Balancing 2v2 (Suggestions)

[Deleted]

Just want to hear you opinion on that. I'm really curious why Blizzard still just doesn't want to balance the 2's bracket. It is a lot more casual friendly compared to the other brackets and the Blizzard guys themselves have stated that there seem to be a lot of players that enjoy that bracket. So why is there that arbitrary decision to balance PvP around 3v3?

From what I remember Blizzard stated that they are baiscally not smart enough to come up with an idea to make healer balanced for both brackets simultaneously, because if they can be killed efficiently by 1 dps (in 2v2) they will die way to fast in 3v3 vs. 2 dps.

However, from my point of view it is just a major design flaw to decide that one type of class (healer) should be able to compete with 2 other players of the dps class. This makes healers too powerful in general, which is a problem that easily shows up in other PvP areas outside of 3v3. In BGs it is a major disadvantage for example if your team has too few healers.

So what would be your ideas to balance both brackets at the same time? So here is what I would do:

- The general design idea about healers should be less about "keeping people alive" but more about "delaying peoples death".
- The general sustained DPS of DPS classes should be lower than currently with respect to peoples health pools
- The general healing of healers AND dps classes should be even lower than that
- The general burst DPS of DPS classes should be a lot higher than currently
- The burst rotation of all DPS classes should require a great deal of setup, no "easy" CD's like Paladin wings or Feral Incarnation, more like Demon Warlock playstyle (building up Fury, requiring enemy to be stunned, cast time nukes), which has lots of counters
- healer mana should matter again

The general pace of the game should be that if both teams just dps each other everyone's health levels should slowly go down. Skilled players will be able to create burst windows though, to blow someone up very fast. But as said above, setting up such bursts should be hard and not just pressing and instant ranged stun button and popping a burst CD after the enemies trinket is down.

If no team is able to get a successful burst kill the game should either end slowly (because health pools should go down in general even in presence of healers) or one healer should run out of mana, speeding up the process.

With this desing 3v3 would be faster in general of course because health pools would go down faster. But because of the burst opportunities, skilled players would be able to end a 2v2 game fast, even in healer + dps vs. healer + dps. The low sustained DPS and hard to obtain burst would also make sure that 3v3 doesn't end too fast by just overwhelming the enemy healer with damage.

Maybe this idea won't work at all, but what are yours to make a balance between 2's and 3's?

[Deleted]

I don't feel any of the suggestions you made. Also you don't understand why they balance around 3v3 rather than 2v2. They balance around 3v3 rather than 2v2 because 2v2 is extremely rock-paper-scissors based. 3v3 teams usually offer more diversity when it comes to CC, team buffs and peels, unless you actively hurt yourself by playing disc-warri-warri (fear and stun DR and only slow as peel). Classes with more control fare much better in 2v2 than classes with less control, which is why druids in 2v2 are extremely powerful healers. They counter control, bring control and can deal damage with hots protecting them somewhat..

Onto your suggestions. You want "much higher burst" and lower sustained damage at the same time and think that's a counter to healers? If anything that promotes healers. If sustained damage becomes irrelevant to the weakest of heals the only way to survive the high burst is with a healer. If you skip having a healer the only way to play 2v2 would be to play one of the following: Pally, Hunter, Mage. No other class could win against them as sustained damage is too low to bring them down and high burst is countered by invulnerability mechanics.

What sort of "burst setup" do you imagine? Running around collecting buffs in the arena maybe? Trinkets with 10k mainstat on use but it needs to be charged via jumping jacks? Bursting an enemy already usually requires you to stun him or his mate (to prevent counter stunning, other forms of CC or offhealing), building up fury (or any sort of buff) doesn't require skill it only requires patience and casttime nukes have the same requirement as the stun, because you don't want your burst phase to be interrupted regardless of casttime or not.

I do agree that healer mana should matter more, then again, there is the simple problem of different mana requirements for different tiers of pvp. in 3v3 the mana requirement is theoretically double that of 2v2, in practise it might be less but from my expereince its 3 to 4 times as high, because other factors weigh in a lot harder.
So introduce manaregeneration dampening to 2v2s? Would promote passive playstyle, trying to force the enemy to spend their mana trying to kill you and then turn around. games would be more boring and longer than they are now. maybe introduce manasapping abilities? not really fun to be left there with no abilities simply because the enemy was leeching your mana from the start.
It's not an easy task to do, simply because the situations are comparatively infinite to the options you have to attack them.


Overall your ideas can swing either way: they remove healers from arena completely or make them more mandatory than now opening up for double healers in arena again. I bet double disc is already viable in 2v2 as long as the enemy is double DPS with no DK in the mix.
Double DPS is possible, but it requires a very high amount of teamplay and only works with strong CC classes like hunter. The higher the skilllevel the less horrid seem healers. CC/peel his DPS and a healer dies to 2 DPS once his major CDs are gone. Those are painsuppression, tree of life and no idea of the other healers, you don't see them a lot on my low level of skill.



If you want to balance 2v2s more, you need to flatten the differences between classes, get rid of 100% countermeasures like immunities and you need to get rid of combat resets. Theoretically you could insert a strong weakpoint in every class, like warriors used to have with recklessness. reck goes up->stun->burst->dead. you can't click the buff away and taking a large amount of extra damage simply kills you. Then again, where would you insert weak points? and why should they end up anymore balanced than the system now?

[Rucati]

Umm, no. Those are terrible suggestions honestly. Don't ruin the entire game because you want to fix a trash bracket.

The best thing they could do at this point is remove 2v2 altogether, it serves no purpose. The only way to balance 2v2 is to make every class identical, short of doing that it will never be balanced. Nor should it ever be balanced, because if 2v2 is balanced it means everything else is broken, and that would be dumb.

[Terahertz]

The only broken things about 2v2 are druids, hunters, priests and melee trains. More specifically feral druid/melee comps. Every single time I've faced those they went on my healer, drooling all over him without me having any pressure on either of them as a WW monk. A druid/hunter team is also near impossible to beat as any melee team and due to the amount of melee dominating it has become extremely difficult for casters to shine as well.

Double DPS is extremely viable. Rogue/mage is really viable. So are rogue/hunter and rogue/boomkin. I'd say other combinations of boomkins are also viable.

As for the changes you mentioned, IMO the only change there should be in PvP is more lethal burst. There should be more fluctuating damage and healing going around IMHO. The sustained right now is amazing and I love how the game has gone to a more sustained approach as well. It's just that certain classes' burst is weak or too sustained for them to actually shine. Take WW monks for example. I don't really have burst but more or less increased sustained damage. A feral druid will be able to hit for numerous 60ks in the period of a Berserk and a ret paladin will be able to spam 40k+ hits during wings. A DK will be able to hit for numerous 40ks+ before needing to recharge. On my monk only during Serenity can I do effective damage which is me spamming 15k~ blackout kicks with an occasional 20-25k rising sun kick. Then there's my Fists of Fury ticking for 15ks during my burst only.

For some classes the game is rather slow paced which sucks.

[Mikael123]

Terrible suggestions by the OP. Most of the suggestions would severely impact 3v3 in a negative way. Healers wouldn't have a chance in 3v3 if they can't even stay alive in 2v2.
Just accept 2v2 being an unbalanced bracket or start playing 3v3 which is way more fun.

[Deleted]

Onto your suggestions. You want "much higher burst" and lower sustained damage at the same time and think that's a counter to healers? If anything that promotes healers. If sustained damage becomes irrelevant to the weakest of heals the only way to survive the high burst is with a healer. If you skip having a healer the only way to play 2v2 would be to play one of the following: Pally, Hunter, Mage. No other class could win against them as sustained damage is too low to bring them down and high burst is countered by invulnerability mechanics.

I want lower sustained but I also want even lower sustained healing. So sustained DPS will kill enemies slower than currently BUT it will overcome sustained healing more easily. In exchange for their lower healing, healers might get better sustained damage (some healers already have decent sustained damage), so they can assist their dps.

There are classes that already have some kind of "burst setup". Monks for example with their stacking Tiger Eye thing. Its a stacking buff so its a) not available to be just spammed in the beginning on the match and b) predictable when the burst will happen. Its just not balanced well as Ermahgerd already pointed out. They should change it from 60% damage 20 sec duration (iirc thats what it currently is) to something like 100% damage 10s duration or so. On top of that you could make the stacks dispellable (1 stack per dispel) so healers could do something besides healing to slow down enemy burst.

The important thing is that the burst windows should be not to easy to get and especially should be counterable. Another example would be mage. They currently also have a stacking mechanic with their Icicles. Personally I would change their playstyle back to Shatter combo by increasing Frost Bold damage big time and removing Ice Lance from shatter benefits. Then make Icicles damage higher and make them release once Frostbolt is affected by shatter. Also make Icicles dispellable.

Such a burst requires setup (because you need to cast FB 5 times to get the Icicles), it also requires casting (which is counterable by interrupts/silence/stun) and can even be countered somewhat by dispels.

This is totally in contrast to what burst is currently for classes like Feral Druid or Ret Paladins. Lots of burst setups currently only require your target to be stunned with trinket down and yourself still having trinket up. Not enough counters to that.

And I agree that there maybe a rock, paper, scissors balance in 2v2 and I would be totally fine with it. The important thing here is that rock, paper and scissors all have strong presence so its doesn't become a game of rock mashing scissors because there are just too few papers. And yes, a good idea would be to add certain weak points to every class.

Even if you would turn all classes into either rocks, papers or scissors you would still have teams of 2 people in 2's. If your team is rock/scissors for example against paper/scissors it would actually be an interesting game which would evolve around team 1 either playing out their advantage of rock over scissors or their advantage of scissors over paper and the other team doing it the other way round.

Of course there would be games like paper/paper against rock/rock and it would be a clear win for team 1. However, not all comps have to be viable and as paper/paper you would still have the advantage of totally destroying rock/rock while getting totally blasted by scissors/scissors.

Actually many MMOs evolve around a rock/paper/scissors balance between tanks/mages and rogues. The deciding element in this balance is actually healers, which kind of live outside of the rock/paper/scissors thing. That's why balancing healing is really one of THE main elements in PvP balance. The goal here would be to fit healers in to be either rock (good vs. rogues, bad vs. mages), paper (good vs. tanks, bad vs. rogues) or scissors (good vs. mages, bad vs. tanks).

For DRs its the same game. It's perfectly fine if not every comp is viable (it is not currently in 3's even if 3's is the "balanced" bracket). It is enough for balance if every class has a selection of a few viable comps.

The main problem I see with Blizzard's balance approach is that their three "categories" are melee, ranged and healer and they don't counter each other in the way of ranged > melee > healer > ranged or something like that. If you really had a balance of scissors > paper > rock > scissors, you could easily form a team of scissors/paper/rock in 3's and it would definitely be viable. You could even play scissors/scissors/paper and be successful as long as you put lots of effort into shutting down the enemy rock with your paper, you just will have a hard time against rock/rock/scissors comps.

In general, in an MMO which is not balanced around 1v1, rock/paper/scissors is a really really good base design for group PvP balance, which holds within 2v2, 3v3 and even larger scale battles. Certain comps have advantages over others with this design but that will always be the case with any design and it is okay as long as they have disadvantages against other comps.

The current WoW is designed in a way that a few "rock" classes (Feral, Ret Paladin, DK) counter "paper" classes (almost all casters) on a 1v1 basis, while there are very few scissor classes (basically only Hunter atm).

Good balance really starts on a 1v1 basis, but not in the sense that everyone should be able to beat everyone, but in the sense that if you let 11 players (one of each class) make a tournament where everyone battles everyone one time, each class should come out with roughly the same amount of wins (5-6). Dark Age of Camelot had a rock/paper/scissors balance among most classes and it is still one of the best balanced PvP MMOs I have played. However, their "trick" of balancing healers was to make them "group-only" classes which were basically almost helpless in a 1v1 against anyone, but very strong if they had someone to peel for them. Would still be a better design approach, even in WoW.

[Rucati]

Good balance really starts on a 1v1 basis, but not in the sense that everyone should be able to beat everyone, but in the sense that if you let 11 players (one of each class) make a tournament where everyone battles everyone one time, each class should come out with roughly the same amount of wins (5-6).

No. This is fundamentally wrong in a team game. 1v1 balance means absolutely nothing when there's more than 1 player on a team.

[Madus]

No. This is fundamentally wrong in a team game. 1v1 balance means absolutely nothing when there's more than 1 player on a team.

His 1v1 balance mean that if you get classes divided into rock/paper/scissor and you force balance like rock>scissor, scissor>paper, paper>rock then in tournament like game (every1vsevery1) all classes get same amount of wins/lose (rocks lose to papter, paper lose to scissor...) when amount of classes is balanced aka rocks=papers=scissors... If you get that then you have it easy balancing for 3v3 too bcs you just pairing 3 roles.

[Deleted]

His 1v1 balance mean that if you get classes divided into rock/paper/scissor and you force balance like rock>scissor, scissor>paper, paper>rock then in tournament like game (every1vsevery1) all classes get same amount of wins/lose (rocks lose to papter, paper lose to scissor...) when amount of classes is balanced aka rocks=papers=scissors... If you get that then you have it easy balancing for 3v3 too bcs you just pairing 3 roles.

Exactly, that's the idea behing rock/paper/scissors balance. It works really well when a game is focused on group gameplay and not on 1v1. As said above DAoC had such an approach. They even did duels for testing and tracked the record like class X wins 66% of the duels against class Y. They had rough goals on how high the chance for a given class to beat another one should be and it was quite far away from 50% because they had rock/paper/scissor balance. They still left something like 20% chances for scissors to beat rock and so on.

They also did some roles in between to smooth it out. For example there were "heavy tanks" (plate armor, shield) which would be crushed by casters but were very strong vs. rogues. Then there were "light tanks" (mail/leather armor) which had better mobility and were stronger against casters (but still lost most of the time) but weaker vs. rogues and would also lose to the "heavy tanks" in 1v1 about 60% of the time.

This "in-between" roles makes balancing a little worse for small group combat, but DAoC was mainly focused on 8vs8 and zerg vs. zerg and it also had A LOT more classes than WoW (40+ with 3 specs each). They had 4 basic roles (tanks, rogues, mages, healers) with tanks being rock, rogues scissors and mages paper. Healers were completely out of the balance and basically intended to lose every 1v1, they were intended to be completely group-dependant (they couldn't even level efficiently without a group).

- - - Updated - - -

That said: a basic rock/paper/scissors balance between tanks, casters and rogues is actually quite easy to obtain and I do think that Blizzard had something like that in mind when they first released WoW but kind of went away from that because they like the "all classes are equal" approach a lot more (as can also be seen in the streamlining they did in PvE in the recent expansions).

The balance between casters and melee is usually in kiting. A caster will just kites a tank to death just like it was with Frost Mage vs. Warrior in early WoW expansions. A rogue would just sneak up on a caster, stun/silence and keep him snared. A Warrior would just outdamage a rogue face to face and resist more of the damage with his better armor. This is the basic idea. Balance between archers and tanks in DAoC was done in a way that tanks were able to block arrows almost completely with their shield (but not spells).

[Rucati]

His 1v1 balance mean that if you get classes divided into rock/paper/scissor and you force balance like rock>scissor, scissor>paper, paper>rock then in tournament like game (every1vsevery1) all classes get same amount of wins/lose (rocks lose to papter, paper lose to scissor...) when amount of classes is balanced aka rocks=papers=scissors... If you get that then you have it easy balancing for 3v3 too bcs you just pairing 3 roles.

I understand what he meant. That isn't how it works though.

[Itisamuh]

Umm, no. Those are terrible suggestions honestly. Don't ruin the entire game because you want to fix a trash bracket.

The best thing they could do at this point is remove 2v2 altogether, it serves no purpose. The only way to balance 2v2 is to make every class identical, short of doing that it will never be balanced. Nor should it ever be balanced, because if 2v2 is balanced it means everything else is broken, and that would be dumb.

2v2 is no more imbalanced than 5v5, maybe less so. 3v3 is imbalanced too, for that matter, it just tends to be the best.

[Deleted]

They will never balance 2v2 just because it would mean that everything they achieved with 3v3 balance to go to waste.. Besides they will never make serious investements when it comes to pvp, WoW is a casual/pve game, pvp is just a tiny branch .. not worth the time/money, they will probly need to hire a new team to make proper changes because its clearly that the pvp team they got now is pretty much clueless in most of the casses, and most of the changes are pve related, and tbh id rather have them invest everything they got in balancing 3v3 more and more, 2v2 is way to boring and less competitve, imagine a 2v2 tournament, ew.

[Rucati]

2v2 is no more imbalanced than 5v5, maybe less so. 3v3 is imbalanced too, for that matter, it just tends to be the best.

Umm, I never claimed 5s was balanced.

I wouldn't mind 5s being removed either. It's dead, have you tried playing past like 2.2k? Queues take forever. Since 5s doesn't give Glad it serves no purpose anymore, the only reason people care is because of Arena Master.

As for 3s, not sure I see any major imbalances at this point with the exception of Hunters having trap up every nanosecond. Other than that, there's not a whole lot to complain about.

[xpose]

Umm, no. Those are terrible suggestions honestly. Don't ruin the entire game because you want to fix a trash bracket.

The best thing they could do at this point is remove 2v2 altogether, it serves no purpose. The only way to balance 2v2 is to make every class identical, short of doing that it will never be balanced. Nor should it ever be balanced, because if 2v2 is balanced it means everything else is broken, and that would be dumb.

Except that it does. Those that don't want to run 3's and still get conquest have an option. LFR doesn't serve a purpose either for those that do normal raiding but it still has its niche

[Deleted]

WoW is a casual/pve game, pvp is just a tiny branch ..

This is exactly my reasoning because I think 2v2 is actually much more casual friendly than 3v3 just because of time coordination. I would also like it if they would introduce personal MMR ratings for random battlegrounds so you get matched with players of your skill level and maybe increase conquest gain from random BGs a little depending on your rating.

What I would like to have is PvP that is casual and competitive. Currently you have 3s and rated BGs for competitive play, but both require quite some organization even if its just 3 people being online and having time at the same time it can be difficult to coordinate. You have 2v2 and random BGs for casual PvP. But neither of them is really competitive because 2v2 is imbalanced and random BGs are totally random without any measurement of player skill.

I do like competitive PvP, but I don't have much time and especially not at a fixed or predictable schedule, so what is the bracket for players like me if not 2v2? I really tried to get a 3v3 team going but there are very few players willing to form such a team if you can't tell them a fixed date/time for arena play. In 2v2 it worked for me because over the course of a week there will always be some day where by chance both players are online at the same time.

However, Raid Finder is a good example that Blizzard obviously thinks that casual players are also non-comptetitive players that just want some kind of progress thrown at them for free.

So, yes, WoW is a casual game but the rated PvP part of WoW is not really casual at all, even though they made some progress with conquest cap transferring over to the next week and players being able to play arena without forming a team.

In PvE it would also be a nice idea if they introduced an MMR for Raid Finder based on your performance (gain rating for boss kills, doing mechanics and based on your DPS/HPS/TPS, lose rating for standing in fire, dying and wipes) in the raids and after a certain amount of MMR you would be able to queue for normal/heroic/mythic raids through raid finder and only being matched with other players that have high enough MMR rating, so you could experience the more competitive content as a casual player.

[Shadina]

no, nono.

2v2 is allready more rock,paper,sissor and you want to make it even more. Where is the fun in playing pvp if you enter the arena and see X class and know.. oki if this player is afk I can win, otherwise he will win. Most classes today if played with a viable parter does allright in 2v2. Some fall of and become gods and some fall of to become well the opposite of gods.

[Rucati]

Except that it does. Those that don't want to run 3's and still get conquest have an option. LFR doesn't serve a purpose either for those that do normal raiding but it still has its niche

The purpose of LFR is for people to see the content for lore reasons. There's plenty of ways to get Conquest points outside of 2s, so it serves no purpose at this point. RBGs, Ashran, Glad Sanctum, 3s, 5s, and even random BGs all give Conquest points. There's no reason that 2s needs to exist, all that comes from it is constant bitching from bad players about how unbalanced it is.

[Madus]

I understand what he meant. That isn't how it works though.

Yep, thats why is balance so fucked up . Its like Mage is paper, Warrior is Rock, Rogue is Scissor, Resto druid is Well and Death Knight is Rocketlauncher.

[ellieg]

The purpose of LFR is for people to see the content for lore reasons. There's plenty of ways to get Conquest points outside of 2s, so it serves no purpose at this point. RBGs, Ashran, Glad Sanctum, 3s, 5s, and even random BGs all give Conquest points. There's no reason that 2s needs to exist, all that comes from it is constant bitching from bad players about how unbalanced it is.

Me and my brother have been 2sing together since arena came out. They would be stupid to remove it. And that argument is awful. Putting more ways to get an item into the game doesnt mean you can then take out old ones. Thats like saying lfr, normal, heroic, and mythic should all share the same lockout. You can also get gear from the follower missions so theres no reason to be able to have separate lockouts on top of that.

[Deleted]

The purpose of LFR is for people to see the content for lore reasons. There's plenty of ways to get Conquest points outside of 2s, so it serves no purpose at this point. RBGs, Ashran, Glad Sanctum, 3s, 5s, and even random BGs all give Conquest points. There's no reason that 2s needs to exist, all that comes from it is constant bitching from bad players about how unbalanced it is.

I don't play for Conquest points. Hell, they could even remove conquest/honor all together and give everyone full gear from the start. I play for fun and not for gear, and fun for me is competitive PvP. However, my time schedule is very irregular, so 2v2 is the most accessible PvP for me that is halfway competitive (even though imbalanced).

The gear grind for me is a neccessary evil to stay competitive.

Random BGs/Skirmishes are kind of fun but its tiring out fast because the quality of your team mates and enemies is varying way too much.