PVP and PVE Balancing Act

[Kelona]

I am kind of new to this forum so please don't yell at me if this has been discussed before on a previous forum. I am sorry. Ok, with that said I can write my post.

I have been playing Wow for a long time as well as many other MMO's and what I see happen time and time again is games breaking themselves trying to balance out PVP and PVE. These are two different kinds of beasts. You can't keep nerfing everything until the game isn't playable to either side. If you do that then you will lose people because no one likes to be on top one day and then the next day on the bottom because they nerfed all your skills and you can't do anything. I don't like it and I am sure many others don't either but then we are talking about what is fair and not about the players.

Most if not all PVPers want a fair playground where one side is not overly skewed in favor of the other team. To put it simple, where both teams are the same. This task would be a lot easier if there wasn't as much diversity with all the different classes and skills that can be brought into the arena or battleground during a match. This is where the game programers have to do their magic and find a balance by either increasing the damage of a certain skill or reducing the damage. Not a easy task since you also have to worry about how this will effect the PVE part of the game. If they nerf it down too low you will get complaints from both PVP and PVE. If you make it to high you will get complaints from the PVP'ers. (Note: I didn't say you would get complaints from the PVE'ers because they would love it!) So, how do you strike a balance that will make both sides happy and for how long with this balance last?

The truely only way to make PVP 100% fair on both sides is to give everyone the same skills that they can do while they are doing PVP. The only downside is that it would be boring after the first few hours. A good example is if they implemented a dodgeball pvp arena. Everyone can get a ball and throw it, block, and catch but other then that they can't do any other skill to make their team better then the other team. This would be fair but would it be fun? Yes, but also no. The first thing any MMO that has PVE as well as PVP needs to know is that it doesn't matter how fair you make it. Someone is going to figure out how to unbalance it to their advantage and exploit it. This could be from a trinket or weapon that does something good in PVE but wasn't attended for PVP because it was too powerful. Someone will figure it out and use it to give their side that advantage.

So how do you make PVP fair without hurting PVE in the process. Well, WoW did figure it out but they didn't entirely implement it. What I mean is that anytime you enter a areana or battleground you are in an instance and that instance can be contolled, skills, weapons, etc. They can contol what skills you can use and what skills you can't. A good example is arenas and how you can't use Heroism or Bloodlust. Why, because then your team would always have to have a character that can do it or you would most likely lose the match. So in arenas your Heroism and Bloodlust are greyed out and you can't use them. But, what if we took this even farther. Why not just change your skills values when you are doing PVP in arenas and battlegrounds. World pvp doesn't really matter because people are just killing each other for the fun and not for the honor points.

Let's say Bob has a Shaman and he is going to do arena with his friends. Once he enters the PVP arena instance his skills will change to their PVP values. When he get's done they change back to the PVE values. So if the programmers need to change a skill they can do it on two different values, PVP and PVE. So if a skill is two powerful in PVP they can change it and it won't effect PVE or vice versa. Yes, it would require some programming to chance a skill that has one value to a skill that now has two values depending on if you doing PVP or PVE, but in whole it would be more balanced. A good example would be let's say Bob is an enhancement shaman and he uses Lava Lash on his opponent. In PVE this skill will do 300% weapon damage but in PVP it will do 200%.

The question is will people like it? Well, it really depends on the player because in PVP you are always looking for a way to overpower your opponent so there will still be people trying to find ways to do that. The truth is that PVP will never be fair unless they give everyone the same skill bar. The true question you need to ask is what will it do to PVE. It will eliminate a lot of nerfing of skills and gear because someone has been exploting a build that uses it in PVP to give themselves a unfair advantage over the other person.

Any and all feedback is welcome

[ComputerNerd]

Blizzard have approached that subject multiple times, and state that having abilities behave different under one type of content vs another is something they want to avoid as much as possible.
It is simply a horrible mechanism and very unintuitive.

It is in selected cases a necessity though.

Your big idea has been brought up many times, so unfortunately isn't an original idea and nor is it going to be expanded more than it is now.
Primarily with CC reductions.

Resilience was an artificial means of solving the damage issue, but that again was simply unintuitive.
Therefore blizzard are making adjustments to player health pools such that hopefully the same ability can hit as hard on a player as it can on a mob without being detrimental to the experience.

[Yakrion]

Essentially, you're saying that damage (and I assume healing) should have entirely different values between pvp and pve. Extending this logically, at least a few skills would likely need to work differently in pvp and pve. It's not a terrible idea, and it's also a fairly common one.

While having all abilities change to suit pvp or pve would probably make balancing easier, Blizzard has stated very bluntly (not too long ago) in the past that they do not like this method and prefer to have abilities work as close to the same as is reasonable no matter where you are to prevent people having to learn two different sets of abilities (paraphrasing). So, I'd suggest trying to come up with changes inside that mindset if you want to suggest ways to improve the game.

P.S. Sorry to kill your intellectual high :P.