Hi. No reason to make a post long if you can make it short.
The explanation is simple; because Arena and BG are balanced differently, you cannot enjoy them with the same classes because what may be balanced in Arena becomes completely broken in Battlegrounds. Because of no dampening, healers and self-healing dps classes become gods. Therefore I think it is more intuitive and easy to balance if you make Arena and Battlegrounds have the same rules.
A lot of people do not realize this, so I suspect a lot of posts regarding imbalance, and the debates thereafter, may come from different experiences in Arena and BG. The solution is easy; streamline the rules so you can expect the same outcome from both Arena and BGs.
In arena you have mostly a 1:1 or 1:2 healer to dps ratio. In Bgs it is 1:6+ most of the time.
Although the resulting numbers for heal-output are very different because of dampening, it makes perfect sense that such a thing exists. If there was no dampening, you can balance the heal numbers, but end up with either healers being too weak in BGs or too strong in Arena.
From a healer perspective, I follow you. The problem is that Dampening hits ALL HEALING, and while I want healers to have a good time, No Dampening gives self-healing classes godlike status in BGs. I think it is ridiculous that you should have to treat DPS classes differently depending on what zone you are in.
And how do you even balance it? I mean, if Feral Druids have godlike status in BG but are low tier in Arena, BECAUSE of dampening, then how do you adjust it? Let them dominate one zone and suck at the other? Must be pretty annoying for self-healing classes to deal with this dualism of balancing.
Do you have an alternative suggestion? If we do not change it, then all it really does is that it forces me to only play certain classes in BGs, so I will stop queueing up on certain classes.
While I agree in some way, I feel that BG and Arena are way different in their objectives. Arena is all about killing the enemy team by doing setups and, obviously, it’s pure possition, cd trading, let’s say combat knowledge and execution overall.
While this is sort of the same for BGs, the main objective in there is to accomplish certain objective that, may be accomplished by other ways rather than direct combat and CD trading.
Adding dampening in BGs would make the meta feel way more rough; It would be super clunky to heal a proper team fight while the enemy team is pressing their abilities (such as full bleed deadmark, etc).
Removing dampening from arena would make hybrid classes literal gods, and mortal strike classes less valuable afterall, since they would only reduce healing by a flat %. Maybe the meta would be more late WotLK-ish, where the mana is the win condition most of the times.
All in all, If I had to chose one way, I’d remove damp in arenas to just get rid of it. However, it would feel turbo-froustrating, as most classes do have alot of selfheal and survability nowadays, and it’s “barely impossible” to kill whatever guy while doing a proper setup in 3v1 without dampening.
It’s obvious that we can’t do a proper analysis of the situation, as the meta would change drastically in either situation, but, I think that mixing arenas and BGs in therms of dampening at least is not 100% correct.
It is impossible to balance PvP in this PvE-Game for 14? classes X 3 specs X talent combinations X gear choices x PvP scenarios. I’ve been playing a glass canon hunter in BGs for a long time, but I never put a step into Arena, especially not with the current meta, my setup has just no chance there
I don’t write this to demotivate you in making your point on self-healing, as a DPS with the worst self-healing I would welcome it if the other DPS wouldn’t heal themselves that much
I can see where you come from. It is a tough one to balance.
I disagree though, BGs are about killing. The WINCON might not be, but it is the winner of the killing that gets the points. And BGs give you everything from 1v1 fights to 10v10 group fights. I like BGs because the WINCON is not killing AND it feels like open world pvp to a certain degree.
Perhaps the ideal solution is to remove dampening, and then truly make a consistent model for hybrid vs pure classes. All in all, dampening is a solution to another problem; that they required all classes to have equal damage output (ignoring balance patch fluctuations), but in such a model, hybrid almost always becomes better than pure, and so dampening reduces the part that makes hybrid classes now broken versus pure classes, yet it still exists in BGs.
Something HAS to be done to address this. I dont think the solution is to have a Feral Druid for BGs and Rogue for Arena, as an example. This is just avoiding the underlying problem.
