“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.”
Pardo indicates that most of the changes to the game since launch have been a success – the shrinking of raid sizes, the addition of Heroic dungeons, etc – but that Arena has been a huge headache for Blizzard and players alike. He goes on to say that if he had the choice, he’d either go back to WoW’s beginnings and change the fundamentals of class balance, or, barring that, would nix the decision to add Arenas during the development of the Burning Crusade expansion.
Thoughts? The article is from 2009, but has it changed? Have PvP skills/items made Arena (PvP overall) better or is class balance still the king.
Personally arena is the only reason i still play this game lol and guess the same applies to many other people.
Also, this article is kinda bs. they showed many times they don’t really care about pvp. the few times they use the pvp balance as excuse is when they’re too lazy to do something, like adding new cosmetic glyphs to the game.
There’s, what, 32 specializations in WoW? It’s not hard to balance them for perform equally in 2 man arenas and dungeons. It’s impossible.
Excessive balancing has led to homogenization and drained the unique and fun aspects from classes.
But whatever. I’m just an armchair developer while blizz has certified professionals.
EDIT:
And before someone says “LoL has a hundred classes and it’s still more balanced”. LoL matches have depth, WoW arenas are an empty room with a pillar in the middle.
Correct me if i am wrong, but i recall something similar being said around the launch of Cata. That Arena was a mistake and that they should have pushed for rated BGs instead.
I think a big problem is group sizes. A 2/3 man group functions very differently from a 5 man group like in PvE. Tanks don’t really work as intended in arena because if it was a 1-1-1 comp then 1 damage just can’t kill 1 tank. If it was 1-1-3 similar to dungeons then maybe specs wouldn’t differ that much between PvE and PvP.
Perhaps during 2009 it was a challenge to make changes but now technology is much more advanced, nowadays they can even tune classes seperately like “Doesn’t apply to PvP combat”, this article is completely useless, they probably didn’t know how to seperately balance classes.
For example Mortal Strike decreases healing by 50% in PvE, whilst it is 25% or 30% for PvP, because we have Sharpen Blades in order to make it 50% and also MS hits a little bit more.
And also that dev is a clown, without PvP this game would be in much worse state currently. For example I do world quests partly in order to kill players, because I know it is a high possibility for someone to go there, it is like Cheesetrap for rats.
My WM is on since its introduction it was BfA prepatch I guess, I tried to play it without WM and I wouldn’t pay that version of game even 1 cent, lol.
Still true. Arenas are the elephant in the room why pvp is in a terrible state for years now.
I wish they would totally get rid of it and put their work into battlegrounds instead
All the hate types will now flood in and say nothing has, but whatever.
Bottom line is there are a lot of moving parts in arenas and balance, but without that gameplay option a lot of people would have never stuck around so long.
THat would be true if the facts would’ve changed since then. 3v3 still wasn’t balanced at any point in all these years. You always had a handful of S-Tier specs and a load of bottom feeders below that.
the only problem with balance is that blizzard item levels dont scale linearly, so when you suddenly have 430 bow drop and it does 2x more dps than 418 bow stuff breaks on purpose by blizz.
However, thats why blizz put arena ilvl to 424 with pvp gear so its easier to balance, but since they keep switching skills and talents every expansion (or even season) it tends to break.
Personally I wish we could use the pvp spells in pve too, and get rid of passive talents
types will now flood in and say nothing has, but whatever.