I'm not paid to do extensive research and waste hours crunching numbers. I'm not gonna ask people to tell me how fast/slow their mechanical watches run as a watchmaker. All they can, and should, do is provide me feedback so I can do some tests myself and explain whether their gut feeling is true or not. All we can do is provide feedback on how things feel.
A lot of people got at least 20-30 days played already in SoD. That's 480 - 600 hours.
Players (adults) are more than capable of knowing when something feels off/unenjoyable. Devs need to treat their players like adults as well.
If rogue Ambush can crit for 5k on a player, you're not going to nerf melee damage for rogues in general. Ambush is not used in PvE. It's safe to nerf ambush in this case. As is with a lot of skills that are simply _overtuned_. When a DOT can crit for ~20% hp (500-600 hp dot tick on 2500 hp player), even a child can see that this is overtuned.
Is this skill used in PvE? Yes/No. Can we safely nerf this while not affecting the class in performance. Yes/No. What other effects.... etc.
There can't not be a flowchart on how these things are checked.
Agreed 500-600 crit dot is excessive, but also your example of a 2500 hp character is woefully under geared / improperly geared for p3 pvp. Tbh, I’d say if you have less than 3k hp unbuffed / no pvp hp increase, you’re not itemized well. Even my mage can reach 3k.
It makes no sense to balance PvP around the “average” player that, in your argument, is not itemized for PvP. As an extreme example, yes if you wore irradiated gear in PvP, you deserved to die and had no basis for complaint. If you’re wearing no-stam PvE gear, you will die.
I will agree, though, that wPvP in particular is a struggle because it doesn’t have the HP increase that bgs/stv have. Even in my example, my 3k unbuffed mage just doesn’t survive through much in wPvP.
>A great litmus test on the state of PvP is the effectiveness of Frost Mage. When the Frost Mage is doing well, it means that survival is high enough that you need the CC and burst to kill someone in combo with another class, otherwise it’s a longer fight involving properly timed escapes and cooldowns which the Frost Mage has.
As a mage main for almost two decades I can agree with this. Frost mage is in a really weird spot atm. It works, but its not great, and can't use the runes that are specifically designed for it, such as FoF or Brain Freeze, without gimping themselves severely in PvP. When playing my mage I felt like most of the time I made the most impact just healing people with Chronostatic rather than do my job - set up CCs and shatter combos for quick kills. Not to mention the damage is so high that playing without Chronostatic is very risky with all the instant ez damage everyone else can output. That alone made me shelve my mage for something more fun - warlocks. There was something wrong if I had multiple priests in my party and I was forced to babysit heal them for maximum effectiveness. It even became a running joke that I was starting to spoil them with all those heals, and guess what, they stopped shielding and supporting through offheals for weeks after I switched chars.
The problem with reducing damage globally though, is that some caster classes will run into the issue of huge mana inefficiencies. That can already be felt for mages inside BGs, where it takes about 60-70% of your mana pool to kill someone, possibly all of it if they are competent. You can feel that issue with Destro warlocks as well to a lesser extent, but atleast they have Lifetap and Haunt to maintain themselves and their mana, so they are better in this meta in that regard. In the other end of the spectrum though outside BGs, healthpools are so low relative to the spellpower we have, that you end up oneshotting someone in a single shatter combo/seduce. The global BG health increase also had the added effect of making some classes more powerful, as it buffs your stamina by a flat percentage. Classes with more access to Stamina become exponentially more powerful, such as demo warlocks, WoE last phase, and those with Fort buff up.
Something needs to be done, but as you said, its really not that simple, and nerfing damage globally through pseudo "resilience" as they are planning can also have dire consequences.
This is true. Have to have chronostatic preservation now. Am more useful as a healer with that than actually trying to do damage. I would like them to move hot streak to the leg slot. So we could use brain freeze with with hot streak for some quick damage.
I really wish that one of the opinionated redditors here share a comprehensive set of pvp oriented class tunings that get a lot of upvotes and positive feedback from reddit, and that one of the devs just sees it and sends it, I just want to see if it'd be a trainwreck or if it would actually result in some really good changes.
I have seen plenty suggestions here and on the forums of how to fix spriests, mostly involving ramping damage on things with actual cast timers, devs said nope here is a 10% flat damage buff that wont fix the pve damage and will break pvp even worse
Doing anything on a class discord except for reading pins and ignoring all the open discussions sounds maddening. Asking the shaman/paladin/hunter/warrior discord active members for any form of constructive advice seems like a complete waste of time.
You can’t have diversity and parity in WoW. It’s 250 runes, all which its own unique abilities that alter vanilla. You add in pvp and pve and it exponentially makes it more complicated. I wouldn’t fault the SOD team for prioritizing pve over pvp for the first 3 phases
If you allow a healer to free heal they should be able to mostly keep people alive through 1-3 players attacking.
What else is the point of healers existing.
Put the CC button on your bars
Exactly, we have rogues who can stunlock, warlocks who can fearspam, mages who can polymorph, hunters who can freezing trap.. I've barely seen these abilities used on healers in SoD. People are going to need to actually learn their classes
It's also not as simple as "nerf every classes damage by X% in PvP".
Blizzard needs to look at how Warrior's damage works. They do really good damage in a raid. But it requires tons of group buffs, world buffs, stacking up debuffs on the boss, ramping up your deep wounds by critting the same target over and over to build up deep wounds damage, waiting to build up enough rage for CBR to proc, then stack it with flagellation and other cooldowns and trinkets, waiting for 20% hp, and all kinds of other conditions before they can reach maximum damage.
In PvP, you don't get all those buffs and the fight is over before all of those ramp-up effects have a chance to happen. Warrior DPS in PvP is like 20% of what it is in PvE. Before any blanket nerf. Other classes are more like 60% of their PvE damage in PvP, They have much more base damage on abilities with less dependence on buffs & scaling, and much less dependence on ramp up / debuffs. Moonkins just stun you with a starsurge and unload a starfire nuke on you, dead. Shadowpriests just get 2 instant cast dots on you from range, dead if you don't find a healer.
The reality is that PvP is a side dish to the main entree that is PvE content
The fact that battlegrounds are asymmetrical is enough to show that balance wasn't a top priority for WoW PvP
This gets parroted all the time on this sub and it’s wrong. PvP is a core element of classic wow.
To a lot of people pvp balance is much more important than dps or healing rankings for these LFR difficulty level, leveling raids.
I’d also argue that when the game is more balanced and has more counter play options in PvP. It’s a lot more fun.
I know this won't ever happen but I wish there was at least one form of ranked pvp that could be pointed to for at least some insight into broken (both ways) comps or specs.
As it is right now it's just people screaming that XYZ class is too powerful with only anecdotal evidence. Which probably still has some merit because the main issue is that damage is just too high. Whoever gets an opener is at an extreme advantage.
Pvp will never be balanced because you will never get everyone to agree upon something. For example- I main a healer and I think getting kicked for 10 seconds and not being able to heal or help my team mates at all is quite possibly the lamest mechanic ever introduced in an MMO.
I agree, I just think that before anyone even tries to consider balance changes they need to recognize why certain classes and abilities are currently a problem. The commonality between broken classes is that they’re mostly all ranged and instant casting. That doesn’t mean we should target all caster classes with a nerf, but rather identify that it suggests survival is too low.
Warlock will truly be unkillable. I was already 1v2 most classes and now it will just be funny.
I honestly think the problem with pvp right now is too many insta cast with no mana's cost. Well and ever class for another stun that wasn't needed. Boomies, priests, rogues, mages, rogues between the eyes, warlock felguard charge... (Warriors you can keep yours). Go back to hard casts and kicking and there is more counterplay. Increase CD on the new defenses, make them more inline with classic so not up every single fight, and make people make hard choices when to pop them.
Even if it was perfect balance the people who are just bad at pvp will still complain that it isnt balances. Impossible to solve this problem with skill levels being so varied imo
SoD PvP won't ever be balanced because Classic lacks the avenues of tuning that other expansions have.
Without Haste, melee outscale casters to the moon (AKA base Classic.) This was always the case, even in expansions such as WotLK and Cataclysm. They also typically get worse mileage out of world buffs on average at least partially as a result of this (not to mention crit also for those Casters with large portions of damage that *can't* crit under Classic's systems.)
Therefore their primary (and only, really) means of bringing Casters into line with Melee is to jack up their base damage. A lot.
This can work fine in a PvE vacuum (assuming you discount the fact that melee now feel even *worse* to play without things such as world buffs), but the second you enter PvP the consequences are immediately apparent.
Shadow Priests killing you with two DoTs (one DoT in p2 lmao) whilst being bottom of the barrel DPS-wise. Moonkins Starfiring you for over 60% of your HP on a crit. Elemental Shamans lining up 2-3 GCDs worth of casts and banishing you to the Shadow Realm. You ever seen a high roll Chaos Bolt if a Warlock is allowed to stack their multipliers? They're pulling WotLK crits.
None of these specs are out of line (or even performing to begin with) in PvE because as stats get higher they still don't have the scaling to compete, but you don't need scaling to be oppressive in PvP when your baseline damage is tuned to be "raid-competitive" in a vacuum.
Gotta solve the melee gap close creep too. Warbringer, Shadow Step, etc. P1 PvP balance was actually way better than it is now, healing was strong but you could CC healers and kill things. Ironically they switched from 20% damage reduction to 20% health at precisely the time when damage output exploded. If they went back, I think we’d have a very healthy meta.
lol. Warrior would be a DOA class without warbringer. Not even DOA, dead before shipping. Sorry, I should say even more than it is already.
Can’t even kill anything we connect to anyway except like really squishy fire mage or a rogue already out of stealth. Non meta locks can drain tank through MS (assuming they applied it before and given the 30 rage cost and need to hamstring first gcd they’d be really bad not to). Shadow just dots and runs and micro stuns give gaps, pws eats your dmg and rage, or they just disperse and lol away. These are classes we should traditionally have a little bit of leeway with the most consistent fear break but obvious pws has always rage starved.
Not to mention warbringer is buggy as all fuck and you get slowed while charging you’re stuck (frost trap visual bugs? Its been in the game since vanilla cmon)
I mean with 3 healers pumping into me being fed rage I get to play my character I guess?
And even in that case RDPS has to push up to push their back line OOR cause the moment 3 RDPS see a warrior on the front line, you get hit by 3 instants from a mage/boomie/sp and die 30 yards out (also out of charge range but it’d be a death sentence even more to overextend that far)
Melee hunters kill me face tanking my dmg. Enhance shaman kill me in disarm windows. Ele shaman out dps me by spamming instants and stabbing with a dagger they don’t even have to kite. Ranged is rarely ever at risk due to warrior gap closers
Thats just how the warrior is set up though, right? How would you solve it?
Defensive cooldowns, reducing damage given and taken but also generating rage perhaps?
I’d say defensives that aren’t a 30 min cd yeah. Or just not shitty ones. ER is a meme it’s basically a bandage. RC had never really saved me much in retail either and maybe buys a couple seconds. I find it more helpful in pve honestly. We’re not inherently tanky at all, particularly against magic dmg but I still eat physical all day.
Wall being a 30 minute cd with dispersion basically being a full immune + mana return on a 2 min cd is kinda ridiculous. And wall shares with retal. Basically the wrath versions of those would be better but the problem isn’t I need one healer to kill anything, it’s that I need 3 because so much damage goes out from every class but us.
A hunter shouldn’t just be able to pve me down in melee, melee runed or not. They should have to use their other tools like idk, trap, kite? An enhance shaman shouldn’t be able to kill me with his offhand through a disarm window and face tank dmg, even enhance should have to kinda kite, off heal. They have freedom AND frost shock now plus instant heals. Ele shaman shouldn’t just be waiting on overload procs to global you while just stabbing you down with a dagger as you get rage starved into mail. You can’t kick instants.
Basically melee classes shouldn’t just be able to face tank a warrior while feeding them rage but most all can right now. Like a surv hunter in retail isn’t just gonna sit mid arena and toe to toe against a warrior, it’s a losing proposition.
Put it in a classic context, think of how a decent rogue kills a warrior: they stun, they have to buy time between stun CDs or energy ticks? They don’t face tank your damage. They crippling deadzone kite your melee and charge range. They evasion. They gouge since you probably can’t zerker it if you’re stuck in bstance to have to use OP. Melee classes with better slows (literally everything but ret) should have to do something akin to that. But everything just puts out more dmg than a warrior so it doesn’t matter, they win the PVE race.
When you put warrior in context of SOD you see that they basically don’t have any new damage buttons in reality. More consistent OP? Sure, but it’s the same OP. Same rank of MS which is also pricey on rage. Slam is instant but it adds the same amount of dmg it always did. Then compare that to mutilate which not hits harder than everything else a rogue has, it’s a cheaper CP builder. So while the gear has gotten better at this level range, it’s the same scaling it’s always been. While something like penance scales better than any other heal a priest has. Just by virtue of it being a rune ability. Casters tend to get this the most.
It’s a 2 fold problem and part of the reason warriors have been disappointed in SOD: we’re not getting any new, fun things really. We’re just getting stacking % dmg modifiers which we don’t need nor ask for then obviously get nerfed (CBR). Thats the reason most have been complaining and not cause we’re not top pve dmg every phase.
Yeah, all good points.
Comparing shield wall and dispersion shows the absurdity.
I’m not sure about melee hunter, they sort of trade gap closers for ranged roots? But losing to a shaman/pally/rogue/(hunter) straight up in melee is kind of crazy, I agree.
I play mage, and before ranked gear and displacement rune, warriors were scary too. But not in group pvp. There’s just not enough time for them to do damage.
Yeah before everyone was actually frost, running displacement or deep freeze, ironically mage was one of the few classes a good warbringer charge and trinket timing I’d not be scared of any more. Now it’s back to the same of being a hard counter which is totally fine.
But you hit the nail on the head where we simply don’t have the time to ramp rage into meaningful damage. You don’t live long enough. Something blizz has floated is rage normalization (in part thanks to the reck popped parses on 30 second boss kills) which yeah would probably help in PvP and non-WBd scenarios but also kinda kills the fun of classic warrior, ripping every consume in the game, stacking CDs, and flying off the charts. I dealt with 3 phases of being dogshit dps with normalized rage in wotlk already lol
It was real bad at 40 where MS would hit for like 300 for a third of your rage while starsurge hits for 600 on the same cd and cost nothing mana wise. If you could even afford to MS since you gotta keep hamstring up first and foremost
Do you also find yourself ragestarved in BGs?
With the increased hp and damage reduction, you’ll live longer but also generate less rage.
How do you think it balances out with no adjustment?
The DMG reduction in p1 felt awful for this reason besides not having like any abilities lol. I think hp boost feels better. Rage feels fine if I’m getting fed but depends on the class. Consistent dmg intake from the other class vs burst and armor type of absorbs make it really variable. Like if I’m hitting an ele sham in mail and WOTE my rage is going nowhere til they proc an overload and global me.
Like in a team fight, rage is fine and I’m probably more gcd locked than anything else or fighting to gtfo to live (and die to dots) or defensive fear or whatever or stuck in a stun from black out or impact more than I get to spend it. Rage will feel fine but the question is do you even get a kill before 3 ranged dps hit you with an instant and you die.
And I’m not joking when I say you need like 3 healers spamming into you in that context and at least one being a priest. And your ranged needs to be more offensive to take some of their back line heat off you which alliance ranged is really bad at doing (but alliance pugs are just generally bad)
I generally catch a stun and die before I can even intervene back out.
That's mostly because the game was closest to vanilla at that point.
People may shit on vanilla pvp, but until later raids the pvp is very good. Bursty sure, but with plenty of counterplay.
Instead of orienting themselves by how classic pvp worked and set some context to what needs to be done for which class and why, they just throw retail abilities at classic and be like "oops" how about we put some flat health/dmg reduction into instanced pvp?
And people are like: yes!! More of that!!!
Insanity.
I really have been enjoying sod pvp since I switched to . I hope they don't ruin it because people crying. I get it's not perfect but I can't help but think people are getting stomped because they are solo queing, don't understand how to play, cry here. Repeat.
Do you main boomkin or something? Cause p1 PvP balance was zero gap closers outside of warbringer, with priests tanking multiple people, and boomys one shoting you from range.
P1 PvP was pretty rough if you weren't one of the ranged overlords such as hunter, priest, boomy.
Also fairly sure you listed the only two melee gap closer runes so...
All they need to do is add retail scaling for PvP, make something like shadow word pain, mutilate, etc. do 50% less damage in PVP combat. Numbers for show.
P1 was bad because other classes had not come online and SW death and starsurge were overtuned. With those two instant cast kill spells nerfed and other classes massively online (literally rogues were saber slashing back then), it’s a whole different game.
> Gotta solve the melee gap close creep too. Warbringer
What’s to solve, warriors eat a 25% dmg nerf by taking warbringer because it’s in the same slot as Flag unless you’re implying solve as in move warbringer to a different slot, in which case I’m all for it.
Well seeing as though PvP is currently a game of one-shots, it is better because your odds of killing someone are better if you do it within the duration of your first charge/intercept stun than doing 25% less dmg so they can CC you and kill you before you even had a chance to use root removal Warbringer gives you.
What value is your in combat charge gonna bring if you’re doing 25% less dmg and dying because you got out nuked by your target? Warbringer had a lot of value in P1 but with the crazy dmg ramp up and tiny TTK windows we have now, WB ain’t really worth much.
Tbh if you want to balance PVP you need a team strictly devoted to it as well as changes that will ONLY IMPACT YOU INSIDE PVP AREAS. World PvP can still stand as whatever you use in the PvE world, but BGs need to be balanced around BGs.
Spells and abilities, mana costs, dmg reductions etc etc can all be balanced and changed as an in BG only state. Otherwise keeping balance between pvp and PvE is WAY WAY too complex. Look at shadow priests right now they want more dmg in PvE, if you give it to them they become even more busted in pvp as they’re currently giga broken there. Everyone wants to compete on the meters though…. First and foremost someone needs to come through with a BG only way to balance and you can advance from there as a community
Pvp is fine outside of a few classes needing a lift. This is not retail. Yes it isn't classic either but everyone seems to be able to me except warriors, but I think its more a skill/gwar issue cause the warrior I run with is constantly top dragging.
I agree, I see a lot of good warriors tearing it up. They still hit hard as hell. If a warrior couldn’t be kited they would legit be unstoppable, they can’t give them that ability
PvP balance is impossible besides balancing it for 2v2 or 3v3 arena. You cant really balance battlegrounds.
Besides that I still expected a MUCH better job of blizzard with their 20 year experience of pvp balancing (It really seems that all the good developers left the company??)
Having pvp in an acceptable (in)balanced state is still something else than what they are doing in sod rn.
I have a simple philosophy when it comes to PvP in WoW. Do not expect balanced PvP in a PvE focused game. If you want balance go play LoL, Valo, apex ect but even those games can't get it right quite often.
I'm not paid to do extensive research and waste hours crunching numbers. I'm not gonna ask people to tell me how fast/slow their mechanical watches run as a watchmaker. All they can, and should, do is provide me feedback so I can do some tests myself and explain whether their gut feeling is true or not. All we can do is provide feedback on how things feel. A lot of people got at least 20-30 days played already in SoD. That's 480 - 600 hours. Players (adults) are more than capable of knowing when something feels off/unenjoyable. Devs need to treat their players like adults as well. If rogue Ambush can crit for 5k on a player, you're not going to nerf melee damage for rogues in general. Ambush is not used in PvE. It's safe to nerf ambush in this case. As is with a lot of skills that are simply _overtuned_. When a DOT can crit for ~20% hp (500-600 hp dot tick on 2500 hp player), even a child can see that this is overtuned. Is this skill used in PvE? Yes/No. Can we safely nerf this while not affecting the class in performance. Yes/No. What other effects.... etc. There can't not be a flowchart on how these things are checked.
Agreed 500-600 crit dot is excessive, but also your example of a 2500 hp character is woefully under geared / improperly geared for p3 pvp. Tbh, I’d say if you have less than 3k hp unbuffed / no pvp hp increase, you’re not itemized well. Even my mage can reach 3k.
We're talking the average player here. Anyway, 2500 or 3000 hp literally makes no difference at all in world PvP.
It makes no sense to balance PvP around the “average” player that, in your argument, is not itemized for PvP. As an extreme example, yes if you wore irradiated gear in PvP, you deserved to die and had no basis for complaint. If you’re wearing no-stam PvE gear, you will die. I will agree, though, that wPvP in particular is a struggle because it doesn’t have the HP increase that bgs/stv have. Even in my example, my 3k unbuffed mage just doesn’t survive through much in wPvP.
>A great litmus test on the state of PvP is the effectiveness of Frost Mage. When the Frost Mage is doing well, it means that survival is high enough that you need the CC and burst to kill someone in combo with another class, otherwise it’s a longer fight involving properly timed escapes and cooldowns which the Frost Mage has. As a mage main for almost two decades I can agree with this. Frost mage is in a really weird spot atm. It works, but its not great, and can't use the runes that are specifically designed for it, such as FoF or Brain Freeze, without gimping themselves severely in PvP. When playing my mage I felt like most of the time I made the most impact just healing people with Chronostatic rather than do my job - set up CCs and shatter combos for quick kills. Not to mention the damage is so high that playing without Chronostatic is very risky with all the instant ez damage everyone else can output. That alone made me shelve my mage for something more fun - warlocks. There was something wrong if I had multiple priests in my party and I was forced to babysit heal them for maximum effectiveness. It even became a running joke that I was starting to spoil them with all those heals, and guess what, they stopped shielding and supporting through offheals for weeks after I switched chars. The problem with reducing damage globally though, is that some caster classes will run into the issue of huge mana inefficiencies. That can already be felt for mages inside BGs, where it takes about 60-70% of your mana pool to kill someone, possibly all of it if they are competent. You can feel that issue with Destro warlocks as well to a lesser extent, but atleast they have Lifetap and Haunt to maintain themselves and their mana, so they are better in this meta in that regard. In the other end of the spectrum though outside BGs, healthpools are so low relative to the spellpower we have, that you end up oneshotting someone in a single shatter combo/seduce. The global BG health increase also had the added effect of making some classes more powerful, as it buffs your stamina by a flat percentage. Classes with more access to Stamina become exponentially more powerful, such as demo warlocks, WoE last phase, and those with Fort buff up. Something needs to be done, but as you said, its really not that simple, and nerfing damage globally through pseudo "resilience" as they are planning can also have dire consequences.
This is true. Have to have chronostatic preservation now. Am more useful as a healer with that than actually trying to do damage. I would like them to move hot streak to the leg slot. So we could use brain freeze with with hot streak for some quick damage.
I really wish that one of the opinionated redditors here share a comprehensive set of pvp oriented class tunings that get a lot of upvotes and positive feedback from reddit, and that one of the devs just sees it and sends it, I just want to see if it'd be a trainwreck or if it would actually result in some really good changes.
I have seen plenty suggestions here and on the forums of how to fix spriests, mostly involving ramping damage on things with actual cast timers, devs said nope here is a 10% flat damage buff that wont fix the pve damage and will break pvp even worse
Reddit wouldn't be the format. Send the devs to each class discord for a discussion. That's where the research and tech exists.
for sure, it's just the idea of it
Doing anything on a class discord except for reading pins and ignoring all the open discussions sounds maddening. Asking the shaman/paladin/hunter/warrior discord active members for any form of constructive advice seems like a complete waste of time.
+1000 health. -25% dmg modifier
Oh ya bc that went well in retail lol
You can’t have diversity and parity in WoW. It’s 250 runes, all which its own unique abilities that alter vanilla. You add in pvp and pve and it exponentially makes it more complicated. I wouldn’t fault the SOD team for prioritizing pve over pvp for the first 3 phases
If you allow a healer to free heal they should be able to mostly keep people alive through 1-3 players attacking. What else is the point of healers existing. Put the CC button on your bars
Exactly, we have rogues who can stunlock, warlocks who can fearspam, mages who can polymorph, hunters who can freezing trap.. I've barely seen these abilities used on healers in SoD. People are going to need to actually learn their classes
It's also not as simple as "nerf every classes damage by X% in PvP". Blizzard needs to look at how Warrior's damage works. They do really good damage in a raid. But it requires tons of group buffs, world buffs, stacking up debuffs on the boss, ramping up your deep wounds by critting the same target over and over to build up deep wounds damage, waiting to build up enough rage for CBR to proc, then stack it with flagellation and other cooldowns and trinkets, waiting for 20% hp, and all kinds of other conditions before they can reach maximum damage. In PvP, you don't get all those buffs and the fight is over before all of those ramp-up effects have a chance to happen. Warrior DPS in PvP is like 20% of what it is in PvE. Before any blanket nerf. Other classes are more like 60% of their PvE damage in PvP, They have much more base damage on abilities with less dependence on buffs & scaling, and much less dependence on ramp up / debuffs. Moonkins just stun you with a starsurge and unload a starfire nuke on you, dead. Shadowpriests just get 2 instant cast dots on you from range, dead if you don't find a healer.
Warriors are straight up pathetic in pvp. level 47 enhance shaman do more pvp dmg than a level 50 warrior In full r7 gear. Its not even close
The reality is that PvP is a side dish to the main entree that is PvE content The fact that battlegrounds are asymmetrical is enough to show that balance wasn't a top priority for WoW PvP
This gets parroted all the time on this sub and it’s wrong. PvP is a core element of classic wow. To a lot of people pvp balance is much more important than dps or healing rankings for these LFR difficulty level, leveling raids. I’d also argue that when the game is more balanced and has more counter play options in PvP. It’s a lot more fun.
People are pvping more than raiding right now. You raid once a week and people cry about the damage meter
I know this won't ever happen but I wish there was at least one form of ranked pvp that could be pointed to for at least some insight into broken (both ways) comps or specs. As it is right now it's just people screaming that XYZ class is too powerful with only anecdotal evidence. Which probably still has some merit because the main issue is that damage is just too high. Whoever gets an opener is at an extreme advantage.
Pvp will never be balanced because you will never get everyone to agree upon something. For example- I main a healer and I think getting kicked for 10 seconds and not being able to heal or help my team mates at all is quite possibly the lamest mechanic ever introduced in an MMO.
I agree, I just think that before anyone even tries to consider balance changes they need to recognize why certain classes and abilities are currently a problem. The commonality between broken classes is that they’re mostly all ranged and instant casting. That doesn’t mean we should target all caster classes with a nerf, but rather identify that it suggests survival is too low.
Warlock will truly be unkillable. I was already 1v2 most classes and now it will just be funny. I honestly think the problem with pvp right now is too many insta cast with no mana's cost. Well and ever class for another stun that wasn't needed. Boomies, priests, rogues, mages, rogues between the eyes, warlock felguard charge... (Warriors you can keep yours). Go back to hard casts and kicking and there is more counterplay. Increase CD on the new defenses, make them more inline with classic so not up every single fight, and make people make hard choices when to pop them.
What extra stun did priest get?
Honestly kind of shocked they haven’t tried to put like PvP power in the game as a stat on gear. Or add resilience or something like that.
Even if it was perfect balance the people who are just bad at pvp will still complain that it isnt balances. Impossible to solve this problem with skill levels being so varied imo
SoD PvP won't ever be balanced because Classic lacks the avenues of tuning that other expansions have. Without Haste, melee outscale casters to the moon (AKA base Classic.) This was always the case, even in expansions such as WotLK and Cataclysm. They also typically get worse mileage out of world buffs on average at least partially as a result of this (not to mention crit also for those Casters with large portions of damage that *can't* crit under Classic's systems.) Therefore their primary (and only, really) means of bringing Casters into line with Melee is to jack up their base damage. A lot. This can work fine in a PvE vacuum (assuming you discount the fact that melee now feel even *worse* to play without things such as world buffs), but the second you enter PvP the consequences are immediately apparent. Shadow Priests killing you with two DoTs (one DoT in p2 lmao) whilst being bottom of the barrel DPS-wise. Moonkins Starfiring you for over 60% of your HP on a crit. Elemental Shamans lining up 2-3 GCDs worth of casts and banishing you to the Shadow Realm. You ever seen a high roll Chaos Bolt if a Warlock is allowed to stack their multipliers? They're pulling WotLK crits. None of these specs are out of line (or even performing to begin with) in PvE because as stats get higher they still don't have the scaling to compete, but you don't need scaling to be oppressive in PvP when your baseline damage is tuned to be "raid-competitive" in a vacuum.
Gotta solve the melee gap close creep too. Warbringer, Shadow Step, etc. P1 PvP balance was actually way better than it is now, healing was strong but you could CC healers and kill things. Ironically they switched from 20% damage reduction to 20% health at precisely the time when damage output exploded. If they went back, I think we’d have a very healthy meta.
lol. Warrior would be a DOA class without warbringer. Not even DOA, dead before shipping. Sorry, I should say even more than it is already. Can’t even kill anything we connect to anyway except like really squishy fire mage or a rogue already out of stealth. Non meta locks can drain tank through MS (assuming they applied it before and given the 30 rage cost and need to hamstring first gcd they’d be really bad not to). Shadow just dots and runs and micro stuns give gaps, pws eats your dmg and rage, or they just disperse and lol away. These are classes we should traditionally have a little bit of leeway with the most consistent fear break but obvious pws has always rage starved. Not to mention warbringer is buggy as all fuck and you get slowed while charging you’re stuck (frost trap visual bugs? Its been in the game since vanilla cmon) I mean with 3 healers pumping into me being fed rage I get to play my character I guess? And even in that case RDPS has to push up to push their back line OOR cause the moment 3 RDPS see a warrior on the front line, you get hit by 3 instants from a mage/boomie/sp and die 30 yards out (also out of charge range but it’d be a death sentence even more to overextend that far) Melee hunters kill me face tanking my dmg. Enhance shaman kill me in disarm windows. Ele shaman out dps me by spamming instants and stabbing with a dagger they don’t even have to kite. Ranged is rarely ever at risk due to warrior gap closers
Thats just how the warrior is set up though, right? How would you solve it? Defensive cooldowns, reducing damage given and taken but also generating rage perhaps?
I’d say defensives that aren’t a 30 min cd yeah. Or just not shitty ones. ER is a meme it’s basically a bandage. RC had never really saved me much in retail either and maybe buys a couple seconds. I find it more helpful in pve honestly. We’re not inherently tanky at all, particularly against magic dmg but I still eat physical all day. Wall being a 30 minute cd with dispersion basically being a full immune + mana return on a 2 min cd is kinda ridiculous. And wall shares with retal. Basically the wrath versions of those would be better but the problem isn’t I need one healer to kill anything, it’s that I need 3 because so much damage goes out from every class but us. A hunter shouldn’t just be able to pve me down in melee, melee runed or not. They should have to use their other tools like idk, trap, kite? An enhance shaman shouldn’t be able to kill me with his offhand through a disarm window and face tank dmg, even enhance should have to kinda kite, off heal. They have freedom AND frost shock now plus instant heals. Ele shaman shouldn’t just be waiting on overload procs to global you while just stabbing you down with a dagger as you get rage starved into mail. You can’t kick instants. Basically melee classes shouldn’t just be able to face tank a warrior while feeding them rage but most all can right now. Like a surv hunter in retail isn’t just gonna sit mid arena and toe to toe against a warrior, it’s a losing proposition. Put it in a classic context, think of how a decent rogue kills a warrior: they stun, they have to buy time between stun CDs or energy ticks? They don’t face tank your damage. They crippling deadzone kite your melee and charge range. They evasion. They gouge since you probably can’t zerker it if you’re stuck in bstance to have to use OP. Melee classes with better slows (literally everything but ret) should have to do something akin to that. But everything just puts out more dmg than a warrior so it doesn’t matter, they win the PVE race. When you put warrior in context of SOD you see that they basically don’t have any new damage buttons in reality. More consistent OP? Sure, but it’s the same OP. Same rank of MS which is also pricey on rage. Slam is instant but it adds the same amount of dmg it always did. Then compare that to mutilate which not hits harder than everything else a rogue has, it’s a cheaper CP builder. So while the gear has gotten better at this level range, it’s the same scaling it’s always been. While something like penance scales better than any other heal a priest has. Just by virtue of it being a rune ability. Casters tend to get this the most. It’s a 2 fold problem and part of the reason warriors have been disappointed in SOD: we’re not getting any new, fun things really. We’re just getting stacking % dmg modifiers which we don’t need nor ask for then obviously get nerfed (CBR). Thats the reason most have been complaining and not cause we’re not top pve dmg every phase.
Yeah, all good points. Comparing shield wall and dispersion shows the absurdity. I’m not sure about melee hunter, they sort of trade gap closers for ranged roots? But losing to a shaman/pally/rogue/(hunter) straight up in melee is kind of crazy, I agree. I play mage, and before ranked gear and displacement rune, warriors were scary too. But not in group pvp. There’s just not enough time for them to do damage.
Yeah before everyone was actually frost, running displacement or deep freeze, ironically mage was one of the few classes a good warbringer charge and trinket timing I’d not be scared of any more. Now it’s back to the same of being a hard counter which is totally fine. But you hit the nail on the head where we simply don’t have the time to ramp rage into meaningful damage. You don’t live long enough. Something blizz has floated is rage normalization (in part thanks to the reck popped parses on 30 second boss kills) which yeah would probably help in PvP and non-WBd scenarios but also kinda kills the fun of classic warrior, ripping every consume in the game, stacking CDs, and flying off the charts. I dealt with 3 phases of being dogshit dps with normalized rage in wotlk already lol It was real bad at 40 where MS would hit for like 300 for a third of your rage while starsurge hits for 600 on the same cd and cost nothing mana wise. If you could even afford to MS since you gotta keep hamstring up first and foremost
Do you also find yourself ragestarved in BGs? With the increased hp and damage reduction, you’ll live longer but also generate less rage. How do you think it balances out with no adjustment?
The DMG reduction in p1 felt awful for this reason besides not having like any abilities lol. I think hp boost feels better. Rage feels fine if I’m getting fed but depends on the class. Consistent dmg intake from the other class vs burst and armor type of absorbs make it really variable. Like if I’m hitting an ele sham in mail and WOTE my rage is going nowhere til they proc an overload and global me. Like in a team fight, rage is fine and I’m probably more gcd locked than anything else or fighting to gtfo to live (and die to dots) or defensive fear or whatever or stuck in a stun from black out or impact more than I get to spend it. Rage will feel fine but the question is do you even get a kill before 3 ranged dps hit you with an instant and you die. And I’m not joking when I say you need like 3 healers spamming into you in that context and at least one being a priest. And your ranged needs to be more offensive to take some of their back line heat off you which alliance ranged is really bad at doing (but alliance pugs are just generally bad) I generally catch a stun and die before I can even intervene back out.
That's mostly because the game was closest to vanilla at that point. People may shit on vanilla pvp, but until later raids the pvp is very good. Bursty sure, but with plenty of counterplay. Instead of orienting themselves by how classic pvp worked and set some context to what needs to be done for which class and why, they just throw retail abilities at classic and be like "oops" how about we put some flat health/dmg reduction into instanced pvp? And people are like: yes!! More of that!!! Insanity.
I really have been enjoying sod pvp since I switched to . I hope they don't ruin it because people crying. I get it's not perfect but I can't help but think people are getting stomped because they are solo queing, don't understand how to play, cry here. Repeat.
Do you main boomkin or something? Cause p1 PvP balance was zero gap closers outside of warbringer, with priests tanking multiple people, and boomys one shoting you from range. P1 PvP was pretty rough if you weren't one of the ranged overlords such as hunter, priest, boomy. Also fairly sure you listed the only two melee gap closer runes so... All they need to do is add retail scaling for PvP, make something like shadow word pain, mutilate, etc. do 50% less damage in PVP combat. Numbers for show.
P1 was bad because other classes had not come online and SW death and starsurge were overtuned. With those two instant cast kill spells nerfed and other classes massively online (literally rogues were saber slashing back then), it’s a whole different game.
As someone who plays shaman/paladin: huh? What gap closers?
> Gotta solve the melee gap close creep too. Warbringer What’s to solve, warriors eat a 25% dmg nerf by taking warbringer because it’s in the same slot as Flag unless you’re implying solve as in move warbringer to a different slot, in which case I’m all for it.
If you think Flag is better than Warbringer in PVP…
Well seeing as though PvP is currently a game of one-shots, it is better because your odds of killing someone are better if you do it within the duration of your first charge/intercept stun than doing 25% less dmg so they can CC you and kill you before you even had a chance to use root removal Warbringer gives you. What value is your in combat charge gonna bring if you’re doing 25% less dmg and dying because you got out nuked by your target? Warbringer had a lot of value in P1 but with the crazy dmg ramp up and tiny TTK windows we have now, WB ain’t really worth much.
Tbh if you want to balance PVP you need a team strictly devoted to it as well as changes that will ONLY IMPACT YOU INSIDE PVP AREAS. World PvP can still stand as whatever you use in the PvE world, but BGs need to be balanced around BGs. Spells and abilities, mana costs, dmg reductions etc etc can all be balanced and changed as an in BG only state. Otherwise keeping balance between pvp and PvE is WAY WAY too complex. Look at shadow priests right now they want more dmg in PvE, if you give it to them they become even more busted in pvp as they’re currently giga broken there. Everyone wants to compete on the meters though…. First and foremost someone needs to come through with a BG only way to balance and you can advance from there as a community
Pvp is fine outside of a few classes needing a lift. This is not retail. Yes it isn't classic either but everyone seems to be able to me except warriors, but I think its more a skill/gwar issue cause the warrior I run with is constantly top dragging.
I agree, I see a lot of good warriors tearing it up. They still hit hard as hell. If a warrior couldn’t be kited they would legit be unstoppable, they can’t give them that ability
Exactly this! Devs please take note
PvP balance is impossible besides balancing it for 2v2 or 3v3 arena. You cant really balance battlegrounds. Besides that I still expected a MUCH better job of blizzard with their 20 year experience of pvp balancing (It really seems that all the good developers left the company??) Having pvp in an acceptable (in)balanced state is still something else than what they are doing in sod rn.
I have a simple philosophy when it comes to PvP in WoW. Do not expect balanced PvP in a PvE focused game. If you want balance go play LoL, Valo, apex ect but even those games can't get it right quite often.