PvP Design flaws & fixes

[Saberstrike]

Most of those are common knowledge, but I felt like making a list / a rant just to see how many people would agree with what I see as problems in PvP. With the new expansion looming near, perhaps someone in Blizzard will see the thread and consider fixing some of the things I (and perhaps you) find unenjoyable.

1) CC. The mother of all PvP problems since cataclysm, instant free AoE CC has been out of control and a subject to hundreds of forum threads that included hundreds of easy solutions ranging from giving them higher costs to just making one DR that fits all.

Nothing was done. Really hope WoD will do something drastic and take a good sweep at things like blood fear, scatter + trap launcher, mages, fears & roots breaking on reasonable damage, etc. etc. etc.

Honorary mention to human racial & PvP trinket. The first should be made baseline for all, the second should be on par with raiding ones.

2) Numbers. This includes a number of things: cooldown burst, miniscule costs of spells that do the most damage & healing, bad inflation of hp / damage / healing, but most of all the sickening amount of scaling between starting gear / top end gear, to a point where missing just a few items puts a player at a hopeless disadvantage.

The fix to that will, hopefully, be long overdue item squish that will also get rid of band-aid stats such as pvp power and just make conquest gear equal to raid gear, for easier balancing.

Honorary mention to battle fatigue which was just lazy.

Second honorary mention goes to RNG (random number generator) aka procs in the hands of shaman / balance druid / mage / others that can make or break a game. It's just not fun to know you lost or you won because you / your enemy got super duper lucky over actually playing well.

Third honorary mention, and I know it's getting ridiculous, but... Mana! -- it needs to be finite, period.

3) Lack of content. There's a reason many miss old school alterac valley: it made PvP feel big and impactful when we got an entire zone all to ourselves where fronts and many other things shifted throughout the huge battle. As is, PvP and PvE alike suffer from being focused on instances, rather than exploration of the actual world. And as such, I hope the expansion will once again focus on giving more than raiders something challenging / rewarding to do.

Honorary mention to Nagrand Arena that simply needs the bridge removed.

4) Lack of dev. feedback. Balance was never perfect, but earlier in the game's life it was for some reason much easier for Blizz to just hotfix broken things within a week of a big patch that brought it. Nowadays, we're lucky if in 2 months' time we get a half-arsed band-aid or even an acknowledgment that there is a problem.

Solution: More hotfix-style patches that don't change everyone and everything but rather 1 thing at a time just to see how well it works.


That's actually about it. Agree? Disagree? Got more on your mind? Spill it.