You can’t “focus on increasing strengths rather than mitigating weaknesses. Always bolstering weaknesses makes everyone more average at everything.” while making WoW a fun PvP game.
WoW is not a MOBA where you can switch champion every game such that it doesnt matter if you’re playing a class with 0 mobility because it happens to counter the opponents comp and next game you’ll play something else instead. WoW doesn’t work like that. In WoW you’re stuck with playing the spec you rolled every single game and that means it has to be at least well-rounded and OK in all regards otherwise you run into an unacceptably large number of situations where there simply are no ways to outplay your opponent because you don’t have the tools to do so.
Everyone has to be at least around average at everything.
Blizzard’s philosophy is obviously flawed and is only a way of defending pruning as a means to achieve casualization while killing of the PvP community for the potential short term gain in new players.
What has happened ever since the launch of WoD is that:
CC has been absolutely gutted. You just need to take a look at Hunter (MM is the best example) and Warlock (Affli is best example here) over the course of MoP -> WoD -> Legion -> BfA and you will see what I mean.
Mobility has been pruned across the board with only a few exceptions (Mage and DH being the exceptions).
If we then say that in MoP the balance between these 5 pillars of PvP was fairly good (lots of people absolutely love MoP S15 and will gladly claim it’s the best season in this game ever), then what has happened now is that two of the pillars are completely broken (CC and mobility) and the balance between the pillars is therefore completely off. What does this result in? Well naturally, a broken and boring game.
Essentially to fix the game the following needs to happen:
CC needs to be unpruned across the board. This will automatically remove pure burst comps with almost no CC that nobody likes facing such as turbo, ebola, ww/dk etc at higher ratings and will instead incentivize MCH. Fears need to not break instantly and need to be 8 seconds duration again. Scatter Shot needs to be re-designed such that it is not on any DR and reverts Freezing Trap to the old arming mechanism. Howl of Terror needs to be re-implemented (replacing Portal as a talent, Portal becoming baseline) along with proper curses which are not mutually exclusive, Instant Hibernate needs to be a thing again, Wyvern Sting, Deep Freeze, Gouge, etc etc etc.
Mobility (especially for casters) needs to be increased substantially. This is the most clear cut case of “focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses” but it doesnt work, can you please realize that Blizzard? It’s not fun to play a class with almost no mobility and having to tank things endlessly - always being at the mercy of non-existing damage/healing tuning determining whether you’re an easy kill or an unkillable god. Turret gameplay is not fun and never will be. Portal baseline, guise returned, Shadow Orbs+DP instead of Insanity, Lightning Bolt castable while walking & instant LB, Freedom on Posthaste, Emancipation, Powershifting etc.
Clunky, laggy, casualized, outright stupid and/or overly convoluted mechanics need to be removed. Blinking while casting, losing survivability on going into Void Form, Bloodtalons, Spider Sting, UA stacking, AoE damage in ST rotations, GCD on shapeshifting, Blade Dance random dodge, unfailable Spell Reflection, one-shot combos (Ret, Feral, Fire Mage etc) etc etc etc.
Just my opinion but I mean… it’s fairly obvious what’s wrong with the game.
Just my opinion, but your suggestions are aweful and you’re wrong in ur assumption that “most people” say s15 was the greatest. Most people keep saying wotlk had the greatest times in the history of PvP, although I personally preferred vanilla.
As for your suggestions, they’re so far off the mark and would just mess things up in the same way the current way of the game’s design has done.
You see, you can cry for the return of CC all you want (personally, I think WW is a better example than huntards of what you were saying) but at the end of the day people don’t like neverending CC chains. Especially godcomp in MoP was disgusting (biggest problem was that synth ability druids had, don’t remember the name of it).
I agree that CC needs to return in essence to move away from the PvE fiesta gameplay that has gone rampant since the pruning started. But the game needs to keep it in moderation, and not let it go overboard like in MoP. Because everybody had comps they hated playing against in MoP because the CC or the specific CC counters some comps had made the matchups so detrimental to the impression of PvP itself.
This automatically disqualifies you from any further opinion. Vanilla PvP was objectively horrible.
Yeah, you’re literally contradicting yourself.
Also I never said that we should return the “unending cc-chains of MoP”.
I never advocated for the return of PoM, instant Wyvern or NS instant Cyclone.
I never advocated for the return of unavoidable instant long duration CC.
I never advocated for taking Cyclone of the Disorient DR.
I never advocated for the return of Symbiosis (PS: There’s nothing called “synth”… I’m starting to wonder if you even played this game competetively).
I’m not advocating for “unending cc-chains of MoP”.
But even with the “unending cc-chains of MoP” you cannot deny that most people who played it absolutely loved S15. Just like in S8 there were of course comps that you hated to play against (TSG or WLD in S8 for example), there always will be. Lastly, if you look at the polls that have been made recently about which seasons/expansions were best you will probably see S15 as number one in front of S8.
The game would be many times better if it was a mix between MoP (without the over-the-top instant unstoppable CC) and WoD (without the pruned/casualized rotations and utility) than what it is now.
Yeah your opinion is already disqualified from the very first paragraph of your reply. Vanilla PvP rofl.
It synthesized the abilities, hence synth. I already said I didn’t remember the name of it. You understood what I meant with it, so please tell me again how I failed, mister. + You kept comparing it to MoP while crying for CC to come back, so I guess it was implied you never wanted those CC chains back, right? Right? Right?
Literally didn’t. I said you can cry for it all you want, and I never said I was against it. Jebus, save me.
You’re acting pretty darn obnoxious. Just letting you know, bro.
Hope you get a job at wows pvp balance team. (im not sarcastic)
I agree with all your points. Ive pvp’ed since vanilla, HW. gladiator all season tbc, 2.2k+ wotlk and then cata hit i played abit, but game started to get wierd. Now im back agian played 2k+ in legion and started agian in BFA. Im not a gladiator player anymore or rank1 but i have played pvp since i started wow and loved it. Ofc there is some major issues, and right now to be frank im not really enjoying it that much.
All classes should have a means to fight back at any class in arena this will promote more skill based play, have a separate but way larger talent pool for instanced pvp. So when you face a certain comp you pick what you need to fight it so you no longer roll the “rock paper scissor” and auto loss vs certain comps
Wow. I can’t even keep myself from laughing. Why do I even bother replying.
Just because I kept comparing things to the best season this game has ever seen doesn’t mean I want everything to be exactly like it. I specifically didn’t mention these particular mechanics/abilities for a reason. It’s like saying anyone who says they think WotLK was the best state of the game ever also want Shadowmourne TSG or unkillable WLD again.
Yeah… I guess you just implied it with nothing. First learn the basics of how to properly convey what you mean, mkay? Etcetera can include a lot of things, and refers to what is implied with the context it’s used in. Etc.
As for the crap you’ve been talking about with “pillars” and so on, it’s the basics of conceptual design. Omnipotence without proper purpose, and inadequate handling, destroys the core, which you can extrapolate to mean that too much strength is a demerit overall. Which is equally true for stories as it is for game design. So in game design, to conceptually design it, it’s standard to “balance” the different areas and, where it exists, also give classes, roles etc. its own niche to specialize in, in exchange for equally, or close to equally, reducing the strength in other area(s).
This is all basic. But you’re not even coming CLOSE to the real problems. To start with, this is a PvE game and by their own admission they design PvP as an afterthought (paraphrased). PvP is full of compromises because they don’t want to separate the “feeling of playing your character” compared to PvE too much, because according to them “it’d be like playing two different characters” if they were to do that.
They’ve also said that they’d be able to design this as a proper PvP game if it weren’t for that. So you’re stuck with what you get based on how they change the game for PvE.
Then there are social design issues in the game, and so on and so forth.
It’s like you’re treating a burn on your arm, while the house surrounding you is on fire.
Treating symptoms instead of causes will not fix the problem. You’re probably one of the people who are pro-Solo Q. Or like one of the people who supports that orange skin colored, yellow-haired grandpa. (You either get it or you don’t, I won’t explain this reference.)
because it wouldn’t be as simple as leaving the game in its current state but adding back all the CC. you’d be giving CC to other classes than RMP and people would in general deal less sustain dmg, have more effective peels / heals / defensives to counterplay with during those CCs.
I must say that things seem better in this patch than 8.0 so far.
My only complaints so far are the duration of necrotic strike debuff from DKs. Should be 8 second duration imo so that you can actually kite it off instead of being forced to heal someone’s full heath pool before it starts going up…
And the balance between healers. Too many healers are being forced into a one button playstyle meta, while others rely on cooldowns to make them heal through doing damage… and then there’s disc which got completely gutted and just feels awful and clunky to play.
Not played a whole lot yet, but just my opinion so far.
Tl;Dr reduce necrotic strike debuff to 8 second duration, make healers more engaging to play rather than press your biggest most mana efficient heal every global or get tunneled and die.
Edit: I do agree mists and wrath was way better still, but this patch is a small step in the right direction
dont think going with the homogenous class design that mop had is that great either tbh. only reason it was “balanced” is cus they decided to just give every single spec in the game everything they could ever ask for and more. don’t think it was particularly fun because of that either, much like it isn’t fun now when only a select few classes at a time have things that make them good.
I’d rather take the later WotLK seasons, excluding the PvE trinkets and legendary weapon that brough things overboard. S15 was such a mess in regards to many things, such as frost mages and their ridiculous amount of CC, druids with symbiosis (i’m certain they never gave PvP a single thought when coming up with the spells it gave certain specs) and a whole slew of other things.
MoP also brought with it the current talent system, which is horrid and the only saving grace for it was the amount of baseline stuff we had.
It might’ve been fun to some degree, but i really wouldn’t call it great class design. I still had more fun with my classes (mage, priest and paladin) back in TBC and WotLK because they felt more clearly designed and not like they were a “jack-of-all-trades”.
Taking mage as an example then i never understood why Blazing Speed became available for all specs, same with Deep Freeze as non-frost where the only activator was frost nova (and lacking pet nova). The old talent system at least restricted some iconic spells/abilities behind spec specific talents higher up in their respective trees to give each spec more defining “moments”.
While they’ve gone with more of a spec specific direction, then the MoP system still feels bad from a PvP perspective. It restricts things where it isn’t necessary, occasionally force the player to pick the less interesting talent due to it performing better and just overall is a mess in some aspects (the AoE tier as a fire mage where you pick Living Bomb and never use it).
It might come with the positive of tailoring it to the individual games, but WoD really did highlight how lacking it is when classes got stripped of a large chunk of the baseline toolkits.
