WoW: Arena Balance going into Season 8

Tags : season 8, arena points, Arena season 8, wow arena balance, wow news

Since the beginning of the new Arena season, and the subsequent changes to resilience, there has been a large amount of discussion about the viability of certain classes and what Blizzard's vision is in terms of balance in World of Warcraft PvP.

Most of this has been focused around Death Knights in particular, as they struggle without the assistance of another class with a wound type ability. Blizzard posters have been fairly active on this subject, and have said some fairly revealing things about their vision of PvP going into WoW's 8th season of Arenas.

Ghostcrawler

Q u o t e:
GC my question with all this DK PVP non sense would be. Why does "bring the player not the class" not apply to Arenas? Why should I be forced to pair with people outside of friends, I don't have access to this comp that "works so they are fine for now" since my friends that pvp don't play the classes that "work" with DK's. Why should Anyone be forced to reroll an entire new class, gear them up to acceptable standards for arenas, just so they can play with who they choose too?

Class synergy matters a lot more in PvP than in PvE. As a very simple example, chaining crowd control with different diminishing returns is almost non-existent in PvE. Therefore, classes with different forms of crowd control play very well together in PvP. To break that (to make class synergy not matter), we'd have to make all CC's DR with each other. I think it would get worse than that though. I think you'd have to give just about every ability to every class for fear that you might be missing one if you just paired with 2 other random players. It takes a whole raid to get almost one of everything in PvE and that's with a lot of homogenization on our part. We like that class comp matters in Arenas. It really doesn't much in BGs.

I also understand that there is a component of players who liked the aspect of BC Arenas where you could pretty much go in with anything and eventually get good gear. Maybe there is a way to still have a place for that, but we backed off of it because too many players were opting for Arena over PvE content simply because the loot per unit effort was so generous. Adding a skill component to earn the best PvP loot pushed some players back into PvE to earn the best gear.

Q u o t e:

then why are you replying to a troll thread and not the ones with context?

For exactly the reasons I stated. There are many DK threads that are essentially just "buff me." DKs have a viable 3s comp, but some DKs just don't like their role in that comp. Therefore I was trying to direct the conversation in a more productive direction of what kind of comps are you expecting to be a part of in an ideal world, and what changes would DKs need to make that happen. There are a lot of "Make me hit hard, then I can pair with anyone and comp doesn't matter!" But there are some good suggestions too.

What Ghostcrawler seems to be saying is that as long as each class has at least one viable 3s comp, Blizzard doesn't consider them deserving of any sort of urgency or rebalancing. Currently Death Knights can run the TSG composition, which consists of Unholy DK, Arms Warrior, and (usually) a Holy Paladin. While this comp is not as powerful as it was in previous seasons, its continued success validates DK balance in Blizzard's eyes.

Understandably balancing a game with 30 potential talent trees, and multiple players on each team is a nightmare. This does not address the fact, however, that some classes, like Frost Mages, have access to a myriad of different viable compositions while others seem to have much fewer viable options.

This may be a shortcoming of the limited scope of the Arena format of PvP combat. The extremely pure nature of Arena combat, where players duel each other in a tiny box, is also its weakness, because it reveals imbalances between classes and specs. It also doesn't help anything that Arena is essentially a side-game to the main stage of PvE raiding, and so recieves less attention.

GC gives an example of this difficulty, and how to potentially frame suggestions in a way that would be useful to Blizzard:

Ghostcrawler

So for those of you not happy with being paired with a warrior, what comps do you see yourself potentially fitting in and what changes would it take to make that comp workable? Are you looking for mage-DK-priest?

(Saying "I should be able to play with anyone" is a fine goal, but deficient enough in details so as to not be super useful.)

We're much more interested in discussions like that than we are "Buff Scourge Strike so I can hit harder" or "Change all these talents so I have more answers." We're looking for a bit more context.

This is a pretty evasive answer, but it gets the point across. World of Warcraft balance is so intermeshed in so many different ways that changing it can only be done in tiny increments. Taking on the balance issues in present Arenas in such a way that would allow a wider variety of compositions would require a complete revamp of the game, particularly regarding wound effects. At this point players will probably just have to deal with it, hope that their class is powerful this season and the next, and see what Cataclysm has in store.

Source: tentonhammer.com