Alliance in high end PVP, but that one race has such a dominant racial effect isn't cool. It's not just a cool little bonus effect like most racials are, it's directly game changing. By not being a human you're already at a significant disadvantage. Even if you're not using specifically a PVE trinket, trinkets are a big deal, it's not some little stat bonus other pieces give, it's a big effect.

    It's not game breaking, but it really is unfair. Apparently not unfair enough for them to tone it down, so I guess it's fine.

    A fix? I wouldn't buff a single other race to counter humans to be "The PVP race" of a faction, nor do I think PVP Power/Defense will fix the Human racial (it's really to fix PVE trinkets used in PVP). I would nerf Every Man For Himself by giving it a longer cooldown. Instead of 2 minutes, I'd change it to 4 minutes or maybe 5. If the time didn't get nerfed, then I'd consider maybe "unable to cast for 3 seconds after use" or maybe 5 seconds.

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