Holinka's interview

[Krusza]

This is a terrible metaphor...did they remove a class? Or a whole damage dealing type (i.e. melee)...no. They're transitioning from having buttons that are situational to actually having to use all the buttons you have, again I don't quite understand what people are complaining when they say "lolz pruning sucks" feel like that's just a meme at this point haven't seen an actual GOOD example in months (and a lot has changed since then).

People are still bothered by pruning? Don't think I'll ever understand why more buttons = more skill...

Maybe if you didn't strawman, you'd understand.

No one is saying "more buttons = more skill". What people are saying is that the buttons they DID remove, were the ones that added depth and complexity to the specs.

All you need to do is play the game to see it, if you didn't notice any of the pruning from WoD onwards, then you are the type of person Blizzard were catering to when they performed the pruning - people that had no idea how to use any of their abilities that weren't part of their rotation.

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20742845147

Here is a list, and this JUST FROM LEGION, there were a lot more in WoD that got pruned, and more meaningful abilities IMO. Some of it is outdated, but you can still see a lot that was removed. A lot are still in the game, but restricted to one spec.

If you think it's just a "meme" and there's no good examples, then you're just ignoring it. Fact.

It's not even just the pruning that's ruining the game, each spec has been dumbed down as a whole this expansion.

Remember how ret in WoD was probably the hardest spec in the game to play in PvP and has generally had a high skillcap for a lot of WoW's history?

Why is it now one of the dumbest specs in the game? Why are Demon Hunters a thing?

[Deleted]

he also said that using the obliterum forge was exciting because the gear could have gem slots on them. =)

[TheVaryag]

i think the issue is pvp is a smaller part of the game then pve
and evereyone wants different things, specially for pvp, people want to curb stomp people who have less gear ,well others want it to be more skill based...
and bgs.. they cant win... every new bg they add people will hate, because people will just stick with warsong gulch and arathi basin...

but yeah pvp has been having alot of issues that could get easily fixed

go back to currency, the rng is horrible
make a pvp focused area in the hub (not underbell,y like a place where you can duel and hang out with pvp training dummies and such)
honor talents are cool, i like the idea of having your class changing in pvp, but balance classes by changing templates/honor talents, dont touch pve talents to pbalance pvp... that was the whole point of the template/pvp change

Smaller? I'm sorry but there's more PvPers than PvE'ers. It's always been this way, raiders are a minority, most of the wow population are pvpers or those who dabble Into PvP. If they loose their PvP playerbase (Which they are slowly In Legion) their game will go Into a death spiral.

And why add new BGs? FIX THE OLD ONES FIRST.

But I do agree we need currency again, less of the random RNG ship and once again guaranteed high end pvp gear. Honor/Conquest gear has to return or PvP will be gone before the next expansion launches. The honor talent system Is fine, It could use re-working, the rewards per honor level could be better, 200 gold, really? That's less than half of what one mission on the table can give me.

PvP Is In the biggest mess It's been since forever, PvP system 3.0 Is not good, go back to 2.0 with the honor talent left In, but re-work some of the talents, and bloody hell remove Artifact Power, nobody likes It. It's just there to make you grind and grind more for pointless and generic 5 % upgrades to ability damage A. And remove the 4th golden trait, dumping AP Into that for a generic 0.5 % upgrade? Worst, Idea, ever.

PvPers are doing more PvE than ever before just so they can do alittle bit of PvP and maybe be stronger than someone else whose spent more time grinding world quests, mythics, raids and BGs and has more AP/gear than you do.

[Gatsbybutters]

This is a terrible metaphor...did they remove a class? Or a whole damage dealing type (i.e. melee)...no. They're transitioning from having buttons that are situational to actually having to use all the buttons you have, again I don't quite understand what people are complaining when they say "lolz pruning sucks" feel like that's just a meme at this point haven't seen an actual GOOD example in months (and a lot has changed since then).



Yeah solo/duo q RBGs would be awesome and should've been implemented a while ago, I'm completely on board with it.
As for solo q 3's, this should never be a thing.

Now why the hell should I break it down for you if other people have? You said you saw good examples of them taking abilities from classes that removed skill and counters against other classes. Your argument is... They're transitioning from having buttons that are situational to actually having to use all the buttons you have... but I used every ability I had in pvp. I had more counters. Why are you arguing for LESS OPTIONS!?

[Krusza]

Smaller? I'm sorry but there's more PvPers than PvE'ers. It's always been this way, raiders are a minority, most of the wow population are pvpers or those who dabble Into PvP. If they loose their PvP playerbase.

Incredibly wrong.

I have no idea where you got that idea from, but it's undeniably not the case. PvE is MASSIVELY more played than PvP and that has ALWAYS been the case. PvPers are a minority by a massive margin.

[Deleted]

also why can't they just make like dueling sanctuaries, if you dual outside a major city you have stat templates.

[Ohmega]

But I do agree we need currency again, less of the random RNG ship and once again guaranteed high end pvp gear. Honor/Conquest gear has to return or PvP will be gone before the next expansion launches. The honor talent system Is fine, It could use re-working, the rewards per honor level could be better, 200 gold, really? That's less than half of what one mission on the table can give me.

PvP Is In the biggest mess It's been since forever, PvP system 3.0 Is not good, go back to 2.0 with the honor talent left In, but re-work some of the talents, and bloody hell remove Artifact Power, nobody likes It. It's just there to make you grind and grind more for pointless and generic 5 % upgrades to ability damage A. And remove the 4th golden trait, dumping AP Into that for a generic 0.5 % upgrade? Worst, Idea, ever.

PvPers are doing more PvE than ever before just so they can do alittle bit of PvP and maybe be stronger than someone else whose spent more time grinding world quests, mythics, raids and BGs and has more AP/gear than you do.

PvP is in an incredibly balanced state, currently. Pretty much every spec of every class is viable in all forms of PvP (that is just a fact). And what is all of this complaining about AP that I see? I have a full-time job and a family and had no problem whatsoever getting all of my artifact weapons to 3+ gold traits within a couple of weeks (two different characters, 6 total weapons).

Gamers these days are so entitled. "I just hit max level and I want to have the best gear now!!!!" Well guess what, it does not work that way, and it never has. Could you even imagine that type of statement in earlier versions of this game? Dear lord.......Vanilla would have crushed you.

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Summary of Holinka's interview (see the front page - permalink):

* We are looking into A, B.
* We are thinking about C, D, E.
* We don't think we are going to do F. <Spends tons of time mulling over the complexities that are so first-level basic that it becomes clear this is the first time Holinka thinks about the topic.>
* That thing you are worried about is working fine, we just have to do a better job explaining how it works.
* We aren't sure about doing G, please send more feedback.
* We sometimes think about H. Don't know if we are going to do it.
* J is a real challenge. No commitments.
* The team is aware that you don't like K.
* By the way, it's all good. We found a metric on which PVP ladder in Legion looks fine compared to ladders of previous expansions. (Or maybe this is false and we just think nobody would pin us on the numbers.)

The only things Holinka said like "here, we did / are going to do this" are:

* Leveling PVP is going to reward more experience (a change of a multiplicative factor, 5 minutes of dev time).
* Rated weekly quests will have bonus rolls (a change of a flag on several quests, same as above, requires next to no time to do).
* They will show the title cutoffs by themselves (at best this is a very minor addition to the bnet API, at worst just a blog post).
* They are extending PVP cups (e-sport, bla bla bla, not something the dev team even does, but whatever).

These guys are officially doing nothing. They have a whole team and the amount of work they can show after several months is less than half of a work day of a single dev.

Disgusting.

What makes you think that claim is false? Do you really just wish that Legion's PvP scene is dead and it confuses you that it is not, relative to previous seasons?

[rda]

Incredibly wrong.

I have no idea where you got that idea from, but it's undeniably not the case. PvE is MASSIVELY more played than PvP and that has ALWAYS been the case. PvPers are a minority by a massive margin.

No.

Roughly speaking, at max level:

The number of players who do random BGs is about the same as the number of players who do instances (not raids, instances).
The number of players who do rated PVP is about the same as the number of players who raid higher than LFR.

One of the main sources is Blizzard's infographics.

Yes, it really is the case, the number of people who PVP is about the same as the number of people who PVE - in multiple measures. PVP is NOT the rarely played niche activity, it is as mainstream as it gets, on par with PVE, and they both are only perhaps surpassed by alting / leveling.

The bounds perhaps drift with time, ie, in Legion it is obvious that PVE is retaining more players than PVP for many reasons, but since up until Legion we had no major cataclysmic shifts in that area, the pairs of numbers above should be if not "about the same" then at least "of the same scale".

[MeinKyzr]

People are still bothered by pruning? Don't think I'll ever understand why more buttons = more skill...

So I can only answer this from my personal perspective, but I can tell you more buttons did mean more skill for me at least.

I played a Feral Druid back in Cataclysm. Ignoring for a sec that they were incredibly strong, the options I had available to me were so much more interesting than they are now.

1. Hibernate - I think this might be one spell I miss the most. With it I had the option to sleep Hunter pets and other Druids (especially other Ferals). This was also before CC effects could remove DoT spells, so you had to be smart using it. It was also a threat to you as well, as other Druids had a very high chance of landing it on you.

2. Scare Beast - This was a ton of fun to play against. Good Druids could make the most out of a powershift by canceling Cat Form to dodge this spell (or a Hibernate). Bad Druids spent all game feared and trapped. This being removed was a buff for me, but was a "fun" nerf.

3. Pred Swiftness - Aside from instant clone being OP, Pred Swiftness had several spells that could benefit from the cast. Wrath, Clone, Hibernate have all been removed from PS's already Root/Heal options. PS feels like a much shallower skill as a result of the prune.

4. Soothe - Another option that's been removed from the game. Fury Warriors weren't the only ones with an Enrage effect (and weren't that great for most of Cata), but was just another dynamic relationship with another class that was removed from the game.

If there's one thing I miss, it was variety in fights. Right now the game feels so much emptier in terms of options (and threats).

[rda]

What makes you think that claim is false? Do you really just wish that Legion's PvP scene is dead and it confuses you that it is not, relative to previous seasons?

My main problem with the metric is not that the numbers might be false (I can't verify that because he is referring to internal numbers and I know enough of interviews like that to say that he might be more or less making / creatively interpolating them up on the spot), but rather that this is just cherry-picking.

Give me two wildly different data sets and I will find a couple of factors on which they are the same / one is "better" than the other. That's what he is doing - taking a particular factor and using it to say that "things are fine" while in reality just pick a different factor and they are not fine again.

[RelaZ]

PvP is in an incredibly balanced state, currently. Pretty much every spec of every class is viable in all forms of PvP (that is just a fact). And what is all of this complaining about AP that I see? I have a full-time job and a family and had no problem whatsoever getting all of my artifact weapons to 3+ gold traits within a couple of weeks (two different characters, 6 total weapons).

Gamers these days are so entitled. "I just hit max level and I want to have the best gear now!!!!" Well guess what, it does not work that way, and it never has. Could you even imagine that type of statement in earlier versions of this game? Dear lord.......Vanilla would have crushed you.

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What makes you think that claim is false? Do you really just wish that Legion's PvP scene is dead and it confuses you that it is not, relative to previous seasons?

That is mathematically impossible. A new player cannot farm 34+ traits in a matter "of a few weeks". It takes months just to get AK25, and only at around AK23 or so is the AP gain high enough to make 34+ possible.

And again, really the issue with Legion PvP is not balance. I'm personally happy they're making changes more often, and yes it's quite balanced right now (although Demo and Frost/Sub is maybe a bit too common for my liking). The problem with Legion PvP is (in order of importance):

1) Class Design. Basically #ThePrune. Yes, more buttons does not by default equal more skill, but it usually does. In this case it certainly does, because the abilities removed were the skillful ones. In the case of basically all specs they made them more about spamming PvE damage (with AoE cleave baked into them) while relying on passives or retarded autoplay mechanics to win instead of carefully executed CC chains involving many players and high level communication.

2) Stat Templates. Some people really want to decide for themselves which stats they want. It's unfair to them to decide for them.

3) The Grind. In 7.2 they're remaking the AP system and adding more traits, AK and enabling them all in PvP. This means that a new player will have to wait even longer until s/he is competitive in PvP. Have fun farming AK30 (or whatever) and 70 traits or so, it'll take over a season to do so. This is killing PvP participation more than anything, why would anyone want to start up WoW to play arena now? It'll take over an entire season just to get competitive, far more than any normal persons attention span if they're just starting up.

4) RNG Gearing. I still havn't gotten any 880+ shoulders in over 200 games of Arena above 2.2k (majority above 2.4k), cba still having 865 shoulders when the season is closing out. And no, "gear doesn't matter anymore" is incorrect. It doesn't matter as much, but a team outgearing the other by a combination of 30 ilvls and 20 traits has a significantly larger chance at winning. Seems they're doing something about gearing though, although I'm sure it'll be just as half-assed and "we love RNG sockets/warforged/titanforged in PvP" as the current system.

[rda]

By the way...

PvP is in an incredibly balanced state, currently. Pretty much every spec of every class is viable in all forms of PvP (that is just a fact).

What???

I am going to link you a picture I used in a different thread:



This is what you call "incredibly balanced".

And you really don't want to know what happens if you switch to the "RBG" tab (ie, Balance: 53%).

[oplawlz]

No.

Roughly speaking, at max level:

The number of players who do random BGs is about the same as the number of players who do instances (not raids, instances).
The number of players who do rated PVP is about the same as the number of players who raid higher than LFR.

One of the main sources is Blizzard's infographics.

Yes, it really is the case, the number of people who PVP is about the same as the number of people who PVE - in multiple measures. PVP is NOT the rarely played niche activity, it is as mainstream as it gets, on par with PVE, and they both are only perhaps surpassed by alting / leveling.

The bounds perhaps drift with time, ie, in Legion it is obvious that PVE is retaining more players than PVP for many reasons, but since up until Legion we had no major cataclysmic shifts in that area, the pairs of numbers above should be if not "about the same" then at least "of the same scale".

What kind of crack are you on? Raiding outside of lfr has always been niche, no one said anything about raiding vs. arena. The vast majority of players never see anything beyond lfr, and many never even join that. These are all primarily pve players. There's a reason the population of pve servers far surpases that of pvp, and why there is endless crying on pvp servers when changes actually require people be exposed to the enemy faction.

[Ohmega]

By the way...



What???

I am going to link you a picture I used in a different thread:



This is what you call "incredibly balanced".

And you really don't want to know what happens if you switch to the "RBG" tab (ie, Balance: 53%).

You are confused. "Balanced" does not mean that the player populations are equally playing/enjoying all specs of all classes in the same way. "Balanced" refers to the relative strength of classes and specs relative to one another. In Legion, I have yet to play a spec, let alone a class that did not feel strong in PvP. (For reference, I have a hunter, monk, and DK all at 110 and have played priest, paladin and mage on a friend's account as well.)

Just because certain classes/specs are underrepresented does not mean that they are underpowered. This should be self-evident.

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That is mathematically impossible. A new player cannot farm 34+ traits in a matter "of a few weeks". It takes months just to get AK25, and only at around AK23 or so is the AP gain high enough to make 34+ possible.

I never said I completely filled out each weapon, only that I got the gold traits on each of them, in a short period of time. (Because I did.)

As far as your other concerns, RNG gear should not bother you as much as it is (same goes for most). Gear means next to nothing these days, especially when you are talking about going from 865 to 880 in a slot or two. Your desire to fill gear slots is an artifact of previous iterations of this game.

[Deleted]

They ignored the more important questions about pruning. There was a question about sub rogues and it just flew past them even tho it got the most upvotes on the forum page.

[Irian]

Yeah, Holinka's "interviews" are increasingly showing how...absolutely nothing they are. They follow the same formula, usually don't say a lot and at most simply say "oh x is an issue" and provides some lazy fix that doesn't actually fix the problem.

[Ohmega]

My main problem with the metric is not that the numbers might be false (I can't verify that because he is referring to internal numbers and I know enough of interviews like that to say that he might be more or less making / creatively interpolating them up on the spot), but rather that this is just cherry-picking.

Give me two wildly different data sets and I will find a couple of factors on which they are the same / one is "better" than the other. That's what he is doing - taking a particular factor and using it to say that "things are fine" while in reality just pick a different factor and they are not fine again.

How are the data sets "wildly different"?

[Krusza]

They ignored the more important questions about pruning. There was a question about sub rogues and it just flew past them even tho it got the most upvotes on the forum page.

Yep, they are only going to answer questions like "y u not ad mor bg!!!" because it's easy to answer.

If they said "we are pruning more abilities to appease the casuals and make it easier to get into the game" there'd be an uproar.

[rda]

What kind of crack are you on? Raiding outside of lfr has always been niche, no one said anything about raiding vs. arena. The vast majority of players never see anything beyond lfr, and many never even join that. These are all primarily pve players. There's a reason the population of pve servers far surpases that of pvp, and why there is endless crying on pvp servers when changes actually require people be exposed to the enemy faction.

I am not sure what you are objecting to in my post. Yes, raiding outside of LFR has been niche. So?

The population of PVE servers does not "far surpass" that of PVP, just so you know. The PVE:PVP ratio is 58:42 on US and 46:54 (the other way around) on EU.

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How are the data sets "wildly different"?

Oh, god... That was an example. It flew over your head. I am going to talk in shorter sentences now. So that you understand.

Ignore the sentence you bolded the words in. Just remove it, the rest doesn't need it. Here's the important sentence:

"That's what he is doing - taking a particular factor and using it to say that "things are fine" while in reality just pick a different factor and they are not fine again."

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You are confused. "Balanced" does not mean that the player populations are equally playing/enjoying all specs of all classes in the same way. "Balanced" refers to the relative strength of classes and specs relative to one another. In Legion, I have yet to play a spec, let alone a class that did not feel strong in PvP. (For reference, I have a hunter, monk, and DK all at 110 and have played priest, paladin and mage on a friend's account as well.)

Oh, really???

And how are you going to determine that "relative strength of classes and specs relative to one another"? By eye? Or will you use some numbers? If so, which ones and how?

Are we supposed to go by this assessment of Legion PVP by you, the expert - "In Legion, I have yet to play a spec, let alone a class that did not feel strong in PvP." ? No, really, explain.

[Ohmega]

Oh, god... That was an example. It flew over your head. I am going to talk in shorter sentences now. So that you understand.

Ignore the sentence you bolded the words in. Just remove it, the rest doesn't need it. Here's the important sentence:

"That's what he is doing - taking a particular factor and using it to say that "things are fine" while in reality just pick a different factor and they are not fine again."

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Oh, really???

And how are you going to determine that "relative strength of classes and specs relative to one another"? By eye? Or will you use some numbers? If so, which ones and how?

Are we supposed to go by this assessment of Legion PVP by you, the expert - "In Legion, I have yet to play a spec, let alone a class that did not feel strong in PvP." ? No, really, explain.

1) I literally used your own words to respond to you. I am sorry your language was unclear (and your follow up did nothing to improve your situation). Comparing arena participation at the start of a season to arena participation at the start of another season seems like a reasonable metric for relative arena participation. Do you not agree?

2) Yes, really. How are you determining that these classes are indeed weak? The data you have provided do nothing of the sort (kind of like your previous argumentative shortcomings). All games of this nature have this same kind of "issue". Some characters or classes are underplayed for some reason for some stretch of time, until someone points out just how strong they are/have been, then people start flocking to that character and calling it "broken" (even though nothing happened to it to make it such). This is an evident trend in pretty much all MOBAs and MMOs alike, and probably more so the case in MMOs because of the greater interaction between character and player that MMOs possesses relative to MOBAs. Once again, just because something is not played often does not mean it is weak. There is literally nothing in your argument to state otherwise.

Quick note: Blood DK and Frost DK are situated at the bottom of your image, percentage wise as is BM hunter. Are you willing to say that those three specs/classes are not viable in PvP? As someone who has played each of those fairly extensively in Legion, I can attest to the opposite.