8 Specific Reasons Why the Current State of WOW PVP is Digital Garbage

[Luxeley]

Like the mix of metals in the forge of a great sword, there are several reasons why PVP in WOW is horrendously bad. I don't list the 8 spefic reasons in any preferrence or order of impact on the game. You can be the judge of that for yourself and perhaps include a reason I didn't touch upon.

In the video I touch upon each of the follwing points in much greater detail. In short the 8 reasons pretain to, but aren't exclusively the following :

- the lack of DPS from undergeared players due to high resilience
- huge imbalance in regular bg comps due to a role cueing system that does not work.
- the virtual and near complete removal of tanks from PVP.
- world PVP is a complete and utter joke now that Heroic Raid Gear, with skill being equal or close to equal, trumps top of the line PVP gear.
- PVP progression is virtually non-existent which is a ridiculous aspect for a MMO to embrace.
- beating and besting the game is more of an exploit than a testement of skill
- crowd control measures are immensely out of control to the put of rendering a PVP trinket useless.
- the homogenization of classes.

[Itisamuh]

Agreed on most, except the progression part. PvP should have no progression, because there should be no gear period. Competition is always best when everyone is on equal footing at all times. I would also add that healing has gotten far too effective over the last couple expansions, which is a huge issue in PvP. It just makes the game incredibly stale, especially when combined with the other problems.

[Deleted]

-snip-

Infracted

[iyamwhatiyam]

Fair enough. Some good points made there and I agree with most all of it.

I admit, at first I was pro-resil baseline when they announced it. I had left my pvp servers to come back to a pve server where I knew a great friend or two were coming back to the game. Obviously I don't stop loving pvp by moving to a pve server, so I want to get these people into it. I thought it was perfect timing. That way they don't have to feel bad getting obliterated while in crafted pvp gear. Once it came out I quickly realized I was wrong, but there are more issues at play there, as well.

CC is out of control, like you said. There are too many instant cast cc's, for one. Melee classes having instant cc is a given. Things like Blind or Intimidating Shout. Ranged shouldn't have any instant cc, though. Fear also doesn't DR enough. Go against a priest/lock combo even as a shaman with tremor totem and tell me you don't want to rage at the amount of fears and horrors.

The queue system is a joke. It gets abused and isn't a great system to begin with.

Could go on and on, but I mainly wanted to agree with most of what you've said and say thanks for posting it.

[Deleted]

Agreed on most, except the progression part. PvP should have no progression, because there should be no gear period. Competition is always best when everyone is on equal footing at all times. I would also add that healing has gotten far too effective over the last couple expansions, which is a huge issue in PvP. It just makes the game incredibly stale, especially when combined with the other problems.

Disagree, it SHOULD have progression. Not all of us want to do PvE to get gear and as we saw this season when they removed the progression you will kill participation.

On the ubject of healing I agree it has gotten out of hand, but then so has damage imo. This is the problem of stat inflation where two "scale everything back" stats had to be added to balance pvp (resil and battle fatigue)

Item squish needed.

[Deleted]

I agree with the CC

[Alantor]

op sounds like an arena n00b This is what wow's lacking.

[Alanar]

Agreed on most, except the progression part. PvP should have no progression, because there should be no gear period. Competition is always best when everyone is on equal footing at all times. I would also add that healing has gotten far too effective over the last couple expansions, which is a huge issue in PvP. It just makes the game incredibly stale, especially when combined with the other problems.

Pvp should have progression. Period. Who wouldn't like to see improvements in the long run?

But sorry i am gonna say no to the video cus I heard to mcuh fail, such as absorbs dont activate battle fatigue just lol? you are playing shadow?

[Deleted]

Wait, absorbs really ignore Battle Fatigue? Huh.. never knew that.

And as a tank main I definately agree on the tank part.

[ipoststuff]

Pvp should have progression. Period. Who wouldn't like to see improvements in the long run?

What is the point? To be on par with everyone else? Why should it take double the time to achieve that? What purpose does it serve?

And as a tank main I definately agree on the tank part.

Tanks dont fit into wow pvp. They were always non-viable or OP in some way. You have dps spec use it. No need to spend ton of time balancing tanks.

[Deleted]

i agree with the video. Good points

[Skorpionss]

What is the point? To be on par with everyone else? Why should it take double the time to achieve that? What purpose does it serve?


Tanks dont fit into wow pvp. They were always non-viable or OP in some way. You have dps spec use it. No need to spend ton of time balancing tanks.

same should be said about Healers. they have a dps spec so use it. I think tanks should bring imba CC to the table instead of burst dmg that dps specs bring. DPS has great damage but dies easily, tanks have low damage but have very good crowd control abilities and can take a beating, and healers have very low damage and survivability but you know, they can heal.

[Linkedblade]

- the lack of DPS from undergeared players due to high resilience
- huge imbalance in regular bg comps due to a role cueing system that does not work.
- the virtual and near complete removal of tanks from PVP.
- world PVP is a complete and utter joke now that Heroic Raid Gear, with skill being equal or close to equal, trumps top of the line PVP gear.
- PVP progression is virtually non-existent which is a ridiculous aspect for a MMO to embrace.
- beating and besting the game is more of an exploit than a testement of skill
- crowd control measures are immensely out of control to the put of rendering a PVP trinket useless.
- the homogenization of classes.

Points are good, but I'm going to try to explain why this is so painful. As far as class homogenization and imbalances.

It is very difficult to balance 40 different playstyles to create any semblance of balance. Look at any other game like WoW and see that there are always balance issues. The only way to make it balanced is to give both players the exact same everything and skilled player will be the winner. However, that is cannot happen on wow.

In order to achieve something close to what pvpers want is something as follows: Create an entirely different set of rules, spell lists, spell statistics, gear, specs, for pve and pvp. That way in a pve environment you can focus on dps/hps/tps and maximise your potential there. And for a pvp environment focus on skill. Perhaps blizzard should create a single pvp spec for classes. Perhaps a similar path of progression as it is now, Craft blues > Honor Blues > Conquest Purps > Elite, but only allow people with a certain set of gear (perhaps pvp ilvl) into rated/arenas.

The seperation of rules and spells will fix quite a few of the problems. Especially cc issues and it will make pvp progression seem like more of a unique and different gameplay. The problem that will be the hardest to overcome is homogenization. Blizzard does constant balance changes to Starcraft (while a different genre) with only three races. I can only imagine what that could be like with 11 classes and 40 specs. It's hard to balance things that have different mechanics and styles.

[Luxeley]

Pvp should have progression. Period. Who wouldn't like to see improvements in the long run?

But sorry i am gonna say no to the video cus I heard to mcuh fail, such as absorbs dont activate battle fatigue just lol? you are playing shadow?

I stand corrected, source I used (the ingame tooltip as well as wowhead) happened to be incorrect. So, Im somewhat wrong on one point out of about 25pts. The fact is, if a player does not possess an absorb ability and/or an ability to temporarily boost his health, it places him at a disadvantage. You simply heard one incorrect pt and hurl the rest of the pts in the mix, that is myopic and unfair.

[Deleted]

Tanks dont fit into wow pvp. They were always non-viable or OP in some way. You have dps spec use it. No need to spend ton of time balancing tanks.

They don't? Who decided that? You?

Last I heard there are points to defend, flags to carry and stuff to escort in PvP. You know, defensive stuff. A tank is good at defensive. Or rather, should be.

Warhammer Online did that great. The tank doesn't do that much.. until you start ignoring him. Taunts working in PvP (decreases the damage the target does until it hits the tank a certain number of times), blocking enemies off (okay, won't work since there's no collision), massive debuffs on the enemies, stuff like that.

[asb]

#8 - "The fearless, gearless player in full questing greens is more useless than ever before."
You claim that undergeared players do very little damage--which is true--but that's nothing new. Unless by "currently garbage" you mean that WoW PvP has been garbage since day one, I feel like I'm missing the argument. A new character currently feels much more competitive against geared characters than it would've in any past expansion. After conceding that new players can survive longer than in the past, you go on to say that "they don't CC, they don't achieve objectives," citing Swifty oneshot macros as the cause. I have to wonder why these players are inclined to believe they can win fights if their gear is so weak that they do zero damage. Regardless, players not optimizing their teamwork isn't necessarily a fault of the game and I certainly don't see how their gear has anything to do with it. There's still plenty Blizzard could improve on here but at least they've started working on it.

#7 - "Healers make or break a PvP endeavour."
I'm sort of with you on this. Throwing a healer at a problem is usually the easiest way to solve it. You didn't focus too much on the balance here so I won't either, but I have a suspicion you're grossly misinformed regarding the burst damage available to several classes right now. These adjustments to resilience and pvp power weren't to simply make healers the best option; they were to make healing possible. Even with these survivability buffs in-place, you can die from full health to a single player in the duration of a blanket cs. I think the bigger issue here is simply how low the skill floor is for healers. You can honestly be pretty terrible at this game but still pull an enormous amount of weight as a healer, whereas dps generally have to be pretty skilled to make a difference.

As for the battleground role system, I don't really see what the big deal is. Sure it would be preferable to have the system functional, but in the meantime battlegrounds go on exactly as they have for years. Being that it's just the standard at this point I'm sure we're all used to this already.

I'm also pretty sure you're wrong about absorbs ignoring battle fatigue. It may have been a bug at one point, but I think it's been fully functional for a while now. Even if you're right, it's fairly irrelevant since Blizzard considers actual effectiveness and those classes would probably be weakened in other areas as compensation.

#6 - "Tanks are... non-existant in PvP right now."
I'm not into RBGs so I'll have to take your word for this. Slightly off the mark here, but just so I've got something to contribute: my perspective on tanks is that they're too attractive a role for random battleground players. I wouldn't begrudge anyone to play a tank if that was simply their spec or role of choice, but I find in the current game that tanks do too much damage for the survival they have. It seems to me that most people playing tanks aren't doing it to be a tank; they're just rats that don't want to ever die. If you want to play a survival spec, you shouldn't have enough throughput to reasonably expect to kill anyone. Same goes for healers here. I have no idea why monk healers can do so much damage and heart of the wild lasts way too long.

#5 - "World PvP"
I had the same initial reaction to baseline resilience as you, but thought about it a little and eventually came to the conclusion that I just don't care. Of course the PvP-geared player should have the edge in PvP. However, I think Blizzard's perspective here is likely that world PvP doesn't really count as PvP the same way that battlegrounds and arenas do. It's PvP by definition, but it's not organized, balanced, or fair, nor does it even provide any notable rewards. I think the idea here is just going back to the classic MMO fantasy: if you've put the most time into the game to become the most powerful dragonslayer, it should show. Realistically, I don't think that gear is an enormous advantage either. Consider the 30%+ free damage modifier you miss out on in PvP power, in addition to some specs' pretty decent pvp set bonuses. In the end, I think it'll be decided by individual skill and what class is favored in imbalanced 1v1 anyway.

#4 - "Gear progression in PvP"
More complicated or challenging gearing systems come at the cost of unfair competition. I don't hugely favor the BC system over the current one or vice-versa. They could probably work out something neat with the new ilvl scaling in instanced PvP--suppose pieces of the elite gear set are unlocked at different ratings, but only give an advantage for world PvP. Short of something like that, I'm pretty content with actual competition being the main draw for PvP. If you're just doing it to chase the gear-carrot, I feel like you'd eventually get tired of progressing only to the same point every season.

#3 - "The OP class of the month."
The inevitable product of infrequent class balance patches and increasingly fast leveling times. I fully agree that this is a pretty sad state of the game, but I can't blame players for this one. A big problem here is that the rewards people are aiming for don't care what class they're playing. If they've got the best chance to hit a new rating achievement or push a new title as a different class, there's really nothing to lose but the preparation time. If Blizzard can't or won't attempt to keep classes balanced, they could at least make percentile-based rewards consider each spec or class independently.

#2 - "Crowd control is out of control."
No question. The thing that bugs me most here is how every class seems to have a cover CC for their real CC. Might get locked/reflected on cyclone? Spec retard-roar. Someone might eat your trap? Spec AoE disengage root. Poly might get deathed? Fear might get warded? Blanket CS. Chastise. It also doesn't help that at the same time the game has the most CC availability dispels were given a cooldown. If there is one thing I want Blizzard to fix in 6.0 it is this mess of CC we have right now. I'd like to see a game where half the classes don't need an extra PvP medallion just to get by.

#1 - "They never went the full ten yards with [homogenization]."
Honestly I don't think the game could be very interesting if classes were fully homogenized. "Bring the player, not the class" is a PvE goal; Blizzard has stated that they're fine with players being subject to finding viable comps for PvP.

[h4rr0d]

Pvp should have progression. Period. Who wouldn't like to see improvements in the long run?

I agree that progression should be part of PVP, however not character power progression, at least not with the current structure of PVP.
In PVE it makes sense - you get blues, you go do heroics, then you get epics you do one tier of raids. Once you are powerful enough, you go to another tier etc etc.
Having power progression in PVP is like closing outdated raid tiers without any way how to get gear from them.

If you don't have full latest PVP gear, you are not competitive in PVP. It was always that case since introduction of resilience. I don't have problem with that. What I have problem with is the fact, that I have to face people already in the full PVP gear while trying to get my set.

[Deleted]

I agree that progression should be part of PVP, however not character power progression, at least not with the current structure of PVP.

Do it like Guild Wars does. A game that actually cares about PvP.

Don't increase the power of the items, just make it look better.

Honestly, I don't see PvP ever being balanced without completely seperating it from PvE. Again, just like GW does.

[sanaubia]

Do it like Guild Wars does. A game that actually cares about PvP.

Don't increase the power of the items, just make it look better.

Honestly, I don't see PvP ever being balanced without completely seperating it from PvE. Again, just like GW does.

that was the only thing they did for pvp.. after that it has been nothing but garbage

[Deleted]

that was the only thing they did for pvp.. after that it has been nothing but garbage

Still, a giant step in the right direction, if you ask me.