The fundamental flaws in legion pvp.

[wholol]

Hello there,

First and foremost, I would like to discuss casters vs melee.

Now before you all throw your pitchforks at me I do believe therein lies some truth to this , mainly the fact that casters have been further reinforced with the casting model with less control/ mobility ( some mage specs less so ) while the melee design keeps increasing in terms of amount of mobility provided through talents etc, this also implies things such as slow/root breaking abilities, anti CC abilities, gap closing abilities, all of which are backed up by very high instant cast damaging abilities that deal tremendous amounts of damage on relatively short cds ( lower than most defensives in the game ).

Now if we pair this with the fact that most casters do not have the tools nor the damage to keep up with melee, and by that I do mean some caster specs ( in example , demolocks / firemages ) have somewhat similar hardhitting burst abilities but at the price of either ramp up or extremely long cast time / turreting, which brings us back to the pvp design flaw.

If casters need to cast, melees cannot have 100% uptime on casters, it has become apparent with every passing expansion that blizzard somehow ignores this fundamental and focuses on other aspects of the design field , instead of simply reducing the amounts of gap closers/ mobility / slow/root reductions for all melee classes.

If casters cannot cast they are forced to give us instant cast hard hitting abilities to compensate for the fact melee has 100% uptime or simply turn all casters into tanks by providing us all with 30% damage reduction baseline , if that sounds absurd I find it more absurd that melee chars can somehow ignore most aspects of control or escape mechanisms that casters have at their disposal.

Next I would like to discuss tanks in pvp, first I must say that I don't find tanks in pvp to be a bad idea, what IS a bad idea on the other hand is the fact that tanks are able to deal the same throughput that a dps specced melee can or even more while still keeping their defensive nature AND providing more utility than regular melee dps, something is very wrong here.

Burst in legion, every class has at least 1 spec ( found more in the melee specs than casters ) in which therein lies a certain set of talent combinations or artifact traits which if stacked with cds will deal tremendous amounts of damage ( 1 mil +) this is not healthy design for an expansion that wanted to move away from burst, I am fine with burst abilities dealing 500-700k as an absolute maximum amount, but 1 mil + when health pools are 2 mil, that's 50% max hp+ , dealt instantly with no chance of counterplay, this type of design cannot be well thought out and I feel somewhat disappointed that blizzard can still think abilities like these are remotely balanced even in the alpha stage.

Cooldown stacking still exists in legion, what is the point in pruning most abilities and cds if the majority of classes still possess several cds to stack,take for example warriors ( not trying to be mean but thats what first comes to mind ) , warriors can still "recklessness"( battle cry ) / avatar / stack several mortal strike % augmenting stacks and further buff this with talents /pvp talents / artifact, to nearly 1 shot people.

PvP ilvl scaling and pvp talents, are redundant. What is the point of having to farm pvp talents if blizzard wants to "balance" pvp, if they wanted to give some incentive to do normal bgs then they could've given all pvp talents baseline from the start and made the prestige system more detailed in rewards and levels instead of having to grind through 50 levels then reset all that hard work ( several times ) simply to achieve cosmetic rewards, this totally cripples any pvper who wishes to do competitive content since they cannot throw away their pvp talents, so instead of naming this a prestige system, it should be revamped into another kind of reward system for pvpers who do not wish to arena or rbg, so that they can aim for some form of rewards or something, or revamp the entire prestige system to be beneficial to people without throwing away all your pvp levels everytime you wish to proceed to prestige lvl 2 +.

Ilvl scaling in legion is a failed attempt to fix the imbalance between gear level differences in pvp, which btw is ironic given that if they truly wanted to remove the disparity between ilvls they would have simply removed gear altogether from pvp, but this would mean a lack of incentive to participate for the lower brackets , which also means that this new system encourages low rated players to pve instead to achieve higher ilvl gear in order to increase their pvp ratings.

In my opinion, pvp gear ilvl granted through current rating is not a bad idea, but this should be only for wearing something and should not affect pvp at all, as in blizzard should simply make templates and remove all stats from gear whatsoever, and also prohibit racial actives/passives in rated content.

Then introduce incentives to participate and improve , since gear is no longer an issue people need to have something to look forward to, and it seems titles aren't enough, there should be rewards based on rating achieved for example : mounts , cosmetic upgrades beyond simple gear ( for example banners or borders upgrades next to ur char's pic),specific benefits the higher you climb like spell/ability color alterations and/or visual upgrades ( for example, a fire spell could become a flying fire serpent or a hunters arrow could be changed to an axe throw or spear or maybe give arrows certain glows ), not to mention cast/ melee animation upgrades , now that would be kickass although costly for blizzard to make, but that's a better incentive than grinding bgs.

I honestly have lost trust in blizzard's words and actions, nothing they say actually seems to mean anything these days, maybe I'm just bitter that this game has degraded so much over the years.

[Caolela]

It's not stupidity or making mistakes. They've done this stuff intentionally to attempt to increase sub times while having to do less work/less cost on content, development, iteration and testing. That translates into better profit margins which is all Blizz cares about.

Do you really think that for a game that they have masses of data on and experience with for 11.5 years, that they'd be so incompetent to make such "mistakes" all the time, or so stupid as not to know better by now? Hardly. They always push the limits to see what the player base will tolerate before they're forced to revert back.

The other excuse or canard is the "lazy" meme that we see kicked around constantly. They're not lazy. They just won't spend the time/money to do certain things when a cost-benefit analysis shows they can make a better margin from making less content while artificially increasing the grind, or dragging out something by costing more gold, gating, nerf/buff specs to cause FotM rerolls, or 100 other ways.

That's why they've made Legion PvP all RNG drops, Artifact weapon grind and talent grind...AND why best gear will be gated behind a high CR or RNG drops in Heroic and Mythic raids. It will be mathematically impossible for most (70-80% or more) of PvP'ers to get that best gear, and they'll be at a constant power disadvantage. They'll keep chasing the 'carrot on a stick' until they get fed up and quit. But by then, Blizz will already have made the money on Legion sales and 'x' months of sub fees and tokens.

[RedGamer030]

The only fundamental flaw here is your reasoning.

[wholol]

The only fundamental flaw here is your reasoning.

Very constructive post, you make very sound arguments in all other aspects of your life I presume.

[RedGamer030]

Very constructive post, you make very sound arguments in all other aspects of your life I presume.

I do not need to be constructive in this thread, nor provide an argument. There is nothing here to actually debate. Your reasoning is flawed and thusly you have no argument.

Infracted.

[wholol]

I do not need to be constructive in this thread, nor provide an argument. There is nothing here to actually debate. Your reasoning is flawed and thusly you have no argument.

Then we are at a disagreement, remove yourself from here since we have nothing further to discuss,boy.

[PrairieChicken]

I do not need to be constructive in this thread, nor provide an argument. There is nothing here to actually debate. Your reasoning is flawed and thusly you have no argument.

Lol I am going to make this signature

[wholol]

Lol I am going to make this signature

Don't feed the troll please.

Keep it civil

[Mehrunes]

Now before you all throw your pitchforks at me I do believe therein lies some truth to this , mainly the fact that casters have been further reinforced with the casting model with less control/ mobility ( some mage specs less so ) while the melee design keeps increasing in terms of amount of mobility provided through talents etc, this also implies things such as slow/root breaking abilities, anti CC abilities, gap closing abilities, all of which are backed up by very high instant cast damaging abilities that deal tremendous amounts of damage on relatively short cds ( lower than most defensives in the game ).

While I agree with pretty much the whole post, the part about Mages is one of the main underlying problems. They went full "Blink is the apotheosis of Mage class fantasy™" in Legion and moved class balance few years back. Back after Cata (I think, maybe WotLK) when they were analyzing PvP balance they finally realized that giving more and more freezing tools, escapes and the like to Frost each expansion (because they couldn't think of anything else to give them) created an arms race between Frost and melee which resulted in other casters getting shafted. Because nerfing Frost was too hard and making one spec counter a dozen (especially since it was melee) was a no-go. So they kept adding more and more catch ups of all kinds to the melee to compensate.

And while Frost was eventually toned down (especially since Blizz moved away from having THE PvP specs) with various DRs getting merged and some of their utility finally being taken away, melees, not so much (because it's meleecraft, can't touch the melee), but luckily other casters were brought up for a while. WoD took a bit of that away and in Legion they went full Class Fantasy™ on everyone which for other casters somehow means less mobility (especially Warlocks because they are casting wet paper "tanks") but as I already said, Mage for reasons unknown went in the opposite direction and the Mage (now all specs) vs melee arms races that fucks other casters (double so in light of mobility nerfs to the rest) is here to plague us once again.

The other main problem is Class Fantasy™ also pushing casters back to less instants, while, as you said, basically every attack a melee has is instant (and the non-instant ones are uninterruptible anyway). Of course interrupts and silences stay the way they are, with some new brilliant additions like the return of Mind-numbing Poison, Spell Reflection reflecting all casts in a 3 second time window and Eye of Leotheras (plus a bunch of even "funnier" things related to DoTs). Meanwhile disarms are the devil and need to be removed. And once they get to you with their gap closers and apply their more or less automatic (in most cases) 50% stay on you for quite some time.