Is WoW Being Designed for Elites ?

[muppetpilot]

Yes, for elites with an IQ over atleast 60 and/or above the age of 12 years.

They're still working on locating more of these people and integrating them into the player base. I believe the last time I played Horde AV, about 80% of the participants met one or both of your examples, lol.

[quitefrankly]

WoW has been dumbed down so thoroughly for 3 expansions now, that I find it laughable that anyone can think the game is designed for the high ranked player.

This goes double for pvp.

I don't understand this argument. I remember BC arenas playing my hunter / priest and every game was exactly the same boring dumbed down of us mana draining. If anything, the pace of MoP games was 3x faster. Did you ever watch high ranked players stream? There is a huge gap between gladiators and the majority of players.

[DechCJC]

Uhm, no, they're not. There's aspects of the game that have gotten more difficult, but there's nothing in this game that is designed purely for elites. Even the hardest content in this game is only difficult because of the amount of people in your group, making you 10/25/20 times more likely to wipe, the individual skill level required for PvE in this game has never been very high and the difficulty of PvP is decided by your opponent, it has nothing to do with how Blizzard is designing it.

As for everything outside of end-game content, it's completely laughable and a waste of time - It really does disappoint me how little there is to do in this game that actually gets me a little bit excited or stimulates my brain in the slightest, if you're not mythic raiding, pushing for high arena rating or maybe doing one of the few miscellaneous things like hexos (not even that bad if you've played super hexagon), green fire quest, endless proving grounds etc - But even then you're really not going to put in more than a few hours at the most to beat these things, even if you're undergeared (as long as you have a basic understanding of WoW controls (you don't keyboard turn and you actually know how your class abilities work)). That's not to say that the game was ever really targeted at elitists (unless you count massive grinds as elite), but the open world at least feels incredibly dumbed down.

[rda]

I don't understand this argument. I remember BC arenas playing my hunter / priest and every game was exactly the same boring dumbed down of us mana draining. If anything, the pace of MoP games was 3x faster. Did you ever watch high ranked players stream? There is a huge gap between gladiators and the majority of players.

Compare to LK, not BC.

Look at the diversity of the setups and the diversity of decisions that players were making. I would say LK had it way better in this respect.

[Anzen]

melee will always be inherintly harder to play than ranged, ranged can stand back hit buttons, melee have to manage close range proximation and hit buttons, a SMART dev will make melee slightly stronger than range to compensate for that huge gap in uptime on your target

casuals can still play the game, they just wont be able to steal melee niche whill also having 40 yards of range anymore, gonna have to learn positioning and pre kiting like the big boy pvpers which isent hard just takes some experience in pvp

What... that doesn't even make sense. You do realise that you've pretty much described the opposite of what the OP posted.

And melee hard to play? Warriors, Enhance and to some degree Rogues & Rets are almost the antithesis of what you just said.

I wanted to quickly get the 100 win achievement before WoD came out, the vast majority of teams had a Warrior in. Would you believe that in the 100+ games we played, every single warrior immediately charged out the gates into us (this includes over 1.8k rating) and popped all cds (typically resulting in a swift death LoS of his healer). I won't even go on about other melee.

I'm sorry I just don't see the 'inherently harder' play-style you are describing.

[Deleted]

Are they designing the game for Elites ?

Hahahahahahahahahahaaa! NO, it's being designed for 12 year old girls.

What about the vast majority of us ?

You mean '...the vast majority of PvP players.' don't you, sorry.

[Indless]

Today on the Convert to Raid Podcast the Devs admitted that PVP will be dominated by melee early in the expansion.

They went on to say that Melee will continue to be dominant at lower and middle PVP ratings, but that at High Rating, ranged should be able to find a niche.

So that begs the question: Are they designing the game for high rated players ? What about the vast majority of us ?

Prepare to bow down to your warrior overlords.

[Anzen]

Prepare to bow down to your warrior overlords.

Pretty coincidental how well Warriors are and have been doing with Holinka as Senior PvP designer considering he mains a Warrior...

Pretty coincidental indeed...

[rda]

Pretty coincidental how well Warriors are and have been doing with Holinka as Senior PvP designer considering he mains a Warrior...

Pretty coincidental indeed...

I don't think it's this. :-)

But yes, it is a problem that they create the imbalance, then fail to acknowledge it for a long time despite numerous reports, and when they finally acknowledge it, they say they won't fix it because supposedly it will work out at high ratings. How exactly???? Noone knows. And they don't know either. (I bet that all they had behind their phrase was some generalized stats from previous seasons which show that melee do better, for some measure of "better", at low ratings.) But it will work out. Yeah, totally...

Just roll a melee.

[Gigana]

I never bother with the PVP part

PvE forum ======> that way

There's tons of CC, defensive CDs, and self heals, yet people still die in a couple globals? That doesn't even make sense.

It makes perfect sense when the game design a bunch of classes can just randomly burst people down with crits and procs. Ele shamans, mages, warriors, rogues, monks, hunters, shadow priests, etc. can all chain massive crits with little warning.

Everyone having tons of defenses and burst and cc doesn't make the game more complex or harder to play. It just means you got a huge margin for error because if your fear is grounded it's np because you have another, instant one that you can use, and if even that fails you can still mortal coil them, then shadowfury them, and if that fails and you're still in trouble, you have teleport + gate + self-heal + healthstone to stop yourself from ever dying.

Coordinating cc with your teammates becomes less important when everyone has tons of cc at their disposal. Back in TBC, I got duelist as destrolock/warrior/rdruid. Our cc was cyclone, warlock fear, roots, warrior fear (2 min cd), death coil (2 min cd), and shadowfury. When you only have 7 ccs, 4 of which are casted, two of which have 2 min cds, coordination becomes everything. You also had to play melee/caster/healer, because without mortal strike + ranged cc, you had no hope of scoring kills against competent teams.

In s15, this same comp would have: fear, mortal coil, shadowfury, howl of terror, warrior fear, stormbolt, aoe stun, charge stun, cyclone, druid stun, druid stealth stun, roots, and probably more stuff that I forgot. When you got so much stuff at your disposal, and there are no issues like mana or rage generation so you can just spam dmg all you want, you can overlap and dr cc all day long and still score kills because even if every cc on your target lasts only 2-3 seconds, you'll still cc them for 20+ sec because you got so much of it.

This is not even getting into all the dumbed-down abilities, like being able to use tremor while feared, or barkskin while stunned, or not having to stance-dance as a warrior, or having an idiot ability like burst of speed or subterfuge for rogues, or brainless self-heals like last wind, or every healer being able to dispel magic, etc.

Thank god blizz is somewhat aware of all this and are working to fix it in WoD.

[rasako]

the "vast majority" of us should at least try to not suck ass... as of right now anyone who doesn't suck can kill garrosh pretty easily

i consider myself a decent player (higher end of the midrange pool of skill, usually) and even when my gear was ilvl ~540ish i kept up with many who were 560ish... it's all about learning to play and actually doing the content

dude, you're a paladin. Learning to play does not even apply to your class. roll face on keyboard and repeat.

[Hb]

no casuals and grandmas

[Deleted]

All game is supossed to be tuned for players that actually take the effort to learn the game (and compete with all of the classes, in this case). Scrubs will fail no matter how tuned it is, and if they cannot handle it then there is always the LFR button.

[Deleted]

It puzzles me too that they would even say such a thing.

One day they seem to make things more accessible, the next day they seem to do the opposite, then they start to do and say random things and eventually the precess repeats at the next expansion.

How about a vision Blizzard?

[Deleted]

WoW has been dumbed down so thoroughly for 3 expansions now, that I find it laughable that anyone can think the game is designed for the high ranked player.

This goes double for pvp.

I'm sorry, BUT I can't hear the 'dumbed down' argument anymore. You are right, WoW isn't designed for skilled gamers it is designed for INSANELY skilled gamers.
Let's take a quick look at the moonkin, for example.

Now, in 3v3 you have 5 targets to take care of at all times.

If you want to consider yourself a high end WoW PvPer you will have to be able to hit the following macros very quickly depending on the situation:

- faerie fire arena1
- faerie fire arena2
- faerie fire arena3
- slow arena1
- slow arena2
- slow arena3
- treants arena1
- treants arena2
- treants arena3
- root arena1
- root arena2
- root arena3
- beam arena1
- beam arena2
- beam arena3
- cyclone arena1
- cyclone arena2
- cyclone arena3
- stun arena1
- stun arena2
- stun arena3
- hibernate arena1
- hibernate arena2
- hibernate arena3
- hibernate arenapet1
- hibernate arenapet2
- hibernate arenapet3

- hot1 party2
- hot1 party3
- hot2 party2
- hot2 party3
- heal party2
- heal party3
- inervate party2
- inervate party3
- dispel party2
- dispel party3

37 keybinds IN ADDITION to all the abilities you cast on yourself (utility, heals, defensives, cooldowns) and your current target (damage, cc).

Not even Melby (highest rated moonkin in the world) has all these binds because as you can see there are simply TOO MANY!

Melby (and most other high rated PvPers) circumvent all these binds by using focus arena1/arena2/arena3

But technically that is not the OPTIMAL way of playing. For instance: you have the elemental shaman as your target, the restoration druid as your focus and the mage (third opponent) casts a critical polymorph on your healer. Beam arena1/arena2/arena3 is on cooldown but you HAVE to stop it. You will now have to target/focus the mage (first button/click) and then stun him (second button). That's TWO buttons/actions. If you had stun arena1/arena2/arena3 bound you would have only needed to press ONE button in given scenario.

Now, tell me again how WoW PvP takes no skill.

[Astray]

Of course balance is calculated for the top % of players. Its the only group of players, where you can be sure at which level of skill they are, its the maximum possible for a human being. How do you calculate that for the average?

[cFortyfive]

So that begs the question: Are they designing the game for high rated players ? What about the vast majority of us ?

Yeah those sub 1500 rating brackets, normal, heroic and lfr content surely are designed with only the "elites" in mind. Or the incredibly difficult questing content. Wow so elite.

Now, tell me again how WoW PvP takes no skill.

Maybe running for rank 1. Otherwise that setup is simply not required.

[rda]

Of course balance is calculated for the top % of players. Its the only group of players, where you can be sure at which level of skill they are, its the maximum possible for a human being. How do you calculate that for the average?

The elephant in the room is something else - why the heck do they say that it evens out at high ratings? And do they even say it, or are they merely saying that several stellar ranged will prevail over mediocre melee (but fail to stellar melee, and that's supposedly fine)? Because I think they are saying essentially nothing substantial. They are acknowledging that, yes, there is a problem. And then they wave it away saying that it might somehow disappear at high ratings. Might or might not.

[wowaccounttom]

no.

the glorious days of vanilla and challenging content are long gone.

what happen do you ask?
lets see.....about 8 other million people started to play and complained that they couldnt see the content so blizz turned wow into a "hello kitty island adventure" player friendly game.

[Terahertz]

From what I've gathered basically casters that still have instant damage will be viable. All other casters I reckon will have an extremely difficult time and hate the game. Boomkins will be immune to kicks and silences so they'll have it easy. (Demo) Locks already do insane instant damage as if it's begin MoP all over again. Arcane Mages are going to tear stuff apart I feel like and they still have instant CC (PoM Frostjaw and PoM RoF still work).

Besides that, blizzard has always considered high end PvP to be the thing they have to balance stuff around. Or at the very least mid level PvP.

I'm just curious how many casters (including me) are going to ragequit because they still can't cast a single spell lol