We’ve made an update to Arenas on the Mists of Pandaria Classic Beta for some experimentation on dampening, and we’re looking forward to you trying it out and hearing your feedback.
The longest a match can go is now 20 minutes (was 15 minutes).
Dampening Starts at 5 minutes in all brackets.
Every Arena starting area now has a Bloodbath Orb, and it requires at least 2 players on a team to channel it to activate.
Activating the Bloodbath Orb casts your vote for earlier dampening in the match.
If no teams activate their Bloodbath Orb, when the gates open an announcement will describe the match as being slower, and dampening will start at 5 minutes and at 0%.
If one team activates their Bloodbath Orb, and the other does not, when the gates open an announcement will describe the match as having a warmup period, and dampening will start at 3 minutes and at 0%.
If both teams activate their Bloodbath Orb, when the gates open an announcement will describe the match as a Bloodbath, and dampening will start immediately at 0%.
Bloodbath Orbs require 2 seconds of channeling from at least 2 players on a team to activate.
The range to channel the Orb is small on purpose, to prevent mis-clicks.
This will allow players to always vote for the type of game they want to play against their enemies, while knowing the specs of their opponents, but not knowing how the other team is going to vote.
We’re looking forward to your feedback! Please leave it here.
Here is the thing: healers have to manage mana and can go OOM.
The only problem is that healers can drop combat and drink. Make that impossible, even with NElf mend and you got yourself a limiting factor.
Placing 2 of them at once is not only lame… But gives NElf racial too much power. Its been a problem since TBC… Its something that should have been fixed 15 years ago.
As a long-time 2v2 player, I personally believe that dampening should begin immediately when facing another healer. Most players don’t enjoy overly long arena matches—especially those with limited playtime—and spending over 15 minutes in a single match can become quite tedious.
In 3v3, however, which is the most competitive format, I think it’s fair for dampening to start a bit later. The higher burst potential and faster pace of those matches naturally help keep the games more dynamic and balanced.
Is it possible to make dampening going on the start of the arena? Arena matches seems so long now, it’s also making burst specs like combat, demo, bm even more meme. Most of the casual players want fast arenas they will mostly not come to type on forum or bugtracker like you think they will.
As a healer, I dont like short matches. Fast matches usually are: Everything is fine until someone gets 1-shot and you loose because of 1 thing. 1 kick, 1 CC, 1 defensive or offensive CD… ONE thing…
So basically. Either they lower burst damage of specs (ALL of them, cause CDs are super powerful), and nerf healers with dampening or preferably mana-regen…
Or… they keep the burstynes of CDs and modifiers (including defensive ones) but leave healers as they are with out any nerfs.
Dampening is lame. Simple as that. Imagine for a minute that it was the other way around. DDs started with -80% damage modifier that slowly increased in time… wouldn’t that be super lame?
As i understand it, its a sequence of CDs and kicks. And preventing them is a sequence of defensives.
So basically. You play your arena and you cant die. Unless you pop CDs to force defensives/trinket.
Sounds a lot like retail if you ask me …
But hey. Maybe you got a point and MoP is different. Then what i suggest is to change dampening to DPS instead of healing. Why do the healers have to play a nerfed out version of their class… Its ridiculous… I mean… Isent there a healer shortage guys???
MoP setups where cc based setups, getting kills by cross cc and chain cc on healer which is what you have to counterplay. MoP has high cc duration in the game but unlike retail, getting something like trap requires you to set the trap up with either scatter, your teammates cc os a clever way of making use of disengage root in some matchups to prevent his mates from eating trap or conc shot silence(for SWD) > trap for the healer so he cant walk out of it. Same with sheep, you cant blink poly sheep and your blink is 1 charge, your only get free of melee zu else is your slows or blazing speed. So getting sheeps requires deep on teh healer.
Those are the setups for guaranteed cc the healer usually requires your teammates to eitehr break those chains or outplay it in some ways. This is whats meant with “setups” in terms of MoP Arena
I am absolutely shocked by this random, highly unusual glint of communication from the World of Warcraft developers, especially when it comes to PvP. Unfortunately, no communication, nada, when it comes to PvP in retail WoW. That is not only highly unfortunate, but also massively undeserving for this game and the Warcraft franchise in general.
Blizzard could simply say that arena matches have to last atleast 5 minutes. And after that, the match either ends in a tie, or you use some other metric like overall DPS or HPS to know who wins.
But they chose to solve that by adding mechanics that make you play a super nerfed-out version of your class… If that seems appropriate to the community then I propose that they implement reverse dampening for the DDs.
It just feels really, really bad to play with dampening as a healer. Its as if blizzard wants me to stress out more and more as the match lasts longer. Let the DDs deal with that BS if they are so worried about infinite matches.