Arenas need to be abolished

[Althraniir]

Many people enjoy arenas and saying "they are horrible and should be abolished" is silly.

Keep in mind rated battlegrounds are coming back in Cataclysm and you will be able to get equivalent arena gear from bg's, so if you enjoy large scale, more strategic pvp but not rock-paper-scissors-arenas (such as me) you will be able to get decent pvp gear.

EDIT: Hunterwep beat me to the rated bg thing by a minute :P

[Tomt]

I am excited for rated BGs.

[ubergoose]

In totality, arenas are most definitely not a mistake by blizzard, the dedication of top-end PvPers match those of top-end PvE-ers, meaning that these 2 aspects of the game are on par with each other.

title make no sense ??? need time to think :-\

[palladiamors]

The dev stated that the problem with the arena was BALANCE. When WoW was created, PvP wasn't really the primary objective. Thus some classes had some abilities that would be amazing in PvE that would later be even more so in PvP. At higher numbers these advantages aren't usually as apparent, for example a rogue loses a distinct edge when tossed into 10vs10 BGs and up. But at lower numbers, where the arena operates, these imbalances become glaringly obvious. This is why RMP has been so dominate from the get go. But at the time that arenas came out, E-sports were exceedingly popular, and BG's don't really feel that niche. So they needed some way to cash in on that area. Thus, arena's were born.

On the whole, I hate arena's. I think they are by and large an exercise in class imbalance. That doesn't mean I think they should be removed, but as some one who has done everything I don't think they should be the MAIN focus for PvP. Blizzards reasoning, that it's a measuring stick for skill and thus for the gear you can acquire, is total crap, since skill will only get you so far if you didn't pick the right class at the character creation screen. If Blizzard is concerned about 'skill' then they should measure character performance in BG's based things like damage done, healing done, objectives completed, defend, and what have you. The better your performance, the better your score or rating. Have a bar for the bottom of activity, say you need to deal so much damage, heal so much, or defend a critical under attack or near an active zone objective point, or you get no honor and no rating. That will prevent or at least mostly eliminate AFKers, and will help to be a more accurate judge of player skill in BGs. Yes, you'll still be awarded for 'losing', but how is that any different from arena at the moment?

[Eletharin]

What bugs me most about pvp nuts isn't their constant instance that pvp is sooo much harder then pve (although learning to play a difficult counter comp is very similar to learning a boss fight, albeit one with very few mechanics), its the fact they insist its so skill based.

Do you need to know your class ... yes
Do you need to know the classes you are up against ... yes
Does your beating them mean you are leet pwners of face and clearly superior ... hell no


A LOT of PVP is gear and class based ... so is PVE, but we aren't so afraid to admit it. If you are in full epics, but a tier behind the current gear level, its very difficult to contribute in a meaningful way to progression content and any raid you try to get in recognizes this. If you are in an arena in furious and a team wearing relentless beats you, the incorrectly assume they are better at PVP. They don't need to be better then you, they don't need to see the future, they don't need to have ninja reflexes, they just outgear you. It happens .. even in your sacred PVP.

[Skultharion]

You know, you completely fucked up your point by starting with this. "PvE-ers" + "GTFO" + "Our forum" in the same sentence.... since when was this a PvP-only forum?

Also, "QQ'ing PvE-ers"..... yeah, those cat nerfs were OBVIOUSLY NOTHING to do with cats being able completely rip the piss out of any clothie, and being able to heal when they manage to get some range to switch out of form.

And DK dps nerfed, or the "healing-strike" nerfs, clearly nothing to do with PvP.

Ooh, and let's not forget the ret nerfs! Those had absolutely nothing to do with PvP.

While i agree that high level pvp requires more personal co-ordination, acting like an ass in an attempt to get your point across doesn't help your case.

Wait, this isn't the PvP-Arena forum anymore?! Ahamagad, mmo-champion must have changed it's title to 'General Discussions' overnight.

Cat druids are designed to kill cloth, since they cannot be snared, but put them against a mail/leather class and it's a totally different matter. The nerf was implemented as cat's DPS was getting overboard for a hybrid, not because of any PvP reasons. The only PvP nerf ferals warranted is the fero bite energy cap, and that was a very welcome change (to me) for PvE as I will not have to worry about pooling and blowing all 100 energy off at once, wasting my pooling efforts.

And 'healing-strike' nerf affected PvE... How? OMG I CAN'T REMOVE HOTS FROM THE BOSS! Owait

The PvP 'nerf' for ret was a nerf to it's burst damage, and an outright buff to its constant damage.. thanks for pointing out PvP helped PvE, eh?

Please get your facts right before attempting to flame.

Kkthxbai

[K4ge]

Getting global'd , still a common issue high ranked people have to face with makes it competitve in your view?
I'll make it easy to get through with my idea : Rogue Mage Priest .

Disgusting .
Arena ever since felt not quite polished . Tone down the rewards and all your competitive play hype will vanish.

For what I care , my main has always been balanced arround cries of pvp'ers. Fair enough , I now pvp as a mage . Albeit , the pve impact went over the board .

AHAHAHA, complaining about rmp, god you're dumb.

[Skultharion]

Sarcasm is a lost art

[K4ge]

Just the fact, that you use rogue as an example of a high damage pvp class shows us how clueless you really are.

[Grimbold]

This constant flame war over this subject is getting old..

We know PVE nerfs affect PvP and vice versa. Deal with it.

PvErs flaming PvPers and vice versa. Why the hell do you care?! Just shut up and play. Its mindless flaming.

Personally i tried arenas during TBC with a not so much popular specc / combo ( shockadin + some sort of hybrid mage specc, fire+arcane or smth). Highest i got was 1730 or smth. We were an unusual combo that got owned by faceroll combos ( resto druid + anything else...ok almost anything) and in the end we stopped due to long discussions over being beaten by combos we couldnt simply beat etc etc.
I quit arenas as i get way too mad and stressfull over that. Just as in PvE you get held back by nubs, in arena you got owned by faceroll combos. Similar situations.

Now i prefer doing BGs and have this fool's hope of entering bgs where everyone knows how to the bg and hope to get a decent, heated match...

Just do ur thing peacefully. Ur urge to whine and flame others leads nowhere except to more flame and whining.

[Fjdn]

Terrible expansion. The damage in arena has been way to high overall (locks,hunters,warriors,retpallys,eleshammys,ferals ect ect) so the balancing between pvp and pve has been way to difficult for blizzard to handle. Stuff that is to hard for blizzard to handle leads to massive forum QQ.

[Azyoulike]

changes that happen to classes because of it usually have very little PVE influence because the bosses will always be downed regardless of a particular class's nerf.

Erm yes, the boss will be downed, but they may not bring the nerfed spec, or if they do it may not be filling the same role - ie. may be stuck off-tanking not main tanking. Nobody is saying that nerfs to PvE due to PvP make PvE harder, that would be stupid. We're saying that it makes PvE less fun, and harder for the nerfed spec to get spots.

Likewise if we nerf a given spec into the ground for PvP, that doesn't make PvP overall any harder. It makes it harder for the spec nerfed, and easier for everybody playing them. So since overall it doesn't make a difference by your argument we could make PvP gratuitiously imbalanced and everything would be fine. Some players would still win, some players would still lose- everything is fine right?

Obviously it would not be fun for the nerfed specs, they'd eventually give up and QQ on the forums till they got buffed. It wouldn't even be fun for the OP specs because people would joke that they facerolled to gladiator etc.

Balance matters in both PvE and PvP, the impact of balancing PvP on PvE is negative, and vice versa. Pretending that it's not the case does nobody any good, and neither is it going to change. The best that we can hope for is that they'll get better at buffing/nerfing to not negatively impact the side they're not concerned with.

[Cosineoftheta]

I play a lot of video games with a huge range of variety. So I suppose I could use that as my reference point.

The biggest parallels I will draw are WoW DotA (or HoN).

Let me first state my opinion, PvP is on average harder than PvE because it requires faster reaction and more knowledge. The exceptions are this... PvE is equal to or harder than PvP when doing a boss for the first couple of times, especially when not having a guide to base it on. Lets put some references behind that!

Before I get into it, I am under the assumption that everyone who is participating in these activities are competent. That is false of course, and dealing with those people is a challenge harder than any game, but in the upper end of gaming you see less of it.

PvP is harder because it requires more knowledge. In WoW arena you not only need to know how to play your class (and your partners), but you also need to know how other people's class play against you and your partner. Essentially, you need to know every class and spec. You need to know what counters what, how to void certain things, and what is effective against X. This also includes knowledge arena landscape and how to use it as an advantage. In WoW Raiding you only need to know your class abilities, what rotation is the most effective, and how the mechanics of each fight work. Most mechanics are either copies of each other, or are slight variations. IE. Control mobs that spawn, Fight Boss, Avoid that spot.

One might counter that by saying, if you accumulate all the knowledge you must know for all the WotLK raids you'd probably have to know more than a PvPer. I can express that by saying that most fights have 1 or 2 gimmicks and can be easily looked up while everyone is buffing if you honestly forgot. So you essentially don't need to keep the knowledge of every raid in your mind each time your raid, just the current fight. In PvP, you do not know what you are up against, so you must maintain the same level of knowledge at all times.

To relate it to a non-wow example, we can look at DotA (Defense of the Ancients). DotA is a game that takes such immense skill that the learning curve is somewhere around a year to be any good what so ever. The biggest reason for that is because the amount of knowledge needed to play the game on a competitive level is somewhere around the level of most of Calculus. For those of you who never took any higher math, that is a lot of stuff to know. The reason why knowledge is important in this game is because you need to know how to counter, and build your items, etc. I won't get into how to play DotA, I could write a book on that. The point is Knowledge causes difficulty.

PvP is more difficult because it requires faster reaction time. I feel that for PvP this is probably self explanatory. I need to be able to keep track of 2 people's exact moves at all time and react to it within a second or it could cause me a lot of grief and quiet possibly the loss of a match. ie. I pop CD to burst and I almost kill their DPS but the healer got out of CC and unless I can silence the healer and continue dps before he gets off a spell, I just lost my CD and they have a good chance to counter. PvE is very much so more forgiving. There are numerous ways to recover your rotation if you are DPS. Healers have back up plans in case they are in trouble, and tanks have a thousand CD's to make up for mistakes. The last is an exaggeration but none-the-less relevant.

And obvious counter would be that if a tank gets hit for huge twice and wasn't able to recover then everyone has to adjust to pick up the slack and try to pull through. people only have within a second or two to do it or else there is a wipe. I will give that it takes skill to recover like that, but that situation is based on luck. If you wipe, you can just do it again and beat them without getting hit twice in a row.

I will once again reference DotA as it does take large amounts of skill to play. The amount of actions per minute required to be good at DotA is usually around 100~120. These actions are all planned and not merely spamming a button because the CD is not done yet. That is 2 actions in less than a second having conscious thought as to what the result will be, throughout the entire game. So at times you may do less because you are waiting, and at other times you may spike to around 3~4 a second. The reason why it spikes is because you have to do your actions which usually are complicated, but on top of that you have to react to enemy players counters and react to them without losing the advantage. At no point in time in WoW PvE are you required to do more than an action a second. WoW arena required that peak during a burst, or to recover from a enemy burst.

So while I may receive "flame" saying I should just go back to playing DotA or HoN, I am merely using it as an example of skill.

As shown above, because PvP requires more knowledge and faster conscious reaction time it is a more challenging situation and thus requiring more skill to be good.



Now having 'proven' why PvP requires more skill, I would like to state that Arenas were implemented poorly. This game was based off of a hugely multiplayer (pvp) game. While it did have immense story, most people played it for PvP (DotA is part of WC3). I don't see how Blizzard wasn't able to take their knowledge about PvP from Starcraft and Warcraft and bring it into a game correctly.

As for balancing between them. PvE can honestly be quiet here. DPS meters are becoming less and less critical because it is so far skewed toward one type of DPS during one fight and one type of DPS toward another. Bosses are requiring you to just follow its gimmick to beat it. IE the safety dance (sorry to bring up naxx, but still). Rotations are becoming easier and easier. Most of the time you are hitting 2 buttons, and the only real 'skill' is knowing when and where to hit those two buttons.

You can rage at me toward that last comment if you want, but its true. None of these nerfs have ever HUGELY affected the gameplay of a class. At most a change of spec so just another rotation to need to learn. Rather than no longer being able to use this mechanic during a PvP fight, which can drastically change who wins. IE. lets say blizz takes away the ability for DK's to DeathGrip warriors using bladestorm. That is huge and game changing. So then you might say "hey wait! What about a drastic change for DPS. Okay.... Blizz changed where DK's unholy blight was, and then what unholy blight did entirely. Completely changing people's spec. How much did that change a DK's rotation? They had to change how they used their runic power at the end of a rotation.

So let blizz balance for pvp, and who cares if FotM class does a little more damage because of it. Your guild is not just going to kick you out for a newbie lock because his class does more DPS. If that was true, then PvE requires ZERO skill.


/end rant

[K4ge]

Just had in intelligasm.
Best wall of text EVER.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

hmmm who's opinion do i value more on the subject ?

the guy responsable for the creation of WoW and one of the 100 most influential people in the world or Skultharion, random MMO champion forum dude . . .

never set foot in Arena and never will

if i want to play small map team deathmatch i'll fire up TF2

it has no place in an MMO

so in your mind supermario and wow would be the same game if mario had 24 brothers u could go kill King Koopa with?

[Figoment]

I love the people that respond that we should get our own servers or go play warhammer.

I have a few things to say to those.

Some of us PvE and PvP if we had our own servers that pretty much a giant middle finger to us from blizzard.

Concerning Warhammer

Warhammer does not have arena it's all just BG's all the time (With the occasional world pvp)
The classes are all totally imbalenced (Order classes>>>>>> Destruction classes except for squig herder)
Finally Warhammer just plainly sucks.

If you have played warhammer you will probably agree with me.

[mangoarizona]

then you can link your 25 Tribute to Insane Skill then? i'm not trying to flame you or anything, but saying that it takes 25 players to do the right thing is just like saying it takes 2, 3 or 5 people to do the same thing in arena. doing the hardmodes requires class knowledge, reflexes and awareness. im not saying its in anyway more difficult, but PvP is all based on, i cast this > he can do this or this > i can only counter this > he casts what i can't counter > try to recover. that is obviously very simplified but how is that different to something like (again) anub. anub casts swarm > everyone starts to die > 7 people counter it heals on 25 people > then he does penetrating cold (just like the can't be countered thing) > and you try and recover with heals/frost prot pots, shields, cooldowns etc.

like i said, im not trying to take anything away from PvP, but i do believe its just a different kind of difficulty and should be a SEPARATE part of this PvE game.

The difference is in most cases in PvE, you KNOW what the boss is gonna do, unlike in PvP, where different people play a little bit differently. You're unsure when the blind is going to come. Good players know when to expect the next spell or move, they don't have DBM.

[Sylreick]

I don't mind arenas they're some minor entertainment, but I think they should be on a separate sort of thing.

Separate it like Pve, bg's like AV, and arenas. I like bg's but they've been ruined because of arena player 'catering' (to use a popular term).

[Figoment]

I like bg's but they've been ruined because of arena player 'catering' (to use a popular term).

So you are pretty much saying that because we have better gear then you we are ruining bgs. You make perfect sense.

[Umon]

sigh...

u people rly do not know the difrance between PvP and PvE....

PvP is based on Reflexes and Quick thinking...

While PvE is based on Focus and Stamina...

If u do not see the point in what i have written above than i rly can not be bothered to write u a big wall of txt just to explain a few morons what that meens...