Ghostcrawler replied to a thread talking about PvP and PvE and how they affect each other in terms of health pools, damage and healing are concerned. The OP of the thread mentioned that the current situation sees us having DPS meant to deal a large amount of damage in a short time, one of the formulas to success in PvP. He also says that PvE situations make it that healers also are able to heal through large amounts of health with little effort, which has could be powerful in a PvP setting. I’m not sure what to say about his assessment since I don’t do PvP that much but Ghostcrawler has the following to say:

Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower. That should help address some of the overly binary feel of PvP and PvE encounters.

You’ll still be able to kill people as well as be able to heal them. The pace will just be a little slower and both healing and killing should require more than 1-2 buttons. source

No matter how you look at it, this is a nerf to healing (and dps in a PvP setting) but probably needed to fix the scaling problems people have been talking about throughout this expansion. With this change it certainly looks like things are going to be slower throughout the game. The dps will take a wee bit longer to kill players in PvP because of the bigger health pools and it’s going to take a wee bit longer for the healers to top of players to full health with the weaker heals. I wonder how this change is going to affect a scenario where heals are not part of the equation, like a one on one fight in a battleground between a rogue and a warrior for example. With this change, it should be a lot harder for the rogue to take the warrior down if at all.

We’ll just have to see how this plays out and hope that it will ultimately fix the problem.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

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

As you know, one of the ways to obtain Stone Keeper’s Shards is to do dungeons and kill bosses while your faction controls Wintergrasp. Since Wintergrasp is a per server thing, the status of control varies depending on what server you’re in. There are times when you do dungeons and you can’t get Stone Keeper’s Shards from bosses and there are times when you can. Since this is a per server issue, this becomes sort of a problem when you’re doing cross-server dungeons using the new LFG system coming out in patch 3.3.

According to CM Zarhym, the system is set up to determine the state of Wintergrasp control in your server and reward Stone Keeper Shards accordingly. So only players whose faction controls Wintergrasp on their server can get the buff that allows players to loot the shards.. It’s actually a pretty simple and fair solution and would be something I would have suggested if someone asked me.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

battlegrounds battlemasters

Blizzard didn’t forget about twinks when they released the feature to gain experience from Battlrgrounds, They did provide a feature that allowed players to turn off their experience gain so that twinks can not only PvP without the fear of leveling past their bracket but also play against their fellow twinks in their battlegroup. This is also to prevent casual players who are doing battlegrounds for fun as they level up from getting stomped over and over by the twinks. This whole thing has caused a bit of a problem though.

Keeping the twinks together and away from the casual guys is a great idea in theory. The problem is that, in certain battlegroups there don’t seem to be enough twinks. Many players have reported that they often have to spend so much time queuing up for the xp-off games. This just proves that twinking isn’t equally popular across all battlegroups. Blue poster Crygil acknowledged that they are aware of this problem and that they are watching this closely. They’re working on a solution to this that won’t affect players who aren’t interested in this practice. The only solution I can see right now is to pool all the twinks into one battlegroup but unfortunately CM Zarhym said that massive technical limitations prevents them from doing this.

Well just have to see what solution they have for this issue but I don’t expect that this is anywhere near the top of their list since twinking still isn’t something they endorse but just allow.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

strand of the ancients

Blizzard has said that they really intended Strand of the Ancients to make sides random but what they did just caused some bugs so they fixed it at Alliance starting out on offense while Horde defends. By patch 3.2 this problem will finally be fixed. It’s about time too since it’s been more than six months already since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion came out. I’m not one who does battlegrounds a lot and Strand of the Ancients isn’t exactly my first choice when I do decide to do some but this news makes me feel good because I like hearing that it’s finally getting the fix it’s needed for a long time. I like hearing that something will finally work as it’s supposed to.

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

silvermoon battlemasters

In my case, I still haven’t tried Strand of the Ancients so I can’t comment on that. Making my judgment based on the other BG’s, I’d have to say that Alterac Valley is my favorite. Ever since Blizzard changed AV in TBC so that the matches reward fast matches, it’s been quite a blast to play. It gives you that feeling of large scale battle and it also incorporates some PvE into that PvP, which I like a lot. Eye of the Storm would probably be my next favorite since it’s like Arathi Basin with a twist of Warsong Gulch without being Warsong Gulch. the thing I hate about WSG is that it could go really fast or really slow depending on how you play. I hate that uncertainty. EoTS and Arathi Basin works on a resource gathering system and you know that once you reach a certain amount the game is over. With that, you know that the game won’t drag on to insane durations like WSG could.

What about you? What’s your favorite BG? Cast your vote in CM Eyonix’s poll. It’s going to end on April 14 so there’s still some time!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

pvp toggle

The past few days I’ve been wondering about a problem my mage has been having. He got flagged the other day and while I’m not totally sure how, it might have been when I dueled a friend. Anyway, for the past few days I’ve been trying to get rid of that flagged status and up to now it’s still there. I’ve tried toggling pvp on and off and the countdown to turn off pvp doesn’t start. Taking a flight path didn’t work but it’s supposed to. I tried going in an instance and while it went away inside, the second i stepped out it went right back.

This is really the strange occurrence that’s been bugging me the past few days and I’m glad I don’t really play my mage much these days. I think it’s time to put in a GM ticket but the strangeness of the situation is keeping me from doing so right now. Have any of you experienced anything strange like this while playing WoW?

update: Learn something new everyday. Thanks to a guildie, I was able to get rid of this problem. Apparently if you have a pvp daily in your quest log (which I wasn’t aware I had), you won’t unflag until you remove it from your log.

Post from: WOW Obsessed