How is Blizzard balancing PvP? (punishing skilled players?)

[korijenkins]

They seem to be trying to make fights take much longer.

Whats been a big complaint with WoW's PVP as of late imo? Health too high, burst too high. Outplaying someone without cooldowns may not matter because the health was so high, bursting with all of them rolling was the only way to take someone down.

Now the problem is theres a GCD on cooldowns that prevents you from rolling 3 of them and bursting, so players still have high healthpools but the burst that countered it is gone completely.

Time to kill is just way too high. If I'm better than someone, literally running circles around them while they hold the S key down, giving them more health just makes it take longer to kill them. It just wastes my time, and gives them more time for someone else to eventually show up and help.

I've played for almost a decade now. And in that time I've seen myself gradually losing the ability to beat players who are probably worse than me. Where I could once 1v3 people before by prioritizing targets, managing cooldowns, and outmaneuvering them, I now struggle to kill a single player because of the insane healthpools relative to my damage.

I guess I just feel that if someone has 30k health, I should hit harder than 3-4k. It shouldn't take 10 abilities to kill a player who sucks. Granted my sample size with the new stat squish is rather low. Most of my experience with the shite that is PvP right now came in Lesion.

[torros]

There is a team of like 4 dudes that each play a character 4-6 hours like twice a month. Based on their expertise in design and the 20ish hours of play experience they make changes.

UNLESS... A lot of really angry people make a lot of noise across several forums and include lots of fancy numbers that seem to be well supported. When this happens you have to choose the targeted class and then give it a random 3% nerf somewhere. GFGG.

[Noctiphobia]

I'd guess a mix of looking at top classes and feelcraft. And they seem to balance around players who aren't completely braindead. E.g. Psyfiend absolutely wrecked people who didn't bother to do anything about it, but was pretty balanced against competent opponents (and I think people only used it in 2v2, because life swap was too important in 3v3), and they left it without major changes for the whole expansion.

[Deleted]

Kinda, but if the class is harder to play shouldn't it be more powerful so it would feel rewarding?

If a one class just has 3 buttons and 1 CD and the other has 5 buttons, 3 cds and has to check out the DoTs and other things on the target doesn't it deserve to be more powerful?

That's how the game used to be, with a few exceptions. Frost, affliction, sub, discipline etc were alll stronger than faceroll specs like fury, arcane, ret, BM etc. Then it all changed in wotlk and went downhill from there.

[Mafic]

They do all of the above.

Blizz doesn't really balanced PVP but they try to make it tolerable. In other words you are going to always have certain specs as part of a meta and then a next tier of specs on par, etc.

[Ermelloth]

I know this might sound shocking to our local PvP pros, R1's etc., but Blizzard should balance PvP around average players (which make 90-95% of potential PvP player base). Because at 2300+ it's a completely different game. But, if you project what is going at 2300+ on 1400-1600, that often results in a disaster.

Because when you balance entire PvP gaming on 2300+ 3vs3 bracket, empowering and nerfing some specs accordingly, this can devastate lower brackets where, for example, very few players know how to properly handle a spec like Sub Rogue. This can lead to a Sub nerf, justified at 2300+ rating, but handicapping an average-low rated 1500 Sub Rogues, causing them to stop queuing altogether...

I think that listening to R1s might be the reason for so many balance failures in the past.

Eventually, what is important for game's success (and PvP's success as a part of WoW) is the numbers and % of total participation. I can understand that, perhaps, it's more prestigious to have 200-300 content R1s than half million content backpedallers, but subs wise, income wise, etc. it should be quite the opposite.