Well it wasn’t really Blizzard but it’s someone high up enough to give this statement a bit more “oomph”. Blizzard’s VP for Game Design and WoW mastermind Rob Pardo recently had an interview with Warcry.com on his view about the 5 years of WoW. It was here that he talked more about how the game has been evolving from a more hardcore game to a more casual friendly game where more players can see the content they come up with. He explains that this was because a lot of designers including himself came from being hardcore gamers in other MMO’s like Everquest and it was this hardcore gamer in them that made them think that’s how things should be. But as we know they’re learned that it didn’t have to be that way to make the game fun.

Anyway, it was in that interview where Mr. Pardo said it outright that the Arena Tournament was a mistake. To clarify, he mentioned that when they thought it up before they never expected how much it problems it would cause in terms of balancing classes especially when taking both PvE and PvP into consideration. These his words:

We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction. source

Mr. Pardo even said that if he could go back in time, either he would go back to before the game came out and changed the rules to make the Arena easier to implement or he would just scrap the idea. Of course they can’t scrap the Arena Tournament now so we just have to live with it, taking the good with the bad. Right now I’m just have this happy feeling that what I was thinking all this time ever since it came out was right all along.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

wintergrasp battle mage

Koralon the Flame Watcher was one of the awaited features announced for patch 3.2 but he didn’t come out when the patch went live a few weeks ago. The release of Koralon instead coincided with the start of Season 7 for the Arena Tournament. His loot for both the 10 and 25 man versions includes Emblems of Triumph and Tier 9 gear for slots similar to what Emalon drops.

I guess it’s safe to say that since he drops loot of the same tier as the Crusader’s Coliseum raid, he’s going to be at harder and more demanding on gear requirements than the Emalon encounter.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Vindication tooltip

One of the changes is coming in the form of a hotfix concerning the Paladin Retribution talent Vindication. Thankfully it’s a PvP change that doesn’t have a big change in PvE since Vindication is mostly a PvP spec talent. As it is now, Vindication reduces all the attributes of the paladin’s target by a certain amount. The hotfix will change it to reduce all attributes except Stamina and Intellect.

According to CM Bornakk, one of the reasons this change is being is because players who face Ret Pallies in the Arena pretty much automatically get handicapped by having their health points reduced at the start of the fight, something that could be powerfully annoying in a PvP setting especially in Arena. I imagine though that the stamina reduction that Ret pallies give would be at least a bit useful for leveling Paladins out there

I’m sure a lot of PvP-ing ret pallies are mad about this because one of the biggest PvP advantage of this talent was taken away. To make things worse, it seems like while this talent would still have some use against the melee classes like Warriors, Rogues and Death Knights it doesn’t do much to affect the caster classes/specs. But comes to think of it, before this change it probably didn’t anyway aside from the intellect reduction. There’s a suggestion to make this talent reduce spell power and attack power instead but I don’t know how powerful that will be.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

engineering goggles

A similar problem has addressed recently with the nerf to stealth detection items. As someone who used to do some arena tournament way back, I know what it’s like to play against stealth groups and it could be quite annoying. It seems though that people have been using stealth detection items to help with this problem, even the low level stealth detection items just because they provided an advantage

According to Bornakk the following nerfs were made because not only did they give a big advantage in PvP but it also forced players to use lower level gear even when better items were available. These changes are already live but the tooltips will be updated in the next minor patch.

* Ultra-Spectropic Detection Goggles can no longer be used in Arena.

* All epic engineering goggles have had their stealth detection removed.

* The following items have their stealth detection decreased:

Catseye Ultra Goggles
MaBlood Guard’s Dragonhide Gauntlets
Knight-Lieutenant’s Dragonhide Gloves
General’s Dragonhide Gloves
Bloodvine Lens
Knight-Lieutenant’s Dragonhide Grips
Blood Guard’s Dragonhide Grips
The Night Watchman

Post from: WOW Obsessed

item level 239 arena weapons

Making season two gear available for honor back in the day just killed my desire to do any arena matches since I could just do battlegrounds for the gear I want. I really wanted the other gear from the newer seasons but I just didn’t want to do any matches especially when they made rating requirements for some of the gear.

I know this is an old topic but the subject of rating requirements for arena gear is still relevant even today and it just got a bit more relevant after Blizzard Poster Crygil came out with news about a change they’re implementing. It actually seems like this change is already in effect based on his words.

The current arena rating system allows more players to have higher ratings in the 2v2 bracket when compared to 3v3 and 5v5. We are preparing an in-game update that will be improving the rating system of the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets to allow all three of the brackets to have a similar number of players able to achieve ratings on par with what’s currently possible in our 2v2 arena bracket. As a result, we are changing the personal and team rating requirements for the item level 239 weapons from 2200 to 2350, but keep in mind the tooltip will continue to show the requirement as 2200 until patch 3.1.2.
source

note: To see Crygil’s entire post, just click the link above.

This means that it’s going to be much harder for players to get these arena weapons, with the rating requirement being raised. Some teams were probably trying to get that 2200 rating just for this and now they’ll be disappointed to see it’s been raised. I guess it’s all for the best anyway since these weapons are the best pvp weapons available at the moment, being compared to weapons you can get from heroic Ulduar. If it gets too easy to obtain then the welfare epics discussion from the past may be revived because of this.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

replenishment

One of the newest changes made in the hope for more balance concerns the Replenishment effect in the Arena Tournament. Replenishment was changed through a hotfix so that it will only affect the player and not the rest of the group inside Arenas. It will continue to function the same way anywhere else. CM Zarhym mentioned that replenishment remains balanced for bigger groups but not for smaller groups. In my experience, arena matches are supposed to be fast enough that players should not really need replenishment anyway. But making it work for the whole team could really provide make players go all out with the damage and healing without worrying about resources.

Post from: WOW Obsessed